Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Against the backdrop of change in 5G spectrum and RF challenges, the OpenRF Association has announced version 1.0 of its specifications, which address the RF front end (RFFE) from the perspective of devices such as smartphones. In this market, traditional RF specialists are increasingly challenged by the rising power of Qualcomm in mobile device RFFE solutions. OpenRF was set up in November last year by a group led by Broadcom, Intel, MediaTek, Murata, Qorvo and Samsung. Its goals is to create an open 5G ecosystem of interoperable hardware and software across multimode RFFE and modem chipset platforms. President Kevin Schoenrock said last week: “This release benefits the entire 5G industry by establishing an open and interoperable ecosystem between chipsets and…
Two organizations have announced work to try to address the issue of RFFE complexity in a world that is desperately targeting simplicity and commonality (see leader above). One is Small Cell Forum (SCF), which has published a reference design to support an open RFFE architecture for sub-6 GHz (FR1) bands, that would allow any radio unit to work with any baseband or transceiver over common interfaces. The project is set out in a paper entitled ‘5G NR FR1 Reference Design: The case for a common, modular architecture for 5G NR FR1 small cell distributed radio units’, published last week. Much of the early commercial deployment of Open RANs, whether based on O-RAN Alliance, SCF or other interfaces, will focus on…
Special Report: Open RF front end Two organizations have published specifications to address one of the thorniest challenges in open networks, achieving a truly open RF front end (RFFE). Small Cell Forum’s new framework comes at the issue from the point of view of base stations while the Open RF Association is targeting a broad ecosystems of mobile devices. The Open RAN story is most convincing when it focuses on the upper layers of the 4G or 5G protocol stack, where network functions and processes can be deployed and orchestrated as microservices on a cloud-native platform, underpinned by COTS hardware. There are more challenges when the discussion moves to Layers 1 and 2 of the stack, which can be…
Macquarie’s Green Investment Group has teamed up with Dutch chemicals producer Nobian to launch a new 50-50 joint venture to develop industrial scale green hydrogen projects. The Hydrogen Chemistry Company will initially focus on the Netherlands before expanding into Europe, with a pipeline of more than 400 MW of electrolyzer projects, including: a 100 MW green steel project; a 60 MW electrolyzer focused on aviation fuels; and a 250 MW facility in Rotterdam designed to replace supplies of fossil-based hydrogen. Taiwan’s Swancor Renewable Energy has entered into a joint venture with Shizen Energy to develop offshore wind farms off Japan’s Kyushu region. Swancor developed the first offshore wind project in Taiwan in 2012 and has since been involved in the…
The US Senate Finance Committee has released its draft version of the Build Back Better Act, which thanks to the efforts of the SEIA now includes incentives for manufacturing inverters and trackers, two lesser parts of the solar supply chain. Support ranges from $0.025 to $0.11 per Watt according to the scale of the inverter, while tracker incentives are at $0.87 per kilogram for torque tubes, $0.87 per kilogram for longitudinal purlins, and $2.28 per kilogram for structural fasteners. For comparison, the support levels proposed in Senator Ossof’s solar manufacturing bill in June are very high at $0.11 per Watt for integrated modules, $0.07 per Watt for non-integrated modules, $0.04 per Watt for cells, $12 per square meter for wafers,…
Sometimes the old ways are the best. At least that’s what Airbus spin-off Airseas is claiming, with its sail-based approach to decarbonizing the maritime industry. The company this week announced that its first ‘Seawing’ system has been installed, with the technology set to start reducing fuel requirements of transatlantic journeys from the start of next month. Installed on the Ville de Bordeaux vessel, which is chartered by Airbus from Louis Dreyfus Armateurs, the Seawing will provide an automated wind propulsion system that can enable a reduction in fuel consumption by 10% to 40%, with the same reduction in associated greenhouse gas emissions. This marks the first commercial installation for Airseas. The roll-on-roll-off ship, which is used to transport aircraft components…
The UK has officially launched its fourth Contracts for Difference allocation round, opening up the country’s largest support package for renewable energy to date. With 12 GW of capacity set to be dominated by offshore wind, the country’s focus now needs to shift to streamlined development, and to raising its targets for deployment by 2030. Opening to applications on Monday, the fourth round of the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme makes £285 million of annual funding available for three different ‘pots’ of renewable energy projects. According to the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), the offshore wind capacity resulting from the funding alone could generate enough electricity to power nearly one-third of the country’s homes. Announcing the scheme’s…
