New sources of value from merging the best of Telephony/SMS with Skype/Yahoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Another common use of the word “platform” that sometimes confuses people is the way it’s used to describe the technology that goes around individual applications in a computer system. Like Microsoft Windows, Linux, Adobe Flash in the browser, Symbian S60 in a mobile phone, or what have you. IT people spend a lot of time arguing about them, which is probably less stupid than it sounds, because the history of IT has been the history of development platforms.

Continue reading "Another Kind of Platform: Telcos as Development Environments" »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We’re putting together our Voice & Messaging 2.0 report, which includes a directory of all the interesting companies in the space we’ve come across. We’ll be presenting some of this at our event next week of course. But in the meantime, we’d like to tell you about one new company that’s extra-interesting.

When we speak about Voice & Messaging 2.0, we’re usually thinking in terms of services, software, or devices that offer… voice or messaging! But it doesn’t have to be limited to this. Our conception of the “ultimate communications experience” doesn’t imply that we’re looking for a killer app, a single, perfect integrated client; it could as well be provided by a school of independent, specialised but interoperable components. They might be within a common user interface, or might not.

So as well as new forms of telephony, we’re also interested in new auxiliary technologies. What, for example, is the new telephone directory? Web search engines are already great at digging out telephone numbers, but then again, numbers themselves are getting less important. When we’re using the phone to interact with an organisation, rather than an individual, anyway, the phone number is not particularly important. What we need to find is a function.

Continue reading "IVR search: a 'Google' for phone menus?" »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "Voice Revolution Watch" »

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

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

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

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

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The price of a marginal voice minute is falling all over the world. A basic access bundle of voice, messages and data is becoming the norm in many markets. That bundle offers an ever-larger, or even unlimited, amount of traffic. At the same time, there’s a dramatic explosion of new kinds of voice going on — embedded in games, mobile VoIP, IM clients growing a voice capability, web-based click-to-call, extensions to enterprise VoIP systems — and none of them are by default inside the telco.

In case you missed it the first time, here are the results from our Broadband Business Models survey on this score:

The message is simple: non-operator voice-enabled application are going to grow very fast. That’s not our opinion, but that of you and your peers. (Our opinion is that the numbers are a little aggressive, but not by much. It may take a 2-3 extra years. Still, contrast mobile in 2008 with 1998 to see how dramatically the world can change.)

If you’re a phone company, and you’re still on Plan A of selling large buckets of voice minutes, it doesn’t look like a very attractive future. At the moment, telco voice is still just about growing in volume, although margins are often vanishingly tiny on fixed line, and falling fast on mobile.

So what could we do about that? The Telco 2.0 way is to divide up your bulk product, and re-package it and distribute it in new ways. We’re going to use dating as an example of how to do it.

Continue reading "Re-packaging voice minutes to raise margins" »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We’ve been putting together a directory of all “2.0”-type players for our forthcoming Consumer Voice & Messaging 2.0 Report. One newcomer, Ribbit, is offering an early foretaste of what the future environment for developing voice and messaging services might look like.

Ribbit reckons it’s “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company”. Silly us, we thought that was AT&T. So what is it? The actual product is a VoIP softswitch, available either as a standalone installation or a hosted service, which offers an unprecedentedly extensive collection of APIs for developers to work into their sizzling lashups. Then, there’s a Flash toolkit intended to let the front-end developers design interesting user interfaces to the system’s voice functions, whether on desktops, laptops, or mobile devices. All very Telco 2.0, really.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Ribbit is that one of the existing applications for it integrates it into Salesforce.com, the hugely successful web-based sales/CRM system; you can’t get more platform-based, enterprise-focused, or two-sided than that. We’re sure there’s huge scope for creativity and user-driven innovation here; but there are some issues that worry us.

Continue reading "Ribbit! The amphibian of telco voice platforms" »

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If you’re winding down for Christmas this week and have a spare 15 minutes before midnight this Friday to contribute your thoughts on the future of consumer voice and messaging, please take part in our online survey here. (You’ll get a free copy of the summary results later in January as a thank you).

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We’re pleased to announce a new online survey about the future of voice and messaging. The survey takes 15-20 minutes to complete and is designed (as always) to be thought provoking. It closes on the 19th December.

All those who complete the survey will receive a free set of summary results. The full results, as well as a deeper analysis of the changes in the industry and a full directory of every “2.0” player in the field will be published in our Consumer Voice & Messaging 2.0 report at the end of January.

