Insights and Trends

Insights and trends reports are always a news mainstay, but perhaps never more so than at the end of one year and start of the next. As 2018 came to a close, BuddeComm released the Global Ranking of its Telecom Maturity Index (TMI), which analyzes the broadband, mobile and fixedlLine markets of a country as well as a range of economic parameters to rank it on a scale of 1 to 100 and compare it to its region. Europe dominated the top 10 global rankings, followed by South Korea, Hong Kong, and the U.S. 

Ericsson released the eighth edition of its ConsumerLab trend report, 10 Hot Consumer Trends 2019, representing predictions of 34 million early technology adopters. The latest edition of the annual report evaluates consumer thoughts and predictions on near-future technology including AI, VR, 5G and automation. The report reveals that autonomous and mood-predictive technology could soon play a bigger role in people’s everyday lives—including how smart speakers might be ready to jump into a family’s arguments as readily as its members.

Analysis Mason Research's top annual predictions list for 2019 includes insights into 5G deployments, the expand IoT market and adoption trends, smart and connected homes, digital transformation, and much more.

Innovation

Innovation award winners made waves this month. Nokia announced the top three winners of its fifth annual Bell Labs Prize, an international competition for innovators with ideas that will significantly 'change the game' in the field of information and communications technologies by a factor of 10. The winners collectively earned $175,000 in cash prizes and are given the unique opportunity to collaborate with Nokia Bell Labs researchers to help realize their vision. Samory Kpotufe won the top prize for his fundamental breakthrough in machine learning. 

SPARK Microsystems, which is developing a low-power wireless transceiver for the industrial Internet of Things revolution, has been named the winner of the Nokia Open Innovation Challenge 2018. To help bring its innovative solution to the marketplace, Nokia will provide SPARK Microsystems with $100,000 as well as access to resources across Nokia and Nokia Bell Labs to further explore and develop their solution.

In other contest news, Microsoft Corp. venture fund M12, in partnership with EQT Ventures and SVB Financial Group, announced the two winners of the Female Founders Competition: Acerta and Mental Canvas. Each winner will receive $2 million in venture funding to further their companies’ trajectories in transforming enterprise tech.

In a world-first achievement, Nokia, Elisa and Efore have partnered to commercially deploy a liquid-cooled base station system in an apartment building in Helsinki, a breakthrough that promises lower costs for operators and owners of base station sites as well as reduced CO2 emissions.

ETSI had a busy news month. In addition to its new Report on prominent 5G backhaul/X-Haul scenarios, it released a new Industry Specification Group on Permissioned Distributed Ledgers (ISG PDL). The group will analyze and provide the foundations to operate permissioned distributed ledgers to be deployed across various industries and governmental institutions, enabling the use of blockchain technology.

Periscope Data has introduced its new Data Engine solution, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Data Engine will enable data-driven companies with complex pipelines or expanding data needs the flexibility to use Amazon Redshift alongside other analytical infrastructure for faster queries for analysis and data ingestion at any scale.

IoT, Cloud, and Security

Optiva announced that a Tier 1 Australian service provider is the first CSP to utilize the power of the public cloud, migrating its wholesale billing solution to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). During its more than six-year partnership with Optiva, this CSP doubled its number of wholesale customers, becoming the market leader in the domain. Migration to GCP offers further evolution of the provider’s BSS with the advantages of the public cloud.

Trinity College Dublin spin-out Danalto announced a seed investment of 750,000 euros led by Atlantic Bridge. The investment will be used to grow Danalto Engineering, Sales, and Customer Support teams in Ireland and expand market reach into global enterprises as the development of IoT—and the proliferation of devices—continues.

RoboSense, a leader in LiDAR perception technology solutions and CES 2019 Innovation Award Honoree, will publicly demonstrate an upgraded version of its MEMS solid-state LiDAR—an automotive grade solid-state LiDAR designed for the mass production of autonomous vehicles—at CES 2019. The new RS-LiDAR-M1 with patented MEMS technology offers ground-breaking vehicle intelligence awareness to fully support Level 5 driverless automated driving. 

Valeo and Autotalks displayed global V2X (vehicle to everything) capabilities integrated into the Telematics platform at CES 2019. V2X technology will significantly increase safety by extending the perception of the car for better anticipation of the potential road dangers. By enabling constant exchange of information between vehicles and with the infrastructure, V2X is one of the key technologies in the move towards cooperative driving and to globally optimize Smart City traffic flow and services.

To offer enhanced protection, Consolidated Communications announced it is partnering with SimpliSafe, the nation's fastest growing home security company, to bring award-winning wireless security services to residential and small business customers across its service area.

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