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Nokia’s Global Analyst Forum this week highlighted two main trends. First, the company says it has caught up to rivals in its 5G radio development. Furthermore, the company expects its wireless systems to become increasingly technologically differentiated from competitors. Second, the company emphasizes its message that it is the “green partner of choice.” We read that the company is making more power-efficient communications equipment. Apart from its significant themes meant for headlines, the company also highlighted that: (a) it’s experiencing strong private wireless growth, (b) its RAN systems are in the pilot phase with hyperscalers like AWS, GCP, and Azure, (c) it is embracing Open RAN faster than other established competitors, (d) it expects the Remote Radio Unit (RRU) to take an increasing fraction of total RAN spending, (e) it sees the RIC as a market expansion, (f) it expects to differentiate in radio in 2022 with its growing Carrier Aggregation capabilities. Nokia, which has significant revenue exposure to Mobile RAN, is in an interesting phase of its corporate development. With having brought on new CEO, Pekka Lundmark, recently, it abandoned its end-to-end product portfolio strategy. Yet, in recent times, the company’s non-radio portfolio has outperformed radio access network growth trends, which reinforces the idea that its broad portfolio serves it well. One of the company’s primary messages from the conference was that its RAN portfolio has caught up to competitors and that next year it will deliver significant improvements, including Carrier Aggregation and a broader portfolio of Massive MIMO systems. The company also said that it is working with a broad set of infrastructure providers and infrastructure software companies that will be able to support its RAN and core portfolio; examples include Anthos, Kubernetes, VMWare Tanzu, AmazonEKS, OpenShift, among others, operating on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or on premises-based infrastructure. Nokia is investing in broadening out the appeal of its RAN and core systems both by embracing these various non-Nokia systems, as well as supporting Open RAN. The company says it expects an increasing amount of value to accrue to the RRU and away from baseband, which we see as consistent with its support of so many different infrastructure systems that would run baseband. The company sees revenue upside in the RIC market, part of the Open RAN architecture. The company’s support of Open RAN will lead to the commercialization of Open RAN systems in about two years, according to Nokia.   Furthermore, the company’s telecom core business is experiencing an acceleration in business trends. Like the RAN architecture support for various cloud systems, Nokia is even further along in offering support for its core systems like 5G Core. Management made two comments during its discussions that did an excellent job of explaining how far along the core market is in moving towards a hyperscaler-based infrastructure. First, Nokia said that “50% of RFQs include an option to run on top of the Hyperscaler.” Second, Nokia explained that of 82 of the engagements, 20 have serious public cloud investigations and dialog going. We are also encouraged by the company’s leadership in Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and 25G PON. In 5G FWA, the company has some significant antenna and software algorithm capabilities, and we expect new, cutting-edge products in 2022. In 3GPP 5G FWA, the company holds a significant revenue market share lead as of 3Q21, illustrating its robust capabilities. The company made a bet on 25G PON and was a significant contributor to an MSA Group called 25GS-PON. Additionally, Nokia developed its own semiconductors, called Quillion, to support 25G PON (backwards compatible to lower 10G and 1G speeds).  
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Mavenir held its annual analyst event this week and highlighted some important information highlighting its progress in transitioning to a maturing ecosystem player in the telecom equipment industry. The company highlighted its recent Koch Brothers $500M investment; existing investors include Intel/Nvidia and Siris Capital, who remain majority equity holders. The company highlighted that it grew revenues and bookings in the mid 20’s percent year-over-year in its Fiscal 2020, an impressive figure. Two main themes came from the show. First, the company’s RAN portfolio is picking up steam. Second, the company’s portfolio now spans very wide, from telecom core to RAN.
