• Strategy & Finance: Smartphone Q4s: Apple, Samsung, Nokia, AT&T
• Broadband Connectivity: Verizon, AT&T, TWC Q4s: fibre and cable beating VDSL soundly
• Google: Wallet chief quits, troubled fibre project, privacy row, search criticised, chromebooks don’t sell
• Customer Data: O2 tells everyone your phone number, Facebook IPO watch
• Technology Disruptions: Must-read - are we risking a repeat of the 1986 Internet congestion collapse?
• The Sixth Bullet: Why can’t you have the MWC agenda in your calendar?

[Ed: This is the last week that ‘Early Bird’ rates will be available for the New Digital Economics Brainstorm in Silicon Valley on the 27th-28th of March, so book now if you can. After that, our spring EMEA event is in London on the 12th-13th of June. We’ll also be at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of February, so let us know if you’d like to meet there - email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 for more on any of the above.]

After last week’s bumper crop of results (Microsoft, Intel, IBM up; Google disappoints; RIM’s two CEOs go), it was another results manic Monday. Apple’s Q4 led the way, almost dripping with success.

“We are very happy to have generated over $17.5 billion in cash flow from operations during the December quarter,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO.

Well, yes.

Continue reading "Joy for Apple, Samsung and Verizon FiOS; pain for AT&T, Google, Nokia and O2 - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:44 PM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Microsoft, Intel, IBM beat expectations - Windows Phones behind WinMo, though
• Smartphones: Google beats expectations - the wrong way, RIM sacks both CEOs
• Content 2.0: Feds seize Megaupload, SOPA wars are over
• Voice 2.0: DECIX launches open ENUM, Startup watch: Vox.io
• M2M & Embedded Mobile: Vodafone - No.1 in the world for M2M?

[Ed: ‘Early Bird’ rates are still available for the New Digital Economics Brainstorms in Silicon Valley on the 27th-28th of March, and then in London on the 12th-13th of June for our spring EMEA event. Email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 to join us.]

It was a busy results week - and, as Businessweek reports, Microsoft, IBM, and Intel beat the spread. Microsoft did especially well, specifically in sales of Office and XBox products, while Intel’s results showed the company recovering well from supply-chain problems caused by flooding in Thailand and the Japanese earthquake before that.

In fact, Microsoft shares surged ahead, reaching their highest mark since early 2010, as not only sales but also margins improved. iSuppli added to the bullishness by forecasting that the Nokia market share would transition over into Windows Phone. However, although some are very pleased with the numbers of Windows Phone 7 devices logging into Facebook, Nielsen’s fourth quarter scoreboard showed that Windows Mobile devices are still outselling Windows Phone, and neither of them are setting the world alight.

Also, it looks like there’s going to be no Skype integration until next Christmas at least (and in fact there isn’t even a port of the Skype client for WP7 yet). Windows 8 wants to control mobile broadband devices.

But is the very idea of a “PC”, central to Microsoft over the years, challenged? Horace thinks so, with this week’s Chart of the Day.

Continue reading "Results round-up: Microsoft, Intel, IBM up; Google disappoints; RIM's two CEOs go - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:29 PM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Free Mobile - reaction, excitement, price war
• Google: Upping the ante on social, or the biggest mistake ever?
• Broadband Connectivity: Telenor CEO on the Telco 2.0 challenge
• Technology Disruptions: Intel, Lenovo, Motorola Mobility push x86 chips into mobile
• Social Media: Facebook IPO for late May?

[Ed: ‘Early Bird’ rates are still available for the New Digital Economics Brainstorms in Silicon Valley on the 27th-28th of March, and then in London on the 12th-13th of June for our spring EMEA event. Email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 to join us.]

Benoit Felten reviews the impact of Free Mobile’s launch, pointing out that it implements two of their historic selling points (low prices and simple propositions) but not the third (innovative services), although there is an argument that the heavy use of WLAN offload and femtocells represents an innovative solution on the cost side.

Continue reading "Free Mobile fracas, Google's search error?, and Telenor vs. Facebook - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:05 PM | Link to this article

• Technology Disruptions: CES - another push for smart TV, more DISH/VZW rumours
• Online Video: UK Netflix is go for launch, pricing above Lovefilm’s
• Smartphone Roundup: Apple loves Flash storage, Samsung Q4 - impressive or just soft numbers?
• Strategy & Finance: Vodafone announces a new partnership strategy, Free.fr mobile launch
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Cisco quietly exits consumer telepresence

[Ed: ‘Early Bird’ rates are available for the New Digital Economics Brainstorms in Silicon Valley on the 27th-28th of March, and then in London on the 12th-13th of June for our spring EMEA event. Email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 to join us.]

It’s CES week, and expectations are high because early sales numbers for Christmas are depressing. Overall consumer electronics sales, according to NPD, were down 5.9% year on year. The bright spots were “streaming devices” (like Roku and friends), home cinema kit, and flat-panel TVs, while everything else suffered and devices whose functions are integrated in the iPhone suffered disproportionately.

TV innovation was a big theme this week. Lenovo showed a 55 inch TV running Android 4.0 on a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU. (A dual-core TV?) It also has a built-in 5 megapixel camera to support face recognition. There are those of us who remember stories about East German TV sets that supposedly contained a CCTV camera so the local Party representative could check you were watching the TV you were supposed to be watching…

Continue reading "Smart TV@CES, Netflix, Samsung's Q4 No.s and Apple's odd forecasts - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:17 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 News Review

• Year in Review: Reviews of 2011, reviewed
• Content 2.0: Top 10 pirated films, UltraViolet review, Akamai-Cotendo fallout
• Broadband Connectivity: IMS brings VZW LTE to its knees
• RIM: Crisis club’s co-CEOs cut own wages to C$1
• Technology Disruptions: Karsten Nohl and the massive GSM security breach. Again

It’s the first Telco 2.0 News Review of 2011, and as a result, we thought we’d begin with a review of reviews of 2011. Mashable thought the defining feature of 2011 was big companies reversing big decisions, with the social media contributing to the trend by creating an enormous fuss. The Register needed two reviews to cover a year packed with news, and concluded that the biggest stories all involved the question of who controls your data, from Facebook to the Google FTC inquiry and the great phone-hacking scandal.

Continue reading "2011 in Review, Reviewed: Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 1:04 PM | Link to this article

• Advertising & Attention: Apple backtracks on iAds business model (plus Apple news)
• M-Commerce 2.0: 70% of Indian e-commerce is COD, 30% fails
• Online Video & Content: Would Verizon really buy Netflix? Also, designing the BBC iPlayer app
• Patent Wars: BT sues Google
• Telco Core Services: AT&T-T-Mobile deal thoroughly dead
• Telco 2.0 Themes: Cloud: keeping Netflix flying, Voice: the future of the PSTN

[Ed: STL Partners would like to wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, and we hope to see you at one of our events next year. New Digital Economics is coming to Silicon Valley again on the 27th-28th of March, and then we pull into London again on the 12th-13th of June for our spring EMEA event.]

Apple backtracks on their iAds platforms’ controversial business model. You may remember that iAds was intended to be a high-concept, high-touch, but mostly high margin magazine ad service by contrast to Google’s micro-advertising model, and Apple expected the advertisers to commit to buying at least $1 million of ads as the entry ticket. Further, Apple also wanted to keep the pay-per-click model and charge for every touch. It was always going to be interesting to see if this would work, and by extension, whether the whole idea of the iPad as a luxury magazine format for big brands made sense.

It looks like it doesn’t - Cupertino has cut the minimum buy-in from $1m to $500,000 and then to $400,000, introduced a cap on how much advertisers have to pay in pay-per-click, and sent a lot of employees to their media buying agency to learn about the business. Meanwhile, developers who signed up for in-app advertising are complaining that there’s no money in it, mostly because there aren’t enough ads to fill the inventory.

Continue reading "Apple re-thinks iAd, BT sues Google, and Verizon / Netflix? - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:46 AM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Android “destroys” Symbian in China; patent war updates
• Broadband Connectivity: Verizon outpaces AT&T - was FTTC a blunder?
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: New Twitter, BlackBerry Conferencing 2.0, Android gets SIP
• Online Video & Content: Google acquires music rights experts
• Telco 2.0 Themes: Google Shipping? Microsoft Azure fights AWS, Verizon denies blocking Google Wallet

[Ed. Now’s a good time to get the dates for the next Brainstorms in the diary: Americas, 27-28 March 2012, Marriott Union Square, San Francisco, and EMEA, 12-13 June 2012, Grange St Pauls Hotel, London.]

Analysys International reckon that Android (and, of course, its growing brood of mutant forkdroids) has “destroyed” Symbian’s once massive market share in China. In Q3 2010, 68% of the Chinese smartphone fleet was running Symbian S60 - now, it’s 58% Android, in a vastly bigger population. Symbian is still at 28% of the market, with Apple on 6%, which is actually behind “others”. Fascinatingly, although the Great Firewall (both as a trade barrier and as a means of censorship) has prevented Google from dominating the Chinese search market, Google’s mobile Linux has proliferated enormously in China. Of course, it’s very doubtful whether any revenue actually redounds to Google’s credit from this, especially in the light of the forkdroid projects which basically replace the Google apps and services in Android with Baidu or QQ’s products.

Continue reading "Android conquers China; Verizon outpaces AT&T; Google buys music rights experts - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:36 PM | Link to this article

• Broadband Connectivity: LTE everywhere - Saudi Arabia, Poland, Uzbekistan, Portugal
• Strategy & Finance: Verizon buys out cablecos’ 2.5GHz, Sprint pays Clearwire
• Technology & Devices: Nokia’s dual-SIM smartphones, WiMAX exit, NSN re-org
• Chart of the Week: Android: is it fragmentation or is it diversity?
• Net Neutrality: Do bandwidth hogs exist?

[Ed. Last week’s Telco 2.0 ‘Away Team’ are just back from the excellent APAC Brainstorm in Singapore, albeit a bit jet-lagged, and will be bringing you analysis from it soon. In the meantime, the dates for the next Brainstorms are out: Americas, 27-28 March 2012, Marriott Union Square, San Francisco, and EMEA, 12-13 June 2012, Grange St Pauls Hotel, London.]

Saudi Arabia’s STC deploys LTE to 11 cities. Poland’s Polkomtel launches LTE with 22% population coverage. Uzbek LTE. Yota seeks regulatory clearance to launch LTE early, after it gave up on WiMAX. They’ve also signed up a wholesale roaming agreement with MegaFon. Meanwhile, Portugal has auctioned its LTE spectrum - PT, TMN, and Vodafone have unsurprisingly secured chunks. Interestingly, Vodafone has also obtained some additional 900MHz spectrum to refarm.

After a few weeks’ brinksmanship, Sprint and Clearwire have come to their inevitable agreement. Sprint extends its wholesale agreement for WiMAX service until 2013, and undertakes to keep selling devices through 2012 and supporting them up to the end of the maximum 2-year contract. This brings in $926 million for Clearwire, which for its part agrees to deploy LTE. If it hits targets set by Sprint, another $300 million is payable. With this deal signed and sealed, Clearwire now intends to pay the $237 million debt instalment it’s been blowing hot and cold about.

Continue reading "LTE's newest blooms; Verizon invests in cable spectrum; Sprint pays Clearwire - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:18 AM | Link to this article

• Platforms: Amazon & Facebook: Android’s unwitting evangelists?
• Broadband Connectivity: Crisis at NSN - 17,000 layoffs, focus on broadband and customer analytics
• Customer Data 2.0: Datamining shopping centre GSM networks for profit and, ah, more profit
• Strategy & Finance: AT&T backs down from T-Mobile deal
• Online Video: TiVo is back! Plus AT&T, Akamai, Juniper in shootout for Cotendo ADN tech

[Ed. This week it’s the APAC Executive Brainstorm in Singapore - hope to see you there.]

ZDNet blogs Google’s numbers and reports that there are some 190 million Androids out there and Google’s mobile line of business brought in $2.5bn in revenue. But, as usual, this is arrived at by taking the fraction of AdSense revenue that came from ads served to a mobile browser, and the debate as to how much of this would have happened anyway rumbles on. However, with the sheer numbers of ‘droids out there, it looks increasingly convincing that Android is a major driver of traffic past the ad properties.

Continue reading "Android 'profits', NSN 'crisis', and AT&T/T-Mobile deal in trouble - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:46 AM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: UK indie fibre investors “certifiable” - Rothschilds
• Broadband Connectivity: Mobile data overcapacity or 20x traffic surge?
• Voice 2.0: Full Skype-Facebook integration launches
• Cloud Computing: Microsoft ditches Dryad, embraces open-source Hadoop
• Regulation: Police raids send Indian MNO shares plummeting

[Ed. Two bits of news from us - we’re off to the fully booked APAC Executive Brainstorm in Singapore next week, and our strategy report on the Disruptors went down well at the EMEA Brainstorm, about which there will be more published in coming weeks.]

Any investors in UK fibre would be “certifiable”, says the head of NM Rothschild’s telecoms investment desk, and calls for OFCOM to insist on wholesale access to Virgin Media’s cable network. Meanwhile, Computer Weekly compares Andorra Telecom’s FTTH to BT’s DSL service, which has to be the most apples-to-oranges comparison in a while. Benoit Felten is still pressing for muni-fibre. Marco Forzati, via the 3G & 4G Wireless Blog, has attempted to quantify the economic benefits of FTTH in Sweden. As usual, the key variable is take-up in the MDUs the fibre passes. That also gives us an undisputed winner for this week’s Chart of the Week:

She’s a beauty!

