EMEA in Perspective: The LTE push is on

EMEA in Perspective is a Monday column focused on the identification of regional trends and outcomes of the prior week’s news. Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and Security. Having experience at an operator, software and hardware vendors and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless through daily contributions going forward.
Looking back at the last week in Europe, it appears that content is still king. And it’s all about delivering this content via 4G/LTE networks. Touching on a few of the interesting announcements of the week gives you a taste of things to come.
In the U.K., Vodafone announced the launch of Google’s Chromecast media streaming device for use by their smartphone customers. The interesting part is that if you are an LTE customer, you get an approximate $8.42 discount on the price of the device. The push to drive users to LTE is on. The announcement with more details can be found here.
In Germany, Vodafone has worked with Huawei to utilize their enterprise LTE solution in order to provide live coverage of the Kieler Woche, an international sailing event in Kiel, Germany. During the event they were able to provide live streaming video from the yachts themselves in order for spectators to watch from shore the real action at sea. Traditional Wi-Fi networks have proved too unstable for this scenario to be reliable in the past.
Speaking of drones, I digress for a moment here. Although this it not LTE, it does relate to Telecom Italia. Beginning in September, anyone who wants to follow a live feed of the construction of the Milan Expo 2015, can do so courtesy of drones covering the construction activities.
The drones have six electric motors, can maintain their stability even in adverse weather conditions, carry a GPS unit and can also stop mid-air in order to film something. They can accommodate traditional filming and infrared sensors. Pretty cool.
Back to the topic at hand: LTE.
In Munich, there is a trial just announced between Nokia Networks and a group of partners – Institut für Rundfunktechnik; the research institute of broadcasting companies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland; Bavarian broadcast company, Bayerischer Rundfunk; and others – to test LTE-based broadcast TV. This is claimed to be the world’s first trial of its kind and utilizes Evolved Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (EMBMS). The goal of the trial is to show how LTE might be used in the future to provide additional options for the distribution of digital TV in Europe.
Shifting to Wi-Fi. Huawei announced a partnership with FanPlay, a cloud-based digital content service provider to offer in-stadium Wi-Fi and content solutions in Europe football stadiums. These services would include live video streaming, playback capabilities, betting, shopping, playing games and purchasing of food and drinks. This is set to begin this year.
Lastly, we need to consider country-specific clouds. Will this really happen in Europe and does it make sense for the Euro economy? Does Europe need NSA-proof clouds? The French think so. Last week’s announcement by Juniper that Cloudwatt will deploy their OpenContrail solution brought new attention to the Cloudwatt effort. OpenContrail is an open source project initiated by Juniper to drive innovation in software-defined networking and network function virtualization, and to help drive adoption of cloud computing.
Cloudwatt bills themselves as “the French cloud” and they aspire to be the cloud for the European economy. This is basically a private cloud for a geographic region. Although the idea of a localized cloud provider that understands the needs of a region is appealing, it makes you wonder if this isn’t going in the wrong direction for an open economy. Cloud Germany is another player going in the same direction.
Personally I am not convinced that this is the right path and reminds me of the days of walled gardens, which we all know failed.