Encryptotel weekly digest(11.11.18)
Litigation, multibillion-dollar deals and fears and hopes of telecom companies associated with 5G networks
Qualcomm has reported a drop in revenue and net profit
American manufacturer of microprocessors Qualcomm has published a financial report for the IV quarter. According to the published data, instead of net profit, as a year earlier, Qualcomm recorded a net loss of $ 493 million. For the entire fiscal 2017–2018 year, Qualcomm suffered a net loss of $ 4.9 billion, while a year earlier the company received a profit of $ 2.5 billion.
Qualcomm does not have the best of times, although the company is trying to cope with the difficulties that have arisen. At first, Qualcomm has lost the largest buyer of its chips — Apple. In attempt to soften the departure of a large customer with the help of new contracts, especially with Chinese smartphone makers, including Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and OnePlus.
In addition, Qualcomm has not yet completed legal proceedings with Apple regarding licensing fees. In April 2017, Qualcomm accused Apple of patent infringement on the iPhone 7, iPhone 8 and iPhone X smartphones and demanded compensation, as well as a ban on the sale of these gadgets. In turn, Apple accuses Qualcomm for bills that the company calls “overvalued by billions of dollars” for several years. Apple also notes that Qualcomm could become a monopolist in the US mobile modem market if it would win the patent case.
Megafon filed a lawsuit against Hewlett Packard
Russian mobile operator Megafon and the manufacturer of equipment HPE are suing. The lawsuit filed in an American court. Megafon requires compensation from Hewlett Packard Enterprise for failures in the subscriber data storage system (User Data Repository, UDR), which led to network outages in November 2016, as well as in April, May and June 2017.
Now MegaFon is demanding compensation from HPE in the amount of $ 28 million and compensation in the sevenfold amount of damage. The amount of $ 28 million was not chosen by chance — it was the amount that the Russian company paid the American supplier for creating the data storage system.
“Megaphone” notes that it faced numerous complaints from subscribers, partners among virtual mobile operators and shareholders precisely because of failures in the HPE system . The representative of “MegaFon” said that the operator is ready to enter a settlement agreement with HPE.
In September 2017, Megafon announced a tender to search for a new supplier of the UDR system.
CommScope will buy a competitor Arris for $ 7.4 billion with an attempt to increase its share in the 5G market
CommScope, an American communications equipment manufacturer, has announced plans to buy shares in Arris International, a manufacturer of high-speed data, video and telephony systems. CommScope is ready to pay $ 31.75 per share, which is 27% higher than the current average monthly price of Arris shares.
CommScope’s goal is to create a major player in the telecommunications market, as well as to secure a share in the market for 5G networks and the Internet of things. CommScope will strengthen its position in the market by expanding its product range, since Arris specializes in cable television set-top boxes, which is a new segment for CommScope.
UK warns telecom companies to check 5G equipment suppliers
The UK Government and the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) sent a letter to the British mobile operators in which they urged to check the security of the equipment for the deployment of the new generation 5G networks. The letter, which fell into the hands of Financial Times journalists, does not mention the names of specific companies. But against the background of the scandal in the USA, where spy chips were found in the telecommunications equipment from China, and the ban on the supply of telecom equipment from China to Australia, the call of the British authorities sounds very clear: companies using telecom equipment from China, mainly from Huawei, should carefully examine it, to avoid putting in danger the national security of telecommunications infrastructure.
EncryptoTel discussed the 5G standard at a conference in Moscow
Our team took part in a major international conference Mobile 360 Russia & CIS in Moscow. And, as at many other telecommunication events, the main discussion revolved around the deployment of the new generation 5G networks.
Russian mobile operators plan to launch commercial 5G networks in 2020. It is expected that by 2025, 5G will represent one fifth of all the country’s mobile connections (48 million).
As creators of a multi-functional distributed telecommunications platform, we noticed that 5G networks significantly increase the speed of mobile Internet access, and therefore provides great opportunities for the development of IP telephony and cloud services. All this will help to change the structure of corporate communications in general and expand the possibilities of real-time communication.
We are preparing a transition to a new architecture.
In parallel with preparing for the launch of our main product, testing and correcting errors, our engineers are working on the deployment and transition to a new VOIP server architecture to improve performance, reduce and distribute the load among already operating servers, as well as setting an automatic server deployment upon reaching peak load.The transition entails changes in the work of internal SIP server management service and the execution of various scripts and billing.
iOS version of the application
After developing the EncryptoTel application which is already available for download in Android Market, the developers are working on switching it to a new version of our system and at the same time developing the iOS version of our application for making calls. We will start testing it soon and it will be available in Apple Store.