Continue reading "Skype-Facebook integration, Mobile data surge challenged, and UK fibre furore - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:02 AM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Key results: Vodafone, Ericsson, Samsung
• Technology Disruptions: Apple patents remote-control SIMs
• Amazon: Jeff Bezos interview, Kindle Fire reviews
• Online Video: Netflix content binge continues
• Voice 2.0: Comcast, AT&T prepare Voice 2.0 options for launch
• Broadband Connectivity: Are we killing the Internet?

[Ed. Hot on the heels of last week’s envigorating EMEA Brainstorm in London our attention is now turning to the APAC Brainstorm in Singapore, 30th Nov - 1st Dec. You can see more on the program here, including Telco 2.0 Strategy, Mobile Broadband Economics, Digital Entertainment, Mobile Payments, and more on our major new research report dealing with the disruptors - Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype, and Amazon which went down a storm at the EMEA event. As a taster of the analysis from the event, the chart below shows EMEA delegates’ views of the contribution of so-called ‘OTT’ players on the significant decline in voice and messaging revenues they foresee.

Join us if you can in APAC or see more on our Disruptors analysis here.]

Vodafone announced solid results this week, with operating profits up 4.4% on revenues up 2%. At last week’s Telco 2.0 event, Vodafone executives briefed on the progress of their project to consolidate the giant carrier’s numerous IT systems and on OneNet, their SMB-focused hosted unified comms product. And, of course, the arrival of the first dividends from Verizon Wireless is doing them a lot of good. In general, Telco 2.0’s Keith McMahon comments, the results reflect a renewed focus on operational excellence without the distractions of constant mergers and acquisitions.

Continue reading "Apple's SIM Patent; Vodafone, Ericsson Samsung results - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:05 PM | Link to this article

• Broadband Connectivity: 97% of 3UK traffic is data
• Telco 2.0 Theme - China: Beijing’s massive offload WLAN, Chinese Web 2.0 stars put on notice
• Apps and App Stores: Will HTML5 take over the world? If Facebook gets its way…
• Smartphones: HTC - North American smartphone leader
• Cloud Computing: AWS deploys notifications and authentication from the cloud

[Ed. At last! It’s the EMEA Brainstorm in London this week (Tuesday 8th PM only, and Weds 9th and Thursday 10th all day), and the key themes are: strategies for defending and extending voice, Customer Experience 2.0, M-Commerce 2.0, Cloud 2.0, M2M 2.0, CDNs, Digital Entertainment 2.0, Payments 2.0 and the launch of our major new research report dealing with the disruptors - Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype, and Amazon. We hope you can make it - be spontaneous and register here or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003 to make a last minute booking.]

3UK reports that 97% of the traffic on its network is now accounted for by data. This in itself isn’t that surprising, as the operator has a longstanding policy of both building capacity for mobile Internet service and also being the UK’s price leader. However, it makes us wonder about all those schemes for prioritising this or that traffic class - if 97% of the traffic is Internet service and a large majority of that is the Web, exactly what is left to enjoy a higher service class?

Continue reading "97% of 3UK traffic is data, the rise of HTML5, and Amazon's new Cloud services - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 3:09 PM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Samsung is Q3 smartphone leader
• Developer Communities: The coming fight for mapping: Google Maps, Nokia Drive, Apple iMaps?
• Online Video: Social TV hype builds, Zeebox is go for launch
• Broadband Connectivity: FCC USF reforms - full coverage
• Cloud Computing: Open Compute Foundation launches

[Ed. It’s the EMEA Brainstorm in London next week (9th-10th November), and the key themes are: strategies for defending and extending voice, Customer Experience 2.0, M-Commerce 2.0, Cloud 2.0, M2M 2.0, CDNs, Payments 2.0 and dealing with the disruptors - Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype, and Amazon. We hope to see you there - the speaker line up is fantastic, and it promises to be an extremely stimulating couple of days.]

Samsung announced impressive Q3 results this week, showing strong profitability across its telecoms division in both devices and infrastructure. Unfortunately, they don’t provide a breakdown of device shipments by type, but Strategy Analytics reckons that they were the world No.1 smartphone vendor in Q3, pulling ahead of Apple, and in second place for handset shipments overall behind Nokia with a comfortable lead over LG. Horace Dediu (who’s covering ‘OS Wars’ next week) pieces together the data and reckons that they gained both in volume and in average selling price, and notes that Samsung is quite rapidly increasing the percentage of smartphones in its portfolio - but not as quickly as Sony Ericsson.

Samsung is also planning to launch something using its flexible screen technology next year.

Continue reading "Samsung's stormer, Map Wars, Lumia Push and 'Social TV' - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 2:18 PM | Link to this article

• Online Video: Q3 - horror for Netflix, profits down at Amazon
• Broadband Connectivity: Verizon - will they ditch copper for LTE+satellite?
• Telco 2.0 Theme - India: Towercos in trouble, government wants 3G for Maoist guerrilla zone
• Technology Disruptions: Could Nokia be profitable with more N9s?
• Telco 2.0 Theme - Payments: PayPal not so keen on NFC, Google Trader in Ghana, women drive MPESA usage

[Ed. It’s now just two weeks to the London Brainstorm (9th-10th November). Key themes are: strategies for defending and extending voice, Customer Experience 2.0, M-Commerce 2.0, Cloud 2.0, M2M 2.0, CDNs, Payments 2.0 and dealing with the disruptors - Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype, and Amazon. We look forward to seeing some of our readers there!]

Netflix’s Q3 numbers are out, and we take a quick look below at just how bad a day it was for the US outfit. (NB We will shortly be publishing a detailed analysis of this business model change in new reseach, plus you can join us to discuss this at the EMEA Digital Entertainment 2.0 workshop at our London Brainstorm in a fortnight.) Netflix is also going to launch in the UK in 2012, but its going to stick to the streaming rather than diving into a head-to-head with Lovefilm.

So, after the results announcement on Monday, Netflix shareholders suffered another traumatic day with the share price down 35% to $77 from a peak of $305 in July - the stock has turned from ‘hero to zero’ in three horrible months. The problem is twofold: a 60% price rise has been met by cries of pain by users, some of whom have left the service in disgust; and international expansion plans in the New Year to UK & Ireland in 2012 will drive Netflix into red ink and losses. The reputation of the Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, lies in tatters. The larger, rarely mentioned, problem is that the transition from an analogue (DVD-by-Mail) to digital (Streaming) business model appears to be destroying margins (we’ll examine this in detail in our analysis).

Meanwhile, over at Amazon, the future is a little cloudy - and we don’t just mean in the sense of services provided from huge data centres.

Continue reading "Netflix's horror show, Amazon's profits slow, and could Verizon's copper go? - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:27 PM | Link to this article

• Technology Disruption: The week the BlackBerrys died
• Broadband Connectivity: iOS, OSX, Ubuntu, Steam updates melt your network
• Online Video: Akamai preps TV, mobility, cloud upgrades
• Voice 2.0: O2 UK embraces alt.voice
• Legends of Technology: RIP, C and UNIX inventor Dennis “dmr” Ritchie

[Ed. It’s now just three weeks to the London Brainstorm (9th-10th November). Key themes are: strategies for defending and extending voice, Customer Experience 2.0, M-Commerce 2.0, Cloud 2.0, M2M 2.0, CDNs, Payments 2.0 and dealing with the disruptors - Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype, and Amazon.]

This week saw a major technology disruption as RIM’s BlackBerry service network failed for days in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Repairs were repeatedly promised. Then the outages spread to the Americas. Not only did it fail, it kept failing. It couldn’t have come at a worse moment. RIM, under pressure, has recently rolled out some impressive new devices like the Bold 9900 and Torch 9810, come up with good ideas like music-sharing via BBM, and made a good decision like hiring Alec Saunders.

But this can only be very bad news. The Observer reports that major British banks are seriously considering abandoning the BlackBerry platform and transitioning their mobile device fleets to Apple iOS. It’s not the first time, of course, that RIM has had a continental-scale outage. In fact, the highly centralised network architecture almost seems to invite disaster. Most of the world’s BlackBerry traffic passes through two pairs of data centres, in Waterloo, Ontario and in Slough and Egham in the UK.

Continue reading "BlackBerryFail explained + how iOS/OSX updates melted networks - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:36 AM | Link to this article

• Apple Special Edition: The Web remembers Steve Jobs, iPhone 4S reaction
• Strategy & Finance: 75% of T-Mobile USA sales are smartphones
• Technology Disruptions: Nokia skunkworks prepares Linux replacement for S40
• Regulation: OFCOM kicks UK 4G down the road
• Broadband Connectivity: Genachowski reveals USF reform, India launches new telco policy
• LTE: Sprint pushes Clearwire towards the brink

Last week’s news was dominated by two big stories from Apple so we’ve published three separate news review posts this week: 1) this one with all the important non-Apple news; 2) iPhone 4S: a winner, if not a game-changer; and 3) Steve Jobs: where were you when you heard?

Ed. A quick reminder - it’s just one month to the London Brainstorm (9th-10th November) where we’ll share some findings from our new strategy report on ‘Dealing with the Disruptors’ - Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype, and Amazon’. Also, we’re just back from the Americas M-Commerce 2.0 Brainstorm in New York and working on the analysis of the intensive and highly productive brainstorm. The key theme of the event was how personal data will change M-Commerce (e.g. advertising, marketing, payments, etc.) - here’s a brief preview showing delegate views on how mobile marketing will change in the next two years to whet your appetite.

Back to the news beyond Apple, Horace Dediu reports that 75% of T-Mobile USA’s sales are now smartphones, and it’s not looking great for RIM in the US market, at least until the new round of BlackBerrys hit the streets. (They announced a WebOS-style devices-kiss-to-share function, and bought a social networking startup.) There are 150 million non-smartphone users left in the US, and the number is falling fast.

Elsewhere in the world, of course, there are many more. But the transition is racing up on us. Mobile data traffic has grown 60% since May in Brazil, and even though iOS and Android are leading the way, you can easily see the significance of this news item on Nokia.

Continue reading "iPhone 4S take, Steve Jobs, US stats, new policy in India - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 3:10 PM | Link to this article

Apple’s much awaited announcement of the Apple iPhone 4S last week was accompanied by some disappointment in the media and analyst communities. Telco 2.0 thinks it will be a success, if not a game changer, and embodies some important strategic moves for Apple.

This post gives our outline views and a round-up of market commentary - you can find our in-depth strategic analysis on on Apple here and at our EMEA Brainstorm in London 9-10th November. Our reflections on Steve Jobs’ untimely death and remarkable career are here.

So, here’s what the iPhone 4S offers in summary.

• The main similarity with past iPhones is that the iPhone 4’s industrial design and look-and-feel (a phrase we wouldn’t be using were it not for Steve Jobs) have been maintained.


• The software, however, gets the new iCloud and wireless sync features Apple announced earlier this year, plus the Newsstand in the App Store.


• There’s also been a deeper hardware refresh - the A5 applications processor is another of Apple’s homebrew (or rather, ex-PA Semiconductor) products, giving it two cores and more power, and the baseband processor and RF chain are coming from Qualcomm and will support dual-mode (i.e. GSM/UMTS and CDMA) operation.


• There’s a better camera and some new prices across the range of iPhones on sale: 4S, 4 and 3GS.

Continue reading "iPhone 4S: a winner, if not a game-changer" »

Posted at 11:48 AM | Link to this article

• Content 2.0: Amazon launches new tablet shopfront
• Cloud Computing: Cloud-maddened telcos go wild for data centres
• Technology Disruptions: Massive security bug in HTC ‘droids
• Developer Communities: Meet Alec Saunders, RIM ecosystem VP!
• Online Video: Akamai faces a wave of CDN competitors

[Ed. Many of us are in New York this week for the Americas Brainstorm, so we hope we’ll see you there or at the London Brainstorm (9th-10th November). Also, our Strategy report on ‘Dealing with the Disruptors’ - Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype, and Amazon will be out in the next couple of weeks - see here or email contact@telco2.net or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003 for more.]

Speaking of Amazon, its new Kindles were out this week, and everyone was fascinated by the Kindle Fire, a 7” tablet based on yet another fork of Android, designed specifically as a content-consumer device (not much local storage, no cameras). There was also a rumour about Amazon buying WebOS off HP, but as usual no substance to it as yet.

Continue reading "Amazon Kindle tablet-fest, Akamai update - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:02 PM | Link to this article

• Smartphones: Apple to cut parts orders 25%: double-dip here we come
• Google: Spanish Googlers get their own MVNO!
• Social Networks: Facebook F8 - the reactions
• Cloud Computing 2.0: Why Facebook developers love AWS
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: WhatsApp: how they did it
• Broadband Connectivity: Much more broadband and video news

It’s also iPhone crystal ball time. Everyone’s expecting a launch in a couple of weeks, with incremental improvements, and varying predictions for sales and the fate of the older 3GS and 4 models. Will one or both be run on as a cheaper option? Meanwhile, there are rumours that Wintek in Taiwan is struggling with a manufacturing problem with the touchscreen, although they aren’t the only supplier.

Inevitably, Apple and Samsung are suing each other again. But it looks like macro-economic issues are going to hugely overshadow the spat - Bloomberg has some very worrying news regarding Apple’s orders for iPad 2 parts. Specifically, they’ve cut them by around 25%. Ouch.

