Sub-Saharan Africa is the fastest-growing mobile market in the world, with an average annual growth rate of 44 per cent since 2000, according to industry body the GSMA.
Social networking giant Facebook this week opened its first engineering centre outside of the US. A team of around 20 employees will be based in Facebook’s Covent Garden office in London, which to date has only housed advertising, sales, support and public affairs staff.
US communications regulator the FCC is considering contracting for a national broadband mobile IP network for the use of the emergency services. It has proposed that this system be rolled out in the 700MHz ex-analogue TV band and operated by private interests as contractors to the Commission. Last year, there was some buzz around the [...]
Low cost femtocells and picocells could emerge as an attractive alternative to voice over IP over wifi (Vowifi), according to analysts. Strategy Analytics has released a report, “Femtocells Enabled by PicoChip to Square Off Against VoFi,” which predicts that femtocells will give wifi-enabled internet telephony setups a run for their money. Chip manufacturers like PicoChip [...]
The Swedish equipment manufacturer, Ericsson, will buy American firm, Redback Networks, for $2.1bn (£1.06bn) the companies said Tuesday. The cash offer of $25 a share is an 18 percent premium to Redback’s closing price of $21.17 on Tuesday. The move is sure to be interpreted as a defensive one: following last month’s Lucent, Alcatel deal, [...]
Nokia edged closer to its goal of 40 per cent share of the handset market this week, after reporting strong results for the devices business. Head honcho Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo estimated that the Finnish vendor’s share of the handset market rose from 34 per cent to 38 per cent in the last 12 months, with much [...]
Security experts caused a stir this week when they revealed how easy it is to hack VoIP software. During a presentation at the Black Hat USA IT security convention taking place in Las Vegas this week, the Viper Lab division of security firm Sipera demonstrated one of several VoIP security flaws. The flaws allow a [...]
Reports are emerging that the much rumoured Google phone is already in prototype and could be commercially available within a year. The web giant is believed to be touting the phone around vendors and operators to gauge interest and fine tune the specifications. It is believed the phone could be made available to consumers for [...]
In news that may not come as a great surprise to UK broadband users, a Which? study has found that there is a huge gap between advertised broadband speeds and the actual speeds users can achieve. In April, 14,642 Which? members took part in a survey about their internet service provider (ISP), then in May [...]
Troubled US MVNO Amp’d Mobile has thrown its customers a lifeline as it prepares to shut shop on Wednesday. Some 100,000 customers still with the firm have until midnight Wednesday to find themselves a new mobile provider, or face having their lines disconnected. For those that elect to stay with Amp’d, a small regional cellco, [...]
One month after launch, Apple has wheeled out its first update for the iPhone, primarily designed to rectify a number of security bugs in the Safari web browser. During the first month of launch, the iPhone has been dogged by security concerns after it emerged that there were a number of ways an iPhone could [...]
It looks like Google might end up putting its money where its mouth is, as web companies on Tuesday won the right to access US spectrum coming up for auction later this year. On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revised its 700MHz band plan and service rules to facilitate the availability of “new and [...]
US mobile operator Verizon Wireless said Monday that it has agreed to buy regional player Rural Cellular for approximately $2.67bn in cash and assumed debt. The acquisition will increase Verizon’s coverage by 4.7 million licensed POPs and will increase its actual customer base by more than 700,000 subs. Rural Cellular uses both CDMA and GSM [...]
Teething problems continue to dog O2 UK’s own-branded fixed line broadband service. The operator has been forced to delay the launch of its service once again, this time until October. The news follows a previous delay back in May, when it emerged that the operator had pushed back the launch of its O2 branded broadband [...]
UK WiMAX provider, Urban Wimax, announced a partnership with Nortel on Tuesday to build and trial a user-ready mobile WiMAX service ahead of the UK’s spectrum auction in early 2008. The collaboration is intended to prove the technical deliverability of 4G mobile WiMAX in mature 3G markets such as Western Europe, the companies said. Nortel [...]
Fixed voice is beginning to disappear in many mature markets as fixed-mobile substitution (FMS) continues its relentless progress and shows every sign of accelerating, according to industry analysts. A report released this week by telecoms research house Analysys, warns that fixed voice faces extinction in those countries that have experienced the most traffic migration to [...]
Former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio has been sentenced to six years in prison in the wake of an accounting scandal that rocked the US telco. A jury in federal court in Denver had already found Nacchio guilty on 19 out of 42 counts of fraud, totalling illegal sales of $52m in stock. Nacchio has been [...]
The bitter battle for control over a 25.1 per cent chunk of Russia’s smallest mobile operator MegaFon looks to be over, according to reports on Monday. It is believed that Russian conglomerate Altimo, originally known as the Alfa Group, has buried the hatchet with Caribbean-based investment fund Ipoc. Ipoc had contested Alfa’s purchase of the [...]
Microsoft announced that its Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator client are code complete and were released to manufacturing on Friday. The move shift’s Microsoft’s unified communications strategy, of which VoIP is the ventral core, into its final phase before launch in the autumn. Speaking to telecoms.com at the ITU 2006 event in Hong [...]
European mobile operators have until Tuesday to reduce tariffs for calls made and received while roaming by as much as 70 per cent. When European lawmakers voted to introduce caps on mobile roaming charges in Europe in May, operators were given until the end of July to implement the cuts across the board. According to [...]
Lean and MeanWith summer supposedly fast approaching, many look to trim some fat and get in shape for the sunny months. The Informer has never been a huge fan of gyms; in fact his favourite machine in the gym is the one that sells chocolate. Telefonica’s UK arm O2, is one business that is looking to get lean for the holidays, though, and this week it announced that it is to trim 3,500 UK employees.
Cross-border opportunities are there, but Telenor has work to do in BulgariaPan-European operater group Telenor is making another move into Eastern Europe, this time buying Bulgaria’s Globul. The move makes sense for several reasons, but success won’t come easy in a country with high mobile penetration and a sluggish economy.
Telecoms.com speaks with Ali Agan, who has risen through the ranks of TeliaSonera Group to become CEO of KCell in Kazakhstan. With a young population Agan is keen to deploy LTE and exploit nascent demand for data services.
Jonathan Bell, VP of Marketing at OpenCloud, discusses how policy and pricing are just two dimensions along which telecoms operators can differentiate their propositions. By adding a third dimension, the service behaviour itself, operators can define and bring true innovation to the market that surpasses the traditional approaches of the past, he says.
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Calls for consolidation in the European mobile market grow louder by the week and four-operator markets look increasingly challenged. Now, those mobile operators that have already built scale seem to be suggesting that there is no option but to expand yet further through diversification.