Together with our friends over at TelecomTV, we are in the process of surveying Telecom Executives about their expectations around the brave new world of communications.

Over 400 people have currently completed the survey and it is still open for a short period. Please take a few minutes to complete the survey — it won’t take long. In return not only will we share the findings with you for FREE, but we will also donate $1 to, UNHCR’s charity, Ninemillion.org. Many thanks to the survey sponsor, Qualcomm.

For us, currently the biggest surprise is that telco executives see the biggest threat coming from new entrants and device makers shaking up the market — rather than the current competition, regulators, technology or users changing behaviour.

For our next executive brainstorm in April, rather than focussing on threats we are going to be looking at new opportunities, namely the 2-sided business model opportunity.

Posted at 03:30 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment

As described in an article in November the work of the TM Forum is becoming more and more important to the development of new telecoms business models.

It’s been trying to simplify the interactions between telcos for years by standardising their OSS-BSS interfaces; if the Telco 2.0 vision comes to pass, what with all those third-party innovators, payments going upstream and downstream, and user data flowing through dozens of APIs, we’re really going to need answers to a whole world of questions around OSS-BSS, roaming, interconnection, and settlement. After all, arbitrarily large numbers of small services (either on their own or as part of bigger organisations) will be busy interacting with telco networks, and the complex of telco, third party developer and customers will be interacting with other telcos, other systems, and other businesses; we’d better have these things nailed down.

As a prelude to their important Management World event on 18-22 May in Nice, we spoke to Keith Willetts, their Chairman (and one of the nicest men in telecoms), about convergence, trends in OSS/BSS and data mining - critical issues, as was re-iterated at the CMO Forum at the Mobile World Congress:

Telco 2.0: Convergence is a popular buzzword, but is it more likely that the industry will diverge - become a much more diverse variety of products using a common IP network?

Keith Willetts: Convergence doesn’t mean “everyone doing the same thing”; it means a new value chain. Most operators do two things - transport, and an end-to-end service. The future won’t be the same; instead, the end-to-end service will be supplied by entirely different players or created from several different products.

Instead of a world in which the operator controls everything it needs, it’ll be about gluing together many different things.

Telco 2.0: So we’re looking at a standard for exchanging commercial information - a really big XML struct?

KW: We’ve got to define a standard trading and management interface between companies. Otherwise, it won’t work for thousands of participants if you have to get on the phone and talk.

Telco 2.0: Rather like GSM roaming, then.

KW: But for many other services. The challenge is integrating it with the SDP. Once, you knew what the service was, telephony, it came out of the network, and you applied OSS-BSS to administer it and bill it. Now, it comes out of a server, and there will be many more services.

As a result, you’ll no longer be able to see the join; some functions are OSS, some are BSS, some belong to other parts of the SOA, some are charging. You won’t be able to walk up and plant a sticker on the BSS. Convergence at the software level means the join between these elements is invisible. I expect there will be fewer small ISVs.

Telco 2.0: How can we price complex information based on multiple telco data sources, the sort of thing we’ll need for advanced mobile advertising? Will we have to move to a more Amazon-like pricing structure; a flat fee per event?

KW: Provided you can measure it you can bill it; the real problem is responsibility. There will be many parties to every transaction - how do you settle responsibility instead of profit? We need to understand this in advance; what happens if someone downloads a movie and the file is corrupted? Does the telco give them a refund - and if so, does the content provider bill them for another copy? Imagine some sort of tied-in marketing that goes wrong.

The trading relationships dwarf the complexity of actually counting the packets. For things like mobile advertising, the basic stuff is all there in the OSS - calling circles, location, etc - but it’s in a gazillion different formats Monetising it upstream is dwarfed by the difficulty of getting it out; in the short term it’ll have to be flat-rate. A service provider like O2, for example, has several thousand OSS-BSS instances with information in different formats.

Telco 2.0: How can we make progress towards solving this?

KW: Iron filings on a sheet of paper; you’ve got to provide a commercial magnet to make the operators go back in there and revalue their data. I was recently in Russia with MegaFon, who are quite good; they’ve configured things to autopopulate the databases. But others are far worse in terms of fragmentation.”

We need some sort of agreement on what data you can supply, and a “service indication” protocol. We also need a OneWorld Alliance of operators to work on a much bigger scale; a lot of operators can offer you 20% of the market, but Google can offer you the world, so we need to start working on a cross-continental scale. None of this will occur until there’s real money on the table. I give it 3-5 years to the first green shoots of new thinking.

