Chris DePuy, founding analyst for 650 Group will deliver the ONF Connect Friday keynote: CORD TAM Research Update at ONF Connect 2019 happening Sept 10-13th in Silicon Valley.

Telecom operators including AT&T, Comcast, DT and Comcast, along with big cloud providers like Google Cloud, are participating in the Open Source network infrastructure movement. They are building large-scale network deployments addressing broadband, edge cloud, optical and RAN.  

Chris DePuy's Friday keynote session at ONF Connect (Santa Clara Marriott, September 13th at 11:30am) provides Insight into the latest 650 Group custom research exploring the scale and scope of the market impact of CORD will be shared. 650 data is sourced from comprehensive market research, survey data from top global telecom operators and executive level conversations covering these emerging trends in depth. Please visit the Keynote session link: https://onfconnect2019.sched.com/event/Tkxx?iframe=no

We attended the Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6 event held in San Francisco today. Representatives from partner companies who attended included HPE Aruba, Cisco, Commscope, Boingo, Netgear, Rivet Networks, AMD, and Microsoft. The principal announcement at the event was that Qualcomm announced its Networking Pro Series Platforms which are focused on Wi-Fi 6 capabilities, semiconductor systems which are in initial stages of availability and expected to be available on systems in coming months and quarters. The new Networking Pro Series chip systems hit four price points generally segmented by the number of antennas (more at the higher end) and are primarily targeted to the enterprise market, though we learned that some of the high-end consumer ("prosumer") vendors plan to use these chips as well. The new Networking Pro products have unique features compared to previous Wi-Fi 6 chips introduced from Qualcomm, including upstream MU-MIMO and upstream OFDMA and the design claim is that these can support 1,500 simultaneous users both upstream and downstream.

In the past, it could be said that Wi-Fi and cellular compete in some markets. We found it interesting that Qualcomm said that it expects that Wi-Fi 6 mesh products will be the way to get 5G millimeter-wave signals indoors. Several Qualcomm executives echoed the message that Wi-Fi and cellular are complementary, even though many Qualcomm service provider and cellular equipment partners do not subscribe to this point of view.

Qualcomm shared some impressive numbers. It ships approximately 1B Wi-Fi device chips per year at a run-rate; it has shipped over 4B Wi-Fi chips since 2015; and by comparison, had shipped 1/2B chips by 2010. It has shipped Wi-Fi chips with MU-MIMO capabilities to a total of 0.75B client devices. Qualcomm claims it has found that Target Wait Time (TWT) can improve cell phone battery life by as much as 60%.

HPE Aruba President, Keerti Melkote, presented and shared with the audience that it had won the Wi-Fi project to the nearby Chase Center, where the NBA's Warriors play and that it should operating soon. Additionally, Melkote emphasized that Aruba had recently begun shipping its price-competitive Instant ON product and the take-up has been strong. Cisco SVP Engineering, Anand Oswal, primarily discussed Cisco's Open Roaming initiative that focuses on seamless and secure public Wi-Fi onboarding. It was interesting that Cisco did not focus its comments on Wi-Fi 6. Morgan Kurk, CTO Commscope and acting President of Ruckus Networks spoke about the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 to venues, primary and secondary educational institutions, including AR & VR, 1:1 and online assessment use cases. Derek Peterson, CTO Boingo, a Wi-Fi/cellular venue services provider shared that it is now serving 1B consumers per year. Its goal is to get 100 MHz to each user, and that it will reach this goal by using all available spectrum, licensed and unlicensed. Peterson also shared its observations of the benefits from using Wi-Fi 6 at its trial that began in April of 2019 at the John Wayne Airport in Irvine, CA. Morgan Teachworth, Head of Hardware Platforms of Cisco Meraki, shared observations of several events it has been involved with, including the US Open Pebble Beach 2019 event, where, to its surprise, upload traffic exceeded downlink traffic. David Henry, SVP Connected Home Products from Netgear, hinted that it plans to introduce its Wi-Fi 6 mesh product, saying wait for details next week. We also learned that Netgear would leverage the highest end Qualcomm Network Pro chips intended for enterprise-class devices. 

VK Jones, VP of Technology, Qualcomm Atheros, spoke about future products and standards work. He said by 2020, we should expect 6 GHz, and, by 2022, 802.11ax Release 2 features including scheduling and spatial re-use to improve old device capabilities. 6 GHz requires a third-party service provider to coordinate what frequencies each access point uses.

On August 8, 2019, publicly-traded Cambium announced that it had completed the acquisition of the Xirrus products and cloud services from privately-held Riverbed Technology, Inc.  Xirrus has been a vendor in the Enterprise WLAN market for a while now and has been associated with its high-performance enterprise-class WLAN products as well as its cloud-managed services.  In our research, we find Xirrus has done well in the large venues, the education, government, and retail markets.

We interviewed the team at Cambium today and learned that the company is committed to using channels as a distribution strategy for the combined portfolio.  Additionally, the team told us it will be supporting both Cambium WLAN customers as well as Xirrus customers, and that, over time, the products and services will be converged.  We think it makes sense to rationalize the products, which will allow future customers to take advantage of developments made at each of the organizations.  The team explained that Cambium will be focusing primarily on medium and small-sized customers and that it will not be pursuing large enterprises associated with the Fortune 1000, instance.

The timing of Cambium’s acquisition makes sense on several counts.  First, it just completed its Initial Public Offering and is more well-capitalized than when it was a privately-held company. Second, during its IPO, Cambium identified that it expects its exposure to the enterprise market is key to its growth, so getting more exposure here will increase it further.  Third, several other companies have acquired enterprise WLAN vendors, and Cambium is part of this greater trend.  For instance, Arista Networks completed its acquisition of Mojo Networks in late 2018 and Juniper Networks closed its acquisition of Mist Systems at the end of 1Q19.
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Huawei had record European revenue in 2Q19 for the Ethernet Switch market. 

Both Data Center Switching and Campus Switching showed strong performance in Europe in the quarter despite the ongoing trade war.  On an overall basis, Huawei’s Ethernet Switch results were flat Y/Y.  China results for the company were down slightly Y/Y, but we note significant competition in China from local companies like H3C, Ruijie, Sundray, as well as several others.
 
With over a dozen vendors reporting results already, Europe has performed inconsistently.  A little more half of the vendors grew Y/Y while the rest had Y/Y declines.  While we expect Europe to fluctuate, especially with vendors have unique country and deal exposure, the results are unique and imply interesting share results for the region when we publish the 2Q19 report.