Continue reading "Apple turns Bear, Google MVNO, and Facebook F8 - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:38 AM | Link to this article

• Social Networks: Revenue crisis at Facebook?
• Online Video: The end of TV as we know it?
• Digital Logistics: Telefonica, PacNet go wild for CDNs
• Content 2.0: Netflix - CEO apologises for botched price change, DVD biz rebranded
• Devices: RIM Q2: dreadful PlayBook sales conceal strong BlackBerry ASPs

So, is there a crisis at Facebook? Reports are filtering out that the company may have missed internal revenue targets for 2011, and badly - $1.6bn as against $4bn. This is the sort of news that sends publicly-traded companies’ stock rattling down, and it’s probably no surprise that the IPO hasn’t happened yet. Datamotion argues that Facebook is “the new Yahoo!”, a company that was in the right place at the right time and therefore looked much better than it is. They point out that Facebook Messages, Places, and Deals have all failed to get traction, that there still isn’t a tablet-optimised version, and now they’re in a race to copy the latest features Google deploys to Google +.

And they’re losing users in the United States in significant numbers.

ReadWriteWeb notes that a major Facebook deploy is planned for this week, and looks at what might be in it and what Google + might push out next. Google + has also started to open up a developer API.

Interestingly, Facebook has just integrated its developer site with Heroku, the popular cloud-hosting service, in order to speed up the deployment of new apps. Heroku, originally a Ruby on Rails project, has recently added support for Python and PHP, supposedly at the request of the Facebook engineers.

Continue reading "'Crises' at Facebook, RIM; CDN appeal; the 'end of TV' - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 1:50 AM | Link to this article

• Devices: Forkdroids everywhere!
• Content 2.0: Yahoo! CEO out, Alibaba.com denies it, blames 40 thieves
• Tech Disruptions: New Nokia Maps - demonstrates the power of HTML5
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Ilya Laurs: mobile vendors will take over the dialler
• Strategy & Finance: Vodafone-Verizon sort-of denied
• The Sixth Bullet: Winston Churchill’s PowerPoint slides, revealed

[Ed. To whet your appetite for our next Brainstorms in New York (5th-6th October) and London (9th-10th November) here’s a short video we made at the Spring 2011 Brainstorms.

QQ’s version starts with advantages - they have an enormous and engaged user base and great brand values. It will be more than interesting to see both how well they do, and also to what extent any of these translate on the other side of the great firewall.

Continue reading "More 'Forkdroids'; the power of HTML5; 'dialler wars' - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 1:47 PM | Link to this article

• Mobile Platforms: Baidu forks Android, Samsung says no to WebOS
• Devices: Amazon Kindle tablet is here - not very much like a Kindle though
• Online Video: Apple iCloud - it’s download not streaming
• Customer Data 2.0: Telefonica sold 190 million subs’ data to Santander
• Cloud Computing: Google App Engine shock pricing row storm

[Ed. Welcome back if this is your first week in the office after the summer holidays - here are the top two Key Telco 2.0 items to note. 1. This week is your last chance to input to our Apple, Google, Facebook, Skype and Amazon research. We’ll send you the survey results and a special deal on the report when it’s out if you do. 2. Book up now for our next Brainstorms in New York (5th-6th October) and London (9th-10th November) run in collaboration with the World Economic Forum. Speakers and registrants so far are top-notch, so don’t miss out.]

We’ve been talking about the possibility of a “ForkDroid” - a parallel development path to Android, using its open-source components but replacing the Google-specific apps and services - for a while. Now it’s here - Baidu has its own Android-clone. In some ways this isn’t really surprising as Baidu occupies the same industry niche as Google - a search engine that branched out into advertising, maps, mobile, e-mail, social networks, etc. and eventually got its own Linux-based mobile OS.

In a sense, the Baidu (aka ‘The Great Firewall’) should be considered more as a customs barrier than anything else - a subsidy to China’s internal Web industry funded by a tax on foreign competitors. In general, more task-specific or forked ‘Droids should be expected.

Continue reading "Baidu-droid; Samsung 'no to WebOS'; Amazon Kindle tablet; Apple iCloud design - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:22 PM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Steve Jobs bows out: full coverage
• Devices: HP TouchPads revived by fire-sale, chaos reigns
• Developer Communities: Samsung: launches instant messaging, buying WebOS?
• Broadband Connectivity: NBN held up by regulatory ruck
• Cloud Computing: A sensible proposal for cloud federation
• The Sixth Bullet: Burning Man 2011 - OpenBTS deploys Tropo voice apps platform

[Ed. In preparation for our next big report we’re after your input on Apple, Google, Facebook, Skype and Amazon here. We’ll send you the survey results and a deal on the report when it’s out if you do. Also, book up now for our next Brainstorms in New York (5th-6th October) and London (9th-10th November) run in collaboration with the World Economic Forum.]

It was the week Steve Jobs retired as Apple CEO. Ars Technica has three case studies on big leadership transitions in the tech industry, at Microsoft, Intel, and Sun Microsystems. That doesn’t sound too optimistic when you think about it, although they make the point that Sun’s fate had a great deal to do with the economic crisis and point out that Apple has so much cash on hand it’s relatively invulnerable to shocks.

Continue reading "Steve Jobs reaction in full; HP frenzy; Samsung speculation; and 'federated cloud' - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:48 PM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: China Mobile: 7.4 million iPhones and no contract with Apple (yet)
• Technology Disruptions: HP cans TouchPad, Symbian-ises WebOS, sells PC business
• Devices: Apple, HTC cut chip orders as Recession 2.0 approaches
• Online Video: Fascinating report from Akamai
• Voice 2.0: New Walkman phone with “annoy dad” button, Skype camera

[Ed. After last week’s coverage on Google/Motorola, have your say via our 2 minute survey here. Why did they do it, and who is it good/bad for? We’ll publish the results next week. Also, August is often a great time for diary maintenance, so why not pencil in our next Brainstorms in New York (5th-6th October) and London (9th-10th November) run in collaboration with the World Economic Forum.]

China Mobile reported that it has 622 million subscribers at the end of the quarter. To put that in context, that’s more than twice the population of the USA. 37.6 million of China Mobile’s customers are on 3G, and interestingly, despite the fact that it doesn’t offer the Apple iPhone, hasn’t got a contract with Apple, and has limited network coverage for such a device, it has 7.4 million subscribers with iPhones. Fortune reports that China Mobile has had several meetings with Steve Jobs and other Apple executives about the possibility of an iPhone that supports the TD-SCDMA network the Chinese government insisted China Mobile build.

In the meantime, you can get an iPhone 4-sized micro SIM from China Mobile but you’ll have to content yourself with EDGE data rates.

Continue reading "China Mobile's awesome No.s; the 'HP-ocalypse'; Apple turns bear? - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 1:25 PM | Link to this article

Here’s our round up of initial industry opinion on Google’s $12.5bn acquisition of Motorola Mobility. The main themes are: ‘It’s all about the patents’; ‘Impact on Android’; ‘Impact on other vendors’; ‘Google as Apple’; ‘Beyond Android’; and ‘Doom!’ - all outlined below.

We’d like your views too - there’s a 2 minute survey here - we’ll publish the headline results in the next couple of weeks (and send you a copy of the results if you want). We’ll also use this as input to our further in-depth analysis for ‘Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Skype - Disruptors and Co-opetition Strategies’, the Strategy Report that we’re publishing next month (please email contact@telco2.net for more on this.

It’s All About the Patents

If there was a consensus of opinion, it was that Google really wanted Motorola’s intellectual property. Moto, after all, is the company that made the very first cellular phone call back in 1973, ringing up the then director of Bell Labs to needle him about it. They also developed North America’s first line of cell phones (StarTAC) and launched the first smartphone, as well as making major contributions to iDEN, CDMA, GSM, UMTS, and WiMAX networks.

Larry Page’s official statement on the Google corporate blog certainly supports this view:

We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android. The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to “protect competition and innovation in the open source software community” and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction. Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

He’s talking about the constant rows over Android intellectual property, although it’s very likely that the ones with Oracle about its home-brew Java virtual machine are more serious, and of course Motorola won’t help with that. (contd.)

Continue reading "Google / Motorola: what's the Industry reaction?" »

Posted at 7:58 AM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Google buys Motorola (who say if Microsoft paid us, we’d do WP7)
• Regulation: Google vs. the FTC, Apple patent wars
• Apple: iCheap iPhone iComing?
• Online Video: NBN Co. names a price for national multicast
• Voice 2.0: Open-source, cross-platform, HD voice apps on mobiles

[Ed. Don’t forget to check out our latest agenda ‘M-Commerce 2.0: How Personal Data will Revolutionize Customer Engagement’, including more details of our next Brainstorms in New York (5th-6th October) and London (9th-10th November) run in collaboration with the World Economic Forum.]

Google is now a huge phone vendor - it just bought Moto Mobility for $12.5bn. We’ll be analysing this in greater detail as part of our forthcoming research report on ‘Apple, Google, Facebook, Skype - the Disruptors, and Strategies for Co-opetition’ (email contact@telco2.net for more details).

Meanwhile, Motorola Mobility chief Sanjay Jha said that the company would consider doing a Windows Phone if they could get the same terms as Nokia from Microsoft. Somehow, we suspect you’ll be waiting a while for a Moto WP7 handset.

The Wall Street Journal has more detail about the US Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into Google. It seems as if the case, if any, is likely to centre on the Skyhook Wireless affair and Android, although that’s not the only issue. The question of content reviews on other web sites may remind people with long memories of when AFP threatened to sue Google to stop them indexing their news stories - for some odd reason it wasn’t enough just to set robots.txt to tell the Googlebot to go away.

Continue reading "Google buys Motorola, fights FTC; cheap iPhone rumoured, Apple surges and fights everyone in patent wars - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:36 PM | Link to this article

• Devices: Nokia goes all-in on emerging markets. Like Moto did
• Regulation: Carriers to FCC: no more USF please
• Strategy & Finance: Verizon Wireless forks out £2.8bn to Vodafone
• Online Video: BT ordered to kill Newzbin 2
• Technology Disruptions: HOWTO hijack a GSM network like Free Libyana

[Ed. Don’t forget to check out our latest agenda ‘M-Commerce 2.0: How Personal Data will Revolutionize Customer Engagement’, including more details of our next Brainstorms in in New York (5th-6th October) and London (9th-10th November) run in collaboration with the World Economic Forum.]

It’s still going horribly wrong for Nokia, with smartphone sales off 34% and overall device shipments down 20%. Stephen Elop is pushing the emerging market product line hard - note the dual-SIM phones that don’t need to reboot when changing between them - but it’s worth remembering that the last major handset vendor to go all in on the low-end was Motorola with the GSMA-sponsored Emerging Market Handsets, and look how that turned out.

Continue reading "Latest on Nokia woes, FCC/USF, VZW pays Voda £2.8Bn - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:08 PM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Strong Apple results, patent crisis for the devs
• Devices: RIM’s product strategy: not as bad as telcos’
• Online Video: Netflix falls out of love with DVDs. Networks, watch out!
• 2-Sided Business Models: 94% of telco CMOs have no OTT strategy
• Mobile Money: First Ericsson international remittance service is go for launch

[Ed. On the Telco 2.0 front we’ve just published M2M 2.0: Market, Business Models, and Telcos’ Role(s), plus don’t forget to check out the Best Practice Live! online videos now available on demand - you’ll need to register.]

If only everything in life was as reliable as iPhone sales. Apple’s results are out tomorrow and the consensus forecast is for a £3.5bn boost to profits as another round of new products approaches. Given the continued importance of the Macintosh as a hero product for Apple, it’s possibly significant that Amazon is offering discounts on MacBook Airs.

Continue reading "Apple's No.s, RIM's Strategy, & Netflix's Online Aspirations - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 9:15 AM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: FCC planning for the end of the PSTN
• Online Video: Telcos reinvent themselves as super-CDN
• Mobile Money: The coming fight for NFC wallets
• Voice 2.0: Facebook launches Skype-powered video…in the browser
• Apps & Appstores: HTC announces first open bootloader phones
• M-Commerce 2. 0 Agenda: How Personal Data will Revolutionize Customer Engagement

[Ed. There are a few things to update you on this week. First, we’ve just published an introduction to our updated research agenda ‘M-Commerce 2.0: How Personal Data will Revolutionize Customer Engagement’, including more details of our next Brainstorms in in New York (5th-6th October) and London (9th-10th November) run in collaboration with the World Economic Forum. There’s more excellent background in this guest post from Professor John Clippinger of Harvard The Privacy Bomb - How to Tame and Feed ‘Big Data’. Last but not least, don’t forget to check out the Best Practice Live! online videos now available on demand.]

The FCC is holding consultations on the possible shutdown date of the PSTN. Michigan Telephone raises the awkward questions of what happens to the open access and common carrier provisions that are attached to the copper wires. Famously, “broadband” isn’t considered a telecommunications service in the meaning of the 1934 Act. There’s more at DSLReports.

Continue reading "FCC & the end of PSTN, NFC wars, Facebook's Skype phone: Telco 2.0 News Review " »

Posted at 12:35 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Devices: Most US phone sales are smartphones
• Strategy & Finance: Dissidents at RIM attack telco culture
• Social Networks: The Valley loves Google+
• Nokia: Did IMS kill Nokia software?
• Spam, Malware, & Abuse: Baby, baby, where did our spam go?

[Ed. All the Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! videos are now available on demand, including Orange on initial lessons from NFC launches, and Telefonica on how it’s used VOIP acquisition Jajah to build a ‘Facebook phone’.]