Telco 2.0: Will the solutions be more of a Web services model, with external applications pulling data from the telco systems and processing it themselves, or a software-agent model where external developers specify logic to be executed within the telco systems that returns an answer? The first is much simpler to implement and secure, but the second may be needed to solve the privacy issues…

KW: It’s a huge issue; who owns this information? It won’t be long before there’s a major lawsuit; I signed up to let this service use my data, and they shared it with my wife! We certainly need a detailed opt-in process. There are other questions as well - if you ask yourself what the top five pieces of information advertisers would want about a user, you realise that you can’t get age from the network. The big unanswered question is - what do the advertisers want?

If you put users, operators, developers, vendors and advertisers in a room, you’d probably end up with some very divergent sets of answers. I guess that’s what the Telco 2.0 events are all about?!.

[Ed - Telco 2.0 will be presenting at and facilitating the Leadership Summit at Management World on 19 May. Details here.]

Posted at 02:38 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment

When the British government inconsiderately lost in the post details of all our children, the event was rather aptly described as a “privacy Chernobyl”. Once out in the open environment, there’s no undoing the contamination that the release of such data can cause.

By coincidence, we’ve been privately using a metaphor of “plutonium data” for some time to describe the most sensitive data that telcos, by their very nature, must gather and store. The paradox is that this data could hold a key to evading the “dumb pipe” fear of so many operators. It also provides a differentiator and advantage to telco building a B2B services platform, at least compared to IT platforms such as Google’s. What if the telco brand could be redefined as a trust mark to mean “privacy protected”?

Separating the ordinary data from the extraordinary data

When running any business, you have to deal in what we call “potato data”. That’s the everyday staple diet stuff — name, address, products bought, support calls made. You have to store it somewhere sensible, but it doesn’t need three rows of barbed wire and armed guards. Standard IT tools and procedures will suffice. No special storage or processing facilities are needed. Furthermore, you can pass “potato data” around between enterprises fairly easily, subject to standard privacy and disclosure rules.

In contrast, “plutonium data” is the most sensitive data, such as location, call history, or credit worthiness. It requires special facilities to house it, and can cause havoc if allowed outside. The problem is that this data is potentially very useful in powering interactions between users and various third parties. Sometimes the third party needs to have a shard of radioactive material released. The taxi company needs to know where you are to dispatch the taxi to the right place. We establish special procedures to ensure that this location dip is done according to the rules.

It’s not about network APIs

Yet the operator would like to have more “value added” than just a bulk messaging or location API. That means packaging up APIs and customer data to solve a business problem for a partner. Consider my personal example of signing up for a new electricity supplier. A month or so later, on the day the new service is activated, I receive an SMS welcoming me to Scottish Hydro, and asking me to send my initial meter reading by return SMS. Sadly, I’m over a thousand miles away from home at the time, so it’s a waste of my time and Scottish Hydro’s money.

The job of the telco platform is to optimise business processes such as these. Rather than forwarding the SMS to roaming users, it should be stored until I’m back in the country. Indeed, it should only be forwarded to me at a time that I’m likely to respond. In this case, there’s no point in sending the message when I’m not physically at home. If I get home at 1am after a long business trip (or, for those so inclined, a long pub trip), it’s probably not the ideal time to ask your customer to hunt in the dark recesses of the under stair cupboard for a meter reading. Indeed, why not take the level of personalisation one step further. Don’t send the message when the user is in a call. Only send the message at a time of day when the user is normally active. You’re a shift worker who sleeps in the mornings and doesn’t make or take calls? We’ll hold the message back until you’re awake.

Get paid for outcomes, not inputs

The telco is then rewarded not for sending SMS messages, but for optimising the number of responses. You can see the same example playing out across other similar scenarios, such as marketing campaigns. In the case of meter readings, there’s margin to be made between the few cents of a bulk SMS API, and the many dollars of a personal visit by a meter reader (or the capex of replacing my meter with a connected smart one).

The catch is that I don’t want Scottish Hydro location dipping me 24 hours a day. And at standard pricing for such location capabilities, they’d go broke quickly too. The telco has to offer an interface that’s easy for the power company (or their systems integrator) to consume, and is fairly standard across all operators. We see the same issue with mobile advertising today, where media buyers find the telco an almost impossible channel to buy from due to fragmentation, lack of metrics, and low volume.