Voice and messaging service operators face increased competition: fixed-mobile substitution, converged services, new low-cost entrants, as well as external competition from rich Internet communications services. The survey is designed to identify the key changes likely to happen in delivering consumer voice and messaging services for fixed, mobile and converged operators. Respondents are invited to identify the best operator strategies and select the key unmet user needs.

This survey has 4 short sections:

1. Introduction & Your details
2. Consumer Voice & Messaging Market Scenarios
3. Best Operator Voice & Messaging Strategies
4. Voice & Messaging Service Execution

Based on feedback from last year’s voice and messaging survey, we’ve made this one shorter and simpler. If you did the survey last year, you’re very welcome to do it again this year so you can get a copy of the new results.

Please take part here.

(Thanks too for everyone who participated in our previous survey on the future of broadband. Those who completed the survey were mailed the summary results a few weeks ago — we’re always keen to hear feedback. The resulting Broadband Business Models 2.0 report is in the final assembly stages.)

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One of the most interesting companies that took part in October’s Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm is VoiceSage, a small Irish firm that develops innovative enterprise applications using telco services. This was a major theme of the event - if you want MySpace for monkeys on LG Prada phones, or the nth twist on music downloads, you’ll be fine asking Vodafone or Sprint, but if you ask anyone who gets Telco 2.0, they’re probably working on something for business users.

There is a very good reason for this; compared to telecoms, most of the trades that conventional wisdom thinks will provide growth and margin in the future are tiny. Telcos could completely crush the ad business - eat every ad agency in the world - and notice only a minor blip in their revenues. The telecoms industry could take over Hollywood and barely feel the bump, like some grey-suited monster lumbering over the Los Angeles canyons. For an encore, they could crush their way up the coast to San Francisco and eat the computer game industry. And it still might not be enough.

Continue reading "VoiceSage and the business of...business" »

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CDRs - Call Detail Records, the database entities that permit telcos to bill their users - are getting a bad press at the moment with the latest revelations about US networks’ willingness to let the NSA dig through their databases without getting warrants or accepting any other quaint legal restrictions.

But at Telco 2.0 yesterday, we heard how CDRs might actually empower the users in a Telco 2.0 future. Keith Wallington of mobile SIP insurgents Truphone suggested that “in the future, this will be bigger than mobile number portability”. Wallington proposed the ability to have calls routed intelligently depending on your preferences and the patterns of use revealed by network data. And this brings us right to his point.

If all your contextual services depend on the contrail of signalling data you leave behind in the operator network, the ability to take that information with you when you churn is going to be crucial. Perhaps we need a right to claim our data; however, the really important point is as always the practical implementation of such a thing, just as it was with number portability.

So, of course, are the legal and privacy problems; the incentives for the operator to implement a platform for interesting contextual services are all about the clever things the operator could do with the data, but the strongest protections for user privacy essentially rule this out. If the user data, for example, was encrypted with a key the user controlled, the user could grant access to it for each service they wanted. But the operators will insist on being able to analyse the data themselves; or they probably won’t do it.

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One of the interesting questions in our online survey on the future of broadband is “who will own the network?”. The current results for cellular-style networks look something like this:

The points of note are that a lot of people think the mobile operators need to increase their efforts at sharing networks; and Openreach-style regulated structures from the fixed side aren’t so popular for wireless. (If you’ve not done the survey yet, you’d better click here quick and contribute your opinion too — and you’ll be on the mailing list to get the free summary results, which you won’t otherwise get.)

However, one respondent came back and asked me why I didn’t offer the handset providers or network equipment makers as an option (at least we had an “other” box!). Which set me thinking — why would someone vertically integrate the different parts of the mobile value chain? This is distinctly topical since Nokia has been busy entering the services space with its Ovi music and entertainment store (which potentially competes with operators, even if not intended to). They’ve also just bought Navteq, which offers an opportunity to bypass operators by baking the mapping data into the device.

We’ve done extensive work in the past for the mobile handset vendors on the co-opetition they have with network operators and how to manage that in an all-IP world. So let’s ponder Nokia’s situation and what their “Telco 2.0” strategy ought to be. Despite their protestations of being an Internet multimedia services company, they’re still a mobile phone maker at heart, and their destiny surely depends on how the core voice and messaging experience evolves. (This will also be the focus of our debate at the Digital Product Innovation Summit at the Telco 2.0 event next week.)