A majority of new phones in the US are now smartphones, according to Nielsen. Interestingly, they also reckon that Android market share has plateaued since Christmas, sticking around 27% (which makes it the market leader). Further growth has come from, you guessed it, Apple, especially since the first non-AT&T iPhones arrived in February. Windows Phone 7 was under 1% and RIM on 6%.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: US Smartphone growth, Google + review round-up" »

Posted at 1:10 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Twitter gets a business model, with BlueVia?
• Social Networks: MySpace: the hubris, the nemesis, the Slushy machine
• Developer Communities: Nokia reveals fantastic, pointless last MeeGo phone
• Voice 2.0: Skype shares scandal splits Silicon Valley
• Online Video: AT&T piles back into the CDN fray
• The Sixth Bullet: Voice 3.0 - really?

[Ed. Reminder - Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live!, our free global online event, is on live tomorrow Tuesday 28th and Wednesday 29th June, and on demand thereafter. Do join us for great presentations and interactive chat with Anne Bouverot, EVP Mobile Services, Orange Group, and Carlos Domingo, CEO at Telefonica I+D amongst others. We’ll be covering Mobile Broadband, Cloud, Mobile Apps and Digital Entertainment - all 2.0 of course.]

GigaOM asks if telcos could be the key to Twitter’s revenue model. It turns out that they’re planning to provide their own photosharing service, and might do it with Telefonica’s BlueVia API. The revenue element is, of course, that BlueVia offers you a share of the messaging revenue generated by your app. So presumably Twitter users pay for the messaging in some fashion and Telefonica kicks some of that back to Twitter. Telco 2.0 event attendees will not be very surprised to encounter Telefonica’s Jose Nunez Valles in there - he’s presenting at Best Practice Live! this week too.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: BlueVia/Twitter, and Skype Shares Scandal" »

Posted at 12:26 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Devices: RIM getting a touch of the Nokias
• Strategy & Finance: Is Groupon the face of Bubble, 2.0?
• Broadband Connectivity: LightSquared & Sprint - who’s the customer?
• Technology Disruptions: Alcatel-Lucent’s ultra-low power LTE
• Voice 2.0: Purge at Skype - 6 VPs out ahead of Microsoft deal closing
• The Sixth Bullet: Happy Efficient 100th Birthday, IBM!

[Ed. In case you missed it, we published our latest new research report Strategy 2.0: What Skype + Microsoft means for telcos last week, and Alcatel-Lucent are presenting more on their new radio device at Telco 2.0’s free online virtual event Best Practice Live! next week, 28-29 June 2011.]

RIM shares plummeted by 21% after they announced a profits warning six weeks after their last update. Not enough BlackBerries are selling and ASP is down - perhaps not surprising as there hasn’t been a new device since April, 2010. RIM has re-announced the next one several times, hardly helping sales of the existing range. 500,000 PlayBooks have been pushed out of the factory, but it’s anybody’s guess how many of those are somewhere in the supply chain rather than selling to end users.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: RIM, Groupon and more Skype" »

Posted at 12:07 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Content 2.0: Apple’s iCloud: lacking bevelled corners?
• Cloud Computing: Inside Amazon Web Services’ cloud infrastructure
• Technology Disruptions:World IPv6 Day
• Regulation: Dutch legislate net neutrality
• Nokia: CTO Rich Green out at Nokia

[Ed: We’ll be publishing more on iCloud in the next few days, plus we’re looking at the range of entertainment services at Best Practice Live! on 28-29 June and in our forward research agenda.]

Apple made its digital locker/online backup/content streaming play this week with the iCloud - Ars Technica has a detailed sceptical discussion, arguing that Apple doesn’t have a great track record with virtual/online products as against hardware or even software. As a friend of ours said, it’s hard to give a cloud bevelled corners. They contrast Google, which excels at creating massively scalable online services but struggles with hardware and user interface design, and argue that Apple has a culture dominated by the figure of the designer - always an individual - compared to Google’s, dominated by programmers who work in groups.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: iCloud, Amazon Web Services & More..." »

Posted at 1:42 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Nokia: Nokia: we’re not making money and we don’t know what’s going to happen
• Technology Disruptions: Microsoft Xbox: it’s your new media centre
• Apple: iCloud announcement tonight, market cap passes MSFT + Intel
• Strategy & Finance: How Groupon’s founders paid themselves $900 million
• Cloud Computing: Cloudmeister Vijay Gill, architect of Google’s infrastructure, quits

[Ed: New ‘Roadmap to Telco 2.0’ strategy report available now here.]

Now that’s what we call a profit warning: Nokia lowered its outlook for Q2 profitability in the Devices & Services division, basically to zero, and announced that it wasn’t going to even try to forecast what might happen for the rest of the year. Both average selling prices and volumes are down. As a result, apparently, they’re “investing to bring new capabilities to our Symbian smartphones”, and they also have “increased confidence” that the Windows Phone 7 devices will be along in time for Christmas.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 1:06 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: 900 million subscribers in China
• Online Video: BT backbone goes multicast ahead of 2012
• Broadband Connectivity: VZW so confident in LTE they want you to run Netflix
• Mobile Money: Google launches Google Wallet, Offers
• Apps and App Stores: Apple, Nokia outpromote the Android Market

[Ed: New ‘Roadmap to Telco 2.0’ strategy report available now here.]

China has reached 900 million mobile phone subscribers in April, according to the Ministry of the Information Industry. So far, only 67 million of those are on a 3G network - this perhaps doesn’t say much for the wisdom of the MII’s massive reorganisation of the industry, forcing China Mobile to give up its UMTS network, etc. But the 900 million subs are there - a massive, undeniable demographic fact.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:16 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Devices: China Mobile & Apple agree on iPhone for China
• Tech Disruptions: WP7 Nokias, with Qualcomm inside
• RIM: Playbook, triumph or disaster?
• Strategy & Finance: Mr. Blank: yes, it’s the bubble again, yes, it’s a good thing
• Broadband Connectivity: AT&T CEO expects “5 years of chaos”

[Ed. Diary reminder: next Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! free virtual event is on 28th-29th June, covering Cloud Services, Digital Entertainment 2.0, Mobile Broadband Networks, Mobile Apps and Appstores, site here.]

China Mobile and Apple have agreed to do an iPhone that supports the Chinese TDD flavour of LTE, although they haven’t decided when. This would knock open a market of 600 million subscribers and significantly help China Mobile in its aim of keeping GSM subscribers from leaking to the new owners of their 3G network at China Unicom. However, it’s also obvious that only a relatively small subset of that user base could afford an iPhone, and this may reignite rumours that Apple might do a cheaper version. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless strongly suggested that the next lot of iPhones will be LTE/UMTS/GSM/CDMA “world phones” - as long as Qualcomm’s chips are ready in time.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: Chinese iPhone + new tech bubble?" »

Posted at 12:34 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Voice 2.0: Microsoft takes out Skype for $8bn: full reaction
• Google: Google I/O: Google Music, movie rentals, roundup
• Tech Disruptions: Google: put your desktop in the cloud, unless you work for Google
• Cloud Computing: Cloudfail 2011: outages at Google, Sony, Twitter, Microsoft, Verizon Wireless
• Devices: Nokia smartphone shipments crash in Q1

To badly mis-quote Monty Python “No-one expects the acquisition”, and after the rumours about either Google or Facebook, it turned out to be Microsoft that bought Skype, for $8.5bn. It sounds like a lot of money, especially when you think that this is the second time the founders have had a payout, but as Telco 2.0 ally Dean Bubley pointed out at our event last week (next events here), it’s the same price-earnings ratio as Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx was and nobody thinks that was a waste of money.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: 'Micro-Skype' Round-Up; Google Music & more" »

Posted at 12:31 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Apple: the world’s favourite brand
• Devices: Euro Q1 smartphones - Nokia off 10% y-o-y, Samsung No.1
• Broadband Connectivity: AT&T markets “Enhanced Backhaul”
• Mobile Money: ISIS radically scaled back?
• Voice 2.0: Google or Facebook buying Skype?

[Ed. Telco 2.0’s EMEA Brainstorm is in London this week from Weds 11th to Friday 13th May, covering growth strategy, cloud, mobile broadband economics, online video, connected TV, M2M, Mobile Apps, customer experience and personal data. There’s also an evening AppCircus developer showcase event. If you can’t make it in person, you can now participate virtually - watch the presentations live online and even take part in the voting remotely and in real-time, from the comfort of your own desktop. Contact us for details

Apple is the world’s most valuable brand, as if you hadn’t guessed by now. The story is based on a “brand index” compiled by advertising agency WPP - one may well be sceptical of this sort of thing, but it’s hard to say that Apple’s brand isn’t enormously famous and surrounded by a gigantic user cult.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:27 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Cloud Computing: Amazonopocalypse: the lessons learned
• Online Video: Handling streaming video spikes: HOWTO and HOWNOTTO
• Broadband Connectivity: AT&T and T-Mobile - the spectrum wars
• Personal Data 2.0: Second massive data leak at Sony
• Regulation: Smartphones with “May spy on you” stickers

[Ed. The next EMEA Brainstorm is in London next week from Weds 11th to Friday 13th May, covering cloud, online video, digital entertainment, mobile internet, M2M, Apps, strategy, transformation, and personal data. See you there!]

After last week’s Amazonopocalypse, the clean-up effort is well under way, as are the recriminations. Amazon Web Services’ own report into the outage is here, basically confirming the view the last Telco 2.0 Review took on it. It seems that an internal router got misconfigured, dumping all the primary network traffic into a secondary network, which was swamped. That in turn led to a cascade failure of the control plane which manages the Elastic Block Service across multiple availability zones. Read it for much technical detail about the problems of really big cloud architectures.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: Amazon Autopsy and Handling Streaming Video Spikes" »

Posted at 11:46 AM | Link to this article

• Technology Disruptions: Massive Amazon Web Services outage tears through the cloud
• More Technology Disruption: Hackers deck Sony PlayStation Network
• Online Video: YouView specifications are out
• More Online Video: Netflix profits surge 88%, shares tank
• Strategy & Finance: Apple profits up on sales of exciting new “computers”

[Ed - It’s just two weeks to the 13th Telco 2.0 EMEA Executive Brainstorm in London, May 11th - 13th - with lots more on Cloud, Digital Entertainment, Apps, Personal Data, M2M, Google / Apple / Facebook and the rest of our agenda. We hope to see some of you there - register now here.]

Now there’s a technology disruption for you - a complex, multi-day, multi-service, multi-zone Amazon Web Services outage. It’s far from clear what exactly happened, but it seems to be associated with their Elastic Block Service product (which emulates local disk access) and possibly also with internal networking. Most AWS clients using availability zones in their US-East service area, and some others, were seriously affected, bringing a lot of very large Web sites to a grinding halt.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: Amazon Cloudburst, YouView, Netflix, Apple" »

Posted at 11:00 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Devices: HTC outstrips Nokia
• Technology Disruptions: Facebook open-sources radical design for giant datacentre
• Cloud Computing 2.0: Telcos in the lead for enterprise private clouds?
• Amazon: 45 minutes, $8,500 to Top 500 computing with AWS
• Telco 2.0 Community: Lee Dryburgh needs your help

Asymco Horace hails HTC’s market capitalisation overtaking Nokia’s - however, it’s worth pointing out that despite their spectacular, Android-fuelled volume growth, their average selling prices and margins have been flat at best for years. In late 2009 they briefly tried to jack up the prices and restore some margin power but saw their volumes hit a wall. There’s more in our Android executive briefing.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: HTC beats Nokia, Cloud & More" »

Posted at 11:26 AM | Link to this article

We’re in Palo Alto preparing for tomorrow’s New Digital Economics 2.0 Brainstorm, so this week’s news review is somewhat abridged and themed on some of the major issues we’re covering. There’s also a seasonal round-up of some the better ‘April Fools’ spoofs we picked up on last week.

As the brouhaha about the AT&T-T-Mobile merger builds up, the UK’s open-access infrastructure provider crashes and takes out half-a-dozen smaller ISPs, Skype’s central infrastructure goes down, Vodafone appeases the shareholders by selling its SFR stake, we’ll be analysing key opportunities for industry growth at the 12th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm on the first day of our New Digital Economics event.

In our new Mobile Apps 2.0 session, we’ll be covering issues like the fight for control of Android’s future development, whether Windows Phone 7 really can take over Symbian’s market share, or whether that says more about analysts’ methodology or lack of it than it does about the market for mobile phones. We’ll wonder why the Symbian source repository just re-appeared and how anyone can expect to get away with suing all the app stores at once and what Google is up to joining the NFC Forum. And are they really making money from Android, or is it more of an anti-Apple virus?

As one of the US’s biggest online marketing companies leaks millions of records, we’ll be exploring the emerging ecosystem of Personal Data 2.0 with experts from the OpenID Foundation and the World Economic Forum.

In the Digital Entertainment 2.0 track, we’ll be covering the digital locker in detail as Amazon blows the issue wide open with its Cloud Drive product. We’ll discuss how Google and Facebook are competing and the lessons of MySpace’s decline

As Amazon Web Services creates more independent availability zones and blurs the definition of cloud computing by offering dedicated EC2 machines, we’ll also be covering the strategy implications of the cloud in depth.

And we might even have a laugh - here’s some fare from the April 1 news feeds: GMail Paper, the anticipatory web, Amazon $NAME, the Smurfs’ intellectual property lawsuit against Skype, hackers changing all the passwords that weren’t already “password” to “password”, and the definitive guide to London’s tech start-ups.