This week the US Biden-Harris administration has put out an EV Charging Action Plan, but it continues to snub the market leaders, in particular Tesla, and may well end up making the EV revolution in the US a damp squib, leaving the country behind in a critical industry. The statement kept underlining that it was all about union jobs, and not about technology leadership, and given that Tesla is not unionized, because it already pays better than all union agreements – Joe Biden may have shot himself in the foot. Most of this is contained in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and these are simply the details of how the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Transportation (DOT) will manage…
Five years ago this week… FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced that he would be stepping down on the day of President Trump’s inauguration, dealing a big blow to consumers with regards to net neutrality and the open set top initiative. And so began four years of Faultline fuming at practically every decision taken by Wheeler’s successor, Ajit Pai. — Kaltura has squeezed another deal into the dying days of 2021, delivering its multiscreen platform to thematic channel producer Dreamia – a joint venture between AMC Networks International Southern Europe and Portuguese operator NOS. Dreamia has used the Kaltura TV Platform to launch kids OTT service Panda+ within four months, which has been made available to Portugal’s operators to offer…
Much of Faultline’s video technology audience may not have heard of bulk acoustic wave (BAW) technology, but as wireless communications creep ever higher up the spectrum bands, it is going to be increasingly important. The rise of WiFi 6E and 5G mean that this new, pricier form of radio frequency (RF) filter is going to be integral to future communications infrastructure. If we look at the relatively small pool of vendors producing BAW RF filters, one seems to be climbing the ranks fast. New York-based Akoustis has its eyes set on toppling Broadcom and Qorvo to become the new face of American BAW filters as it moves into mobile handsets, that is, if it can grow its production facility fast…
Haivision’s ‘Ultimate Guide to SRT’ landed in Faultline’s inbox with a splash, but it quickly became apparent that nothing is new with the Secure Reliable Transport low-latency streaming protocol, or ultimate for that matter. What we did learn from the glorified sales pitch is that an overwhelming 53% of the world’s broadcasters have now adopted SRT, according to Haivision’s own Broadcast IP Transformation survey, which is hardly a going to be an unbiased sample size. However, while emphasis is – as always – on the free and open-source code base of SRT, with no royalties or hidden subscription fees, this opportunity at 47% of broadcasters still to adopt SRT could be worth $billions to the SRT community. This is why…
A routine webinar on OTT challenges through four different vendor lenses seemed like a suitable way to sign off 2021, before it quickly escalated into a live love affair between 3SS and NPAW. The two video software specialists were a little too keen to showcase their flourishing lovechild, leaving the remaining two panelists from castLabs and Unified Streaming looking like spare wheels at times. Innuendos aside, there were some valuable takeaways from the discussion – particularly as panelists pooled their collective frustration into a missile fired directly towards the territories of smart TV manufacturers. Before we elaborate on the 3SS/NPAW relationship, the catalyst for this smart TV ire came from Bojan Jovanovic, Media Solutions Specialist at castLabs, who lambasted smart…
Norwegian broadcast technology vendor Appear was planning for IBC to be the stage on which it would unveil its new Neo line of server-based products – an evolution from the bespoke appliance offerings that have served its remote broadcast customer base for so many years. It was to be a big stage, festooned with the new corporate branding, to announce Neo to the world. But, alas, as we know, IBC did not go ahead, and so Appear did not get the chance to introduce some 30 new hires, swelling the count to some 170, to the rest of the industry. Appear’s CEO Thomas Jørgensen tells Faultline that the cancellation hurt, and when flipping the interview dynamic to ask us if…
