WCA November 2019

From the Americas total Bluetooth and 27 per cent of Wi-Fi device shipments, an increase from 2018 of 13 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively. Smartphones will continue to be important markets for both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, however, when it comes to the Bluetooth shipments, the IoT market is expected to overtake the smartphone market for the first time in 2024 as its share of the market falls to below 30 per cent. The share of smartphones as a proportion of Wi-Fi device shipments is also set to fall, to below 40 per cent by 2024. “Bluetooth will continue to grow in other areas, such as speakers, headsets, mobile and PC accessories, and both technologies will continue to push into other consumer electronics devices such as connected toys and home entertainment. However, the IoT is beginning to take an increasingly significant share of the market,” explained Andrew Zignani, principal analyst at ABI Research. Key IoT opportunities for Bluetooth will be found within asset management and location services in devices such as beacons and personal trackers. These are anticipated to grow from around two per cent of the Bluetooth market in 2018 to over 8.5 per cent by 2024; Bluetooth-enabled wearable devices are also expected to break the 400 million device barrier by 2024, these will include smartwatches and smart clothing. Wi-Fi-enabled wearables are also expected to reach over 250 million units by this time. The smart home will be among the fastest growing markets for both technologies. Wi-Fi-enabled smart home devices are expected to grow from five per cent in 2018 to nearly 16 per cent by 2024 and Bluetooth will rise from four per cent to 13 per cent in the same period, with traction in voice-control front ends, smart appliances, smart lighting and sensor devices. Wi-Fi 6 has huge potential in the IoT space, due to new enhancements such as target wake time, orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) and narrowband implementations. However, ABI Research believes that the transition away from 802.11n in favour of Wi-Fi 6 will take some time. “802.11n is a well established technology, available at…low cost from a wide number of vendors, while new chipsets driving down power consumption are continuing to arrive to the market. Many industry players are still having product discussions leveraging 802.11n and expect this to continue for some time. In addition, some regions, such as China, are more conservative on newer technologies,” said Mr Zignani. He added: “Much of the initial marketing around Wi-Fi 6 has been at the higher end with limited focus on IoT applications. While this is understandable, given the initial rollout in networking, laptop and smartphone clients, much needs to be done to educate the industry around the other benefits that Wi-Fi 6 can bring to battery-constrained IoT devices. However, as 802.11ax chipset prices fall, and vendors refine their product lines to support IoT clients, this is likely to change.” ABI Research expects the IoT market to transition toward Wi-Fi 6 within the next two to three years. Chipset availability for 802.11ah, also known as Wi-Fi HaLow, is still very limited. Many HaLow ICs are still in development and most of these are from startup companies; many of the traditional Wi-Fi IC vendors are not backing the technology.

The first HaLow ICs are slowly beginning to appear, and ABI considers the next 12-18 months will be crucial in establishing HaLow’s position in the IoT landscape. Andrew Zignani believes that IoT will open up the market to new chipset vendors. “While the connectivity chipset market is currently dominated by Qualcomm, Broadcom and MediaTek, thanks to their entrenchment in the smartphone market, the IoT opens the competition to a wider range of chipset vendors who are exploring different dimensions of differentiation. These include companies like Cypress [recently acquired by Infineon], Silicon Labs, Nordic Semiconductor, Dialog Semiconductor, NXP, STMicroelectronics, TI, On Semiconductor, u-blox and Atmosic.” It’s good to talk – sometimes The Federal Communications Commission has been handing out penalties for holding “prohibited communi- cations” during the agency’s CAF II auction in 2018. The FCC has fined AT&T $75,000 and AMG Technology Investment Group $100,000. The FCC said that William Baker, AMG CEO, was “discussing AMG’s Auction 903 bids, its bidding strategies, and bidding results” in order to “secure discounts from AT&T.” No supporting details have been provided, but the agency has listed the fines under the “auction collusion” section of its website. The FCC’s $1.5 billion Connect America Fund phase II (CAF II), dubbed Auction 903, was a reverse auction where the agency promised to give money to the companies that submitted the lowest bid to provide telecommunications services in rural and currently under-served areas. AT&T was a registered but unsuccessful bidder. AMG’s NextLink, however, won the most money of any participant in the auction, amassing $281.3 million in funding to supply Internet services to homes and businesses in rural areas of Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas. NextLink recently confirmed to Light Reading [AMG’s NextLink: The FCC’s poster child for crossing the digital divide] that it planned to use the funds to build an extensive fixed wireless network to deliver services to poorly served areas. Participants in any FCC spectrum auction are prohibited from communicating with each other during the “quiet period” that can last for months before, and during, agency auctions. FCC documents show that Mr Baker sent several emails to AT&T executives over the course of the auction. He also met with AT&T executives as well as holding a video call with them. The FCC named AT&T as “the party that ultimately stopped the prohibited communications, by advising AMG that it could no longer engage in discussions”. Both companies told the FCC about the communications a few months later. The FCC has previously imposed fines of $100,000 and is authorised to levy fines of up to several million dollars. Gill Watson Features Editor

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Wire & Cable ASIA – November/December 2019

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