And finally, we’re glad to report that the stray sheep has been safely removed from the Telco 2.0 office.

Posted at 5:17 PM | Link to this article

Interested in joining the crew of the Telco 2.0 spaceship? A berth has become available. Read on for the full job advert…

STL Partners - Vacancy for Head of Client Services - £40-£50K OTE, London (City/Shoreditch)

As a result of our rapid and continuing growth, we are now looking to recruit a Head of Client Services to oversee the management of our client projects and, working directly with the CEO and sales team, help grow a significant new line of business.

We want to hear from those who seek P&L responsibility and have the drive and determination to make a success of an exciting B2B marketing opportunity in the Telecoms, Media and Technology sector.

You must have a minimum of 3-5 years proven expertise in:

• Planning and selling creative and effective B2B marketing solutions (digital media, lead generation programmes and events)


• The Telecoms, Media, Technology sector


• Client/Account Management


• Project Planning and Management (working effectively with internal product and sales teams)


• Directly managing and motivating telemarketing teams


• Database development and reporting


• Campaign Tracking & Measurement


• Monitoring and managing internal revenue growth targets


• International assignments

The opportunity would suit someone who has been trained at a larger agency or worked on the client side and risen swiftly through the ranks, and is now looking to take on new responsibilities and make a major new career move to leverage their skills and experiences.

Significant performance-related bonus and share options to supplement the base salary will be offered to the successful candidate. The post reports directly to the CEO, Simon Torrance.

• Office location: Border of City/Shoreditch. No relocation package applies.


• Full-time, starting as soon as possible.

Posted at 4:37 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: US merger rows - in full!
• Broadband Connectivity: National Broadband Plan - 4Mbps targets questioned, North Carolina prefers 768Kbps
• Online Video: OTT numbers thrashing IPTV, Google says it with cash
• Social Networks: MySpace - how big websites die
• Voice 2.0: Sprint integrates numbering with Google Voice
• The Sixth Bullet: RIP Paul Baran

[Ed. Our Americas Brainstorm is next week in Palo Alto - book now via contact@telco2.net or call +44 (0)207 247 5003 - we hope to see you there. There’s also more detail here, and on the EMEA Brainstorm, 11-13 May 2011, here.]

The AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile USA was always going to be controversial, and sources close to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski have confirmed that it faces a “steep climb” to win regulatory approval. Among many other things, there is concern fropm the consumer side about what will happen to T-Mobile’s customer service, considered excellent, and also its privacy policy.

Of course, there’s also a huge question of market power, pricing, and access. Connected Planet points out that both operators have huge wholesale, enterprise, and carrier services operations. Will this create opportunities for synergy between DTAG and ATT WorldNet, or will it be yet another regulatory problem? They point out that the history of such ventures is not promising - BT Concert, anyone?

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: More AT&T Fall-Out; Sprint & Google Voice" »

Posted at 12:40 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: AT&T buys T-Mobile USA: hell of a row to follow
• Regulation: 3UK’s Russell rages at 900MHz refarming
• Devices: Painful second thoughts and Nokia N8s
• Broadband Connectivity: Cisco pays out first dividend
• Technology Disruptions: The SMS that destroys hardware

[Ed: Diary reminder - it’s now just two weeks to the Americas Telco 2.0 Brainstorm, 5-7 April in Palo Alto, and seven weeks to the EMEA Brainstorm, 11-13 May in London.]

AT&T has agreed to buy T-Mobile USA off DTAG in a deal valued at $39bn in a mixture of cash and share swaps. As part of the transaction, the German operator will retain 8% of AT&T and get a seat on the board for Réne Obermann. AT&T gets an enormous pile of spectrum, a highly rated HSPA network, and a whole lot of regulatory trouble, as competitors line up to denounce an oligopoly with enormous spectrum resources. Major operator mergers in the past have often involved very large disbursements of assets to satisfy the regulators.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: AT&T buys T-Mobile USA (and a huge fight) " »

Posted at 12:38 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Technology Disruptions: Japanese ISPs defy tsunami, but fears for component makers
• Strategy & Finance: Huawei CEO: change of service strategy
• Broadband Connectivity: Out on the fibre trail with BT
• Voice 2.0: Skype goes ad-funded
• Devices: Microsoft / Nokia ‘sweetener’ rumour

[Ed: Diary reminder for our upcoming Telco 2.0 Brainstorms in Americas, 5-7 April, EMEA, 11-13 May, and APAC 22-23 June 2011.]

Renesys reports that Internet traffic through Japanese IXen fell by 25 Gbps immediately after the magnitude 9 earthquake struck, but it returned to normal levels by the end of the day. You may have to stop updating Facebook to hide in a doorway, but it seems it takes more than apocalyptic devastation by the awe-inspiring powers of nature to faze a Japanese network administrator.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:56 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Russia gets a single LTE network
• Broadband Connectivity: Sprint threatens to flip to LTE
• Regulation: Free.fr Mobile is go for launch, at last
• M2M & Embedded Mobile: Vodafone in Bosch, Hyundai super-deals
• Cloud Computing 2.0: Werner Vogels: AWS adds a whole Amazon circa. 2000 every day

[Ed: We’re covering new mobile broadband business models, the impact of LTE, M2M, Cloud Services and much more at our upcoming Brainstorms in the Americas, 5-7 April, EMEA, 11-13 May, and APAC 22-23 June 2011.]

Network-sharing comes to Russia: Russia’s big three GSM operators have agreed to support a common LTE network deployment, to be managed by ex-WiMAX operator Yota.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: US & Russian LTE, Vodafone M2M wins" »

Posted at 12:23 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Broadband CAPEX up worldwide, Huawei snags giant contract
• Broadband Connectivity: Vodafone UK sabotaged!
• Content 2.0: Samsung Media Hub gets carrier billing on Android
• Online Video: Amazon vs. Netflix: it’s war and your network is the collateral damage
• Technology Disruptions: Windows Update update kills Samsung phones - whoops…

[Ed: We’re covering a lot on the digital ecosystem agenda - broadband, Amazon, Apple, adjacent player strategies etc. at our upcoming Brainstorms in the Americas, 5-7 April, EMEA, 11-13 May, and APAC 22-23 June 2011.]

Connected Planet reports that spending on broadband equipment was up sharply in the last 12 months as major deployment projects pressed ahead. DSL, optical Ethernet, and cable technologies were all affected.

Basic connectivity is something of a theme this week. Huawei dared the US government to investigate it, and then went on selling enormous amounts of network equipment. Vodafone-Hutchison Australia announced that it was planning to replace its entire radio access network, after the CEO issued an apology to their customers for what sounds like truly dreadful service.

“The issues some customers have experienced included dropped calls, delayed SMS and voicemails, slow data speeds, inconsistent coverage and long waits when you called us”

Those Aussies - always direct.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: Broadband CAPEX up globally, Amazon vs. Netflix" »

Posted at 12:30 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Nokia-Microsoft: full roundup
• Developer Communities: WAC 2.0 is clear for takeoff - HTML5 is everywhere at MWC
• MWC 2011: Feeling rundown after MWC? Here’s a rundown of the rundowns
• Broadband Connectivity: Telstra, VZW show how you deploy LTE
• Online Video: Akamai-Ericsson partnership for mobile video delivery

[Ed: We’re covering a lot on the digital ecosystem agenda - Apple, disruptor strategies, etc. at our upcoming Brainstorms in Americas 5-7 April, EMEA 11-13 May, and APAC 22-23 June 2011.]

No prizes for guessing the lead story, again. You’re all probably well aware of Nokia’s “strategic partnership” with Microsoft, but just to recap, Nokia will be using Windows Phone 7 as its primary software platform. Symbian is going to reach end-of-life after another 150 million units. The new environment apparently won’t use either Microsoft Silverlight or Qt. MeeGo Linux is left up to Intel to look after. Most of Ovi will shut down, although the Ovi Publish interface (the back-end into the app store) continues to exist. The Mobile Phones division keeps ticking on shipping S40 devices to India and China, but how it stands for future development is anyone’s guess as part of the deal is a radical cut-back in Nokia’s R&D budget.

The reaction has been explosive - we’ll be giving our initial take later this week.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review: MicroNokia; MWC, WAC, LTE update" »

Posted at 11:54 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 News Review

• Strategy & Finance: Tellabs threatens “end of profit”, Vodafone data revenues overtake SMS
• Technology Disruptions: IANA assigns the last IPv4 addresses
• Online Video: Why nobody really wants to “cut the cord”
• Devices: Android zooms into No.1 spot, all eyes on Nokia’s Friday statement
• Google: Is YouTube far more profitable than previously thought?

[Ed: Watch the full Best Practice Live! virtual event online, including presentations on Google, Facebook, and more. Sign up here absolutely free.]

Tellabs threatens the “end of profit” for the mobile networks within the next few years - by 2013 in North America. However, readers at Informa’s telecoms.com point out that their assumptions about cost structures are highly conservative, and also that the study assumed that the network operators won’t do any repricing/usage based pricing. Further, increasing their use of data offload pushed out the evil day beyond 2015.

On the other hand, for the first time, Vodafone made more revenue from data traffic than it did from SMS, with data revenue of £1.33bn in Q42010, growing at a 27.2% clip, compared to £1.31bn worth of txts. That doesn’t sound like disaster. On the other hand, the business is flat in Europe and voice revenues are declining - but rapid growth at Vodafone-Essar and Turkcell makes up for this.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:06 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Eric Schmidt moves upstairs at Google, strong Q4 results
• Voice 2.0: Google Voice gets number portability…briefly
• Devices: Android patent wars rage
• Customer Data: Verizon wants to own identity management
• Broadband Connectivity: Chattanooga gets 1Gbps fibre, 80 billion smart grid datapoints a year

[Ed: Telco 2.0 presents our Best Practice Live! virtual event in two weeks’ time. On the 2nd of February, 0900-1500 GMT, and the 3rd of February, 0900-1500 Pacific Standard Time, we’re presenting a succession of talks from key innovators in the industry and on-line discussions. Sign up here - it’s FREE more details are here]

A clear top story this week: Eric Schmidt hands over after 10 years as Google’s CEO. Schmidt’s hopping upstairs to stay on as chairman of the board, in fact executive chairman, while Larry Page will take over as CEO. On the official blog, Page said that he now felt he no longer needed adult supervision. Not many other startups would have decided to give the top job to an outsider because they didn’t feel mature enough to run the business - it’s one of the reasons Google is such a special company. Meanwhile, Sergey Brin is moving to a new role heading Google’s product development.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:51 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Devices: Verizon iPhone analysis roundup
• Online Video: YouTube passes 200 million mobile vids
• Broadband Connectivity: BT Openreach opens the kimono on open access
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Sales, marketing and CRM drive SMBs to the cloud
• M2M & Embedded Mobile: GSM-enabled traffic lights robbed of their SIM cards

• Strategy & Finance: Indian Government to force the truth out of Huawei
• Technology Disruptions: BT cranks up fibre deployment
• Wholesale 2.0: Heads of Italy’s three altnet families make Telecom Italia an offer it can’t refuse
• Broadband Connectivity: Australia issues detailed NBN plan
• Customer Data: When does it stop being non-identifying data?

[Ed: Diary reminder: 28-30 June 2010, Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! - the first carefully curated, online, video-based, interactive knowledge bank of cutting-edge ‘Telco 2.0’ services, business models and solutions from around the world.]

Huawei goes along to get along with India; in return for the Indian government’s lifting of its ban on their equipment, they’ve undertaken to create an Indian business unit with Indian directors and management, and more importantly, they’re going to come clean at long last about exactly who owns the company. Rumours have circulated for years that the company is secretly controlled by the Chinese Army - the firm was founded in 1988 by a retired officer and instructor at their electronics school.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 5:18 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Broadband Connectivity: ‘1M iPads sold’; AT&T iPad data tariffs out; US operators re-price data
• Strategy & Finance: China Unicom, Comcast, MTN Q1 numbers
• Content 2.0: Apple kills LaLa, Spotify hooks up with Facebook
• Advertising: Apple iAd goes straight for big ad accounts
• Devices: Say cheese: Nokia N8, the phone for filming cops
• Technology Disruptions: Cable cut, BGP leak: lights don’t go out

  [Ed: For your diaries: Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! provides the first carefully curated, online, video-based, interactive knowledge bank of cutting-edge ‘Telco 2.0’ services, business models and solutions from around the world. It runs on 28-30 June 2010.]

  Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

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  Posted at 10:57 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Apple profits up 90%, iPhone shipments up 131%
• Customer Data 2.0: Facebook vs. Google: Unconvincing Privacy Wars!
• Technology Disruptions: Hackers get location of any GSM phone
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Carriers: we love mobile VoIP developers
• 2-Sided Business Models: Werner Vogels on the hunt for new platforms

[Ed: Before we dive into this week’s Apple newsfest, a last minute reminder that the 9th Executive Brainstorm is in London this week - the volcano dust has been swept off the runways, the weather is surprisingly welcoming here in London, and there’s a great line up of speakers, attendees and content, so we’re looking forward to seeing some of you there.]