The RAN portfolio has made significant progress. The company claims over 20 deployments in 14 countries. And, Mavenir has demonstrated the capability to deploy on AWS, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud, and VMWare. The company spent a great deal of time reviewing definitions of various Open RAN terminology, to address confusion, spanning from vRAN, O-RAN, C-RAN, Cloud-RAN, and Open vRAN. We’ve seen many public statements from Mavenir, its competitors, operators and pundits, alike, espousing the various benefits of some or all of these systems. We think the point Mavenir was making at its conference is that Open vRAN is the most open, interoperable system. When operators enable open systems, of course, it allows Mavenir and other vendors to bid on deals for networks that have existing equipment from traditional vendors like Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, and ZTE. We see Mavenir’s efforts to work with various infrastructure companies and systems like AWS and VMWare as a means of gaining a foothold with operators who are trialing or in the early stages of deploying these various infrastructure systems. Speaking of partners, the company claims it has relationships with nearly 15 Remote Radio Unit (RRU) players. The company says it can deliver Massive MIMO capabilities to customers, which means that its RAN systems can satisfy what would be considered mainstream 5G use-cases; this represents very significant progress over last year’s RAN capabilities. Mavenir’s portfolio is extensive. The company made separate presentations about the following topics: RAN, OSS, Radio, Packet Core, Mobile Core, BSS/Digital Enablement, Security, Private Networks, and Enterprise over three days. With over 5,000 employees spanning the globe, exposure to the most relevant parts of the mobile infrastructure industry, Mavenir is a serious contender for deals. The company also highlighted that its telecom core technology uses modern programming techniques that enable it to operate on cloud infrastructure; among these are fully containerized micro-services design. The company shared that most microservices file sizes are under 25 Mbytes, evidence that the systems are designed as microservices (and can load fast). The fact that in April 2021, well-known Koch Bros made a $500M “strategic minority” equity investment in the company is an important validation of Mavenir’s place in the telecommunications industry. We see the investment as a reinforcement of the company’s balance sheet and an opening to new customers. Best Laid Plans and Confidence Over the Summer Still Leading to Supply Chain Shortages in 4Q2110/19/2021 Our supply chain checks across the technology and cloud sector continue to turn pessimistic during the early days of October. As a result, orders for semiconductors that were thought to be secured and guaranteed are being cut. The implications are clear that most segments we track are in for several bumpy months, with all efforts to bring 2022 back to normal. Component suppliers are cutting or negotiating back existing commitments – Factory shutdowns, lack of fab capacity, and logistics gridlock continue to hamper the ability of system vendors to get adequate supplies. Vendors continue to burn through their stock, and no vendor can ship a 99% complete product. Vendor resources, which should be on 2022 product launches and securing capacity for future product cycles, are instead spent figuring out what to ship and adjusting components in existing product lines. In general, vendors are shipping fewer varieties of SKUs now than at any point in the past 20 years. Prices are increasing for components and, in some cases, will never return to the previous price – While some price increases could be classified as temporary or transitionary like rush charges, air freight, and redesigns, many events are leading to more permanent price increases. At the very least, vendors will dual source suppliers, manufacturing across many geographic regions leading to lower volume with each supplier. As a result, we view some semiconductor components as never returning to pre-COVID price levels. So the big question remains when products will return to historic price erosion? 2022 lacks new product designs – In 2021, there were very few new product introductions and downsizing in SKU offerings. In some markets, we track there was minimal impact, but in other areas like 400/800G, the lack of clarity is causing many hyperscalers to reevaluate their speed transitions. We expect a different tone in earnings season as vendors, component suppliers, and customers adjust to the new normal of not getting every type of product they want over the next several quarters. As a result, some projects will be delayed, others scaled back, and spare capacity at AWS/Azure/GCP will be put to the test as many enterprises embrace capacity to buffer shortfalls in premises-based hardware.  This week's MWC Barcelona 2021 had several themes; the most important was that several outsiders to the telecom industry were ever-present. The new entrants – the party-crashers - included Starlink, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Compute, and NVidia. These new players are forcing change either through economics, new technology, or new regulatory frameworks, or combinations thereof. We’ll touch on the importance of these crashers and then circle back to a few other ongoing themes that continue to remain relevant in this article.
