In Today’s Issue: Vodafone after T-Mobile UK? Femtocells ready to launch; voiceprint ID at Vodafone Turkey; moving to the Smoke; HOWTO install unauthorised software to a Palm Pre; Intel-Nokia strategic alliance; Moto Karma launches on AT&T; AT&T femtocells coming; subscription navigation application; TV to go; Comcast, TimeWarner break with Hulu; Virgin Media to bother filesharers; ARCEP says yes to urban overbuild, divides France into three parts; NSN gets optical kit from Juniper, i.e. Ericsson; the long death of Nortel; new Ericsson CEO talks to the FT; Indians alarmed by exploding Chinese gadgets; GVoice hype and cold water; AdSense for mobile launches; native SDK out for Android; BREW’s future; iPhone 3GS costimates; EBay “bought Skype but not the code”; Genachowski’s in at the FCC; Entanet shoots back in the UK wholesale wars

Consolidation watch: the Financial Times claims there is an offer on the table for T-Mobile UK, from Vodafone. How will OFCOM respond to that? A combined company would have no less than 40% of total spending on mobile service in the UK, and this would trigger yet more repercussions for the spectrum situation. Perhaps part of the regulatory solution would be to trade off a tranche of 900MHz to 3UK, in exchange for T-Mobile’s 1800MHz holdings?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 29th June, 2009" »

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“to secure the UK’s position as one of the world’s leading digital knowledge economies”

Continue reading "Digital Britain: Too Large a Scope" »

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In the last 12 months the fundamental question related to the ‘2-sided’ telecoms market opportunity has changed from “what is it?” to “how do we do it?” A new report describes the key priority areas.

Continue reading "7 Strategic Priority Areas for new Telecoms Business Models" »

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There is an ongoing debate about the size of the losses at YouTube and for how much longer the parent, Google, can afford to fund its errant child’s excessive lifestyle. Credit Suisse put a high price on it; Brough Turner criticised their analysis; RampRate decisively debunked it.

The debate has focused upon YouTube as a standalone service and little attention has been given to the spin-off benefits accruing to the parent. Google controls a significant, and growing, share of the means of production of the entire Internet industry. We argue that ownership of YouTube is a crucial ingredient for Google’s control of the economic rent that Google extracts from the whole of the Internet value chain.

We believe that YouTube is used indirectly to drive profits at the parent, and that Google is currently incentivized to keep these profits hidden from prying eyes. The key indirect benefits accruing to Google of owning YouTube are as follows:

i) YouTube gains Google a critical slice of growing online video eyeballs, which will attract more marketing dollars to the Internet as a whole. This is much more important in the USA, where the main competitor Hulu is ad-funded than the UK, where the BBC iPlayer is taxpayer funded;
ii) YouTube gains Google yet more important meta-data which can be cross-pollinated with data from other Google services;
iii) YouTube traffic strengthens Google specifically in peering negotiations and generally in network design;
iv) YouTube is probably a small fraction of Google’s overall cost base, and the spin-off benefits from lower overall unit costs;and
v) YouTube positions Google very powerfully for a key role as a gatekeeper in the copyright world.

This article explains these indirect benefits in detail and explains a strategy for telcos to adopt in the online video world.

Continue reading "Google: The Internet Behemoth and how it profits from YouTube" »

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Telco 2.0 is delighted to announce that Nathan Richardson, Executive Producer for EVE Online at CCP Games, will be speaking at November’s EMEA Telco 2.0 event, to help us understand the ‘digital generation’.

EVE Online is one of the world’s biggest massively-multiplayer virtual worlds, a community which incorporates as many as 300,000 subscribers and 45,000 others on free trial accounts. Within its world, players organise themselves in alliances, guilds, and commercial corporations and compete to dominate the trade of the Universe, whilst of course looking out for space pirates, or perhaps dabbling in piracy themselves.

The game is implemented…

Continue reading "EVE Online comes to Telco 2.0" »

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We mentioned that IBM Research is charting a Telco 2.0 agenda, concentrating on mobile enterprise applications, emerging-market mobility (especially applications for SMBs), and enterprise-to-end user applications. Here’s a video demonstration of their Seer augmented-reality application, which is being trialled at Wimbledon this week.

A couple of points come to mind. The first is that Anssi Vanjoki’s remarks at this spring’s Telco 2.0 event about the future of the Web being contextual, rather than semantic, and that this would be driven by the proliferation of new sensors (orientation, machine vision, location, etc) on mobile devices, are entirely right. The second is that this shows the power of an open development platform. It may look like science fiction, but there are quite a lot of similar projects going on, working primarily in Android or Symbian S60, both inside Nokia R&D and independently.

The third is that device API standardisation is important, and the BONDI, JIL, and related projects are crucial for the future of the industry. The fourth is that the IBM developers didn’t involve a telco in any way, except to provide data transfer. Can anyone spell “dumb pipe”?

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Ericsson is promoting its Java SDK on YouTube:

Well, it’s good to be reminded of the fundamental need for communication. Netscape legend Jamie Zawinski said something similar in a now-classic blog post about groupware, social networks, and contacts management:

Continue reading "Developers - That's where Telco 2.0 comes in..." »

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A new open-source technical toolkit (based on Linux, Asterisk, OpenSER and perhaps OpenSS7) is emerging for Voice 2.0 applications. In this note we will discuss the elements that go into it, the possibilities and problems involved, and the consequences of these developments for existing operators.