Mix and match APIs to increase value

This means that to work, the telco needs some kind of combinatorial API that only forwards the message when I get home. This is a mix of location, presence, messaging and personal data and preferences. A key idea here is we’re keeping all the “plutonium data” inside the telco. The telco knows your location anyway, and we’re not passing that to any third party. All they want are meter readings.

We can easily imagine this personalisation process happening in other ways. For instance, the taxi company I use starts off it’s IVR with an automated message “if you want a taxi dispatched to right away, press one”. Not much point in sending a taxi there if I’m not at home, and equally annoying to ask me if the taxi company can location dip me. In a future scenario, you can image their application passing some VoiceXML to the telco platform to drive a telco IVR. If I’m at home, the telco asks if I want that taxi sent there; otherwise, I go straight to the operator. Again, we’re keeping the “plutonium data” within the telco’s special processing facilities.

The next problem is that every vertical will have its own needs. You can’t keep on spawning APIs for every use case. The next guy will want the “forward this message when the user gets home, but only to adults” API. So just as Web 2.0 needed a new programming paradigm, so might Telco 2.0.

A new kind of computing

The Web 2.0 world has two technical innovations. One is web services, so that it’s easy to fetch data and invoke code remotely. The second is AJAX, which is how we download bits of code (i.e. Javascript) from the server to the browser to be run locally, since those user interface interactions are most sensibly done in that context of the user’s own PC. Web services enable the AJAX code to talk back to the server code.

The Telco 2.0 equivalent is a move towards a software agent model. That means the application sending a bunch of logic or code to the telco to be executed. The telco keeps all the super-private data, and aggregates the behavioural information (“does this person respond to marketing messages?”) across the different application providers. They don’t need to run the whole of their application inside the telco, just the bits that need to interact with “plutonium data”. For example, they might want to route calls based on your previous history of interactions with the callee, and the telco has the CDR history to enable this.

This provides a radically different vision of the future of the telco network than the one being pushed today by vendors or IT giants. The “intelligence at the edge” model of the Internet implies user data dispersed all over, and ignores that some of that data has a natural affinity with the network itself. Potentially, we’ve a “get out of jail free” card here against over-the-top threats. So we’re looking forward to sharing this concept more with everyone at the next Telco 2.0 event, but equally look forward to your feedback and opinions right here.

Posted at 01:56 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment

The most popular forms of broadband whether ADSL, Cable and HSPA Wireless all suffer the same technological limitation — it is almost impossible to predict the actual speed that the consumer will enjoy. And therefore, the marketeers take over and sell the maximum theoretical speed and in some small print actually describe that only in exceptional circumstances will the maximum speed be realised.

The following graph based upon a sample of 175k Plusnet customers illustrate the scale of the challenge.

The graph illustrates that only around 12% of the base get the full 8Mbps at synchronisation whereas just over 6% of the base are languishing below 1Mbps. Very little fault can be ascribed to Plusnet — it is just a feature of ADSL technology that speed is proportional to line quality and length. In fact, Plusnet work hard to ensure that their customers are satisfied. The recent polls of customer satisfaction showing Plusnet topping the list can not all be wrong.

In fact, we seriously doubt whether the majority of UK population actually currently know what speed they are receiving — to most people the biggest test is whether the BBC iPlayer streams acceptably or whether Skype calls do not break up. Most people we speak to these days just accept that the really big bandwidth hogging applications such as P2P or Usenet downloading are just something you do in the background and it is not important when they arrive. Life is probably much more difficult for the IPTV service providers such as BT and Tiscali, who require more bandwidth.

However, we feel that all is about to change with the next generation of monitoring and comparison tools which are about to be unleashed onto the unsuspecting ISP networks. There is now the technology available to monitor broadband connections and determine where the bottlenecks are within an ISP network — if the sample is big enough it will produce results down to the individual exchange / central level.

This will be a frightening thought to most ISPs — a new churn generator entering the market. Churn is quite possibly the most destructive force ever invented for telco business models.

This will also be applicable to cable networks. Although they don’t suffer the same degree of problems as ADSL technology, nonetheless DOCSIS is a shared pipe technology. Indeed… it is rumoured that on some segments in some areas of the planet some pipes are overloaded.