Apple’s Q2 numbers are now out and they are startling: profits up 90%, iPhone shipments up 131%, Macintosh shipments up 33%, although the iPod fell 1% year-on-year. (And only real geeks even remember there’s an Apple server division…) 58% of iPhone sales are currently going for export as Apple signs up more and more carriers as exclusive channels.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

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Posted at 11:28 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Eurotelcos shout at Google, EU’s Neelie Kroes talks back
• Regulation: Broadband for America - breadth may vary
• Broadband & Fibre: Google Fibre - it’s an experiment, says Vint Cerf
• Smart Grids: Intel launches energy-control devices
• End-User Services: UK’s broadband plan fails
• Special: RIP Guy Kewney

Google is in the news yet again, following last week’s article, reporting that DTAG, Telefonica, and France Telecom had a Ed Whitacre moment, complaining that Google wasn’t paying them to reach “their” customers, and that the EU Commissioner had already joined the debate. There’s more below on this plus our usual news round-up.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t yet done so, please give your views on the threats and opportunities presented by Google here in our short online survey. We’ll be sharing the findings in forthcoming articles and at the 9th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm next week on the 27th-29th April in London (the Brainstorm is definitely ON in case you were wondering).

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 10:45 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Broadband and Fibre: Verizon cuts back FiOS; Google presses on
• Strategy and Finance: Lobbying war over new US entrant
• Regulation: Spectrum fix may fail politically
• Devices: iPad launch week - 300,000 shipped, but is that good or bad?
• Mobile Money: iPhone payments app draws Apple into mobile money

Verizon slows new FiOS deployments, while Google staff are sifting through 1,100 RFPs for their FTTH experimental project. VZ is apparently going to concentrate on filling in the gaps in the current FiOS footprint; discussion elsewhere suggests that the take rate for FiOS has been disappointing, arguably because their strategy for it was based on competing for cable or satellite TV subscribers, with voice and Internet service as a side project. Margins in the TV business haven’t proven to be good enough to let Verizon undercut the TV players.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 10:37 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Vodafone-Verizon - enter the behemoth
• Technology Disruptions: Kineto intros Managed Offload - a Telco 2.0 business model in an app
• Broadband Connectivity: Is GCHQ blocking an anchor institution plan for the UK?
• End-User Services 2.0: David Isenberg and the six-day Verizon FiOS outage
• Devices: Invasion of the Androids: Google’s robot army assaults the smartphone market, China resists

[Ed - don’t forget, just four weeks until the 9th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in London, 28th-29th April 2010, book here or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003.]

Is Vodafone going to merge with Verizon? The FT thinks it’s possible, and also expects that Vittorio Colao will soon be able to force Verizon to resume paying dividends from Verizon Wireless after the mobile operation pays off its debts at the end of this year.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 4:21 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy and Finance: China Unicom reaps the benefits of 3G standardisation
• Devices: China Mobile desperately seeking iPhones
• Customer Data 2.0: Google about to pull out of China
• Technology Disruptions: …but builds its peering infrastructure ever faster
• Broadband Connectivity: FCC’s first moves on the Broadband Plan

[Ed - ‘Early Bird’ discounts to the 9th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in London, 28th-29th April 2010, end this week on March 27th, so book early here or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003.]

Brough Turner brings us a data point about 3G in China; despite having a much smaller share of the overall market, China Unicom has as many 3G subscribers as China Mobile and is growing faster. It probably has something to do with the fact China Unicom got the iPhone - and more importantly, the impact of the Ministry of the Information Industry’s reorganisation of the sector, in which China Mobile had to turn over its UMTS assets to China Unicom and start building a TD-SCDMA network.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:58 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Vendors weather the crisis thanks to China, Safaricom & friends, VZW
• Mobile Money: Telenor…buys a bank
• Regulation: British intelligence: music wants to be free, maaan!
• Broadband Connectivity: OFCOM moves on 800, 2600MHz bands at last
• Advertising 2.0: How Apple missed out on Admob - and how Google spent $750 million to spite Steve Jobs

[Ed: There’s a major session on ‘Living with Google - Where to collaborate, where to compete?’ at the 9th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm, 28-29th April, London]

ABI closes the books on 2009 and concludes that despite the global recession, mobile CAPEX held up well, if you count a 5% dip as “well”; key drivers of this included 243,000 base stations for China, Huawei’s lavish vendor financing, and Verizon Wireless’ LTE supercontract.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:00 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Broadband Connectivity: FCC to switch USF over to fibre deployment, and back PSTN replacement?
• Regulation: BSG - bring us your cost estimates and help build UK broadband
• Emerging Markets: Megatender is off, Unitech Wireless relies entirely on tower sharing
• Technology Disruptions: DARPA: the troops need an app store based on Google Android and they need it now!
• 2-Sided Business Models: The secrets of Amazon.com

We may be facing a major moment in industry history: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is looking at using the Universal Service Fund (USF) to fund broadband deployment. In the past, the use of the USF has been purely voice-oriented, and has hitherto transferred large sums of money from urban and suburban telecoms users to rural operators.

If this goes ahead, watch out for many operators deciding that it’s time to set an out-of-service date for the PSTN itself - USF subsidies are assessed by PSTN line, and if they start flowing in other ways, there’s not much reason to go entirely cellular or to VoIP.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 1:52 PM | Link to this article

You really must show more application. According to a TNS poll, apps are now the joint second factor in subscribers’ choice of device - neck-and-neck with brand loyalty, behind look-and-feel. This rises to the first factor for the 16-30 age group.

Unsurprisingly, the other kind of applications - the ones that happen when you aren’t looking - are also burgeoning. Here’s yet another warning about the threat from malware - especially from the possibilities of a fake femtocell.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:49 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Technology Disruptions: Google steals Mobile World Congress!
• Developer Communities: RIM - your new advertising threat
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Verizon Wireless meets Skype
• Broadband Connectivity: Is the mobile data wave real?
• Privacy: School FAIL

All the ‘sparkle’ at last week’s Mobile World Congress seemed to be about software and developers. While Nokia chose this year to keep off the conference site itself, Google showed up for the first time. Eric Schmidt made a show-stealing keynote speech which we reviewed here after the stardust had fallen from our eyes. Alternative views are here.

In addition, anyone who had anything to do with Google Android had rockstar status, Google told the world that it was willing to invest in 1Gbit FTTH projects, and launched a virtual tour of the Trans-Siberian Railway. To which we can only quote the view of someone on Gordon Cook’s listserv, to the effect that telcos spend money on lobbyists and lawyers, but when Google feels the need for influence, it carries out a small but spectacular tech project and everyone loves it.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 2:10 PM | Link to this article

Top Stories

• Broadband and Fibre: BT: all right, have those ducts
• Strategy and Finance: T-Mobile USA merger rumours - mmm, spectrum
• Online Video Distribution: Everyone loves WLAN managed offload
• Advertising: Apple: they’re planning something location-based
• Technology: UFO spotted among the Google clouds - what is 1e100.net?

Potentially seismic news in the UK: BT changes its mind on duct-sharing. Both OFCOM and the Conservative Party are keen on the idea - OFCOM had a survey of some ducts carried out, and discovered that a surprisingly large percentage of the UK’s telecoms infrastructure is full of raw sewage, and the Tories have threatened to legislate to force BT to provide ducts if they win the election. Mind you, they also threatened to abolish OFCOM - work that out. It’s a major turnaround for BT, which not so long ago wasn’t even willing to provide street cabinet access for the South Yorkshire Digital Region project.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:11 AM | Link to this article

Top Stories

• Broadband and Fibre: Brazil, New Zealand reach for public dark fibre, shared LTE
• Online Video Distribution: AT&T loves WLAN offload, buys $2bn worth of backhaul fibre, makes money
• Devices: Q4 smartphone volumes: Nokia, Apple, RIM rule the world
• Content: Amazon vs Macmillan: content pulls a goal back on distribution
• Advertising: Google Local Search - now with voice

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:32 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Ericsson: everywhere’s awful but the US, China, and India
• Regulation:Google vs. China: escalation, no Androids for you!
• Technology Disruptions: DNSSEC deployment, IPv4 down to 10% - a complicated week for the Internet
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Truphone MVNO is go for launch; Vodafone femto blitz; O2 virtual PBX problems
• Special: Haitian relief effort, powered by…SMS shortcodes

Don’t assume the crisis is over; horrible sales figures from Ericsson were published this week, with fourth-quarter revenues down 13 per cent and profits positively crashing. Another 1,500 jobs are going. However, they did manage to cling on to market share. According to CEO Hans Vestberg, the trouble was concentrated in the emerging markets, where many of their customers were still unable to raise funds for their network deployments. Interestingly, Ericsson’s best performing markets were the US, China, and India - you might think that those three would be enough to support a half decent business, and it’s telling that China and India no longer come under the heading of “emerging markets”.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:12 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Devices: Googlephone: Costs $174, sells for $530…when it sells
• Strategy & Finance: Google falls out with China
• Special: Haitian NIC appeals for Internet community help
• Broadband and Fibre: DTAG makes an offer on duct access, dark fibre
• App Stores: Ovi reaches take-off - 1 million downloads/day

iSuppli has finished costing out the bits of a dismantled Google Nexus One, and they conclude that the $530 device costs about $174 to make, which is a fascinating margin by anyone’s standards. It’s worth noting that the silicon in the gadget is almost entirely Qualcomm - the main processor, and most expensive single component, is a Qualcomm Snapdragon, and the radio hardware is Qualcomm as well.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 2:06 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Devices: Google gadget goes for half a grand, CES roundup
• Technology Disruptions: CES: swarm of iPhones eat AT&T’s network
• Strategy & Finance: Nokia CEO: democratise the smartphone
• Advertising 2.0: Apple buys an ad broker
• Strategy 2.0: Netflix invests in content, fails

Well, we’ve just had CES and the buzz was of course about the Google gadget. Connected Planet asks whether Google might subsidise apps or content on the “Nexus One”. Although there’s certainly something appealing about the idea of flipping the business model, getting rid of the handset subsidies, and instead pushing the app ecosystem, it seems unlikely - the device is pricey, at $530 a go with no carrier subsidy, so you’d have to push out a lot of subsidised applications in order to make it a financially attractive proposition that way. (Also, this is roughly the model Nokia is pursuing for Ovi.) If the iPhone was anything to go by, that $530 includes a substantial profit margin - but the problem is surely how much subsidy to applications the user could absorb.

iFixit has a teardown out, so the genuinely intrepid can have a crack at costing out the BOM and estimating the margins themselves. We’d guess that the Snapdragon chip doesn’t come cheap. Apparently, the device is actually made by HTC, so you might expect that they’ll get the the lion’s share of the price after the upstream suppliers like Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc. have got theirs.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 1:34 PM | Link to this article

Happy New Year! Top Telco 2.0 Stories this week:

• Devices: Google’s Googlephone set for launch
• End-User Services: Facebook 2.0 - APIs “the key to 1 billion users”
• Strategy & Finance: China Mobile VP terminated with significant prejudice, though not extreme
• Broadband and Fibre: UK ISPs demand better wholesale
• Technology Disruptions: CCC: hackers fall in love with GSM

[Ed. - Please help Telco 2.0 improve our analysis service to you, via a short online survey of your research interests for 2010: brief survey here.]

It was probably inevitable that 2010 would kick off with a Google story; the rumour machine is operating at full power ahead of an announcement scheduled for tomorrow. It looks like it’s going to involve Google’s own Android handset, but at the moment it’s hard to say what if anything is special about it. Certainly, selling them for $530 a pop isn’t going to start any revolutions although the margins are probably decent, as they are with the iPhone.

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:13 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: TNS: the recession is over
• Online Video: AT&T’s network-killingest iPhone app
• Broadband & Fibre: Free.fr 3G rolls out to the launchpad
• Devices: AdMob data shows Apple hammering Nokia market share
• Crystal Ball Fest: 2010 predictions and 2009 roundups, rounded up!

Please help Telco 2.0 improve our analysis service to you, via this short survey on your research interests for 2010: brief survey.

TNS (a consumer research company) reckons the mobile industry is about to pull out of the recession, with a burst of growth expected in handsets. (Although, as we described a few weeks ago, will the vendors actually make any money?)

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 1:36 PM | Link to this article

[Ed: Help Telco 2.0 improve our service to you - take a brief survey.]

Top Stories, 14th December 2009

• Devices: Google tries its hand at a handset
• Strategy and Finance: AT&T throttles heavy users, Sprint’s McGuire: “We must break the Big Bell dogma”
• Digital Advertising 2.0: Telefonica launches ad platform in 18 markets
• Broadband: Kigali gets WiMAX
• Regulation: Bruce Schneieron the future of privacy.

Rich Karpinski Editor of Connected Planet (previously known as Telephony Online) has been blogging from the first-ever Telco 2.0 America Executive Brainstorm: if you weren’t there, there’s a taste of the event here and here.