Continue reading "The Toolkit of Voice 2.0 - Linux, Asterisk, OpenSER..." »

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In Today’s Issue: Nortel - the final curtain; NSN vultures up CDMA, LTE assets; CSL CEO: Chinese vendors are our rightful masters - submit!; Iran: HOWTO strangle the Internet; actually, asking NSN seems to be the staff solution; MTN chafes at the bit; more censorship data; Uncle Sam’s monster e-mail database; Novarra: half the data traffic is from basic phones, and we know because we read it!; Indian 3G auction set for September; WiMAX to follow; the great British spectrum sale?; AT&T/Slingbox/Baseball neutrality row; cablecos can community on Canoe; AT&T gives away MMS; 80% of growth at RIM now consumer; IBM R&D to spend $100m on Telco 2.0-ish agenda; Intel wants to put your phone in a cloud; Free lobbies on, self-funds fibre rollout; Wind faces cash call; BT will deploy more fibre, one day, perhaps; the call centre that can’t; augmented reality, without pills, with Gphones; new Android gadgets at T-Mobile; Palm SDK - still waiting; security alert from OpenBTS; Apple launches some sort of mobile device, apparently

It has come to this: Nortel throws in the towel. The vendor, once valued at $250bn, is to be broken up in an effort to recover some cash; the first vulture is already in, and it’s Nokia Siemens Networks. They’ve acquired the CDMA and LTE infrastructure operation for $650m, which gives them a considerably boosted presence in North America and control of important patents over LTE technologies. Other plums are likely to include the optical networking and carrier-Ethernet businesses.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 22nd June 2009" »

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A major milestone has been achieved; the first inter-carrier mobile payments system in a developed market since PayForIt. We were impressed when we first met Zoompass at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC); we’re more impressed now. It will offer Canadian subscribers a comprehensive transfer, transaction, and account management service with encryption, whichever of the three main mobile operators they use.

In so doing it has adopted key Telco 2.0 concepts - trusted agent networks, inter-carrier cooperation, and extending telco assets and capabilities into thousands of other business processes.

Continue reading "Zoompass: Implementing Mobile Money, Right" »

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Sometimes new business models feel too complicated to undertake. However, new methods and technologies are enabling operators to trial new business models without having to change their existing systems or processes. Some people are calling this “BSS 2.0”.
 
Building on our last post on how to pilot Telco 2.0 ideas, this guest article from Andrew Thomson, VP Solutions at Infonova expands on his stimulus presentation from May’s Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm and provides some examples of where and how “BSS 2.0” could add value.

PS: Scroll down to see an interview with Simon Torrance and Andrew Thomson for TelecomTV on the same topic

Continue reading "Pilot 2.0 (Part 2): Using Old Systems for New Business Models" »

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In Today’s Issue: Sprint sells iDEN assets; US mobile data price wars; value heads for the edge and for key infrastructure; T-Mobile denies Data Thieves of 2009 caper; epic net neutrality row in the UK as politicos play to the whistle on Digital Britain; C&W in fatcat punchup; Australian NBN news shows Telstra and Optus making nice; a hundred flowers blossom, a thousand schools of thought contend, and they all want a broadband stimulus cheque; universal GSM for the poor - the US poor; Telekom Austria looks at separation; Qwest - customers don’t care about speed but do want everything now; Sprint-L(3) tie up to buy up Qwest; Kenya’s submarine cable comes ashore; China Unicom “buys 125,000 Node-Bs”; Qualcomm sees recover; Dell claims to monetise Twitter; dismantle your Palm Pre; Palm hires Apple iPod chief; Nokia coming for Adobe and MS developers; two Nokia howtos; sue your way to popularity; HP mobile social network; pitfalls of the smart grid; Cisco California comms considered costly; analogue switchoff, MediaFLO on the air; Iranian BGP admins working for the clampdown

So it finally happened: Sprint-Nextel is selling a chunk of iDEN assets in the Midwest to settle with one of its many, many angry affiliates. This sounds like an opportunity for someone innovative to make use of the system’s special powers in enterprise Voice 2.0. Meanwhile, price war rages; Sprint again slashed its data tariff this week after Verizon did likewise. With 500MB/month for $40, they’re yet to get close to the sort of prices 3UK offers.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 15th June, 2009" »

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Below is a summary analysis of the Technical Architecture 2.0 session at the May 2009 Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm.

The premise we explored was this:

The implementation of new ‘Two-Sided’ Telecoms Business Models has major consequences on telco network architecture. Perhaps most importantly, data from separate internal silos needs to be aggregated and synthesised to provide valuable information on a real-time basis. Key process interfaces that enable new services must be made available to external parties securely and on-demand. Network and IT functions must start collaborating and function as a single entity. Operators need to migrate to a workable architecture quickly and efficiently; vendors have to support this direction with relevant new product offerings and strategies.

Continue reading "Technical Architecture 2.0 - Good Start, but Significant Gaps" »

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Below is a summary analysis of the Video Distribution 2.0 session at the May 2009 Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm.

The premise we explored was this:

The demand for internet video is exploding. This is putting significant stress on the current fixed and mobile distribution business model. Infrastructure investments and operating costs required to meet demand are growing faster than revenues. The strategic choices facing operators are to charge consumers more when they expect to pay less, to risk upsetting content providers and users by throttling bandwidth, or to unlock new revenues to support investment and cover operating costs by creating new valuable digital distribution services for the video content industry.

Continue reading "Online Video 2.0 - TIme to re-think the fundamentals" »

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Below is a summary analysis of the Pilot 2.0 session at the May 2009 Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm.

One of the recurring themes at the event was ‘where to start?’ with Telco 2.0 business models. Although many participants could perceive where operators would like to be eventually, there was much less belief or consistency in working out how to get there.

Continue reading "Pilot 2.0 - How to trial new business models" »

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