The situation for wireless companies is even worse: for not only is it a shared technology, but the signal degrades with distance from the cell site and when passing through walls. Vodafone recently revealed that 50% of its data traffic is transmitted from 10% of its cell sites. This illustrates the scale of the network engineering challenge facing the wireless operators.

In short, no technology is perfect and currently only a limited amount of customers will be aware or even care whether they are on the best local performing network. This is all about to change and the ISPs, whether fixed, cable or mobile, need to get ready and focus on delivering the best possible connection with the customer support to match to keep hold onto the base.

Your customers are about to become a lot more informed. What’s your plan?

Posted at 10:35 PM | Link to this article | 4 comments

We are close to finishing our latest research report, The Two-Sided Telecoms Market Opportunity, which outlines in detail how operators can achieve growth by adopting a two-sided business model. We’ve invested a huge amount of time and effort in sizing the opportunity for operators a.) by capability (Identity, Authentication, Security + Advertisng, Marketing, Business Services + E-Commerce + Off-line Order Fulfilment + On-line Order Fulfilment (content delivery) + Billing & Payments + Customer Care) and b.) by vertical industry. This helps us not only show how and why operators should tackle this opportunity (the usual strategic focus of our research), but also demonstrate the potential size of the pot.

We discuss the different functions of 2-sided platforms in the report and then look at Google, Amazon, Monster, iTunes, Betfair and AP Moller-Maersk in detail, pulling out appropriate lessons for telco operators. In this article we explore Google and, in boxing parlance, who measures up better in the ‘tale of the tape’…

Google is interesting because many people feel that it is ‘game-over’ for the operators and Google will merrily extend its dominance of web search into other areas, including voice and messaging and mobile advertising. In the report, we take a fresh look at Google:

• What it has achieved and why
• Its skills and assets
• Its current strategy

Operators and Google both make noises about being cosy partners. But we all recognise that they will also compete in a big way going forward.

Those interested in boxing may notice that the pictures above are of Mike Tyson (Google) and the unfancied British heavyweight Danny Williams (Telco operators). They are taken from a world heavyweight contest in 2004 in Louisville. The assumption of most people at the time was that even a Tyson in decline would brush Williams aside. Instead, Tyson was knocked out in the 4th round. Now, we are not suggesting that the same will happen in the battle between Google and and the operators but we do feel that the operators have plenty of weaponry IF they can use it. And Google thinks this too. This is from the IPO prospectus in 2004 and still holds true today:

We face competition from other Internet companies, including web search providers, Internet advertising companies and destination web sites that may also bundle their services with Internet access.
In addition to Microsoft and Yahoo, we face competition from other web search providers, including companies that are not yet known to us. We compete with Internet advertising companies, particularly in the areas of pay-for-performance and keyword-targeted Internet advertising. Also, we may compete with companies that sell products and services online because these companies, like us, are trying to attract users to their web sites to search for information about products and services.

We also compete with destination web sites that seek to increase their search-related traffic. These destination web sites may include those operated by Internet access providers, such as cable and DSL service providers. Because our users need to access our services through Internet access providers, they have direct relationships with these providers. If an access provider or a computer or computing device manufacturer offers online services that compete with ours, the user may find it more convenient to use the services of the access provider or manufacturer. In addition, the access provider or manufacturer may make it hard to access our services by not listing them in the access provider’s or manufacturer’s own menu of offerings. Also, because the access provider gathers information from the user in connection with the establishment of a billing relationship, the access provider may be more effective than we are in tailoring services and advertisements to the specific tastes of the user. (Our bolding). See the full prospectus here.

Rather than walk you through the case study on Google, I have uploaded in slide format:

| View | Upload your own

Posted at 01:48 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment

In Today’s Issue: Big Trouble over Phorm; no immunity for US telcos; mystery letters from Apple; iPhone hacked, cracked, and rehacked; 500 million Flash devices; unified comms drives datacentre demand; Deutsche Telekom looks at OTE; Sprint merger dread; Virgin Media USA suffers; Verizon does topological P2P; Safaricom IPO back on; BSNL looks for prepaid packet-pushing partners; Bharti Airtel looks for wholesale customers; broader broadband beats basic broadband

BT get caught over using personal data in Phorm trials: real customer data was used to test the system. The Phorm Ultimatum highlights two key considerations for any successful platform: privacy and rewards. The Pope of the Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee puts its succinctly:

It’s mine - you can’t have it. If you want to use it for something then you have to negotiate with me, I have to agree; I have to understand what I’m getting in return.