Continue reading "Nokia's dilemma: operator friend or foe?" »

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Mixit is the root of all evil whether controlled or not…Hermanus - (creator of mixit) I hope you sleep at night cause I’ve prayed many times that the fleas of a thousand camels with infest you!! (Link)

Surprisingly, this remark about South African hit mobile messaging app MXit didn’t come from a telco marketing director. Neither did it come from a telco data network engineer struggling to cope with demand. In fact, its author was more worried about the content of messages than their quantity; but being common carriers, of course, telco people should be quite the reverse.

And MXit should be giving you nightmares. Since its launch in 2005, the service has been recruiting users at a rate of 10,000 a day. It’s one of the first examples of a really successful over-the-top strategy in mobile; the heart of the service is an instant messaging client that uses the mobile packet data channel and the Internet. But as you will see, it’s far from being “just” mobile IM.

Continue reading "Going Over The Top: MXit" »

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“One of the hottest of hot topics these days is the topic of Internet platforms, or platforms on the Internet. Web services APIs (application programming interfaces), web services protocols like REST and SOAP, the new Facebook platform, Amazon’s web services efforts including EC2 and S3, lots of new startups talking platform (including my own company, Ning)… well, “platform” is turning into a central theme of our industry and one that a lot of people want to think about and talk about.

Indeed. Andreessen is certainly right to say that there is a lot of confusion about it, too - we mentioned this in our post on jNetX. In an attempt to clarify this, he defines a platform as any system capable of modification by the user; we broadly agree with this. What we find more interesting is his three-way typology of platforms, and the importance he attaches to them.

Continue reading "Evolving Internet 'Platforms' - Lessons for Telcos?" »

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As we discussed back in August, it’s been 15 years since the first txt msg pinged into humanity’s consciousness, between two engineers at a company we used to know as LogicaCMG but now call Acision. LogicaCMG’s Telco Products division, which has now been spun off into Acision, is best known as the world’s leading maker of SMSCs (Short Message Service Centres), the machines that handle SMS messages.

But it’s not all they do.

Below is a Q&A with Steve Van Zanen, Acision’s VP of Marketing, covering the future of messaging, the role of IP, mobile advertising and strategies for saturated vs emerging markets. (Steve and colleagues will be joining other expert stimulus presenters at the Digital Advertising & Marketing Summit, and the Product Innovation Summit - Voice & Messaging 2.0 - both on the 16th October in London.)

Telco 2.0: How far do you think subscriber growth in mobile has still to go? We’re already well into the majority phase of the Bass diffusion model; at what point will all the people who can have phones have them?

SVZ: I think there is still a huge amount of growth ahead of us. In terms of subscriptions, for instance, we can expect at least another billion net adds over the coming 4 years as penetration levels are soaring in regions like the US, China, India en Latin America. If we take SMS, as an example, volumes are expected to double from 2 to about 4 trillion per annum. Even in highly penetrated markets the ‘basic’ SMS service is still growing in terms of both penetration and frequency of use.

We shouldn’t forget that the mobile device, in the end, is just a channel for a rapidly expanding range of services. In markets where everyone already owns at least one phone, it is service innovation which represents the key area of growth. From our point of view, enabling operators to provide innovative services at high volume and performance levels is a definite growth area.

Telco 2.0: Text-messaging is the mobile industry’s gift that keeps on giving. Your infrastructure products are already migrating to IP. How rapidly do you expect messaging traffic to migrate to its own IP-based solutions, such as the various instant messaging apps? Will we see widespread adoption of IP-based SMS origination bypass services (e.g. Vyke, smsbug)? How might it affect operator pricing and revenue?

Continue reading "The Future of Messaging and its Role in Mobile Advertising" »

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Telco 2.0 was supporting the 21C Global Summit at Blenheim Palace this week. And what did we find?

Well, it’s increasingly clear that our ideas have traction. Everyone who so much as touched on telco business models, or the infrastructure that underlies them, agreed on key points; points that could have been taken from the last few months of this blog or the main texts of Telco 2.0. The challenge now is to fully internalise what these mean within telco organisations and create some action plans to do something about it. This requires stronger leadership - a recurring theme of the event.

For example, Andy Zimmermann of Accenture’s Technology Strategy practice opened the conference pipes on Wednesday morning by explaining the importance of some Ps; portals, partners, and platforms were all there. Another was “plexes”, which rather than being another word for your navel was used to refer to big IT infrastructure. Again, that’s certainly a theme you’d meet in your daily Telco 2.0. Further, Zimmermann cited content-delivery networking, secure control of sensitive data, and payments as crucial functions telcos need to develop.

