Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Although not confirmed, rumors have been strengthening that Huawei is under consideration for supply of 5G equipment to Brazil’s major MNOs as they plot rapid deployment using spectrum acquired at the auction early this month. Cost and energy efficiency are significant factors leading operators towards including Huawei in the mix, resisting continuing pressure under the Biden administration that began with President Trump’s higher profile campaign to exclude the Chinese vendor from 5G infrastructures in as many countries as possible. Brazil’s apparent stance echoes sentiments expressed elsewhere in Latin America. This is the case in Chile, which is ahead of most other Latin American countries over 5G deployment, after regulator Subtel confirmed in September 2021 that 5G roll-out would proceed at…
When Nvidia announced its $40bn proposal to acquire ARM, the powerhouse of processor IP, from Japan’s Softbank, it appeared confident that, despite the glaring conflicts of interest on view to some of ARM’s licensees (and Nvidia’s rivals), the deal would pass regulatory muster. That is less clear now, and certainly the deal will take a lot longer to finalize than Nvidia had anticipated – so long, perhaps, that cash-strapped Softbank might start to look at alternative ways, such as an IPO or less troublesome buyer, to cash in on its golden goose (the deadline to complete is the end of 2022 though Nvidia has consistently predicted closure around March 2022). The prospects got tougher for Nvidia earlier this month when…
Special Report: Chip shortages The global shortage of semiconductors, one of the most visible effects of the pandemic crisis, has hit availability and prices of many everyday items from new cars to smartphones. Even Apple, famous for using its huge cash reserves to store up future suppliers of components, was forced to reduce its forecast for new iPhone production dramatically in its most recent financial statement. Prices of memory chips and foundry services are rising, with a knock-on effect on the affordability of new gadgets such as 5G handsets, which may in turn slow the adoption of 5G services in budget-sensitive groups during the year ahead, putting further pressure on a near-term 5G return on investment case, which is…
Yet another mammoth-scale hydrogen project has been penned for South Australia, with 6 GW of hydrogen – produced by an even split of solar and wind power – set to target ammonia export markets to Japan and South Korea through a 500-kilometer pipeline. The Moolawatana Renewable Hydrogen project, being developed by Kallis Energy Invesmtnets, is currently in pre-feasibility stage, joining the likes of the 28 GW Western Green Energy Hub, 14 GW Asian Renewable Energy hub, and the 8 GW HyEnergy Zero Carbon Hydrogen project, set for installation in Australia. Enterprize Energy has also outlined plans this week for a $10 billion investment to build a 4 GW offshore wind farm off the southwest coast of Ireland, powering a 3.2…
In a bid to curtail inflation, President Biden has announced an injection of 50 million barrels of US oil into the markets from the US strategic reserve and secured similar agreements from allies China, India, Japan, South Korea and the UK. But strategic reserves can provide only a short-term fix, and the fact that OPEC+ has refused to budge on its supply cuts suggests turbulent times ahead. The move comes amid lingering concerns of inflation. High oil prices mean high gasoline prices at the pump, and higher prices for transport are knocked onto the price of goods across the economy. The same applies to oil-based heating Oil supply has not risen in line with demand through the global recovery from…
Over the past few days a number of European utility heavyweights have reported numbers, and held capital markets days, and the ink on a few other results are just a week or two drier, all reporting Q3, and 9 month figures. Here we look at Italy’s Enel, Spain’s Iberdrola, and Germany’s E.on and RWE, which swapped assets almost precisely 18 months ago. Enel took the most strategic approach to investors, talking up its long term strategic plan, and how it will head for zero emissions ahead of the pack. It will spend €170 billion ($191 billion) over the next ten years up 6% on its previous plan, but starts from a position ahead of the others, in that it is…
Population: 212,559,417 (+0.72% vs 2020) GDP per Capita (Nominal): $6,796 (-4.74% vs 2020) Debt to GDP: 98.9% (+ 10.3% vs 2020) Brazil, the largest user of energy in South America, is a country steeped in climate contradictions. It is a country that stormed out of the blocks with hydroelectricity in its power sector, only to find that its destruction of the Amazon has left its rivers running dry. While other countries ramp up their efforts to decarbonize their energy supply, much of Brazil’s role in the fight against climate change will depend on how well it can protect and restore one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. The Amazon Issue facing Brazil’s economy For Brazil’s democratic federative republic government…
