What's wrong with being a dumb pipe - lots of money here. New ways of pricing and funding networks (MuniNets, End2End, Wimax, Wifi)

In Today’s Issue: DT/Sprint murder’n’acquisition poses world’s biggest OSS BSS MESS; shareholders scared; political egos swell; warming up by buying OTE; and a side order of Nokia Ovi content, please; Mobistar MVNO mastery; Microhoo muffed; Yahoo+Jajah; huge Brazilian mergermonster slithers out of rainforest, eats shareholders; Virgin Media intros TV-over-IP-over-TV-over-IP; Globe Tel intros TV-over-3G; Sony Ericsson offers nightmare coding turducken; all-open-source mobile dev framework Flyer

No! Don’t do it! Think of your family! It’s one of those moments where someone’s about to be very ill-advised indeed, and the rest of us can but watch in horror and incredulity. Yes, we said Deutsche Telekom was a company with a huge overseas acquisition in their future, and guess what? They want to buy…the Telco USSR, Sprint Nextel. Apparently DTAG considered a bid for Nextel way back when - so no wonder they’re interested in getting it cheap, with Sprint thrown in free (they spent $40bn on Voicestream alone - they’re now looking at $23bn for the whole Sprint empire). But you have to wonder why anyone would want this: let’s see, that’s German, British, Dutch and US GSM and UMTS, German DSL, VDSL and even some ISDN, CDMA2000 at mainline Sprint mobile, iDen at Nextel, WiMAX at Sprint XOHM, more GSM/UMTS in Central Europe, FLASH OFDM in Slovakia and UMTS TDD in the Czech Republic. To say nothing of their competing global carrier operations, and WLAN hotspots, and SprintLink US fibre, and T-Systems call centres…

It’s like a charming screwball comedy entitled Converge This!, in which we follow the exploits of two hilariously ill-matched OSS-BSS engineers, Sven and Sven, as they strive to integrate the back-office operations of a giant mobile phone company that uses literally every network protocol in existence…no wonder the Frankfurt stock market doesn’t like it at all.

What is considerably less funny is the answer to our question: basically, the German government, which owns a large chunk of DTAG, is mad keen to see them do a “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” moment in Washington (well, Overland Park, KS) by becoming the US’s biggest mobile operator. They may have forgotten that the character in Raoul Walsh’s film said that whilst standing on top of a giant tank of petrol in an oil refinery on fire, being shot at by the police….

But what is funny is that some US politicians apparently think German ownership of Sprint would be a menace to national security…

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 5th May 2008" »

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Meet JIL; that’s the Joint Innovation Lab, a project worked out between Vodafone and China Mobile that’s meant to establish standards for mobile widgetry. Apart from the obvious point that only telcos could come up with anything like a standards body for widgets, what’s the betting the standard turns out to be a lot like the Nokia Web Runtime?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 28th April 2008" »

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At the Telco 2.0 event last week there was much debate about whether online video (a fast growing phenomenon) would kill the ISP business, not only fixed, but mobile too. Our analysis of the real life effect of the BBC’s iPlayer on ISPs in the UK was used to challenge the optimism around mobile broadband. Two senior execs from the mobile world agreed that the issue was an important one and, no, their companies, and the industry in general didn’t have a solution…but needed one…pretty fast. They’re lucky, they have some time on their hands, relative to the fixed world.

So, here is some more analysis to fuel the debate:

In our recent report on future broadband business models we have several case studies on how you need to match the distribution system to the content — and how some people get it right (e.g. Sky), and others get it wrong (e.g. Joost).

The BBC is providing us with a fascinating experiment in the economics of distribution of digital goods. Who will pay for the postage and packing charges of all the content being delivered in future?

Continue reading "BBC and its paymasters: Cutting the Gordian knot" »

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In Today’s Issue: Online businesses crave telco capabilities (potentially…). Motorola rearranges the deckchairs. Nokia profits up 25%, but you wouldn’t want to see what went into that. Is Comes With Music a lossmaker? Nobody pays for the stuff anyway. Silverlight everywhere. And Moonlight. Is Microsoft IBM in 1993? 1,788 entries in the Android dev competition, but Google can’t keep a SIP server running. They can send a man to the moon… O2 users optimise radio network by whingeing. FTel+TeliaSonera=nightmare on Wall Street? Truphone gets a cash dump. UPS saves fuel with a platform. Pat Robertson, selfless crusader for your digital rights? AT&T fearmongering vs Andrew Odlyzko; there can only be one winner. Data centres in containers will eat the world. EBay finds giving away telephony is not a business. And there’s the day the YouTube died.