Not just that, but the means he recommended had a notable Telco 2.0 feel; specifically, telcos needed to work on their service-delivery platforms, which don’t need to be IMS. (See Martin’s post for more on this…)

He wasn’t the only one, either; Ross Fowler, Cisco’s VP in Europe, drew everyone’s attention to the curious way the functions of content providers are converging with those the GSM/UMTS standards world think are the core functions of a telco. For example, they require high-level applications such as video editing and collaboration, policy/authentication functions to control how their output is released - and the indispensable networking infrastructure to haul bits. Ross, by the way, will be going into more detail about this at the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm on the 17th of October.

Continue reading "21C Global Summit: A Weird Consensus..." »

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This year’s Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm is rushing up at us with telco-shattering force again, and that means it’s also soon going to be time for a ‘Summit’ session focused on the ‘Digital Youth’ market. Pushing on the debate from the last session in March, we’ve invited some interesting people to tackle in more detail the paradox of a market segment that’s neophilic and increasingly rich (in mature markets at least), but is also dramatically turned off by obvious efforts to appeal to it. For example, there’s Raju Rishi, COO and co-founder of US-based company Rave Wireless.

Rave gets around the paradox by primarily doing business with universities and schools, not with the youths themselves; essentially it’s a MVNE (Mobile Virtual Network Enabler) that creates micro-MVNOs for these institutions, buying bulk capacity from whichever carrier suits. The carrier gets a targeted marketing effort to shift bits, and the institution doesn’t just make a turn on the deal, but also gets to chuck out its desk phones without needing to buy a ton of SIP or UMA devices and a huge LAN upgrade. You can do that when you are your own telco.

Continue reading "Rave Wireless at the Digital Youth Summit" »

Posted at 06:48 PM | Link to this article | 3 comments

Readers of Telco 2.0 are probably well aware that we like the British model of structural separation, where the local loop is controlled by a specially-created company with a duty to provide nondiscriminatory access to all-comers, a lot. This approach helps to mitigate risk across the BT Group and, theoretically at least, liberates the individual units (Retail, Wholesale, Access) to be more innovative and responsive to customer needs (levelling the playing field a little with internet players like Google). (More on the benefits of this here).

Naturally, we jumped at the chance to interview the good people at Openreach, the BT access division. Especially in the light of rumours that BT might be considering a KPN-like deployment of fibre to the street cabinets; which would make the Local Loop Unbundling model Openreach was formed to defend partly obsolete.

Our interview with Steve Robertson, CEO of Openreach, (who will also be a stimulus speaker at the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in October) is below the fold…

Continue reading "Making Structural Separation Work: Interview with Steve Robertson, CEO, Openreach" »

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Centralised architectures can always cause trouble. Not that this is a point in distributed systems’ favour, necessarily; look what just happened to Skype, which has suffered a whole day’s outage.

We at Telco 2.0, as you may know, are actually a group intellect, structured rather like the brain of a large cephalopod. Rather than one single brain, there is a node for each tentacle, the whole being interconnected by the highest-bandwidth nerve fibres known in nature. Unlike the squid, the Telco 2.0 team uses Skype quite heavily in order to maintain coherence among its multiple cerebellums (cerebella?), so we may be forgiven for feeling a little sporky. We’ve been debased to using Google Talk for much of the day.

Telco 2.0 in its natural habitat

So all day, access to Skype has been to all intents and purposes impossible, starting around 1000 hours GMT. The pathology takes the following form; on start-up, the Skype client successfully registers on the network (often with considerable delay), but rapidly logs-off again, and struggles to reconnect. During the brief intervals of successful operation, the number of logged-in users is very low; between 100,000 and 320,000 according to our own observations.

What was up? Surely the nature of a peer-to-peer network means that there is no single point of failure? Well, everyone speculated, so why not us too?

Continue reading "404 Skype Not Found" »

Posted at 01:15 AM | Link to this article | 6 comments

We’re wary of crying wolf about threats to core operator voice and messaging revenue. Too often you end up vigorously licked by a cute puppy instead of viciously dismembered by some noisy new disruptor.

