Saturday, August 15, 2020

Money Moves: July 2020

Here are some of the most prominent venture capital and merger and acquisition news items from the past month. If you’d like SDxCentral to report on your company’s VC or M&A activity in our monthly Money Moves section, or if you have any tips on that activity, please send the information to Sydney Sawaya (ssawaya@sdxcentral.com).
           

Friday, August 14, 2020

Crown Castle defends fiber strategy against Elliott

In July, activist investor Elliott Management launched an attack against Crown Castle International, claiming the tower company needs a makeover of its fiber strategy. And in a sign that Elliott may be swaying the Crown Castle board, yesterday Crown Castle announced that its Chief Operating Officer for Fiber James Young plans to retire following more than 14 years with the company. 
           

T-Mobile keeps customer satisfaction crown

Retail stores remained the primary place where customers made wireless purchases during the first half of the year and overall satisfaction ticked up in the face of COVID-19, with T-Mobile retaining the postpaid buying experience crown.
           

Cisco will weather the dog days of summer and Covid-19

On the heels of its Q4 earnings on Wednesday, Cisco suffered its worst day on the stock market in 11 years on Thursday. Naturally, there was a flurry of analyst and investor activity on Thursday following Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins announcing the company was embarking on a restructuring plan that includes voluntary early retirement program and layoffs.
           

O2 pumps green appeal of 5G

While 2020 might not be the catalyst year for 5G some were hoping for, O2 has turned to the environmental benefits of the technology to engage enterprise customers.
           

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Starlink speed tests surface

Starlink remains mum on pricing and packaging, but beta tests show speeds exceeding 60 Mbit/s down and more than 17 Mbit/s up, paired with latencies as low as 31 milliseconds.
           

Contradictions Muddy AT&T's Social Justice Message

AT&T is lauding a series of recent legislation it lobbied for in multiple states to address police reform and racial inequality. The company’s legal and state-level executive teams helped enact a hate crime bill in Georgia, supported the passage of a police reform bill in Minnesota, and joined business leaders in calling for the removal of the Confederacy symbol in Mississippi’s state flag.
           

Google Cloud Adds Free COVID-19 Datasets

Google added more COVID-19 datasets to its free, public repository. The cloud giant also extended its free-querying offer for all of the COVID-19 public datasets for another year through Sept. 15, 2021.
           

Blaber: Samsung forges a deeper relationship with Qualcomm

Samsung has been in sharp focus in recent weeks, announcing updates to its smartphone line-up ahead of a highly competitive and unprecedented holiday shopping season. This started on July 23 with the launch of its Galaxy Z Flip 5G and continued on August 5 at its Unpacked event, where it unveiled its Galaxy Note20 and Note20 Ultra and Galaxy Z Fold2 smartphones, along with Galaxy Tab S7 and S7+ tablets. There's been a lot of coverage of these launches, and you can read about CCS Insight's views here.
           

Court rules in favor of FCC in small cell case

In October 2018 a large group of U.S. cities and counties filed suit against the FCC objecting to its rules designed to speed up the deployment of small cells for the rollout of 5G. But yesterday, the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals issued its decision upholding the vast majority of the FCC’s wireless infrastructure orders.
           

Verizon will manage Bayer’s global IT network

German pharmaceutical company Bayer is outsourcing the management of its global IT network to Verizon Business. The company said that in the past its in-house team handled the global IT network and was supported by several different technology companies, including Verizon. However, when Bayer decided to move to a cloud-first model, it decided that it wanted to outsource the management of most of its global network to a single service provider and selected Verizon.
           

Wednesday, August 12, 2020

MEF Weighs SASE Standard

Secure access service edge (SASE) has seen widespread adoption over the past year, but with its rise in popularity the market has been flooded with noise. Industry trade group MEF want to cut through the noise by beginning work on a SASE definition (MEF W117), much the same way it did with its MEF 70 SD-WAN definition late last year.
           

Cyber Threat First Responders Fight COVID-19 Attacks Amid Pandemic

Okta Executive Director of Cybersecurity Marc Rogers, like many of us, has lost all concept of time during the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s pre-COVID life and work, and then there’s the Groundhog’s Day existence that has become our collective reality. “I measure things in 2020 units now,” he said, during a virtual interview at Black Hat. “Some of it’s turned into a daily grind.”
           

Will MEF's definition give SASE its groove back?

MEF hopes to clear the air by fleshing out a definition for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) services – dubbed MEF W117 – and deliver a framework to standardize SASE services based on MEF's current standardization work on SD-WAN, security and automation.
           

T-Mobile puts emphasis on business customers with free trial

In a move that indicates T-Mobile plans to grow its enterprise business unit, T-Mobile is offering a new promotion that will let any business try its network for free for up to 30 days. In addition, T-Mobile will offer business customers a Samsung A51 5G phone for free and pay off up to $650 from a previous provider.
           

Qualcomm prevails in appeals court antitrust ruling

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a 2019 antitrust verdict by a federal judge who sided with the Federal Trade Commission and said that Qualcomm had abused its monopoly position and overcharged mobile phone makers for its patents. This decision, coupled with a patent licensing deal that Qualcomm struck with China’s Huawei last month, are big victories for the San Diego company.  Qualcomm’s shares were up more than 2.3% at the opening of trading today.
           