When Synamedia announced a fortnight ago that Astro had launched the first addressable TV advertising service in South East Asia (excluding South Korea), what it really meant to say is that the this is the first customer for the Synamedia Iris product since it launched in August 2020. That is obviously significant for the vendor, although that should not distract us from the more important takeaways here in the broader context of addressable. Faultline caught up with Scott Kewley this week, Synamedia’s VP of Commercial Product Management, who helped forge the Synamedia Iris advertising business from the fires of the technology that formed Sky Ad Smart, and there was an early mutual decision during our call that the two should…
French software house Dotscreen has been a linchpin in video and audio UX development for more than a decade and yet somehow the name has featured only fleetingly in Faultline. One excuse is that Dotscreen has simply been too “busy” by its own accord focusing on being a front-end specialist and nothing else, according to co-founder Stanislas Leridon, which is a comment that instantly sparked a healthy discussion about Dotscreen’s product expansion roadmap – or more like a dead end. Most front-end vendor experts we speak with have either already diversified their product portfolio or have a roadmap to expand into areas like data-driven marketing, or CMS, or business intelligence, or ad insertion, or any back-end extension feature that might…
While RDK has achieved a lot of great things in 2021, the RDK Central community probably won’t thank us for summarizing this as the year the open source RDK video ecosystem became a lot more like Android TV. We have reached that consensus despite being deprived of a single physical demo from either camp this year (and last, for that matter), instead collating conversations with countless technology vendors of all flavors. Oh, and how could we forget Faultline’s infamous “hacking” scandal of an online RDK event earlier this year, as the panicked PR team worded it in an accusation, despite sending an invite straight to our inbox. That was certainly a 2021 highlight on our part. As for what’s new…
Picocom announces open small cell system-on-chip UK/Chinese start-up Picocom has announced availability of its first commercial product, a system-on-chip (SoC) for open small cells that supports 4G/5G and two sets of open specs – O-RAN fronthaul and Small Cell Forum’s FAPI. The PC802 is a PHY SoC for disaggregated or integrated architectures and it will ship to lead customers in the coming weeks. AWS launches digital twin and vehicle monitoring services Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched two IoT services, AWS IoT TwinMaker and AWS IoT FleetWise. The first is to create digital twins or replicas of industrial sites, equipment, or production lines, while FleetWise is to collect and transfer vehicle data to the cloud. Siemens, Accenture and NXP Semiconductors…
Telecom Infra Project (TIP) has been heavily focused on Open RAN in the past couple of years, so it can be forgotten that its broader aim is to make all kinds of telecoms infrastructure more deployable and cost-effective, in order to extend high quality broadband to the next billion over all kinds of access and transport networks. One of its newest project groups, FiBR, covers fixed broadband, and its first major action was to issue an RFI (request for information) in July, for an open broadband network gateway (OpenBNG). The process is similar to one that has been run several times for Open RAN elements in recent years, with a group of operators setting out their requirements, and then identifying…
ARM’s bid to make its processor core designs into real challengers to Intel x86, in high end servers and cloud infrastructure, has had a rocky ride. And just as it is starting to gain some real momentum in environments such as vRAN infrastructure, it may be challenged in turn by the open processor architecture, RISC-V, which also has its eyes on advanced use cases that require cost and power efficiency as well as performance. In the ARM world, early innovators such as Smoothstone fell short on performance with 32-bit designs, and even the move to a 64-bit architecture did not result in a major breakthrough against the incumbent, despite calls by hyperscalers and server makers for more choice of suppliers.…
Canada’s BAI is emerging as a leading emerging player in the private 5G neutral host model, targeting especially mobile connectivity and infrastructure for smart cities and public transport. Its recent acquisition of UK-based Vilicom for an undisclosed sum expands its presence in the European market and also brings over 1,500 additional deployments, including some with smaller (unnamed) MNOs, according to the company, as well as various private networks spanning healthcare, hospitality and real estate. The latter includes Irish stadium Croke Park, Bristol Myres Squibb’s biologics plant and among the most interesting, an offshore windfarm in Moray East, Scotland, involving a customized private network covering 295 square kilometers (115 square miles), which we have discussed before in Wireless Watch. BAI, which…