Mobile network operators don’t breakout cellular IoT service revenue. They keep the numbers confidential and report only the number of connections. China Mobile broke away from this practice becoming one of the very few that publicly reports this number. It announced cellular IoT service revenue of RMB 5.2 billion (USD 736 m) in the first half of 2019.… Read More »
There are a few myth about 5G that I came about in discussions with executives, investors, smart city officials and other parties active in technology development and planning for new services. Two examples: Don’t bother deploying a certain IoT technology – for example LoRaWAN or similar technology – because 5G will serve all these applications (e.g. street lighting,… Read More »
A survey of smart city activities around the world shows that much of the focus of smart city projects remains on establishing the most basic of services such as connectivity. In fact, there is a clear lag in the deployment of technologies and services in smart city applications, versus what technologies enable. We call this the cascading technology… Read More »
Two days at TMT Finance M&A Forum in London were an excellent forum to get the perspective of the business community on developments in telecom, media and technology space. For me, it was the perfect opportunity to hear the CFOs’ view points on many topics that occupy CTOs – anything from evolution of technologies in the telecom and… Read More »
There’s not event like Mobile World Congress for gauging the pulse of the industry: 108,000 visitors and over 2,300 exhibitors provide the right platform for that. As I participated with other partners at Xona Partners in drafting our observations from MWC, I wanted to share a few notes and thoughts:
It’s only a week or so for MWC to opens. The biggest telecom event in the globe continues to grow, challenging companies to get their message heard. Press releases are no-longer effective. Day 0 – Sunday before the show – is now a full event day. But even that is not enough, leading major corporations host to analysts and… Read More »
As the year winds down, I wanted to share a few brief notes and observations. In short, I view 2016 as a ‘transitional’ year. This transition will unfold unfold over multiple years. It will see new technologies and business models rising while others fading away. Some highlights based on what we at Xona Partners have been involved in:
Three events were held this past week that provided an opportunity to get a midterm pulse of the telecom industry: the MWC-Shanghai, 5G World and WBA Congress. Having attended the last two, I wanted to summarize a few observations: * The vision for 5G is converging; industry is aligning along common themes. A few leading operators are racing to claim 5G capability… Read More »
There are over a dozen LPWA technologies contending to provide connectivity for some of the billions of connected devices as projected by market analysts. How they all compare with each other is a hot topic in the race to markets. We recently published detailed analysis benchmarking these technologies in terms of capacity, range, throughput, power consumption and other… Read More »
Beyond the hype of Smart Cities lies a number of challenges that have made the realization of smart cities a slow and arduous process. Some of the top challenges in my experience are the following: 1- Budget: cities operate on very tight budgets. The budget allocated to information technology is a relatively small part of the overall budget.… Read More »
Many industry associations emerged on the scene within the last 8 – 18 months reflecting both the heightened interest in the general IoT space and the need for interoperability in a fragmented market. These alliances can be categorized broadly into two groups: industry collaboration alliances and technology alliances focused on ensuring interoperability among devices. For the home automation space,… Read More »
Over a year ago, SK Telecom invested in SigFox in a round that raised €100 m from a consortium of investors that included Telefonica and NTT Docomo. This week, SKT announces that it will build a LoRa network at a cost of more than $84 m over two years. In the meantime, SKT is working with Ericsson to evaluate the… Read More »
MWC16 was a great venue to check the pulse of developments in IoT connectivity. We summarized part of our observations which we shared and published (link). It caused many follow ups by colleagues and friends who voiced a wide range of opinions that I thought some further color would be useful. To start, the main challenge in IoT is… Read More »
Smart home startups took $454 million in investor funding in 2014, an increase of 57% over 2013[1]. Among the largest deals in the space over the past six months include a $38MM Series B from Bessemer Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures to August (smart locks) and a $31.8 million Series B to connected home software platform… Read More »
The adoption of wireless technologies for connectivity has shaken up the home automation market unleashing a number of trends: The race to own the gateway. Home automation devices connect to the Internet through a gateway in the home. A standalone hub, cable set-top boxes, xDSL routers, a tablet may all serve as potential gateways. Established and startup companies… Read More »