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

T-Mobile Details $40B Network Upgrade Strategy

T-Mobile US appears to be the busiest and most overachieving mobile network operator in the country, if not the world. During the next three to four years it plans to spend $40 billion upgrading network infrastructure spanning at least 50,000 cell sites, push coverage deeper into rural America, and deliver a fixed broadband footprint that reaches half of U.S. households.
           

Podcast: What's the story with Peacock?

On this episode of 'What's the Story?' – a new series from the Light Reading Podcast – Jeff Baumgartner talks with pod host Nicole Ferraro about NBC Universal's new streaming service, Peacock: the latest news, why it matters and what's likely to happen next.
           

Verizon says 5G edge computing zones will be a game changer

Verizon’s partnership with AWS to bring 5G mobile edge compute (MEC) to more locations around the country will be an advantage for application developers, says Adam Koeppe, the company’s SVP of technology, strategy, architecture and planning.  Speaking at a Cowen investor conference, Koeppe touted Verizon’s partnership with AWS and its Wavelength cloud computing platform. The companies last week announced that they had two MEC locations launched —in the San Francisco Bay area and Boston—and will launch 10 more locations this year.
           

Report: Broadband upstream consumption continues to peak in Q2

Broadband upstream consumption increased by 5.3% from the end of Q1 to the end of Q2, according to a report by OpenVault. The increase in upstream consumption was likely driven by the onslaught of video conferencing and remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Q2 2020 OpenVault Broadband Insight (OVBI) report.
           

Rakuten says network will cover 96% of Japan by next summer

Rakuten Mobile, which only launched its LTE network in Japan four months ago, is anticipating that it will beat some of its anticipated coverage goals. In a strategy session with analysts today, company executives said that they had previously anticipated that Rakuten’s network would cover 96% of Japan’s population by 2026 but now they think the network could reach that goal by as early as summer of 2021.
           

AT&T says FirstNet is faster than the company’s core network

AT&T executives are touting the speed of FirstNet, the company’s dedicated public safety network that it built through a public-private partnership. During an Oppenheimer investor conference, AT&T CFO John Stephens said that based upon the company’s own independent testing, FirstNet is “significantly” faster than AT&T’s own core network and faster than any other commercial network. Stephens said that the reason FirstNet is so much faster is because it was built with a separate core.
           

Entner: European lessons on broadbroad — A look at Germany

For a country that is known for being as efficient, organized and technologically advanced as Germany, its state of mobile networks constitutes a rare black mark. Germany is the third largest economy in the world with 82 million inhabitants (double that of California in half of the area) with a highly efficient and advanced high-tech manufacturing industry. Where it is struggling is with the digitalization of the economy and both fixed and wireless networks.
           

Monday, August 10, 2020

HPE Aruba SD-Branch Voted In by Videotron

Hewlett Packard Enterprises’ Aruba division scored a deal to provide Canadian telecommunications provider Videotron with its SD-branch platform. The move furthers what has been a busy few months for HPE’s broader SD-WAN efforts.
           

SonicWall Sounds Off on Next-Gen Security Line Up

SonicWall unveiled a sweeping revamp of its security line up today. Alongside a unified operating system and cloud-native management console, the company also introduced a new generation of enterprise and branch firewall appliances.
           

US Cellular says data traffic surged 20-25% in Q2

The stay-at-home orders that were widespread in April due to the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a surge in data traffic for regional operator U.S. Cellular. The company reported that data traffic on its network increased 20% to 25%. “We engineered our network for peak usage periods and the network continues to performed well,” said Doug Chambers, SVP and CFO at U.S. Cellular.
           

Wireless industry remains immune to 'Covid effect'

If you have spent any time listening to investors asking questions on company second quarter earnings calls you’ve probably heard the term “Covid effect.” Investors are hammering wireless company executives with questions about how the Covid-19 pandemic is impacting their businesses. Back in April, when stay-at-home orders were in place throughout most of the country, a lot of executives deferred those questions, noting it was too soon to determine the impact Covid might have on the wireless business. But now that the pandemic has been around for six months, investors are looking for more concrete answers. 
           

Qualcomm pushes for permission to sell Huawei 5G chips – report

Qualcomm has been working to sway the U.S. government for permission to sell smartphone chipsets including 5G chips to Huawei, warning that export restrictions only stand to hand billions of dollars to competitors, according to the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, the Chinese tech giant said U.S. sanctions are forcing partners to stop production of its own advanced processor chips
           

Sunday, August 09, 2020

Election 2020: Will Disinformation Trump Election Security?

Election security took center stage at Black Hat, but not in the usual, who can hack a voting machine way. Hardware and software vulnerabilities still exist. But the COVID-19 pandemic, rampant disinformation campaigns, disenfranchisement, and impatient voters may pose far greater security risks.
           

CIOs Embark on 5G Edge Cloud Journey

The top five public cloud providers strengthened their collective hold on the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market last year as global revenues reached $44.5 billion, according to Gartner.
           

Synchronoss Scores Verizon Cloud Extension

Verizon re-upped its contract with Synchronoss to provide the operator’s consumer-focused cloud service for another five years. The extension provides Synchronoss with a longer runway for revenues down the road at the expense of near-term financial gain.
           

Windstream Taps Ciena for Nationwide Network Expansion

U.S. network operator Windstream announced today Ciena‘s coherent optics will power its National Converged Optical Network (NCON). Once complete, the network will connect Windstream’s tier one, two, and three markets to major U.S. data centers, cable landing stations, and cross-border gateways.
           

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