At the same time, the US telcos are back on the hook for illegal wiretapping after a new version of FISA, without immunity, passed the House of Representatives. It makes you wonder who you’d prefer to spy on you.

Perhaps Apple. The computer company everyone loves followed up the announcement of its iPhone SDK with a mystery letter to hundreds of developers - no-one’s quite sure whether it’s a threat or not. There’s much to be said for taking your competitors by surprise; but astonishing them isn’t quite the same thing. Over at eComm 2008, meanwhile, Google bashes the iPhone. Incredibly enough, they reckon Android is superior. Meanwhile, the iPhone hackers have knocked the firmware wide open; including the bit that lets Apple brickify ones they don’t like. Linux iPhones can’t be far off now; not that there would be any point, but when does that stop hackers’ unbridled neophilia? Meanwhile, the port of Lotus Notes for the iPhone is confirmed. And Adobe reckons there are 500 million mobiles around with Flash Lite installed - but not one iPhone.

Building the platform requires laying the foundations. Telehouse is spending £80 million on doubling the size of its carrier hotel in Docklands, as a world surge in data centre spending keeps up. They’re also adding 15,000 square feet of floorspace in Paris and setting up shop in Singapore. You can’t fake infrastructure, so don’t try. If you want to know who wants all that rackspace, this could give you an idea.

We’ve repeatedly said that Deutsche Telekom is a company with an overpriced foreign acquisition in its future: now here it is. DTAG plans to buy Greek incumbent OTE; stand by for more details, but you have to worry. At least the rumour about them buying Sprint-Nextel hasn’t come true yet; Telephony Online reports that Merrill Lynch is behind it, and discusses the appalling complexity of such a deal. It would create a company with CDMA2K, UMTS, GSM, iDEN, WiMAX, FLASH OFDM, and UMTS TDD networks, and that’s just in the mobile division. To say nothing of arguing with both US and EU regulators, and maybe buying a piece of a giant illegal-wiretapping lawsuit (remember, T-Mobile USA was one of the two honourable exceptions next to Qwest). Don’t do it, man - think of your wife and children.

Telephony Online speculates that T-Mobile might want it as part of a grand scheme to build an LTE-based pan-global mobile empire. One network to rule them all. But if T-Mobile wanted to do that - they’ve already got 2+ GHz spectrum across the US for their UMTS build. In the EU, they’re already acquiring masses of cell-sites for the same reason. So why would they want the Telco USSR’s problems? Still, it really would be a huge, overpriced foreign acquisition. Alternatively, maybe Sprint will just demerge Nextel; leaving what?

Just to help matters, Sprint’s major wholesale customer, Virgin Media USA, is suffering after a sharp drop in subscriber additions. The excuse is that they didn’t see value in competing at the low end of market. The alternative, more plausible reason, is that the recession and competition is starting to bite.

Verizon looks a better bet; they’re looking seriously at the problems of developing a topology-aware P2P distribution system. This is something the industry badly needs to tackle the broadband incentive problem and further develop its digital logistics capability. But if you can’t wait for that, the short-term upside is still in emerging markets. Proof is that the Safaricom IPO is back on after being held up due to a screaming mob problem.

India’s state incumbent BSNL is looking for franchisees for pre-paid WiMAX; Bharti Airtel is working on its wholesale business. Finally over in the Netherlands, cable and fibre pull ahead of DSL for broadband access.

Posted at 12:16 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment

The vision of our Voice & Messaging 2.0 project is coming ever closer in reality. Two pieces of news this week underline this; first, Sony extends in-game VoIP to more PlayStation Portables. (You’ll remember, of course, that earlier this week Sony filed patents on a PSPhone.). Second, IBM pours $1bn into unified comms. In this article we explore where the telco can fit in…

Sony’s move is an example of one major world trend; the extension of voice (and video) into applications and devices that have never had it in the past. The PSP is a games device; ever since the first MUD (Multi-User Dungeon)s, the ability to chat or rather, to mock, taunt, gloat at, or conspire with fellow players has been common in gaming. (Arguably, it’s been so ever since Dungeons and Dragons.) Equally, sound is critical to the realism of the gaming experience. But so far, most sound in games originates from a file of predetermined effects triggered by…the trigger, more often than not. Communication is usually restricted to text equivalents to IRC (Internet Relay Chat - Chat Rooms being the most prominent example), and gestures in virtual space; no voice.