Ed Wray, CEO of Betfair, the world’s biggest betting exchange, came to last week’s Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm and told the assembled crowd of telcosians he would be delighted to pay a telco to solve his ‘digital logistics’ problems. Authentication is crucial to Betfair’s business, not just to prevent fraud but also to prevent Americans and the under-age from using the site, something which can lead to an executive jail problem. And telcos, he says, can provide it. At the moment, it’s costing him $22 to verify the identity of each new customer; with 1.5 million active customers, you could see how that might get expensive.

“There’s a tendency when building a platform business to do too much yourself - I come back to payments, I come back to authentication. People in this room can do this,” he said. A couple of telco execs came up to him afterwards to double check that he really was supporting the analysis on which the event was based.

In a keynote the day before, Sally Davies, CEO of BT Wholesale, described the 2-sided business model opportunity as “exciting and compelling”, but with many challenges in execution ahead. If there was a single theme of the conference, that was it; you couldn’t move for people who’d independently come to similar conclusions to those in the newly released the Voice & Messaging 2.0 and 2-Sided Business Model reports. The issue, of course, is how to disseminate these ideas more widely…

Much more analysis of last week’s Telco 2.0 event to come…

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 20th April 2008" »

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In Today’s Issue: Data surge at 3UK; price war in Sweden; Vodafone (powered by BT); what next after Big Ben?; more Phorm horrors; Carphone vs BT vs OFCOM; BT vs WiMAX; UK 2.5GHz auction coming; Qualcomm: Is a Telco; flying femtocells and Truphone; bad science at NTT; Apple zaps SDKs; Opera for Android; mystery MVNOs; Sonopia is toast; Embarq embarks on Telco 2.0; big chip merger; Safaricom caught fibbing about subscribers; mobile banking hits Orascom

There’s been a surge in data traffic and revenue at 3UK after they launched their wave of HSPA dongles last year; can anyone guess their secret? That’s right, they radically cut prices, and guess what, demand went way up. While it’s certainly good news for anyone who wants mobile Hovisnet service (it’s the Net wi’ nowt taken out), how long will it be before they find themselves stuck between raging demand and yet another trip to see the nice man from Ericsson?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 14th April 2008" »

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LAST CHANCE TO JOIN 200 SENIOR EXECS AT THE 4TH TELCO 2.0 EXECUTIVE BRAINSTORM NEXT WEEK (16-17 APRIL, LONDON). ALL PARTICIPANTS GET A FREE COPY OF ONE OF NEW RESEARCH REPORTS. DETAILS HERE.

In Today’s Issue: 60 WAP sites - meh; Tellabs - beware big telcos; Google not buying Skype; Carphone Warehouse joins forces of Righteousness; cars! with periscopes!; Visto on the skids; Yahoo! Other people who searched for Yahoo! also searched for Yes!; unofficial iPhone SDK; cheap iPhones; new Nokia E90 firmware; WiMAX optimism; LTE promises; iClones; dumb terminals for your smartphone; 35 years of mobility

NBC Universal offers a thrilling new content play: “direct access to more than 60 WAP sites on your handset”, no less. We thought you already had “direct access” to considerably more than that. Of course, what they mean is that they’ll yuck up all the menus with ones they want you to visit so they can show you ads. So very 1999-dotcom-boom. Just don’t tell us there’s another bust coming…

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 7th April 2008" »

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For some unknown reason, I have this mental image of 1940s actress Hedy Lamarr, glamorous co-inventor of spread spectrum radio, doing her work in some swanky Manhattan hotel suite. A grand piano sits in the corner, and servants flutter by. Who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall as an eye-catching actress chalks up one of the foundation stones of modern communications? And all over afternoon tea and cake.