Five years ago this week… Flaky rumors were in orbit that Eutelsat was tipped to be acquiring SES. The suggestion was not entirely ludicrous – as such a deal could have prospered the pair amid declining video revenues, with the combined entity carrying over 13,000 channels. However, the most glaring issue was that the market cap for Luxembourg’s SES was over double that of French-owned Eutelsat, at $9.6 billion and $4 billion, respectively. Eutelsat was also harboring considerably more debt, but the biggest red flag of all was that Luxembourg’s deputy PM had openly opposed the merger, with his government holding a 16% share in SES. Needless to say, Faultline was right to be skeptical. — IBC 2021 is…
In April 2018, Faultline penned the headline ‘Orange needs to buy VOO to keep its brand alive in Belgium’ – and it has taken until November 2021 for the French telco to heed our advice. Orange’s Belgian division is in discussions to acquire a majority stake in the local cable operator, initially at approximately 75% in a deal that would value VOO at €1.8 billion ($2 billion). A successful bid will mark Orange Belgium’s debut into the fixed line market – bolstering its 3 million mobile subscribers with VOO’s roughly 500,000 broadband subscribers and 50,000 pay TV customers. When we published these guiding words to Orange three and a half years ago, it was based on the ominous news that…
Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has been prompted into action, at the request of operator-backed video services in the country that claim it is unfair that only Rostelecom’s Wink app must be preinstalled on smart TVs imported into the country. Notably, Yandex’s Kinopoisk and a handful of independent video services are also included, and so the stage is set for an operator showdown. The current regulations mandate that manufacturers of smartphones, tablets, PCs, and smart TVs, must pre-install specific software – effective from April 1, 2021. Currently, Rostelecom’s Wink, Yandex’s Kinopoisk, ivi, Okko, Channel One, More.TV, Premier, Look, NTV, and Start are the mandated video services. This list was compiled by the Ministry of Finance, and Tricolor argues that it…
Discovery and A+E Networks are long in the tooth in terms of their historical rivalry as well as friendlier distribution agreements, yet the two media heavyweights have had a lot of growing up to do – and fast – in an OTT video era to execute some of the latest major projects. Naturally, the cloud has been part and parcel of everything. Prior to the launch of the Discovery+ streaming service in January 2021, Discovery and A+E Networks forged an OTT truce, of sorts, involving Discovery licensing a bunch of content from A+E Networks for it shiny new platform. As with any content deal, this involved shifting thousands of hours’ worth of assets from one place to another, which turned…
News from around the world of WiFi this week suggest that vendors are seeing the demand for WiFi 6 and 6E-enabled CPE steadily trickling in, even if the surrounding infrastructure or consumer demand is not quite there yet. Both Technicolor and integrated device manufacturer Akoustis have signed new deployment agreements, even as industry consortiums wrestle to fully unlock 6 GHz. Rethink TV, Faultline’s forecasting arm, has been busy the past few months tracking and predicting the roll-out rates of the various WiFi standards, old and new, both across CPE and consumer client devices. One of the biggest considerations has been whether WiFi 6 (802.11ax) will roll-out across the world at the same speed as its predecessor, WiFi 5 (802.11ac)? On…
MediaTek has unveiled its Pentonic 2000 SoC, a 7nm design that it claims is the first commercial VVC chipset. The SoC will appear in 8K 120 Hz TVs in 2022, and is right on track with the titillating transcoding timeline from our research wing Rethink TV. The new chip includes AV1 support – something of a highlight from MediaTek’s Summit event. As well as VVC and AV1, the older HEVC and VP9 codecs are still highlighted in the datasheet. The China-centric AVS3 codec is there too, but this is unsurprising. Notably, AVC is not mentioned at all, such is its table stakes status. MediaTek is correct in framing this as an optimized global platform, which should allow the same OEM…