Putting voice functions into the console means that - to start with - voice and messaging can happen alongside games. It also means - much more importantly - that games developers who want voice or messaging can use the device API and its hardware capabilities rather than building their own, which in turn means that many more games will have in-game voice.

And where are the telcos in this? Nowhere. (But imagine the possibilities of presence/availability, mobility, location, and payments.) Here’s what the respondents to our Future Broadband Business Models survey think will happen to mobile voice over the next 10 years in Europe.

The upshot is that voice minutes of use - in so far as this measurement is at all meaningful - will keep rising, indeed, may rise faster than ever before. But the share that telcos handle and bill will fall. Up to a point, it’s a good thing that telcos aren’t part of some of this voice activity; for example, there is very little point building a telco instant-messaging platform, because there is very little revenue or customer retention to be had. (Imagine telcos trying to design a games console; and weep.) It’s essentially junk voice; there’s no money in competing for free or near-free VoIP traffic.

Telcos could, however, make their contextual features useful to the emerging embedded voice applications - remember the “Seven Questions”, and this scenario for value-based pricing of voice into social networking sites.

Probably the most commercially interesting IM users in the world are the 17 million people who use Lotus Notes’ instant messaging client, Sametime, inside enterprises.
Their traffic is highly valuable to them, and to their companies; the archived chatter is valuable, both for reference and for regulatory compliance. Security, reliability, and identity authentication are critically important. They can’t just churn off to MSN, Yahoo, Skype or IRC - hence they are a genuine asset to Lotus’s owners, IBM. This brings us to the second piece of news: IBM pours $1bn into unified comms.

IBM is targeting its biggest enterprise customers with the latest version of Sametime, which now includes VoIP and video conferencing next to IM, e-mail, group scheduling and other collaboration/teamwork applications as an integrated suite. As far as voice goes, the first new feature is intelligent call-routing telephony; watch this grow as an application.

This is their response to Microsoft’s Unified Comms server software, and Cisco’s Unified Comms hardware. Computerworld perceptively points out the synergy with IBM Global Services; their network and hosting/managed services infrastructure is, in a sense, IBM’s answer to all those Cisco voice switches. It’s also a lot like the “pipes” and “platters” in the Telco 2.0 model; with the software as the “product” and possibly the platform, and probably IBM itself as the “partner”.

It’s worth noting that much of the new functionality originated with third-party developers contributing to IBM’s Eclipse ecosystem for Java coders; IBM put the source code out on Eclipse two years ago and is now reaping the rewards.

The upshot? Voice is growing at both ends of the spectrum - but telcos are in the middle of it. At one end, we see many, many ad-hoc micro-networks providing basic chat inside all kinds of other applications - chat that will be free in itself. Telcos can participate here by making nonvoice functionality available for cheap through their APIs. At the other end, we see increasingly sophisticated total-communications managers developing value from the context of every communication event; large enterprises and companies like IBM will develop their own solutions, mostly needing bulk bandwidth and mass-scale infrastructure from the telcos.

But who will bring these functions to the vast numbers of power users and SMBs who don’t have the scale for an IBMicroHP TotalComms Enterprise Environment? The answer could be - you. Remember that telcos already have the ability to interconnect pretty much anything in terms of voice and messaging, and to bill for anything that raises a signalling event, wherever in the world it happens. They also know who and where their customers are; all of these capabilities are difficult and expensive to implement as an over-the-top application using the Internet, which means that only really big companies can afford to do so for their own needs.

Telcos, however, have these capabilities as part of their evolutionary inheritance, and already operate at huge scale. A scale that Google et al cannot match today…

[Ed. - find out about the praticalities of exploiting these capabilities at the Telco 2.0 event on 16-17 April in London].

Posted at 11:35 AM | Link to this article | Add a comment

In Today’s Issue: BT starts Verwaayen succession plan, ideal candidate said to be “probably male”; Brough Turner takes the separation gospel to ETech; iPlayer hits mobile; Alltel goes flatrate, hoists white flag; Yahoo! lines up to whack telcos; Sun outwits Apple over iPhone; Sony lines up to whack telcos; hackers assail Chinese mobile-IM users in first mobile ransomware; Symbian Platform Security considered harmful?; more on the Death Of Mobile Apps; HSPA+MobileTV=coffee+grit?; heads roll at Motorola

BT looking to the post-Verwaayen era. Telecoms’ best-known International Relations grad may be looking to name a successor; if he gets this right, after being right about structural separation, he will go down in BT’s history as close to the perfect CEO. Ian Livingstone of BT Retail is being mentioned as a possible candidate. It’s very unlikely, however, that Verwaayen’s successor would be a woman: Brough Turner wants to know why.