Wait a few decades for the invention of the transistor, mix in some incomprehensible algebraic magic, et voila - CDMA radio, 3G and footie clips on your mobile.

In stark contrast, we’ve been down in an anonymous terraced house in Clapham in south London, quietly watching agape at a technology that could unleash a revolution of equal magnitude, only this time targeted firstly at fixed networks. Just as with CDMA, a bunch of boffins have applied some clever maths, and worked out how to get a ton more value out of your communications network.

The company is a tiny start-up, Predictable Network Solutions (PNSol). And it’s got “disruptive” written all over it in big neon capitals. We don’t have any shares. They’ve not paid us anything (although they’re generous with cups of tea). We’re just fans.

Continue reading "PNSol: Answer to the broadband riddle?" »

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In Today’s Issue: Motorola gossip: the demerger cometh; cablecos’ Comcast-Clearwire concert party; HOWTO deploy fibre in NZ?; here’s an answer from San Francisco; Symbian OS platform security is hacked; free WLAN in BA lounges; 3UK is profitable, pigs fly; another MVNO casualty; Virgin Mobile India “not an MVNO”; Miss Bimbo; $20 a month on ringtones; Cuba Movil!; Chinese 3G; really fast stuff; 3G iPhones; another startup-without-money.

Inside gossip at Motorola; someone claims to have been the Richard Kinder figure of their crisis and accuses Ed Zander of working their past CMO to death, and also playing too much golf. Which of these sins is more serious is left as an exercise for the reader. It was also this week that saw Moto finally take our repeated advice. They got rid of the handsets operation, thus leaving it “floating downwards to find its own level”, in the immortal words of Sir Norman Fowler describing the collapse of Sterling.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 31st March 2008" »

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In Today’s Issue: 37% of Ultra-Mobile PCs to get WiMAX; Virtual PBXs could eat your business customers; low-cost telepresence like low-cost spaceflight, i.e. not very; MSFT buys callcentreco; Don Price on managed services; topology aware P2P; variable speed limits for the Net; price war rages; i-mode fails in Europe; huge telcos win huge telco auction; epic Aussie brawl over WiMAX; Sprint’s new core network - platform perfection or IMS infection?; Vodafone & MTN; French FTTH; Deutsche Telekom disaster; sickening “human skin” phones.

37% of ultra-mobile devices to fit WiMAX. So says Intel — but then again, how big will the market for ultra-mobile PCs really be? Time will tell…

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 25th March 2008" »

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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.

Continue reading "Broadband: but not quite as broad as advertised" »

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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.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 17th March 2008" »

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NGMN.org ran a half-day conference at CeBIT on mobile broadband. The presentations - from Vodafone, LG, Nokia Siemens, and Texas Instruments - can be downloaded here…but Hamid Akhavan’s, CEO at T-Mobile International, seems to have been withdrawn from the site now. We managed to grab it before it was. The key image is below. It shows the economic unsustainability of mobile broadband, especially on flat-rate tariffs. If you understand that low quality YouTube videos now account for 10% of all global web traffic, then imagine what will happen when the quality improves. In fact you don’t need to imagine: see the real stats of the impact of the BBC’s iPlayer (high quality streaming video) on UK ISP’s in the last 8 weeks since launch (a doubling of streaming traffic and a trebling of costs - analysis here). Then you have to ask: “Don’t we need a new business model here, in parallel with the 4G technical developments?” The answer is of course, yes, and we explained why to NGMN.org in detail over a year ago on this blog (here). But, of course, we’ve had a deafening silence from the tecchies about this (“Not our problem!”). Hence the 4th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in April to bring 200+ tecchies and commercial people together to look at this in a structured way.

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In Today’s Issue:: Flat-rate menaces US cellcos, mobile voice volume booms, COLT feels the pain, Voda/Orange mast-share, OFCOM after the fibre, mobile filth disappoints, DVD Jon turns on mobiles, Pakistan breaks the Internet, GSM crypto cracked, BlackBerry down again, Facebook loses traffic, microwave spectrum in demand, France resists Reding, pretty PDFs, and Sprint-Nextel goes all Telco 2.0…

It was the week of flat-rate: all US national mobile operators are now offering flat-rate calling plans, as well as flat-rate data plans. Some day this war’s gonna end. We knew T-Mobile USA’s UMTS rollout would boost competition; we just didn’t think it would happen quite that quickly. Broadband incentive problem, meet US MNOs; US MNOs, meet broadband incentive problem…as Telegeography points out, this is ugly news for the landline world as well.