Sky plans to have 100% of its content processing workloads handled in the cloud across the organization within the next 12 months, ramping up from approximately 50% today. That is just the tip of Sky’s substantial cloud iceberg, however, as it targets having a vast quantity of production done in the cloud in three years, while even production of live Premier League soccer matches could be cloud-based in just five years. Sky’s David Travis, Group Director of Content, Broadcast and Platforms, admitted that maybe six months ago, he might have estimated that cloud-based Premier League production would be seven years away – such is the unpredictable pace of Sky’s cloud transformation. Speaking during this week’s AWS EMEA Media and Entertainment…
Athonet urges enterprises to bring their own RAN Private network specialist Athonet wants to extend the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) mantra to provision of RANs for private enterprise 5G and LTE networks. Under the banner of ‘bring your own RAN’ (BYORAN), the company has introduced a network management option enabling customers to select from a portfolio of radio products according to application mix in their edge environments. The acronym, deliberately conflated with Open RAN, is designed to position Athonet as technology-agnostic, able to assist enterprises with deployment of diverse RAN products and encourage them to look wider than legacy LTE and 5G RAN providers. It is also aligned with Nokia’s message that the real intelligence of private networks resides in the core, not the radio. …
The market may be poised for the bubble in towerco valuations to burst, or at least deflate, in Europe, but many operators are still keen to cash in before that happens. Deutsche Telekom has been one of the more cautious of the major European MNOs about potentially divesting or carving out its tower operations, even as many of its peers have announced ambitious plans – Vodafone Vantage, Orange Totem and so on. However, CEO Tim Höttges appears to be thinking hard about unlocking the value in the German group’s towers. “I’d love to have an industrial partner and I’m willing to deconsolidate,” he told a Morgan Stanley European telecoms conference last week. However, he does not want to take the Vodafone route of…
Ericsson has generally been painted as being stubbornly hostile to Open RAN, protecting its network lock-ins even as Nokia and Samsung, in a bid to steal some of its market, have pinned their colors to the O-RAN mast. In fact, the Swedish vendor’s approach has been more nuanced than this. For instance, it is active on several O-RAN working groups, and has now introduced its first product for an Open RAN environment, the Intelligent Automation Platform. This is a Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) system for Open RAN networks and contains a non-real time RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). The non-real time RIC has been Ericsson’s key focus of active interest in the O-RAN Alliance and could enable it to take a strategic role…
The so-called ‘Gang of Five’ European operators, which are collectively supporting Open RAN and the building of a local ecosystem, have published their second major document following the memorandum of understanding they signed earlier in the year. Deutsche Telekom, Orange, TIM (Telecom Italia), Telefónica and Vodafone have published a set of recommendations for governments and policy makers, urging more direct support to ensure that Europe retains a significant role in the 5G ecosystem if Open RAN prevails. The five operators are very strong public supporters of Open RAN and each of them has opened at least one lab, testbed or trial to put the nascent architecture, and its suppliers, through their paces. They aim to procure most of their RAN equipment with compliance…
It is an old story for both wireless and fixed broadband provision, the question of reaching the last few per cent of the population and reducing the urban/rural digital divide. The US Competitive Carriers Association (CCA) is latest to weigh in with an estimate that it will cost an extra $36bn beyond what operators are willing to spend on infrastructure to establish true 5G ubiquity, as opposed to the nationwide coverage claimed by major MNOs on the basis of a certain proportion of the population reached. Such ubiquity, the CCA would contend, is desirable not just to reach those relatively small numbers of people living in the most remote areas, but also to ensure that many others are able to…
The shock announcement this week that Toshiba is planning to split itself into three separate companies – one based on power and infrastructure, another on devices and opting to sell off most of its third arm, its semiconductor business – funnily enough did not touch its share price. If anything its shares went up. But as we have been saying to any investors that will listen, there are a whole cluster of companies which have huge, vested interests in “burning fossil fuels” which simply have to eject those technologies from their balance sheets, before they can find any real value once again on stock markets. Siemens, GE and now Toshiba have found that if you make the turbines which make…