Satellite broadband, while not exactly a mobile technology, will catalyze significant changes to the mobile industry. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite services, evangelized today by SpaceX-owned Starlink, announced plans to spend as much as $30B in building out its constellation over its lifespan. Yet, it will reach users across the globe. Elon Musk said Starlink is in beta in 12 countries, and it plans to have ½-million users in the next 12 months. The billionaire highlighted that Starlink’s ability to reach rural populations is unlike that of terrestrial players. We think the rural reach of LEO broadband is precisely why Starlink will be so important. Musk’s pitch to the mobile industry was that of a partnership – he said that Starlink is partnering with 5G MNOs to offer satellite backhaul and rural broadband services. We view satellite broadband, and later 3GPP satellite, as critical components in the telecommunications industry, and therefore we chose to write about satellite first in this article. All three hyperscalers, Azure, AWS, and GCP, made a splash at MWC21. As a group, these infrastructure providers have already changed the way telcos operate. In fact, the hyperscalers’ architectures were the inspiration behind the decade-old telco push for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). But, these days, hyperscalers’ operations are more than an inspiration to the telcos. MNOs are now moving some of their workloads to hyperscaler infrastructures. The evolution of these workload migrations to hyperscalers is moving in three phases, phase 1, the back-office, then phase 2, telecom core, and last, phase 3, the access layer. In the weeks leading up to MWC21, we’ve seen progress on all three workload migrations, including that on Mobile RAN. Incoming AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said at MWC that AWS is talking to “virtually every telecom operator.” Some examples of announcements made surrounding the MWC show include:
With Open RAN capabilities come the possibility that MNOs can source various RAN components from multiple vendors. Rakuten has already technically demonstrated multi-vendor sourcing (Altiostar baseband and Nokia and NEC radios). In addition to system-level multi-vendor interoperability, in previous years, multiple semiconductor companies had been bolstering their RAN offerings (Marvell, Qualcomm, EdgeQ). Marvell had previously crashed MWC (MWC19 and MWC20) and is now a RAN supplier to Samsung and Nokia. For MWC21, we saw yet another entrant to the RAN chip market, NVidia. NVidia has received pubic endorsements from Ericsson, Fujitsu, Mavenir, and Radisys. NVidia’s current chip offering is called “AI-on-5G,” and the company’s offering starts in 2021 as an “on a server.” NVidia’s next offering is expected in the 2022-2023 era and will be an “on a card” offering. Then, after 2024, NVidia will offer its “on a chip” offering. On April 21, 2021, DISH, the fourth wireless operator in the US market, and hyperscaler Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced plans to work together, whereby DISH will leverage AWS infrastructure and services to build a cloud-based 5G Open Radio Access Network. The DISH/AWS announcement is important because this is the first 5G Radio/hyperscaler deal – or second if you count Rakuten as a hyperscaler. We are encouraged by the DISH/AWS deal and think this represents a big step in the industry. What’s so important is that two of the three major Radio Access Network (RAN) functions will be running on AWS; these are the Centralized Unit (CU) and the Distributed Unit (DU). We see the DU running on the AWS service called Outposts as being the most critical part of this announcement, because historically this hardware has been delivered as a proprietary hardware system using proprietary semiconductors from the likes of vendors like Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei. Thus, AWS’ involvement in the DISH network serves as a reminder of the opportunity for RAN vendors to deploy cloud native RAN in future cellular network deployments. DISH is employing a terminology it called a “Capital Light” model, whereby it reduced the amount of capital spending it requires to build out its planned national network. Key to achieving this light capital model is leveraging the capital spending done by AWS and instead leveraging what some might call an OPEX oriented model. DISH plans to launch live cellular services in Las Vegas, NV first, and then its 5G network will cover 20% of the US population by June 2022 and then 70% by June 2023 and 75% of by June 2025, and thereafter it will continue its build to “match competitors beyond 2025.” The company also plans to begin building enterprise focused 5G networks beginning in 2021. In our follow-up inquiries to the AWS and DISH teams, we have learned that DISH is exercising an option to run O-RAN using AWS Graviton hardware plus Enterprise Kubernetes Services. Additionally, DISH has the option to use Intel based COTS based hardware in parts of its network. Thus, DISH has flexibility to deploy baseband systems on AWS or in its network, and can use Graviton or Intel systems. We have seen AWS engage in contracts with other parties where there are minimum usage rates or dollar commitments. We are not sure this is the case for the DISH deal, but AWS explains that it expects to deliver “thousands of site specific hardware,” while at the same time DISH expects that by mid 2023, it will have built out “15,000 cellular sites.”  What AWS plans to deliver to DISH  DISH use of AWS infrastructure We wanted to share some insights on how this relationship appears to be structured. It appears that many scenarios have been envisioned as to how the relationship may evolve in the future, and we think that both parties have worked in contract terms that allow some flexibility in achieving each company’s goals. We did not review the contract between the two companies, but in a webinar presentation held April 30, 2021, executives from DISH hedged their bets somewhat on the relationship with AWS in ways we found interesting:
In a briefing with Rakuten Mobile today, we learned two neat things: It is experimenting with 3GPP on satellite, and it hopes to announced a full-stack Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) customer as early as next quarter. The company also shared some plans that it has for improving coverage to 96% by the end of the summer '21, and that it believes it has a 50% total cost of ownership advantage for its 5G infrastructure versus a traditional network operator.