Here we go; mobile voice minutes of use in Europe are expected to whizz past fixed any time now.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 25th February 2008" »

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The UK’s largest broadcaster finally launched its online video streaming and download service on Christmas Day. Plusnet, a small ISP owned by BT, has provided a preliminary analysis of the traffic and the results should send shivers down the spine of any ISP currently offering an unlimited “all-you-eat” service.

The iPlayer service is basically a 7-day catch-up service which enables people who missed and didn’t record a broadcast to watch the programme at their leisure on a PC connected to the internet. The iPlayer differs from any other internet-based video service in certain key respects:

• It is funded by the £135.50 annual licence fee which pays for the majority of BBC activities. The BBC collected 25.1m licence fees in 2006/7. No advertising is required for the iPlayer business model to work.
• It is heavily promoted on the BBC broadcast TV channels. The BBC had a 42.6% share of overall UK viewing in 2006/7 and therefore a lot of people already know about the existence of the iPlayer after one month of launch.
• It is a high quality service and is designed for watching whole programmes rather than consumption of small vignettes. This is sharp contrast to the current #1 streaming site, YouTube.

Continue reading "BBC's iPlayer nukes "all you can eat" ISP business model" »

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So everyone else has done their 3GSM…sorry…Mobile World Congress round-up posts; what did Telco 2.0 think was cool? As you’ll no doubt guess, it wasn’t the shiny gadgets that got us; even at MWC, the anti-shiny goggles all Telco 2.0 team members get issued still block them out. It was a very serious conference this year; we think it may have been the first to get serious about the kinds of communication and enterprise-focused activities that will eventually make serious money for carriers. We broke them down by themes…

Continue reading "Telco 2.0's Private Mobile World Congress" »

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[Ed - reader promotion: If you’re thinking of coming or sending a delegation to the next Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm - 16-17 April, London - there’s a 20% discount if you book before 12th Feb. Details here]

This Week: Winners and losers from the cable cut crisis; Deutsche Telekom loses 2 megasubscribers, copies BT’s homework; AT&T EDGE outage; Sprint relaunches iDEN to battle $31bn writeoff; Dunstone darks DunBlog; Vodafone in data price cut, number porting case; Moto considers handset sale; MS vs Yahoo; Android phones are coming; Nokia-Trolltech analysis; IMS pony still yet to be located; 2.5 million SMS news subs in India.

It was the week the network died, what with no less than four major submarine cables getting backhoed (or rather, anchored). Some thought terrorists were assailing the world’s communications infrastructure; others that the giant squid were getting restless down there. Others thought it was the prelude to a US air-raid on Iran; Todd Underwood and his team at Renesys, though, had the data; Iran wasn’t even in the top 10 countries for outages as a percentage of BGP prefixes. As the operators of FLAG & Co scoured the world for cableships, divers and the like, their competitors who still had capacity in the area (like SMW-3, SAFE et al) were circling like vultures.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 4th February 2008" »

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A very selective tech downturn: as the stock market tanked, Nokia reached its world-domination target of 40% total market share. They celebrated with a recreational acquisition, buying Norwegian mobile-Linux specialists Trolltech. This brings not only their Linux technology, but also their cross-platform development environment Qt on board; this is presumably a means of hedging against Google Android et al. The mobile development race continues.

Meanwhile, a closer look at the figures for handset market share suggests one thing. It’s not just that Nokia is doing well; Motorola is doing catastrophically.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 28th January 2008" »

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“…our business is about scope and scale and having superior incremental margins. If you are looking to tax content and bundle device, application and network, it isn’t going to work. You had better be good at moving information if you want to be a network service provider.” - Jim Crowe, CEO, Level 3 at Citigroup 2008 Global Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference.