For example, Skype still represents only around five percent of global voice traffic, and most of that appears to be incremental to paid PSTN use. Only the narrow segment of international calling cards got hit. On the basis that your enemy’s enemy is your friend, and Skype also drives voice termination minutes and broadband uptake, the short-term impact has probably been positive. Skype was a form of “better telephony” but hobbled by the form factor of the PC — “much worse handset”, and thus served different needs from traditional fixed and mobile services.

We’re not so sure that complacency is in order when it comes to the new challenger for user attention, social networking services (SNS). Chatter has been a function of the Internet from before the Web; and indeed geeky users were communicating via bulletin boards long before even home Internet access became the norm. People have always been far more willing to commit time and money to talking with each other than they have in absorbing packaged media goods. The proximity of music, video clips and celeb gossip is just fodder to feed the users’ conversations.

We’ve been thinking about this area as a prelude to our forthcoming Telco 2.0 event and Digital Product Innovation Summit. So this is the first part of the Telco 2.0 outlook on the social networking phenomenon and what it might mean for operators.

Continue reading "Facebook: a voice & messaging competitor?" »

Posted at 04:22 PM | Link to this article | 5 comments

SMS celebrated its 15th birthday in July this year, demonstrating just how remarkable the service is - still at the top of its game long after many younger mobile applications have died a death. SMS is often called the “accidental hero” of the mobile industry, but just what is its history? Steven Van Zanen, VP marketing for Intuitive Messaging at Acision - the company formerly known as LogicaCMG - gives us the low-down. (You can meet Steve and the Acision team at the Telco 2.0 event in October.)

As we all know, the Short Message Service (SMS) is a means of sending short messages to and from mobile phones. SMS was defined as part of the original GSM standard in 1985 as a means of sending service messages of up to 160 characters to and from GSM mobile handsets. Since then, support for the service has expanded to include alternative mobile standards such as CDMA networks, satellite and landline networks. At the time of inception, just what this messaging capability would be used for was not immediately clear - some were planning for telemetry, some thinking of voicemail or service alerts, but person to person messaging? That was never the plan.

Continue reading "Happy Birthday, SMS" »

Posted at 04:27 PM | Link to this article | 1 comment

As many of you know, we are in the middle of an ambitious research project looking to tap into a global panel of experts to forecast revenue scenarios in the Telco industry for the next 5-10 years. As well as gaze into the future and set the Telco industry to rights, we also felt it would be beneficial to consider how service providers and vendors can improve their propositions and products NOW. There is a lot of talk about ‘innovation’ in the industry at the moment, but what needs to be done to turn the words into effective action?

We have decided to undertake another (much smaller) piece of analysis to test our hypothesis about what is inhibiting innovation in marketing and product development departments today and what needs to be done to improve this situation. In this post we outline our hypothesis. At the Digital Product Innovation Summit in October (part of the Telco 2.0 event), we will feedback the results of our interviews with senior marketing executives from across the service provider and vendor community, presenting delegates with an ‘insider’s view’ of the current drivers and barriers to proposition/product innovation and a set of recommended actions to improve this.

Our Hypothesis:

Continue reading "What Stops Marketers Creating Solutions Customers Want?" »

Posted at 08:02 AM | Link to this article | 4 comments

How do major telcos respond to the challenges of Telco 2.0? France Telecom’s experience offers some answers.

FT is perhaps the archetypal traditional PTT; still part-nationalised, with a dominant position in fixed-line, ISP, and mobile markets at home. During the .com boom, the carrier expanded heavily and ran into debt (it didn’t help that the government hit it up for some cash to meet the requirements of joining the Euro). Meanwhile, the fixed-line voice market began a steady slide as the first alt.telcos, VoIP, and fixed-mobile substitution began to bite. Although the French government was slower than some to take regulatory action, eventually the new regulator ARCEP began to hammer at the de facto monopoly.

So, what did they do about it?

FT’s acquisitions turned out to be better deals than they looked in the smouldering aftermath. Among other things, they had given the company one of the strongest brands in the industry, Orange, a strong ISP in France (Wanadoo), and stakes in global cable backbones and other world-wide presence that permitted them to build strong businesses in bulk IP networking (Opentransit) and enterprise VPNs (Equant). More recently, the company has decided to go all the way, rolling the entire consumer side into Orange.

In terms of a business model, F Tel/Orange is very keen on bundling. As an integrated full-service carrier, it can offer quad-play in France. Interestingly, it’s trying to take advantage of industry horizontalisation to expand this vertically integrated model elsewhere; in the UK, Orange Broadband is providing PSTN and DSL s