So, what's so important about "3GPP on satellite?" If satellites are able to communicate with all cell phones and other cellular devices, this would mean that coverage could be enabled where we might need to have placed macro base stations. If we don't need macro base stations everywhere as satellites provide that coverage in sparse areas, or maybe even along highway routes, then a future cellular operator might be able to build its network with far fewer macro towers and rely more on a "barbell" approach, with small cells providing high throughput in busy areas and satellites providing coverage between busy areas. This would reduce demand for 5G base stations. Rakuten expects that its satellite partner, AST, may offer satellite coverage for Japan at the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024 - that is a ways off. But, this means that in 3 or so years, the need for base stations may be considerably reduced. Also, Rakuten spokesperson, Tareq Amin, said he thinks it is possible that Rakuten may announce its first RCP customer as early as next quarter. We published about RCP in November 2020, around when the team first started making RCP known to the public. This means that a division of a mobile operator, Rakuten Mobile, may be selling its know-how, technology and services to another telecom operator, presumably outside of Japan. This is a big deal in that most operators buy from vendors and systems integrators, not from others who are in the same business as them. It is also a big deal because cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google all want to sell their cloud services to operators, too. And, if RCP gets there first, and sells its full stack (radio, core, billing, orchestration, OSS) it would represent a first-ever full stack services deal. AWS (Amazon Web Services) grew nearly 30% Y/Y, remarkable results for a $10B a quarter business. 650 Group enterprise interviews indicate that IaaS is the preferred platform for new application development in the new-normal COVID-19 world. We do expect at some point enterprises will move some of these workloads back to the premise, but don’t expect a headwind. Still, more of normalization as this premises-based move in 2021 will be occurring right as AI workloads add a new leg of growth to IaaS providers. AWS Custom ASIC and semi-custom ASIC development include many projects beyond Annapurna’s Smart NIC and Amazon’s investment into satellite connectivity with a $10B investment in project Kuiper for low earth satellites in direct competition with SpaceX’s Starlink will make the company's Cloud platform even more popular. Also, if satellite connectivity is just for media, which we see as unlikely, the way consumers connect their devices over the next decade is going to go through a significant transformation, and this is just the best-case will have a minimal impact.  Over the next five days, we will highlight each of the US Hyperscalers and the results they had during 1H20 and 2Q20. Today we will start with the overall trends in the market. US Hyperscaler revenue grew 20% in 2Q20 compared to a year ago, setting a new record. US trade war activities, mainly against Huawei, caused significant lead time increases in many critical components for Cloud data center build-outs during the quarter as the 5G battle against China is having ripple effects into the Cloud supply chain. Custom ASIC and semi-custom ASIC development in the Cloud continue to expand with multiple new initiates around #AI #ML., #SmartNICs, accelerators, and #CPUs underway. This is not to mention Amazon Web Services (AWS) getting into #6G with a $10B investment in project #Kuiper for low earth satellites in direct competition with @SpaceX Starlink. There are over 50 custom ASIC projects in the Cloud. Each one has implications on the supply chain and immediate potential to shift market share from each Cloud provider. Our overall projections for data center spend in switching, servers, and storage remain relatively unchanged since our previous forecast. Current results affirm our forecasts as we shift to vendor performance over the next two weeks, which we expect to be dependent on each company’s vertical and enterprise exposure.  Federated Wireless announced that it will offer a managed service that will be offered to enterprises that plan to operate private cellular networks (both 4G and 5G). For companies to use Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum (3.5 GHz) in the US market, a service provider called a SAS is required; Federated is a pioneer in this SAS market. What the company announced today, though, is that not only is it going to offer SAS services to customers, but it will now offer discovery, planning, design, building, operations and support services that will allow enterprise to get the benefit of cellular coverage in their facilities.
Another very interesting facet to the Federated Wireless entry to managed services is that it has also announced selling partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. In summary, customers can visit each AWS or Azure sites, click some buttons and then Federated will show up and build and operate the cellular network to allow services such as critical communications (like employee-to-employee communications), mobility services (such as trucks moving onsite), Wi-Fi backhaul (without the need for installing new conduit and wires), IoT sensor deployment, and many other uses. Federated will be an enabler to companies who don't want to work with traditional mobile network operators in order to expand cellular coverage to their corporate locations. What this means is in the US market, companies may contact AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile to get licensed cellular, but now they can contact Federated Wireless to get their own shared-spectrum, in this case CBRS, network that carries only their traffic. Today Intel had a major Data Center event in San Francisco. It was a multi-hour announcement showcasing all the different products Intel is/will be launching.
Some interesting background that Intel talked about was that only 2% of worlds data has been analyzed and a 5G will be a major driver move compute to the edge. They also touted that over 50% of AI workloads are inference and runs best on Intel (X86). Noticeably absent at the beginning of the presentation was Intel’s work on training. We found the most interesting parts of the announcement being that AWS talked about custom versions of Intel’s CPU and a Up to 14X inference improvement from just July 2017 in its XEON processors. Overall there is a 30% gen/gen improvement in XEON, the biggest jump in 5 years. While staying at 10NM, Intel is able to continue to squeeze performance gains out of the server. It is important as we hit the limits of process geometry that everything be accelerated, especially with Intel having a similar view of AI workloads and that’s what we saw with Intel. New Optane memory, new persistent memory, faster Adapter cards which will lead to more Smart NIC announcements, and a 10nm FPGA. It was clear at the event that large cloud provers like AWS, Azure, and Tencent are looking at all avenues to increase performance and reduce power consumption via software and hardware advancements. Some interesting highlights included AWS touting over 100 unique instances that leverage Intel processers with more SAP instances running on AWS than anywhere else and Formula 1 using of 65 years of historic race data to train its models in order to make real-time race predictions. |
CHRIS DePUY
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