As some of our readers will know we’ve just completed a major 6-month study into the future of broadband, including an online survey responded to by over 800 industry insiders, interviews with leading figures and actors in the industry, and desk research into comparable networked industries like container shipping and power distribution. We’d like to share some of the key findings with you, which very much echo Jim Crowe’s comments above.

Continue reading "Ten things you need to know about the future of broadband" »

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This year, we’re focusing on seven themes in the industry; Investment and Market Valuations, Disruptive Threats, Two-Sided Business Models (a key theme in the forthcoming Platforms report), Adjacent Markets, Core Products and End-User Needs, and of course Regulation. So these news posts will be centred around these concerns.

Despite everything, it looks like Sprint is going ahead with the big WiMAX rollout; launch is scheduled for mid-April, and a gaggle of new contracts have been issued to hardware vendors like ZyXEL. The mob that is the Apple fanbase is working itself up over the thought that this year’s Macworld might see the launch of a WiMAX-capable device of some sort — apparently they’ve got ad banners reading “There’s something in the air”. There’s conclusive evidence for you.

However, it’s true that Sprint is looking at bundling WiMAX connectivity with devices, just as it wraps EV-DO data in the price of the Amazon Kindle (“In Amazon, book reads you!”), so perhaps there’s something in it. Meanwhile, China Mobile doesn’t want the iPhone.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 14th January 2008" »

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BT strikes in the set-top box market; they’re the first to ship Xbox360 consoles as IPTV endpoints. And there’s more; BT Vision gets an “on-screen magazine” based on the same single platform. We’ve often said that the fixed-line world doesn’t get user equipment, and that this creates interesting opportunities; BT has just leapt right on it. See our case study on Iliad’s Freebox in the Broadband Business Models report.

PS: we’re trying out a new format for Ring! Ring!…

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 7th January 2008" »

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Telco 2.0 Strategy

Structural separation? We don’t need no stinkin’ separation! So says Belgacom…

Telco 2.0 Comment: They built a VDSL network, and now their competitors want to play. Belgacom of course claims they took the risk and therefore should reap the rewards; but the biggest competitor is the company that laid the fibre already everywhere else, and now wants to offer unbundled service in the rest of the country. Will profits come from pleasing customers, or regulators?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 17th December" »

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In Today’s Issue: Asia goes crazy for network sharing, plastic fibre, fixed-line videocalls (yes, really), Opera Mini conquers all, make a widget and win a Nokia N95, UMA gadget with 2GB storage, data centre heists, iFlop, BlackBerry WiFi on a plane, Nokia threatens UGC boom, new torrent tracker tech terror, free music, ads in P2P movies, and Telco 2.0 Recommends…

Broadband Connectivity

Vodafone, Bharti, Idea in monster network sharing deal.

Telco 2.0 Comment: Shared, structurally separated, and community-owned infrastructure is a major industry trend in responding to the broadband incentive problem. This deal is especially interesting due to its sheer size; India is getting a giant shared mobile infrastructure operator, which will probably draw in other carriers.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 10th December" »

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In Today’s Issue: 3.3bn Mobiles, Open VZW, 3UK sues the world, Peter Erskine spends more time with his money, another WiMAX outbreak, Japanese data prices tumble, Dutch fibre prices untumble a tad, Saudi Mobily buys huge IP network, Vodafone and Telefonica and adverts, Lithuanian and Brazilian IPTV, rapid withdrawal from Iraq, Nokia’s cool tools, sinister stalkerware from Google, and Telco 2.0 Recommends: the best of the blogs.

Telco 2.0 Strategy

3.3bn mobile subscribers worldwide…

Telco 2.0 Comment: And that’s still only 50 per cent world penetration. The big question is now just how close to the world adult population it’s possible to push; is more than 75 per cent achievable?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 3rd December" »

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David Goldie, CEO of Carphone Warehouse Telecoms posed half a dozen big questions around broadband video strategies at the Telco 2.0 brainstorm last month. He was honest enough to say he currently didn’t know the answers. Below is our response, which we’re sharing on our blog because we feel lots of other telcos around the world can learn from this.

For those not familiar with the company, Carphone Warehouse is the number one retailer of mobile phones in Europe and is currently expanding in the USA through a partnership with Best Buy.