Our best guess is that it’s something to do with telcos having alienated three generations or so of young techies; in the 1980s everyone wanted to work for Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Lotus and friends. In the 1990s they wanted to work for Yahoo!, Netscape, Cisco, or Electronic Arts. And today, it’s Amazon, Apple, Google, your favourite open-source project, or else some random Web 2.0 lashup.

Brough also likes branded ringback tones. Hmmm, the next step is to make a really unpleasant noise so the subscribers pay for personalised ringback to get rid of it….right? Sounds like a plan.

In our continuing Brough-fest, he also has an interesting post advocating structural separation and a de-commercialised, either regulated, shared, or publicly owned, dark-fibre operator. Call it the Super-Openreach option. You’ll need it, too; Alltel is the latest US operator to go flat-rate, and the BBC iPlayer is coming to the mobile networks. Watch out!

The pressure, in general, is well and truly on the telco business model; Yahoo! has announced a content-manager application that works across PCs and mobile devices, organising all your stuff. Most of the stuff will be locally cached as you use it, so there’ll be no data charging bonanza for the telcos either. Chuck in their unified-messaging/stalkerware app, OneConnect, and search, and they have an impressive emerging portfolio of over-the-top mobile applications. Maybe that’s what Microsoft actually wants.

Speaking of Microsoft, the launch of the iPhone SDK this week faced a double spork attempt on both flanks; Microsoft’s Silverlight in-browser development languagecame to Nokia devices, whilst Sun Microsystems declared that it was working on a Java Virtual Machine implementation for iPhones, which would neatly run around Apple’s planned Apple-branded development ecosystem. And it’s going to be available through the Apple Appstore, priced free. Curse you, Red Baron.

Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson patents a phone based on the PSP, suggesting a highly advanced user interface (no keys, haptic feedback under the touch screen, accelerometers…); the question is, however, will Sony cut a side-deal for connectivity like that on the Amazon Kindle (or Truphone vs The Cloud), or perhaps stuff them with pre-loaded content? Remember that the next versions of the PS3’s software includes some voice and messaging functionality. Consumer electronics is pushing into the undemarcated zone of new voice and messaging; are you ready?

New gadgets, and new forms of voice and messaging, mean new security threats; Chinese hit mobile IM platform QQ gets hit by hackers, who released a Trojan called Kiazha-A. It appears to be the first case of mobile ransomware; the victims receive threatening SMS messages demanding that they send a ransom in QQ’s internal currency in exchange for the Trojan’s deactivation. At the same time, it copies all their messaging traffic to (presumably) the attacker, who is believed to want it in order to phish for passwords. If you don’t have a QQ account, the ‘bot will set one up; considerate! Nokia S60 devices are affected by the virus, which is spread using old favourite Commwarrior’s MMS and Bluetooth functionality.

Only good software gets cracked, as Gabor Torok says at Forum Nokia, demonstrating another workaround of Symbian’s security platform. It’s an interesting question whether Symbian codesigning is actually more useful than not; clearly, people are getting hacked anyway, and the codesigning process is a significant barrier to innovators as well as a general bloody nuisance. In fact, come to think of it, even installing Python for S60 is needlessly annoying, before you get to the stage of doing any development.

The risk for Nokia is that, especially with the release of their Web Runtime and MS Silverlight, developers will migrate to working in the browser, which cuts them out of the value chain (Nokia’s own efforts to create a business model for widgetry could backfire on them here). The risk for the rest of us is more mobile malware, but then, not only is this the cost of freedom, but if everyone turns to working in AJAX, Flash, JavaFX, or Silverlight, we’ll get rigged mobile web pages instead of dubious apps, which is a considerably more efficient distribution vector and one against which Symbian codesigning doesn’t provide any protection.

Well, at least QQ can be pleased that they have built something useful; if the enemy are using your product there can’t be that much wrong with it. We shall see if that’s the case with Huawei’s new HSPA+mobile TV dongle. Sounds more use than a tri-band CDMA-only gadget.

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