Meanwhile, pictures and details of what is supposed to be a Google Phone leak. If true, Google is making its own stab at an Android device and will be marketing it direct to consumers, which means that it will at least look expensive compared to the competition with their handset subsidies. However, you can be fairly certain that this device will come with Google Voice. Google was also working hard to snag more phone numbers this week: after Google Voice users got the ability to use the service with their existing phone numbers, they’re now being given the chance to “upgrade” and get a Google-assigned number instead.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:52 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Online Video: Distribution vs content: Comcast buys NBC Universal, Google may charge for TV content
• Devices: iPhones blitz flat-rate data plans
• Broadband & Fibre: How France got fibre
• Advertising 2.0: 8% of users = 85% of ad clicks
• Strategy & Finance: BSNL’s 93 megasub tender up in the air again

So you thought content was king? Think again; Comcast, the huge US cable operator, star of multiple net-neutrality rows, and now significant wholesale provider, has bought a controlling stake in NBC Universal. In a slightly curious deal, they’re paying GE some $6.5bn in cash and $7.25bn in kind - specifically, in rights to programming they own. That gives them 51% of NBC, owner of movie studios and TV channels.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:09 PM | Link to this article

Last week’s top Telco 2.0 news stories

• Enterprise 2.0: Salesforce.com adds social network to its cloud platform
• Online Video: iPlayer via satellite broadcast - now with added usage data
• Devices: The $30 Android phone, and the Tesco iPhone
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Hands-on with Vodafone 360
• Broadband & Fibre: “Our network is sabotaged 10 times a month”
• Telco 2.0 Event: Last chance to register for Telco 2.0 Americas, (9th-10th December)

As part of the Telco 2.0 Americas event, we’ll be debating the value of AppStores with American delegates to see if they differ in their views from their European counterparts, who we asked to vote on this question: “How successful will the current focus on consumer apps and app stores be for operators?”

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Telco 2.0 News Review, 30th November 2009" »

Posted at 1:34 PM | Link to this article

Last week’s top Telco 2.0 news stories

• Strategy & Finance: Voda’s EMEA CEO promotes ‘two-sided’ business models, but omits key factor
• Telco 2.0 Events: CEO of world’s second biggest app store to speak at Telco 2.0 Americas
• Broadband & Fibre: Verizon CTO: it’s fibre we need, not spectrum
• Infrastructure: Backhaul - it’s where the excitement is!
• Products & Propositions: AT&T vs VZW: coverage is it
• Technology & Devices: Nokia + Sony Ericsson = Web + Linux

Vodafone is keen to find new ways of deriving revenue from its soaring data traffic. One way, according to Vodafone Europe CEO Michel Combes, might be to charge end-users or perhaps even content providers for guarantees of better QoS. This could go either way - two-sided triumph or IMS-headed fiasco. After all, it’s not clear to what extent a mobile radio network really can guarantee quality of service over the air.

Before this even becomes relevant, though, Vodafone may face a worse problem; without cross-industry collaboration, content providers, clouds, etc may not be interested in negotiating with every mobile operator in Europe and integrating with their diverse technical solutions. Delegates at Telco 2.0’s EMEA Brainstorm agreed that appropriate collaboration on APIs is now necessary to create the market.

The CEO of Getjar, the world’s second biggest AppStore after Apple, is to speak at the 8th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in Orlando from the 9th-10th December.
Wired News has a warning about the dangers of committing to app stores dominated by one huge vendor.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 1:30 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Online Video: YouTube to turn on HD video, backhaul network quakes
• Digital Advertising: Google forks out $750m for Admob
• Devices: Apple makes more profit from phones than Nokia
• Technology: Asterisk - how an open-source project grows
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Teaching English to 300,000 Bangladeshis with voice and SMS
• Telco 2.0 Events: We’ll be covering these issues and more at the 8th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in Orlando from 9th-10th December

YouTube is about to turn up high-definition video, with the 1080p standard becoming available from next week. Just watch the backhaul links light up when that stuff starts flowing. Clearly, we’re still going to need a bigger boat - or rather, a better, integrated video delivery system.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 16th November 2009" »

Posted at 11:01 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• CEBP: 66% of Telco 2.0 delegates say enterprise business processes should be the focus of telco APIs
• Content 2.0: UK Music: peace could break out between labels and ISPs
• Regulation: The ISP-as-policeman zombie is back!
• Technology: Juniper, Ericsson prepare for the data centre future
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Vodafone 360 - cross-platform unified social messaging, and carrier billing too
• Devices: iWorm: iPhones hit by geek-seeking virus

Last week was Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm time again in London; watch this space for blogs, video, slides, etc over the next few weeks as we run up to the first ever Telco 2.0 Americas next month.

After a panel that included the heads of API programmes at operators representing just under a billion subscribers, two-thirds of the delegates to Telco 2.0 believe that telcos should concentrate their efforts in developer communities on enterprise business processes, rather than consumer applications. “Which of the following markets are most profitable for telcos to focus their API efforts on? (Choose one)”:

UK Music chief and ex-Undertone Feargal Sharkey’s keynote in the Media 2.0 session at Telco 2.0 dealt with the possibility of peace breaking out between the music industry and the Internet community; he reckons the growth of services like Spotify and DRM-free download stores like Amazon’s may lead to the industry eventually out-competing the pirates. After Pirate World, new players emerge - where have we heard that one before?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 9th November 2009" »

Posted at 4:34 PM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: CDG joins 3GPP, but LTE disappoints
• Platforms: Qualcomm joins Symbian Foundation
• Technology & Devices: Hack reality with Layar; join thousands of others
• Broadband and Fibre: Hong Kong gets 100/100Mbits for $13 a month
• End-User Services: Be a better spammer on Facebook

[Ed - The Telco EMEA Brainstorm in London this week is packed to the rafters - so join us at the US Event in Orlando on December 9th-10th instead.]

The standards wars have been over a while now, and here’s the peace treaty; the CDMA Development Group is joining the 3GPP, the GSM/UMTS world’s standardisation community. The specific purpose of this is to represent the CDMA carriers, like Verizon Wireless, who are transitioning to LTE.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 2nd November, 2009" »

Posted at 12:53 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Fixed-mobile substitution boosts China Mobile, hammers China Tel
• Regulation: FCC prepares to launch draft Net Neutrality rules, EU acts on spectrum refarming
• Enterprise 2.0: $95bn in data revenue from business by 2014
• Technology & Devices: Brough Turner on fixing AT&T’s mobile data congestion
• Emerging Markets: GrameenPhone IPOs

China Mobile reports a return to growth in Q3, with income up 2.6% year on year after the first quarter of decline since 1999. The carrier signed up another 15 million subscribers in the quarter. Meanwhile, China Telecom saw a 48% plunge in its profits as subscribers rushed away from its core fixed-line voice business towards mobile, and its subscriber acquisition costs rocketed as it makes its own move into the mobile business. It reminds us of a crack of Boris Nemsic’s when he was running Mobilkom Austria; if all your national fixed-line and mobile calls are inclusive, what do you need fixed-mobile convergence for?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 26th October 2009" »

Posted at 12:03 PM | Link to this article

• Telco 2.0 Events: Agenda out now for Telco 2.0 events this autumn
• Strategy: Nokia announces first loss in 10 years on huge NSN writeoff
• Advertising 2.0: Storming Q3 results at Google
• Technology: New study backs Telco 2.0 on YouTube bandwidth costs
• Broadband and Fibre: FCC loves Berkman Centre on open public networks

The agenda is out now for Telco 2.0’s European and American events; book here while there are still places available.

Nokia announced ugly Q3 results this week, booking the first quarterly loss in 10 years. In Q3, Nokia lost €559 million overall, against a consensus forecast of a €350 million profit. In fact, the analyst consensus wasn’t that far off in terms of the operating level - Nokia took a €908 million write-off against the value of Nokia Siemens Networks, which therefore implies the company must have made €351 million from operations before the monster accounting charge hammered it. (Remind anyone of Vodafone’s books back in the day?)

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 19th October, 2009" »

Posted at 11:40 AM | Link to this article

• Broadband: BT - more fibre coming
• Technology & Devices: Verizon Wireless plunges on Android, Motorola
• Strategy: Amazon’s two-sided business model for Kindle International
• Regulation: FCC to carriers - love my spectrum, love net neutrality
• Special: The East End’s Nobel prize-winning fibre pioneer

BT says it’s actually going to do a lot more FTTH than previously planned, and it’s going to overbuild as well as install in new construction. Apparently, this is because they’ve discovered that it doesn’t cost as much as they thought, and (according to various press reports) they can use their existing ducts. Wasn’t this obvious? Or is this a reference to the secret cable-stripping tech they bought into?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 12th October 2009" »

Posted at 5:04 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Bharti-MTN talks collapse
• Technology: Telefonica sets LTE vendors at each other’s throats
• Broadband: US Knight Commission, Said Business School, Cisco - government action needed to deploy fibre (like T2 said)
• Online Video: The “exaflood” that wasn’t
• Regulation: South Korea - more flat-rate data plans now!

Coming Up: Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorms, Europe, 4th-5th November, and Americas, 9th-10th December

In other news: Aircom predicts $1.8bn per carrier for LTE deployment; Tony Blair fails to secure Wataniya Palestine’s spectrum; US operators drain the spectrum tub and holler for more; trust busters warn them against disorderly conduct; Telenor/Alfa row finally ends; France Telecom No.2 quits over suicides; Amazon settles over Orwell-zapping; Sony will publish anyone’s book; MapReduce available as EC2 instances; 50,000 new EC2 instances a day - cloud turns black, thundery, grows rapidly; Lotus Notes in the cloud; RIM, Apple, Google work together to mobilise Flash Player; Nortel GSM on the block; Sierra Leone gets mobile money; more war stories from OpenBTS’s David Burgess; 2 billion iPhone downloads; Spotify offers offline; Grauniad for your iPhone; beta release for Google Wave; another 20 million iPhones post-exclusivity; more BBC web traffic comes from mobiles than PCs in Nigeria; Comcast CEO “in top five overpaid execs”

Crash of the über-merger; getting a deal that would satisfy both Bharti-Airtel and MTN’s sets of shareholders and the aspirations of their respective management teams was always going to be hard, and integrating the two companies even harder, but getting the politics right? Really hard. And that’s what’s happened - the South African government, which owns 21 per cent of MTN, has refused the deal on the grounds that they aren’t keen on foreign ownership of MTN.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 5th October 2009" »

Posted at 12:11 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Content & Apps: Vodafone launches social network platform
• Devices: Vodafone, Verizon Wireless fire starting gun for LiMo
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: O2 UK, BT in iPhone app row over premium-rate calls
• Regulation: EFF forces disclosure of illegal wiretapping lobby
• Broadband: US muni-fibre projects push ahead, grant or no grant

Vodafone boss Vittorio Colao wasn’t kidding about social networks the other day. In a major product announcement, the carrier presented its new Vodafone 360 client, which is a single interface for multiple third-party social applications. Most of the handsets that will run this suite of applications will be running LiMo Release 2, and will provide an HTML/CSS/Javascript widgetry API for the app layer. As well as an app store, there’s a cash reward out for the most compelling application - as this is presumably going to be linked up with the other JIL carriers, it’s a case of “gentlemen, start your engines”. Gadgets are expected by Christmas, with the various associated services rolling out in Vodafone’s core markets by then.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 28th September, 2009" »

Posted at 11:42 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Vodafone - out with the footy clips, in with social networks
• Digital Advertising: Facebook shuts down controversial ad play
• Technology & Devices: Motorola’s sociophone - all a bit of a BLUR
• Strategy: Regulator tells Telstra - separate or die!
• Online Content: SongBeat - free music, paid-for search

In other news: Phorm - the end is nigh; Robo.to tells you more about incoming callers than you can read before you pick up; new version of Android; I love my INQ Mini, rather too much; Palm loses money under GAAP, loses 10x less under own rules; no more Windows gadgets from Palm; Hesse sez FCC “fair” to probe exclusive handset deals; row over Walsten’s FCC seat; VZ ditches the copper world, would quite like to keep tax break; AT&T denies role in Gvoice/Appstore; CMT slashes Telefonica wholesale rates 25%; VoLGA standard is here; NSN first call on LTE; T-Mobile USA first HSPA; FON gets into GSM; David Burgess at Burning Man; Y! intros combined OpenID/OAuth; IBM, Cisco both want smart grid standards; dire desk phone GUI, mocked; Braille on your phone; dodgy iPhone update; dedicated Apple support; HD voice “driven by VoIP”; Skype, Joost suing

Vodafone announces Vodafone 360, the successor to Vodafone live! The interesting bit here is exactly what 360 offers - rather than the video-heavy content offering that characterised both Live! and most operators’ ideas about what to do with 3G back in the day, its main selling point is as a wrapper around multiple social networks and other communications services. Vittorio Colao recently told investors that the social networks were one of the biggest drivers of traffic on Vodafone, and this looks like they’re suiting the action to the word. 360 is also going to include an app store - at least it’s a better name than Vodafone Widget Manager…

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 21st September 2009" »

Posted at 12:12 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 Top Stories:

• Digital Advertising: Dunnhumby profits surge, but public info can turn into private info, and US TV ad buying crashes.
• Broadband: Internet traffic surges through the recession
• Online Content: BBC wants to open iPlayer to the competition
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: HD voice is here, or rather, in Moldova
• Digital Money: The economics of an M-PESA shop

In other news: The end of TV ads? Raise you the end of fixed voice; China Mobile moves into Symbian’s giant app shed; spectrum upshot of T-Orange merger; Spotify hits the brakes; Rhapsody for iPhone; Vodafone outage; Vodafone launches better voice for SMEs; SingTel buys Eircom; Singapore NBN taps ALU for OSS BSS, in orgy of TLAs; US telcos - actually, we would like the money; Google’s latest SSN sails and dives deep; Indian 3G auction is go in December; AT&T adds more HSPA; NEC/Hitachi/Casio merger; weird Sony Ericsson gadget is weird; list of Ovi Maps apps; Nokia acquires startup; next INQ to run Android; DT-Sprint horrors rise from the deep; how M-PESA agents’ businesses work; Zimbabwe telco cuts everyone’s bill by half in desperate bid for cash

The ups and downs of advertising. Here’s probably the world’s number 1 in targeted ads and data mining, Tesco spinoff Dunnhumby, creators of the Tesco Clubcard. Their profits were up 71%. Great, no? We could really do with some of that in telecoms…so you’re probably already thinking of all those hard disks in the billing department. [Ed. - Martin Hayward, Dunnhumby’s Director of Strategy & Futures will be joining the panel on ‘Customer Data 2.0’ at the EMEA Telco 2.0 event on 4-5 Nov in London.]