Continue reading "Carphone Warehouse: Broadband Video Decision Time" »

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Basic economics says that when demand exceeds supply, rationing is one possible solution. In the ISP world, this is achieved by traffic shaping and we believe it is a perfect solution as long as it is implemented in an open and transparent manner to customers. Plusnet, a mid-sized UK ISP recently acquired by BT, provides a possible template for all ISPs worldwide.

Continue reading "Plusnet: We traffic shape and are proud of it" »

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Could it be that Britain is edging towards a major high-speed deployment? Minister for Competitiveness (and ex-telecoms analyst) Stephen Timms is expected to call in BT and other telco execs today for what promises to be a heavy meeting; see here and here for details. The figure of £7bn mentioned is believed to be for a deployment of fibre to the street cabinets.

There are reasons to think some of the telcos who will go to see Timms might be keen on the idea. After all, cable neo-monopolist Virgin Media has just given up on its plans to deploy triple-play over ADSL outside its cable footprint, thus leaving Cable & Wireless’s troubled DSL operation (ex-Bulldog) hanging again. However, Virgin is going ahead with the Sky Sports clone channel they are developing with Setanta.

Carphone Warehouse, meanwhile, who led the “free” broadband burst in Britain, is having some problems of its own; it’s running out of metro backhaul in London. This is roughly what you might expect; selling the product for cheap with no explicit limits, Carphone must have had to pack its infrastructure ruthlessly, and now the cracks are showing. They showed plenty of moral fibre going ahead with it, a certain amount of dietary fibre marketing it, and now they are desperate for optical fibre.

Obviously, the best strategy to adopt in this situation is to bribe more people to sign up - right? Well, that’s precisely what Carphone is doing - giving away Playstation 3s to new subscribers. Which is rough on other retailers, but will do nothing at all to help Carphone’s creaky backhaul net or creakier balance sheet.

And, apparently, the industry still hates its customers.

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In Thiis Edition: Vodafone’s first data billion, investment plans in China, Romanian call centres, Expansys’n’Truphone, China Mobile switches off Everest, India joins Google in the WiMAX queue, a contest for rural mobile apps, Sarin vs the iPhone, and just how difficult is it to develop for the thing? Plus, of course, Telco 2.0’s favourite blog posts this week.

Telco 2.0 Strategy

Vodafone makes a billion from data

Telco 2.0 Comment: Possibly the first operator to break a billion sterling from data traffic? It’s where the disrupters are, after all. More importantly, note that Voda had to shift 19 per cent more minutes of use to gain a 2 per cent uplift in revenue.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 19th November" »

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This is the first in a new series from Telco 2.0 looking at commercial developments in important Markets. We start with Fixed Broadband in the UK because it is consolidating fast and the players are starting to differentiate their bundles through Value Added Services.

In the future, we will be examing other interesting markets around the world: fixed, mobile, media, technology, mature and emerging.

Let’s kick off with some key stats just in from UK players for Q3 2007:

Continue reading "Market Dynamics - UK Broadband, Q3 07" »

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One of the key lessons of our current research activity is that Telcos (fixed and mobile) and CableCos need to better understand CDNs (Content Delivery Networks): in particular how they can improve operator economics and help enable a better service for customers (upstream and downstream). Here is your CDN primer (it builds on our previous article):

Continue reading "CDNs: A Logistics Service for the Digital World" »

Posted at 09:21 PM | Link to this article | 1 comment

In this edition of Telco 2.0’s ‘Hot News’ : Viviane Reding wants the power; The iPhone fails to explode in Europe; Who needs Google Android when we’ve got LiMo?; TD-SCDMA gadgets, at last; T-Mobile Shadow under test; 900MHz 3G is here; Sprint and Clearwire fall out; Helio burns yet more cash; BT buys Sonus kit; COLT buys an IMS. Plus, ‘Telco 2.0 Recommends…’: the best from last week’s blogosphere.

Digital Politics and Regulation

Reding wants the power…the power to unbundle all Europe.

