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April 14, 2008

Ring! Ring! Hot News, 14th April 2008

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

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

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March 03, 2008

Ring! Ring! Hot News, 3rd March 2008

In Today’s Issue: Mobile apps RIP? And are mobile RIAs the killer? Control your private plane with a Nokia N810; or develop for IMS. It’s your choice. NEC pushes “It’s not IMS”. Sprint = Telco USSR? British ISPs; how not to do it. Comcast: much the same. iPhones; hacked again. Hackers deploy platform strategy. Salesforce.com menace rises. Big changes ahead at Telecom Italia. Nokia GPS-tags photos. Virgin Mobile in India. EU “worse than communism”. And cancerogenic BTS doesn’t exist after all.

Have downloadable mobile applications died the death, to be replaced by a Web-based future? Former Palm and Apple exec Michael Mace thinks so; Carlo Longino agrees. The argument is that the diversity of possible platforms, the difficulty telcos (especially) and vendors have relating to the developer world, and the restrictive terms of business they apply, have rendered it just too difficult for a real developer ecosystem to emerge. Meanwhile, the surge in things like Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe AIR, and JavaFX means that the richness of applications that run in a browser is beginning to challenge what you can achieve reasonably quickly in a native application. This is a significant change in the balance of power between the Web 2.0 players and telcos, since you don’t need a special (telco-issued) digital certificate or pre-installation for web applications.

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February 25, 2008

Ring! Ring! Hot News, 25th February 2008

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

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

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

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January 15, 2008

What’s Next in EU Regulation

Profit in telecoms has often been as result of pleasing regulators as much as paying customers. Our many non-European readers may be unfamiliar with the interesting shifting dynamic of the European regulatory scene. Traditionally, national regulators have retained most of the regulatory levers; there is no real European equivalent of the relatively powerless state Public Utilities Commissions in the US, but the relationship between the states and the Feds is mirrored by that between the national governments and the European Union. Despite this, the politics could hardly be more different.

The first three years of the current European Commission (the EU’s executive branch) have been marked by unexpected activism on the part of its regulators, especially in telecoms and anti-trust. Many observers had expected that the Barroso commission would be marked by conservatism and slow decision making, as the commissioners struggled to get their confirmation hearings complete at the European Parliament. Parliamentary objections looked like they might hedge much of the activity of several commissioners; two appointments were turned down flat, and Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes was forced to promise to recuse herself from a very long list of issues due to her conflicting interests, which included directorships of every significant company in the Netherlands and a few others besides.

Amid all the fuss, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Viviane Reding would turn out to be a reasonably uncontroversial steward of the union’s Directorate-General for Media and the Information Society; certainly no-one was particularly incensed at the Luxemburgish journalist’s appointment. However, neither conflicts or obscurity held them back; Kroes and Reding have probably been the most visible and effective of the commissioners, and their confrontations with the telecoms and IT industries have been positively bruising.

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