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

Posted at 5:15 PM | Link to this article

• APIs and Enablers: Nokia launches Ovi SDK
• Digital Advertising: Big push for privacy legislation - will it kill or cure LBS and targeted ads?
• Online Content: New Nokia Comes With Music phones target Spotify head on
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Orange: future of work is decentralised offices, not telecommuting
• Strategy & Finance: Bidding war on for T-Mobile UK

In other news: Nokia still loves stalkerware; new blog about Nokia musicphones, entirely useless to 90% of our readers; Symbian for mass market, Maemo for high end; Nokia “has enough operating systems for now”; MoBot, the mobile scripting tool for power users; NSN chief leaves, Nokia services chief takes over; Sony Ericsson’s PS3 streaming gadget; Verizon joins TV-streaming alliance; Gmail outage; Kai-Fu Lee quits Google.cn; sense from Telephony Online about VoIP and unicomms; new HTC gadgets; Facebook friends for sale; China Unicom and Telefonica swap shares; funny filesharing figures from the BPI; French teachers want mobiles back in the classroom; Cisco dishes out rewards for failure; Digicel brings GSM to Nauru.

It’s here: at Nokia World this week, Nokia announced the launch of the first set of Ovi developer tools. There will be a software-development kit for Ovi applications in general, based on (inevitably) HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (it will be interesting to see if it conforms to the same standards as JIL), and there will also be APIs for Nokia Web services. To start with, they’re offering access to their map server and to the server which generates turn-by-turn navigation instructions. At the moment, you have to pay for this last service through Nokia’s Maps application, so one wonders what the business model is.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 7th September 2009" »

Posted at 11:10 AM | Link to this article

Top Telco 2.0 Stories

• Apple App Store “selling $200m a month”?
• Hulu pulls ahead of Time Warner Cable
• Nokia dives into mobile banking; Orange buys digital ad network
• EBay/Skype - the end of the affair
• Hackers assail GSM A5/1 encryption

In other news: Apple accepts Spotify app; broadcast still the best way to deliver live content; now that’s what we call LBS; 12% broadband growth in France; Brough Turner forecasts LTE for 2012; Maemo Linux gets telephony API; IMS still hoping for video-sharing; mystery Vonage surge; heads roll at Clearwire, again; Intel: data centres can safely warm up; SkyTap’s VPN cloud; Cloudera vs VMWare; semiconductor sales up 5.3%; new Motorola Android gadget; iPhone goes to China - no revenue sharing there; Samsung’s app store; why m-banking is right for Canada; taking over the Internet; Home Office gets it wrong

Just how many applications is Apple selling through the App Store? According to AdMob, it could be as much as $200m worth for the month of August; there’s a good row going on over at GigaOm as to whether their methodology is likely to have produced valid numbers. It’s probably worth pointing out that the release and huge sales of the iPhone 3GS might have skewed the month, what with all those new iPhones getting apped-up at once. But it does tend to suggest that the App Store is a genuine business.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 1st September 2009" »

Posted at 10:25 AM | Link to this article

Top stories:

FCC prepares for mobile competition hearings, and wades into Google/Apple/AT&T

China Mobile app store launch

N97 disappoints - Nokia links up with Microsoft

Telco data “can tell better than you who your friends are”

African Internet traffic surges as East African cables light up

In other news: Verified online dating; “dynamic green routing” to save power in the cloud; Google seeks smart grid interoperability; cable cuts cause Chinese chaos, but not as much as in 2006; routing diversity scores on the doors from Renesys; BGP fatfinger strikes again; SingTel profits up on big Bharti contribution; giant credit-card hack; AT&T, T-Mobile robbed by ex-employees; Australian police too clever for their own good; Hacking at Random builds its own GSM network; Patricia Russo’s six weeks at SpinVox; 4th French 3G licence coming; O2 Germany OK with mobile VoIP; BT outsources everything, closes grad recruitment; Yorkshire lifeboat crew builds their own FTTH; slow progress on fibre in Spain; Budde, Conroy speak on open fibre networks; USDA report out on rural broadband; teledensity passes 100% in Venezuela; Orange, Vodafone looking for a social network; INQ-Spotify hookup; RIM “fastest growing company”; cops desert Airwave for RIM; John Todd speaks about Asterisk, communities, etc

The FCC is considering whether it should launch a full-dress inquiry into competition in the US mobile business. As the new FCC staff have begun to bed in, the agency has been increasingly activist, and this hearing is intended to look at the complex topic of intercarrier pricing, the US equivalent of termination in Europe. Could this be the beginning of a Viviane Reding-like telco-bashing rampage?

There’s a heavy agenda at the FCC right now; they’re taking submissions on the question of how to define “broadband”, or to put it another way, what the minimum standards for the US’s telecoms infrastructure should be, and they’re wading into the Google Voice/Apple/AT&T row as well. It all suggests that more regulatory pressure can be expected on the Telco 1.0 business’s margins going forward, to say nothing of more competition.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 24th August 2009" »

Posted at 11:39 AM | Link to this article

Top stories:

In other news: Spinvox, Symbian S60, BT FTTC/VDSL, Spotify, 35 varieties of Asterisk - free!

The Bharti-Airtel & MTN merger grinds on. Last week they were promising that the merger made so much sense they would have to keep running the two companies independently; this week they resorted to a more reliable form of persuasion - cash. Bharti is hiking the cash element of the deal by $1bn, reducing the volume of new shares that will be issued and also fudging the question of who controls the company. Not only do the South Africans see MTN as a strategic national asset, but there are more than 20 regulators to satisfy across the combined empire. It sounds almost as fun as that proposed FTel/TeliaSonera tie up…

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

Posted at 9:24 AM | Link to this article

In Today’s Issue: Strategy: Sprint’s WiMAX plans leak; Sprint loses contract customers; buys and closes Virgin Mobile; BT cleans up after Satyam SatScam; BT, FTel, Telefonica, Motorola shares up on non-awful results; ALU wants to sell more assets; Telefonica saved by Latin American businesses; 900MHz refarming is go!; what a mess at Nitel; Bharti Airtel/MTN - support the merger, we promise we won’t really merge; Core Services: Secret of the iPhone - telephony; AT&T accused of Telco 2.0 in reverse; Blyk swaps 200,000 MVNO subs for 12 million as a managed service; B2B Platform: TWC squeezed between Web video and IPTV; Google uses SMS for verification; BREW, RIM integrated with VZW app store; Enablers and APIs: Qualcomm, VZW plan to “explode” M2M applications; new Nokbrowser out; Technology and Devices: 1.5% of Indian Symbian devices virus-ridden; hackers explode iPhone with special SMS; spying on Amazon EC2; no MSFT phone; Intel gives “MIDs” the humane killer; upgrading your hacked TiVo; HOWTO stage the jewel heist of the century; the best papers on internetworking, ever

Strategy

A Sprint document leaked, giving details of their next wave of WiMAX deployments. Interestingly, they aren’t in the places you might expect; perhaps they are doing the easiest radio plans first? It would hardly be surprising, seeing as they made a large loss, as valuable contract customers left the building and they also decided to buy out Virgin Mobile USA for $420 million. The plan is to fold the Virgin customers into Sprint mainline; so what did happen to the wholesale strategy?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 3rd August 2009" »

Posted at 3:31 PM | Link to this article

In Today’s Issue:

Strategy: The spoils of Nortel; why would RIM want to be Nortel 2.0 anyway? Ericsson the winners so far; reasons to be cheerful - AT&T spending on infrastructure again; the iPhone sends waves through AT&T’s balance sheet; Zain/Vivendi deal off, revenues up; Ahuja and friends launch WiMAX startup; East Africa online; Core Services: Data traffic booms; NSN reckons it will exceed voice by 2011; mobile broadband subscriber numbers; Vodafone results down despite data surge; America Movil results up because of data surge; O2 UK’s nightmare week; HOWTO get US Federal broadband funding; Quigley picked to run Aussie NBN; B2B Platform: KCOM in trouble over war on filesharers; Will Page: music industry actually OK, really; Apple considers iTunes-focused tablet; Enablers and APIs: Rackspace, the latest API-enabled cloud; Technology and Devices: Avaya in pole position for Nortel voice assets; NSN opts for Alvarion’s WiMAX kit; WiMAX trouble in Malaysia; Ericsson chief promises to back Sony-Ericsson; ZTE: SDR-based LTE/CDG Node B; Telus prepares for CDMA-LTE leap; SpinVox is people!; 26% of Chinese crooks wannabe hackers; no wonder, when it’s this easy; Symbian-approved virus spreads by SMS; Apple breaks Palm Pre-iTunes sync, Palm unbreaks it; Nokia buys super-address book startup; a watch in a phone in a watch

The vultures swirl around Nortel. And sometimes they turn on each other…RIM complains bitterly that it’s not getting a fair chance to buy the core CDMA and LTE assets; Nortel says they can only bid for them if they promise to buy more assets after that; RIM wraps itself in the flag and claims that it must keep these strategic assets in Canadian hands. Meanwhile, one of Nortel’s creditors threw in a low bid for the assets, Nokia Siemens Networks made an offer…and Telephony Online asked why RIM wanted to become an underscaled infrastructure vendor, just like…Nortel.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 27th July 2009" »

Posted at 3:48 PM | Link to this article

In Today’s Issue: More app stores, but Symbian has a giant app distribution warehouse just off the M25; Nokia sells key Symbian unit; awful figures; another service strategy…; NSN gets $1bn Brazilian contract; Palm Pre syncs with iTunes, Apple rushes out update to stop it; Pre SDK away, hooray; Google’s voluntary total surveillance project for iPhones; 1.5bn downloads from App Store, most intended to replace native applications; wall of money hits iPhone games; Google Voice for Android; Sony Ericsson - the horror! the horror!; embarrassment at Motorola; Frenchmen threaten to blow up Nortel plant; operators “can’t stop now” on infrastructure spending; IBM detects “nanoscale green shoots” with new electron microscope; Spinvox offers shares rather than cash; O2 Germany intros “Comes With Malware”; Etisalat hacks BlackBerries, gets caught, lies about it, sees profits rise 10%; 3UK wants to advertise on dongle clients; Alierta skates from insider trading charge; even more highly doubtful piracy stats; is YouTube actually profitable?; the coming CDN boom; cool new TV box comes to Britain; C&W shareholders furious; simple ad spot prevents Federal broadband funds being paid; Telstra loses case over price hike; Thailand, Angola laying fibre; new hybrid HSPA/satellite network; loads of data on HSPA; fixed-mobile collision hurts BSNL; desperately seeking a voice solution for LTE; users considered intelligent in Wi-Fi study; 36% want mobile iPlayer; VZW cuts exclusivity before the Feds do; Vodafone to update on cost cutting this week; who will be Amazon’s pet MVNO in Europe?; O2 launches prepaid VISA card; Biz Stone says…something

Yet more app store noise. Well, not quite.

More details are emerging of the forthcoming Symbian app store, Horizon; in fact, it’s not going to be so much an app store as a giant app shed near a motorway junction in Wiltshire, delivering truckloads of apps to stores all over the world. Not necessarily a silly idea; the plan is roughly that Horizon would be a single buyer from developers, taking care of technical support, signing and certification, and distributing revenue share, and selling wholesale to operator app stores. Presumably, the Ovi Store is going to be a front end for the project. That would make sense; but then, when has Nokia’s services strategy ever made sense?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 20th July, 2009" »

Posted at 2:18 PM | Link to this article

In Today’s Issue: Virgin after 4th French licence; SFR basks in iPhone glamour; India trebles teledensity, heads for 500 million subs; Indian military gets fibre in exchange for spectrum; Sarawak gets WiMAX; Oregon gets WiMAX; Portugal gets 100Mbits broadband; Econet rolls out in Kenya, Zimbabwe; Eurovendors - still got it, Ericsson edition; ignorant senators; Smart Comms’ next move; GrameenPhone IPO is go; Iran says no to Zain; Vodafone and CPW make nice; latest T-Mobile UK rumours; O2 gets Palm Pre, but Orange gets Blyk; T-Mobile: we can’t spy on our customers, we’re doing too much network-address translation!; BBC: Canvas makes sense, you know; Joost sneaks off quietly; new ad spec from CableLabs; Nokia immediately updates new phone; HOWTO make N97 homescreen widgets; rumour: Nokia to do an Android gadget; yet another dead Nokia service; Ericsson has an app store now; VCs throw money at iPhone start-ups; Zer01 launches, Tracfone is cheap; US broadband grants come with net neutrality; EU finally ends the charger madness; bad connectivity makes a fool of Bloomberg

Stalking the French fourth mobile licence; Virgin Mobile is apparently interested, with a “strategic partner”. Presumably this means that a big enough MVNO, in the opinion of its own management admittedly, now qualifies as a launch customer for a greenfield UMTS network; looks like wholesale really is becoming crucial. According to French government sources, the tender should be issued before the end of July for a decision in January 2010. Relatedly, SFR claimed it had a “good” Q2 in terms of subscribers, probably driven by the iPhone halo effect.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 6th July 2009" »