Telco 2.0 Comment: Proposed; a single regulator for everything that’s European and telecoms, with you-know-who in charge. It’s a fearful vision if you’re Telco 1.0, and pretty scary if you’re Telco 2.0, come to think of it. Expect much more structural separation if this happens.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Monday 'Hot News', 12th November" »

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This is an edited version of the keynote presentation of Martin Geddes, Chief Analyst at STL Partners, at the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in London last month. It provides some initial findings from our research into future business models for broadband service providers (BSPs), including our recent online survey. (The summary results will be mailed out to respondents in the next few days.) Those wishing to find out more may want to take a look at our forthcoming report, Broadband Business Models 2.0.

To save you the suspense, here’s the headlines for what’s upcoming for the telecoms industry, based on what insiders are saying through our survey and research:

1. Operators are going to face a slew of non-traditional voice service competition. To corrupt the words of Yogi Berra, “The phone network? Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” The volume may linger on, but the margins in personal communication will move elsewhere.
2. Content delivery is a logistics problem that spans many distribution systems. Those who can solve the delivery problem by sewing together many delivery services, rather than those focused on owning and controlling one channel, will win.
3. Wholesale markets in telecoms are immature and need to evolve to support new business models.
4. Investors aren’t up for more “loser takes nothing” facilities-based competition capex splurges. Time to look hard at network sharing models.

So, read on for the background and evidence:

Continue reading "Beyond bundling: the future of broadband" »

Posted at 11:13 AM | Link to this article | 4 comments

Our good friend Keith McMahon blogs on Playlouder, a British company which plans to offer unlimited, DRM-free music downloads to its customers who buy their DSL service. Naturally, there’s a premium associated with the music, which is the core of the business.

Now, interestingly enough, Playlouder describes itself as a “Media Service Provider” rather than “just” an ISP, which tends to confirm that their content business is part of their solution for the famous broadband incentive problem. The economic value created by widespread Internet use mostly happened after always-on broadband became available and cheap. Flat-rate broadband gives the user every incentive to use as much of it as possible; but the network operator has no corresponding incentive to create more capacity. Therefore, usage tends to increase until the network becomes congested.

Certainly, Playlouder expects their customers to run the copper hot downloading all that music; but they’re paying for it, and presumably Playlouder’s sums assume that the content charge covers the extra traffic, the licensing costs, and some margin. What they are offering, then, is connectivity plus. When we carried out a survey of industry experts recently, the idea of offering inclusive content as a way of managing costs was very popular; you can learn more in our Broadband Business Models 2.0 report when it comes out in December.

Continue reading "MSP: ISP plus Content" »

Posted at 11:55 AM | Link to this article | Add a comment

Alcatel-Lucent is one of the major sponsors of the Telco 2.0 Future Broadband Business Models study, and was a Platinum sponsor of the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm, two weeks ago in London. We asked Martine Lapierre, Vice President Marketing Programs, and one of our panelists at the event, to sum up the potential of IPTV to support new business models, rather than just emulating existing broadcast services.

One of the important insights to come from the Telco 2.0 Future Broadband Business Models survey, and a recurring theme of the Brainstorm event, was the need to give more consideration to end users as a critical telecom asset, and not just as a profit centre. Survey respondents certainly believe broadband service providers should focus on revenue opportunities from partners who want to reach and do business with this customer asset.

We believe that broadband service providers can keep their customers brand-loyal by packaging third party services in a way which addresses end user demands for convenience and simplicity. They can attract upstream revenue by providing meaningful customer intelligence to these third parties (advertisers, government organizations, content providers), who can in turn make their marketing targeted and relevant to end users.

One of the strategies operators are employing to realize this vision is the deployment of IPTV services to households around the world.

Why? IPTV services give broadband service providers the following:

1. A touch point within the customers’ home network — strengthening the broadband service provider’s relationship with that all-important customer asset.
2. Ownership and management of a back-end channel capable of providing very rich customer behaviour and intelligence, which can be monetized.
3. The ability to broker engagement between a number of 3rd parties and consumers through the most-watched screen in the household today.
4. An anchor to evolve towards more sophisticated ad insertion, ad-sponsored distribution, and other models of content distribution.

The survey — sponsored in part by Alcatel-Lucent — will finally close at midnight tonight GMT. Last chance to complete it if you want a free copy of the summary results!

Posted at 01:23 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment