Dish Networks must be ruing the fact that this generation is now all but passed, as it turns to good, old-fashioned nationalist scaremongering in its bid to defeat Japan’s Softbank in the battle for control of US carrier Sprint. Dish has launched a media campaign likening Softbank’s move for Sprint to the 2006 Dubai Ports World (DPW) incident in which Middle Eastern conglomerate DPW had its acquisition of a number of US ports blocked on security grounds.

This smacks somewhat of desperation, doesn’t it? Surely if Dish was confident that the differences between its bid and Softbank’s were sufficiently in its favour it wouldn’t need to trade on the differences between the people. Mind you, as Nigel Farrage has proved recently over here, you don’t actually need a coherent set of policies to win followers, you just need to bang on about scary foreigners.

Dish wants spectrum and it wants it bad. Reports emerged this week that the satellite TV provier had tabled a stalking-horse bid of $2bn for the spectrum assets of LightSquared. That spectrum was itself the subject of a successful bout of anti-outsider lobbying, with GPS users managing to block its use by LightSquared for LTE. It’s difficult to see how Dish could use this spectrum for a terrestrial service given that the interference issues cited by the GPS lobby have not changed.

For its part Softbank offered US authorities the opportunity to oversee the appointment of a security director at Sprint, should the Japanese firm’s bid prove successful. Previously it has also pledged not to use Huawei equipment in the US (it has kit from the Chinese vendor in its domestic network) and to swap out Huawei kit from Clearwire’s network.

Last year it emerged that Softbank was interested in acquiring a stake in Thai incumbent TOT and the Bangkok Post reported this week that a deal was fractionally closer after Softbank offered, anlong with fellow Japanese player Sumitomo, to fund the second phase of TOT’s 3G rollout in exchange for a jointly held minority stake. A decision is expected later this year.

Staying with Thai 3G for a moment longer, all of the market’s mobile operators have agreed to lower their 3G prices by 15 to 20 per cent, as instructed by national telecoms regulator the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC). According to local reports, the NBTC directed the nation’s operators to slash their prices a few weeks ago, but the operators raised the mobile data allowance by an equivalent amount instead, prompting a review of the way the tariff cut was being applied.

In the US AT&T has been going in the other direction, raising customers’ hackles with the introduction of a $0.61 monthly “aministrative” fee for its postpaid users.

In a statement, the operator said: “Consistent with similar fees charged by other carriers, the monthly fee of $0.61 per line will help cover certain expenses, such as the charges AT&T or its agents pay to interconnect with other carriers to deliver calls from AT&T customers to their customers; and cell site rents and maintenance.” And boardroom bonuses.

The charge applies to postpaid users of which, according to Informa’s WCIS, AT&T has just over 100 million as of March 2013. So the resultant net revenue uptick the firm is likely to see as a result stands at over $732m per year.

The operator  was inundated with online messages from customers complaining about the fee and threatening to report it to the US Better Business Bureau (BBB), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

On AT&T’s online community forum, one customer wrote: “The fact that other companies charge it is irrelevant.”

“Three or four wrongs don’t make a right. On the contrary the fact that the big wireless companies take turns matching each other’s increases is an old story and is the closest to collusion they can get without going to jail. In competitive markets such as Europe prices are going down.”

Well the grass is always greener, isn’t it. Listen, mate, in Europe it’s not just prices that are going down. Just ask Vodafone, which reported a 90 per cent drop in profit for the full year ended March 2013. The operator posted a profit of just £673m, down from £7bn a year earlier, hit hard by a £7.7bn impairment charge in Italy and Spain over the course of the year.

Group revenue also fell by 4.2 per cent to £44.4bn while full year organic service revenues declined by 1.9 per cent. The profit Vodafone saw from US operator Verizon Wireless, in which it has a 45 per cent stake, rose 30.5 per cent to reach £6.4bn. Which makes a sale of that stake look a little unappetising at the moment.

“We have faced headwinds from a combination of continued tough economic conditions, particularly in Southern Europe, and an adverse European regulatory environment,” said Vittorio Colao, group chief executive.

Despite the good performance from Verizon Wireless, Vodafone’s results are a continuation of the story of the challenges facing Europe’s telcos, according to Steven Hartley, telco strategy analyst, at research firm Ovum.

“Ovum has always maintained that the primary goal of Europe’s telcos is to stabilise their performance at home. Emerging markets are good but our forecasts for 2017 warn of ‘emerging maturity’ as emerging market growth slows. Besides, low ARPU across emerging markets means that these markets generate less revenue and profit relative to their subscriber base,” he said.

Prices in Europe aren’t coming down everywhere, if that’s any solace to AT&T’s frustrated customers. According to data from Finnish analyst Rewheel, mobile operators are charging over three times as much per gigabyte in Germany than in the UK and up to 15 times as much than in some smaller EU member states such as Finland.

Research conducted by Rewheel for its EU27 mobile data competitiveness report shows that in markets such as Finland, Sweden and Denmark, smartphone tariffs are up to ten times cheaper and radio spectrum utilisation is ten times higher than in Germany, the EU’s largest market. The firm attributed this gulf to the fact that the German market is served by international operator groups Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Telefonica and KPN E-Plus, none of which are present in the other three markets.

In EU markets where international operator groups are not present, consumers get on average ten times the data allowance when spending €24 than in markets where they are. They also get twice as many minutes and SMS messages allowed in their packages.

As a result Rewheel, which has submitted its report to the European Commission, has called for provisions in the EU’s Regulatory framework for electronic communications that will mandate national regulatory and competition authorities to carry out periodic market analysis and determine the minimum number of national mobile network operators necessary to foster competition.

So, how do European operators bring down costs? They could outsource their customer care function, as O2UK is doing, for a start. O2 has signed UK firm Capita on a ten-year deal worth £1.2bn that will see Capita take on more than 3,000 call centre staff. The UK Communications Workers Union said that some 600 staff will be made redundant, describing the decision as a “mistake” and a “betrayal”.

Operators have, over recent years, outsourced core network deployment and management functions to vendor partners and claimed that they aim to differentiate by specialising in customer relationship management. But how do they plan do that when somebody else is managing those relationships?

Deals like this are built around target KPIs like call volumes, complaint resolutions and satisfaction surveys. The outsourcing partner, in this case Capita, will almost certainly face financial forfeits if these KPIs are not met. The logical extension of this is that O2 will save even more money if the customer service that Capita delivers fails to hit the targets it’s been set! And O2 can sidestep blame for any drop in quality by pointing the finger at its provider Capita, whose slogan should be: “We care, so you don’t have to.”

The whole thing puts the Informer in mind of one of those old people’s homes run by a corporate scale-builder. The operator’s customers will end up ignored, poorly tended, patronised and quite possibly sitting in a puddle of their own making when all they really want is somebody to talk to.

This wasn’t the only big money deal in the news this week as internet old-timer Yahoo! huffed back a couple of viagra and hooked up with social blog Tumblr for $1.1bn in cash. This is a last ditch attempt to keep Yahoo relevant and CEO Marissa Meyer made a promise during the announcement “not to screw it up.”

As a result, Tumblr will be operated as a separate business and David Karp will remain CEO, with product, service and brand defined and developed separately from Yahoo. According to Yahoo’s latest financials, cash, cash equivalents, and investments in marketable debt securities totalled $5.4bn as of March 31, 2013 compared to $6bn as of December 31, 2012. Yet actual cash only totalled $1.2bn, so this latest acquisition wipes out Yahoo’s liquid reserves.

Tumblr claims more than 300 million monthly unique visitors, 20,000 signups every day, 900 posts per second, 24 billion minutes spent on site each month and no profits.

The acquisition is expected to grow Yahoo’s audience by 50 per cent to more than a billion monthly visitors, and to grow traffic by approximately 20 per cent.

But the big question now is how this move fits in with Yahoo’s other similar-sounding, similarly anti-‘e’, picture-focused blogging social site, Flickr. Mayer had said that the photo sharing site was a top priority for investment in an attempt to regain lost ground on rivals Facebook, Twitter, Google and Instagram. It remains to be seen how that will play out once the money has been spent.

It is not inconceivable that in years to come foolish, expensive and/or desperate acquisitions will become known as “taking a tumblr”.

Take care

The Informer

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index released this week, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has just edged past Mexican mogul Carlos Slim, who’s lost more than a few pounds since Mexico’s government passed a bill that could quash America Movil’s market dominance.

Gates’ net worth is up 16 per cent year on year to $72.7bn, while Slim’s dropped a similar amount to $72.1bn. The Informer’s mind cannot fathom what it must be like jockeying for position with those sort of numbers, but this week Korean vendor Samsung has been racking up some unbelievable numbers of its own.

According to numbers crunched by analyst house Strategy Analytics, Samsung captured 95 per cent of profits from Android devices during the first quarter of 2013. The crystal ball gazer put global operating profits from the Android device market at $5.3bn for the quarter, with Samsung accounting for an astonishing $5.1bn of the total. In second place, fellow Korean player LG took three per cent of the market, which probably doesn’t even get you onto the rich list. Saying that, the 100th richest billionaire, Russian steel giant Alexey Mordashov, has a tidy $10.9bn to his name.

Samsung really is benefitting from Google’s hard work in the Android space, and Android itself accounted for 43 per cent of total smarpthone industry operating profit for the quarter, which Strategy Analytics estimated at $12.5bn.

Still, Google has got its hands full with other projects at the moment. On Thursday a Bi-partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, established by US Congress sent Google CEO Larry Page a letter with several questions examining core privacy concerns raised by Google Glass.

“Because Google Glass has not yet been released and we are uncertain of Google’s plans to incorporate privacy protection into the device, there are still a number of unanswered questions,” said Joe Barton, co-chair of the caucus.

The questions focus on how Google would deal with getting consent from non-users who might have information collected by Glass, how facial recognition would work and what kind of personal information would be stored on Glass itself. Google has been given until June 14 to send a response.

It was the Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco and product updates for various Google services made an appearance. Google Talk has been discontinued on Android in favour of Hangouts. Except US carrier AT&T got subscribers’ backs up almost immediately by blocking video calling over cellular in the Google Hangouts app. This is a repeat of the fiasco AT&T started a year ago when it blocked Apple’s Facetime over cellular. Although the company later backed down if users bought a specific data package.

Meanwhile UK MP Margaret Hodge branded Google “devious” and “unethical” as a UK Commons committee continues to haul the firm over the coals for avoiding UK tax, despite allegedly making sales in the UK.

On the social media front, Google Plus is also being upgraded with a more insightful analytics layer to try to get user more engaged and to interact with more content across their networks. It’s an awful lot of Big Data crunching, which is something Google is good at, so expect to hear more on this front in the near future.

Canadian vendor BlackBerry was trying to drive engagement for its own social network too, finally promising to make its popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) application available on iOS and Android platforms later this year.

In the first version of multi-platform BBM, iOS and Android users will get access to instant messaging; multi-person chat; voice note sharing; and BlackBerry Groups of up to 30 people able to share calendars, photos and files.

BlackBerry claims more than 60 million monthly active BBM users of which more than 51 million are daily active users connecting with friends or colleagues an average of one and a half hours every day. The firm also claims that BBM users send and receive more than ten billion messages each day, which is nearly twice as many messages per user per day as compared to other mobile messaging apps (it says) and almost half of BBM messages are opened within 20 seconds of being received.

Mozilla was also looking to generate a buzz around its Firefox OS mobile operating system, by releasing handsets to developers ahead of the commercial launch of the platform later this summer.

The firm has launched its Phones for Apps for Firefox OS programme to encourage developers to build Firefox apps or port existing Chrome, webOS, Blackberry WebWorks, or the PhoneGap apps to the Firefox platform. Developers with interesting plans will get their hands on a Geeksphone Keon ahead of the game.

A game of another kind entirely was afoot in Europe this week as the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) began a public consultation on draft guidelines in relation to regulated retail roaming services.

The latest set of regulation proposals will bring fundamental change to the structure of the European roaming market, requiring European mobile network operators to open their networks to providers of voice and data roaming services acting as MVNOs, from July 2014.

Domestic service providers would be required to enable their customers to access regulated voice, SMS and data roaming services provided as a bundle from any alternative roaming provider.

Thing is, although the proposals lay the foundation for an intensifying of competition in the European roaming market, there is little appetite among telecoms and non-telecoms firms to enter the market as roaming MVNOs. Still this might change as we get closer to the July 2014 deadline and Paul Lambert, Senior Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, notes that operators will also have to decide if they see a benefit in extending their reach into other European markets by setting up their own roaming MVNOs.

While some are redefining roaming, others are redefining voice. Speaking at the TM Forum Management World in Nice, Dean Bubley, founder of analyst firm Disruptive Analysis, said that mobile operators should cease to measure voice services in terms of minutes used, as it no longer reflects how humans communicate.

Bubley argued that voice is a 130 year old product that has seen little innovation in its lifespan and as a result, the industry is using an outdated metric to measure its core service. “Voice allows you as a human being to achieve something, whether it is to make a sale, to contact family members or for customer service needs. But it does not represent how we as humans communicate – we can do better now.” Over time, voice services will become fragmented into silos, creeping into new areas, such as gaming or smartphone apps such as taxi-hailing apps, and this is a trend operators should embrace, he said, “because it adds value to their offerings. Services need to be tied to human behaviour and that is what makes them successful. For example, Facebook is successful because it appeals to a specific human behaviour – showing off.”

On its Facebook page, Vodafone Group was busy showing off its shiny new carrier services business unit, formed out of the acquisition of Cable & Wireless Worldwide in 2012. The new unit within Vodafone Group Enterprise, dubbed Vodafone Carrier Services, aims to deliver economies of scale and giving CSPs a single interface to Vodafone, with cost savings and efficiencies for both parties when buying and selling.

Meanwhile in Germany, Vodafone was playing nice with local fixed line operator Deutsche Telekom, using the latter’s fixed network to deliver high speed broadband and IPTV nationwide. Vodafone will be able to offer its customers connection speeds of up to 50Mbps from the outset, rising to 100Mbps once DT has deployed vectoring technology.

Finally, the Big Three in the infrastructure space, Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson and Huawei, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaborate with a view to reducing Operations Support Systems (OSS) integration costs for carriers and enabling shorter time-to-market for new services.

The OSS interoperability initiative (OSSii) is designed to facilitate multi-vendor interoperability ‘up front’ between the OSS products of all three vendors, simplifying operations, reducing the overall integration costs as well as speeding up the time it takes to roll out new services. The reciprocal agreement will cover fault, performance, configuration and basic network event and trace management for the northbound interfaces from Radio Access, Circuit Core and Packet Core network management systems.

Commenting on the deal, Peter Patomella, head of operations support systems (OSS) business at NSN, rightly points out that the OSS marketplace is a patchwork of standards and proprietary interfaces that are controlled by the IPR owners. “With cross-license agreements, we want to help operators take full advantage of the best available products in our industry. Openness and fairness have been the guiding principles in the agreement of the OSS Interoperability Initiative,” he said.

Stay standard and take care,

The Informer

While Sir Alex Ferguson called it a day in Manchester, it was all kicking off down under as Australia’s digital dividend spectrum auction saw three operators win spectrum and the Aussie government pocket nearly A$2bn ($2.06bn). But it should have been more, says one consultancy firm, which accused Australia’s regulator of failing to do its job properly.

With 700MHz and 2.5GHz blocks up for grabs, Telstra, Optus Mobile and TPG Internet each secured spectrum, regulatory body the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) announced. Market leader Telstra paid over A$1.3bn for its spectrum, second placed Optus Mobile spent A$650m and fixed line operator TPG Internet became a new entrant in the mobile operator space, securing 2x10MHz of 2.5GHz spectrum for a total of A$13.5m.

But the CEO of spectrum auction planning specialist Coleago Consulting, Stefan Zehle threw a proverbial pizza slice into the face of ACMA, accusing the regulator of squandering potentially several billion dollars that would benefit the economy as a result of setting reserve prices too high.

Citing a report from operator organisation the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association (AMTA), Zehle argued that the digital dividend spectrum was estimated to generate between A$7bn and A$10bn.

However, 2x15MHz of 700MHz spectrum remained unsold and Zehle reckons it was because Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) decided not to bid due to the extremely high reserve prices set by the regulator.

“Since VHA ended up without spectrum it will further weaken their relevance in the market. Since competition is likely to have been weakened this will reduce the “consumer surplus” from the digital dividend, in other words, the benefit consumers would gain in form of lower prices.”

And Zehle didn’t mince his words, adding that: “ACMA’s failure could hardly be more complete.”

“The outcome says a lot about politicians’ lack of understanding of how investment decisions are made and also demonstrates an unwillingness to listen to the industry.”

But the plot thickened. Little did Zehle know that ACMA chair Chris Chapman was sat at his PC, reading the comments on Telecoms.com, busy drafting his rebuttal.

According to Chapman, Vodafone said in October 2012 that it did not need to buy the spectrum on offer at the auction because it already has enough to provide LTE services in the future.

“Vodafone’s CEO, Bill Morrow, made this announcement two months before the Minister directed the ACMA to set the reserve price for the 700MHz band at A$1.36/MHz/pop,” Chapman said. Fair dinkum, one  might say.

He added that Vodafone had also refrained from bidding for licences in the 2.5GHz band, “even though it is hard to characterise the reserve price for this band (A$0.03 per MHz/pop) as extremely high, and indeed all 2.5GHz lots were sold.”

Chapman added that ACMA expects consumers will benefit from the substantial increase in spectrum holdings for Telstra and Optus. “The ACMA is optimistic that all these companies will investing the community when they commence 4G services, which will further transform the way Australians communicate and do business.”

The Informer understands this saga is not about to end just yet, so watch this space.

The country’s Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy also announced this week that an additional 1.3 million Australian households are being added to the country’s National Broadband Network (NBN). This will bring the total number of premises where NBN construction will commence or be complete by June 2016 to more than 4.8 million.

Meanwhile, Australia’s not-so-noisy neighbours New Zealand welcomed CEO of Chinese equipment vendor Huawei, Ren Zhengfei.

With Huawei contracted to build Telecom New Zealand’s LTE network, which is expected to go live in October this year, and also having been selected as a core supplier for New Zealand’s Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) initiative, Ren paid a visit to reaffirm Huawei’s commitment to the country.

“New Zealand is one of Huawei’s most important strategic markets and is very valuable to us,” he said. “Huawei has been selected to help build a 4G/LTE and the UFB network in New Zealand. We will continue to deploy world-class, advanced communications technologies here, delivering the safest, most advanced networks for the nation.”

He also addressed comments from the US House Intelligence Committee claiming that the vendor is not to be trusted. He voiced his confidence that none of Huawei’s staff would engage in spying, even if asked to by Chinese security agencies. He added that the vendor is not in a position to collect operators’ network data in the US in any case.

“Huawei equipment is almost non-existent in networks currently running in the US,” he said. “We have never sold any key equipment to major US carriers, nor have we sold any equipment to any US government agency. Huawei has no connection to the cyber security issues the US has encountered in the past, current and future.”

According to the Associated Press, this was Ren’s first media appearance. But in a manner similar to the retiring Scottish football manager, Ren wanted full control at the press conference. No photos, no international media, no interviews, he insisted. Ren also insisted that Huawei has an open, transparent and collaborative approach to cyber security, in a curiously contradictory statement that Fergie himself would be proud of.

Elsewhere, US operator Sprint took a dig at its kit suppliers this week, blaming them for stifling the rollout of its Network Vision project.

Pointing the finger at its three infrastructure partners Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Samsung, the operator said that it had been forced to revise its plans to bring 12,000 multi-mode base stations on-air by the end of 2012, pushing the deadline back to 1Q13.

“The deployment of multi-mode technology is project managed by Sprint but dependent upon three primary OEMs, each of which has responsibility for a geographical territory across the United States,” Sprint explained in the filing.

“We have recently experienced delays with vendor execution, backhaul connectivity delays, shortages in equipment such as fiber cable and antennas, as well as other regulatory and environmental issues.”

The operator added that the delays have caused an increase in depreciation to existing Nextel and Sprint assets.

The Informer tried to get in touch with the vendors involved but Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson refused to comment, while Samsung chose not to respond to voicemail messages. If it’s half as hard to chase up multi-modal base stations from these vendors as it is to obtain comment on a news story from them, The Informer can’t help but feel a little sorry for Sprint.

Taking a swipe at national authorities seems to be all the fashion these days, as Coleago’s Zehle was joined by Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer  Padmasree Warrior, who aimed her criticisms at Taiwan’s local government. With a name like that, The Informer suspects Warrior is one not to be messed with.

Fortunately for Taiwan, Warrior’s comments weren’t quite as cutting as Zehle’s. When asked for her advice to the local government she merely argued that better broadband would enable Cisco’s customers and suppliers in Taiwan to operate more efficiently. Faster speeds would help, “transform industries” and “allow companies to have innovative power” in a wide range of sectors such as medicine, education and manufacturing, she said according to local reports.

The comments raised eyebrows as Taiwan is thought of as a technology leader. The country currently has broadband penetration of 78.8 per cent, according to Informa WBIS statistics, higher than the 74.6 per cent of the US, and 70.29 per cent of Europe.

Operator group Telefónica this week extended its vision beyond smartphones and keen to get in the business of provide connectivity to laptops, signed a Europe-wide M2M deal with PC maker Dell. The two are setting out to deliver pay-as-you-go mobile broadband services for notebooks and tablets.

Dell NetReady is a pay-as-you-go connectivity service powered by Telefónica. It uses an M2M SIM-card and an application that allows the customer to choose their own connectivity bundle.

The service is aimed primarily at enterprises, according to Telefónica, which are demanding mobile connectivity solutions that allow their users to connect to the web easily while on the go.

Once registered, pay-as-you-go bundles are available immediately, with plans available for just 30 minutes up to one month. Telefónica has created two separate tariff structures for long term and short term access.

Telefónica wasn’t the only operator announcing an M2M tie-up this week, as AT&T and Deutsche Telekom both extended their M2M offerings.

AT&T extended its M2M agreement with Indian IT and outsourcing outfit Wipro. The two firms are using an M2M platform supplied by cloud-based M2M services and software provider Axeda.

Wipro will help AT&T offer M2M development services and systems integration to the operator’s enterprise customers across all major industries. This will dramatically speed the delivery time and lower the cost of application development and maintenance for M2M applications, according to AT&T.

Meanwhile, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom is to offer a usage-based insurance solution that enables vehicle insurers to offer their customers special benefits for driving safely. The operator has partnered with telematics technology provider DriveFactor to bring to market an M2M solution that evaluates driving behaviour.

The  solution uses a tracking module and a SIM card to evaluate driving data. The pay-as-you drive insurance concept is attractive for insurers and their customers, as drivers will benefit from a reduction in the premium paid in return for taking part in the programme.

“Jointly with our partner DriveFactor we offer insurers a complete single-source usage-based insurance service—from the hardware to integrating evaluated driving data into their IT systems,” says Jürgen Hase, head of Deutsche Telekom’s M2M competence centre.

And in what is arguably the second-biggest management appointment this week, Vodafone announced that telecommunications services provider ACN Europe’s CEO Brian Fitzpatrick will join the firm as group carrier services director. Fitzpatrick will assume the role on May 7, 2013, reporting to Nick Jeffery, group enterprise director.

At ACN Europe Fitzpatrick has been responsible for operations in 18 countries. Prior to that, he was managing director of BT Wholesale Markets.

And the African continent became more connected this week as global telecoms network exchange Epsilon Telecommunications interconnected with both the SEACOM and West Africa Cable System (WACS), giving the company undersea cable connectivity that circumnavigates Africa.

Epsilon, which specialises in managed network services, said it is seeing growth in Africa for its outsourced network service model. African carriers which need to connect abroad are using Epsilon to gain access to 170+ countries and similarly Tier 1 carriers who need a presence in smaller African markets can now use Epsilon to connect in the region.

And finally, after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously declared in February 2012 that he was “betting the company” on Windows 8, the operating system designed for both PCs and touchscreen devices, the firm has come to the conclusion that actually, it’s not very good. Microsoft announced that it will be making changes to platform in the coming weeks. Awkward.

The move comes on the back of sales of PCs taking a nose dive; global PC sales fell 14 per cent in the first three months of 2013, according to research firm IDC. On the plus side, Microsoft still enjoys over 90 per cent market share in the desktop operating system space, according to web analytics firm Net Applications. So the question now is who, or what, is going to knock it off its perch?

And that’s about all for the week – take care.

The Informer

But more recently over half a million people have been compulsively tapping their screens to break down a cube in order to find out what lies at the centre, thanks to Molyneux’s latest creation. The iPhone ‘game’ is an interesting social experiment. It costs nowt to participate and the gameplay itself consists of nothing but finger-tapping a virtual cube, chipping away layers in the hope that you will be the user who breaks through the final stratum to claim the prize within. It’s a massive game of Pass the Parcel.

No one except Molyneux has any idea what the prize is. And given the always playful, often grandiose visions this man has it may well be a big, fat nothing. In that case the prize would be the lesson that hundreds of thousands of people are prepared to spend their time carrying out a menial, repetitive task for scant chance of reward. It’s a bit like writing A Week in Wireless.

What the game designer has effectively done is turn these half a million people into the slavish minions from his portfolio of god games. And he is the player, controlling them all.

Telefónica, Intel and Samsung have been running with a similar theme this week, investing undisclosed amounts in San Francisco start-up Expect Labs which is looking to create its own digital minions that allow devices and applications to monitor user behaviour in order to better anticipate information that the user needs.

According to the firm, which has already benefitted from investments from Google, its platform can model the context of user interactions in real-time, and proactively find information before the user needs to search for it. “In just a few years, we will live in a world where the connected devices all around us will know who we are, understand what we say, and be far more capable of interpreting our intentions and anticipating our needs, “ said Timothy Tuttle, Expect Labs CEO and founder.

So at least when our human relationships fail our white goods will care. When Ian comes home to find his wife has left him, his washing machine will console him with the information that it had never liked her anyway, his fridge will have ordered some beer and the microwave will ping in sympathy as a chicken madras bubbles like lava behind its door.

And the next morning Ian will be hugging the toilet not just because he’s being sick, but because it understands him. Come to think of it, an intelligent toilet would be the worst of the lot. It would be like living with Gillian McKeith.

Tuttle’s unnerving prediction gives context to Nokia Siemens Networks’ newly released vision for 5G—which is that, by 2020, mobile operators will be able to deliver 1GB of personalised user data, per user, per day, profitably. Whether you want it or not. Big vendors need a Vision. Ericsson’s got its 50 billion connected devices and NSN now has its Gig-a-day-a-person mantra. But are these the kind of visions you get after you’ve bumped your head? We’ll see in seven short years.

The Informer shudders to think of a personal avatar that anticipates his needs and interprets his intentions, given that he’s been suppressing them so successfully for so long. But that seems to be where the money is at the moment. A one year old US-based start up, Wavii, was snapped up by Google for an estimated $30m this week as natural language search and summarisation captures the industry’s imagination. The youth clearly has it, as Wavii’s customised news feeds, summarising articles, blogs and twitter feeds appears comparable to the UK startup Summly, founded by a teenager, and acquired by Yahoo for a similar amount last month.

With all of these ‘digital assistants’ doing stuff on our behalf how long before we devolve into the blinkered, bloated, screen jockeys so delightfully pictured in Pixar’s Wall-E? The Informer’s fear isn’t that the machines will take over it’s that we’ll somehow disappoint them when they really get to know us. As happened with Ian and his wife from paragraph seven.

It’s the smart cities of the future that represent the most beneficial outcome of M2M technology, according to a survey of IT decision makers. The majority of respondents also believe that firms that fail to implement M2M technologies will fall behind competition.

A survey carried out by Harris Interactive on behalf of software firm SAP found that almost 30 percent of IT decision makers across Brazil, Germany, India, US, UK and China believe smart cities will be the most important deployment of M2M technologies, promoting increased efficiency, productivity, employee collaboration and mobility.

On a slight tangent, the Informer sometimes wonders how these futuristic cities will be powered, and perhaps Norway has the answer. It was stunning to see in the news this week that Oslo, which provides power for its 1.4 million inhabitants by burning garbage, is now having to import rubbish from neighbouring Sweden and the UK as it’s run out of its own trash to burn. What a shame that Oslo can’t burn the digital crud clogging up the networks.

Facebook’s a guilty party here, and the firm is enjoying a rise in revenue and profit year on year for the first quarter of 2013, with mobile accounting for 30 per cent of all advertising revenue for the quarter compared with 23 per cent in 4Q12.

Still, some are getting tired of the endless stream of “like this to end world hunger” posts. Ten million users in the US have made an exodus, while the UK audience remains static. But the rest of the world is picking up the poke and the company claims 665 million daily active users for March 2013, representing a year on year increase of 26 per cent and a slight lead on Telecoms.com.

Messaging is one of Facebook’s key assets and the volume of OTT messaging traffic is set to become twice that of P2P SMS messaging by the end of the year, according to data collected by Informa Telecoms & Media.

Daily OTT messaging traffic has already overtaken daily P2P SMS traffic in terms of volume, with an average of 19.1 billion OTT messages sent per day in 2012, compared with an average of 17.6 billion P2P SMS messages, the researcher said.

By the end of 2013, Informa estimates that 41 billion OTT messages will be sent every day, compared with an average of 19.5 billion P2P SMS messages. But there are far more P2P SMS users than there are OTT messaging users: about 3.5 billion P2P SMS users in 2012, compared with about 586.3 million users of OTT messaging. That’s an unbelievable average of 32.6 OTT messages a day. That’s a lotta lols. Speaking of which the Informer was wondering the other day whether anyone has ever posted an update along the lines of: “FML.Broke my neck! Loll.”

What are all these people messaging about so much? In the face of such statistics you’d think people didn’t talk anymore, so it hardly seems worth the bother when operators say the most challenging aspect of introducing Voice over LTE services (VoLTE) will be deciding how and whether to transition individual legacy voice services to the new domain.

According to Michel Lenoir, programme manager for LTE at Vodafone Netherlands, the move to VoLTE gives operators a chance to reassess their voice services portfolio but the range of options open to them is very wide and operators must be clear about which services they want to keep and how best to maintain them.

“With all the IN-based voice services in our core network we need to decide what we’re going to do with them,” he said. “Do we port them into an IMS domain and, if so, how? Do we secure interworking with the circuit switched domain and the new IMS domain?  There are all sorts of options and, for me, this is the most challenging discussion that we have.”

Vodafone Netherlands is working with specialist software provider OpenCloud on this issue and OpenCloud’s head of marketing, Mark Windle told the Informer that gaps in the LTE standard mean that operators will have to find their own route through these interoperability issues. It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen in terms of quality of service, and as Bengt Nordstrom, CEO at consultancy firm Northstream, pointed out, with the increasing reliance on all-IP technologies, “even carriers don’t do carrier grade anymore.”

Perhaps this is why carriers are banding together, safety in numbers and all that. UK incumbent BT has signed a ten year deal with mobile operator and old spin-off O2 to support the latter’s launch of LTE. BT will build a high capacity transmission network for O2’s roll out of 4G services later this year, which is expected to place even greater pressure on its network.

Google’s vice president for northern and central Europe, Matt Brittin, will be feeling the pressure soon, having been summoned before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) a second time over allegations that the web giant is dodging UK corporation tax.

Last year Brittin claimed Google’s UK sales team was based in offices in Dublin, which has low rates for corporation tax, and that no sales people are based in the UK. Staff in the UK were only supposed to fulfil the role of marketing support, but an investigation led by Reuters discovered evidence of Google sales staff working in London. So now Brittin has to battle the PAC or explain himself.

The online giant this week also joined open security authentication project the FIDO Alliance (Fast IDentity Online) which aims to allow users to replace old school passwords with a range of authentication methods including NFC and biometrics. Both Google and NXP have now signed up to the project, alongside founder members including PayPal and Lenovo.

The popcorn came out after AWIW had already gone to bed last week (a messy metaphor to mix), when Tele2 CEO Mats Granryd broke step with the operator ranks and voiced his frustrations at Apple in the frankest terms. “It would be best if people stopped buying Apple,” Granryd said. “I hope that Apple gets bad. It’s very difficult to do business with Apple.

Granryd’s words had the intensity of a long-suppressed emotion finally given vent and you can be sure that many other operator executives will have read of his outburst with silent approval. In fact another (former) senior operator executive got in touch to say: “The not so hidden part is the subsidising of the handsets that Apple requires, which in fact makes the operator look at the business case of iPhone as a loss leader. The more hidden costs are associated with the mandatory marketing and QoS requirements that Apple demands. When you add up the whole cost, any business manager worth an MBA will tell you, it is not a business you want to be in.”

Almost half of enterprises will be getting out of the business of providing devices to workers by 2016, according to research firm Gartner, which this week published a survey of CIOs that found that 38 per cent of companies interviewed expect to stop providing devices to employees over the next three years, as bring your own device (BYOD) programmes continue to become commonplace.

According to Gartner, roughly half of BYOD programs provide a partial reimbursement for devices, and full reimbursement for all costs will become rare. The research firm believes that due to mass market smartphone adoption with the steady declines in operator fees, employers will gradually reduce their subsidies and as the number of workers using mobile devices expands, the number of employees who receive no subsidy at all will rise.

Another business you don’t want to be in is getting caught exploiting your users. The E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA) League this week admitted to embedding Bitcoin mining code inside client software downloaded by users.

The inclusion of Bitcoin mining tools was supposed to be an internal test project, but some rogue employee snuck it into the live code and took control of a farm of unwitting users PCs to mine coins.

Initial assumptions were that the code didn’t mine more than 2 BTC but the company has since discovered 29 BTC were generated. That’s worth a few thousand dollars in ‘real’ money, but imagine if the perpetrator had carried out his scam just a few weeks ago and offloaded those coins before the recent crash.

The ESEA has since donated the ill gotten gains to charity, but not before users started claiming that their video cards were maintaining over 90 degree Celsius temperatures for extended periods of time while the mining was in operation. That’s one of the big questions being tackled in the Bitcoin world at the moment as debates rage over whether the heat produced and energy used in Bitcoin mining actually outweighs the monetary gains. Maybe Oslo could use a Bitcoin farm to channel that heat into energy that, literally, pays for itself.

Breaking the Bitcoin chains is a bit like what those users are doing with Peter Molyneux’s cube – chipping away ceaselessly to get at what’s inside. It’s an almost zombie-like compulsion but one that anyone who played video games in the last couple of decades has been conditioned to. After all, the Mario Brothers spend a good portion of their time banging their heads against bricks for unknown potential rewards.

One last thing before the Informer heads off for his long weekend (Bank Holiday Monday here in the UK), but it’s a sad day for metal after US guitarist Jeff Hanneman, co-founder of Slayer, died on Thursday aged 49.

He died of liver failure, but not from some final drink and drugs fuelled binge. Rather he was bitten by a spider and developed the flesh-eating disease necrotising fasciitis (wasn’t that one of Slayer’s early albums?).

RIP Jeff, what a metal way to go. Hopefully you’re North of Hell.

Take care

The Informer \m/

That said, it was the first drop in a decade, the latest bump in the road for CEO Tim Cook, who was never going to have an easy time picking where Steve Jobs left off. Revenue was up, on the other hand, to $43.6bn, although the margin was down from 47.4 per cent to a wafer thin 37.5 per cent.

In a bid to keep the shareholders happy Apple announced plans to return $100bn to them by the end of 2015, by which time the firm will have repurchased $60bn of its own shares. It also increased its quarterly dividend by 15 per cent. The firm ended Q1 this year with $145bn in cash.

For the next quarter Apple expects revenues to slacken to somewhere between $33.5bn and $35.5bn with a margin between 36 and 37 per cent.

Meanwhile Apple’s biggest rival in the device space, Korea’s Samsung, grew profits by 42 per cent for the quarter, to $6.4bn, on revenues of $47.5bn. The firm’s IT and Mobile Communications business was the heavy hitter, contributing 62 per cent of revenues, with Samsung remaining coy on device shipments, saying only that sales of the SIII and Galaxy Note II were “sound”.  It warned that growth might weaken as the year unfolds.

“Although market uncertainties from the European crisis and the slow global economic recovery are still lingering, we expect to increase R&D spending for strengthening our competitiveness ahead of planned new product launches,” said Robert Yi, senior VP and head of investor relations.

“We may experience stiffer competition in the mobile business due to expansion of the mid- to low-end smartphone market while TV growth will continue to wane in developed markets.”

Samsung added that smartphone sales are expected to stay flat in the second quarter but will pick up again in the second half of the year.

Fortunately research outfit IDC was on hand to fill in some of the blanks. Samsung’s concerns over the creep of low-end smartphones seem well justified, with IDC reporting this week that smartphones out-shipped feature phones for the first time in the industry’s history during Q1 this year.

418.6 million devices were shipped in the quarter, of which 216.2 million were smartphones. That is a 41.6 per cent increase on the same period last year.

“In addition to smartphones displacing feature phones, the other major trend in the industry is the emergence of Chinese companies among the leading smartphone vendors,” said Ramon Llamas, research manager with IDC’s Mobile Phone team. “A year ago, it was common to see previous market leaders Nokia, BlackBerry (then Research In Motion), and HTC among the top five. While those companies have been in various stages of transformation since, Chinese vendors, including Huawei and ZTE as well as Coolpad and Lenovo, have made significant strides to capture new users with their respective Android smartphones.”

IDC put Samsung’s smartphone shipments at 70.7 million for the quarter, more than the combined totals of Apple, LG, Huawei and ZTE, which occupy the rest of the top five rankings.

Samsung wasn’t the only Korean going great guns this week (that’s not a reference to Kim Jung Un, by the way)  as SK Telecom announced that, just 21 months after launching its LTE service, it has passed the ten million subscriber mark. SKT took 37 months, by comparison, to hit the same milestone on its WCMDA network, it said, and LTE now accounts for 37 per cent of its total mobile subscriber base.

South Korea and Japan are about a year ahead of their nearest rivals in terms of LTE progression, according to Thorsten Robrecht, head of portfolio management at NSN, which is one of SKT’s network suppliers. The operator said that it will be introducing some LTE-Advanced features from September this year to improve the service and aims to sign up a further five million LTE subs by the end of this year. It’s ranging 25 LTE-capable smartphones, five tablets, two USB modems and an LTE-enabled camera.

Here in the UK we’re a smidgen off that pace. EE, the first and so far the only UK LTE operator, announced this week that it has 318,000 LTE subscribers. The operator, which reported quarterly revenues of £1.4bn, 5.4 per cent down on the same period last year, said that it signed up 166,000 new postpaid subs during the three month period and is on track to hit one million LTE subs by year’s end.

US operator Verizon is the subject of much speculation at the moment, with many in the industry clearly expecting it to make a muscular bid for the 45 per cent of Verizon Wireless that is currently held by the UK’s Vodafone. Reuters cited people “familiar with the matter” as revealing the US carrier’s intention to offer Vodafone $100bn for its stake.

Only time will tell us whether  this is indeed true, or whether the matter these people are familiar with is actually bovine and faecal in nature.

$100bn is big money and this week Verizon reported quartlery net profit of $1.95bn for 1Q13, a 16 per cent year on year increase on the $1.69bn generated in 1Q12. The firm’s first-quarter revenues hit $29.4bn, a 4.2 per cent increase on 1Q12.

The operator said earlier this year that following the introduction of its shared data plans it would switch from using average revenue per user (ARPU) to average revenue per account (ARPA) as an indicator. This increased by 6.9 per cent year on year to $150.27 per month, the firm said.

At the end of the first quarter, smartphones accounted for more than 61 per cent of the Verizon Wireless retail postpaid customer phone base, up from 58 per cent and Verizon Wireless saw total revenues rise 6.8 per cent year on year to $19.5bn.

The news was less rosy at TeliaSonera, which saw revenue fall by 4.5 per cent year on year to SEK24.5bn ($3.75bn) for 1Q13. Net profit dropped more modestly, by 0.3 per cent to SEK4.1bn. Over the period, the Swedish operator group also saw its customer base shrink by 800,000 customers.

“Our industry continues to go through a period of change where traditional business models are being challenged by new customer behaviour,” said acting president and CEO Per-Arne Blomquist.

Blomquist also warned that the group would have to take cost-cutting measures to get it back on track.

“In order to maintain our ability to invest in future growth, it is essential to manage our cost base in a prudent way. We have continued to put significant emphasis on implementing the efficiency measures initiated at the end of last year. There were effects within Mobility Services already in the quarter, while within Broadband Services they will come in the latter part of the year. We remain determined to bring total costs down by SEK2bn net over a two year period.”

And Mexico-headquartered América Móvil saw its net income fall by 17.4 per cent year on year to 26.87bn pesos ($2.34bn). First quarter revenues stood at 193bn pesos, which were up just 0.2 per cent higher than those of the prior year in Mexican peso terms, and 6.1 per cent up at constant exchange rates, according to the firm.

The group finished March with 328.2 million customers, a 7.4 per cent year on year increase. Of that number, 262.9 million customers were wireless subscribers, 30.3 million landline customers, 17.8 million broadband users and 17.2 million PayTV subscribers.

The firm’s mobile subscriber base rose 6.9 per cent year-on-year, most notably in Brazil, where 1.1 million subscribers got on board and in Mexico where it won 854,000 new subscribers. In the US, its Tracfone MVNO also gained 839,000 users, twice as many as the firm gained last year in the country.

Over on the infrastructure supply side, Ericsson’s first quarter profits fell year on year to SEK1.2bn $182m) from SEK8.8bn for the same period in 2012, largely due to the boost given to 1Q12 numbers by the firm’s exit from the Sony Ericsson device JV. While the vendor recorded a two per cent uptick in sales to SEK52bn it was hit by currency fluctuations and a disappointing performance from its network rollout business.

Sales in the Networks and Global Services units were up three and four per cent respectively, hitting SEK28.1bn and SEK 21.5bn. But Support Solutions, behind which Ericsson has been putting considerable weight in the last year, saw sales drop by 19 per cent to SEK2.4bn.

Managed and Professional Services held steady but the Global Services unit was pulled down by  the Network Rollout unit, which saw operating income drop by 73 per cent to a loss of SEK1.1bn. Ericsson CFO Jan Fryhammar described this as “nothing dramatic” and due to unforseen delays in LTE deployments, particularly in Latin America where Ericsson had “some idling resources,” he said.

Frykhammar said that, while there were positives in the top line, and in the profitability of the Networks division, he was concerned by Ericsson’s cashflow. “I will never be happy when the cashflow is negative,” he told Telecoms.com. “We have a tendency towards a strong finish on our operating cashflow but this time it was negative SEK3bn. That’s something we will work hard to improve going forward.”

North America and North East Asia remain the most important regions for Ericsson, given the advanced state of LTE deployments. Frykhammar said that one of its key North American LTE projects (presumably Verizon) had now “peaked” but that he expected high activity levels in the market to continue, shifting to capacity rather than coverage as the year goes on.

In North East Asia Ericsson’s most important upcoming project is the deployment of TD-LTE by China Mobile, although that operator’s retreat from GSM investment impacted on Ericsson’s first quarter, Frykhammar said.

While Ericsson’s core business will remain the provision of equipment and services to the world’s telecoms operators long into the future, the firm is looking to other sectors as operators endure turbulent times. Frykahmmar pointed towards contracts with shipping giant Maersk and energy supplier Eon as examples of important diversification, as well as its growing business in the media segment.

But the firm wants direct relationships with customers and, in pursuing them, could find itself at times in competition with its core customers. “We will expand into other customer bases,” said Fryhammar. “We want to do direct business, though; we don’t do indirect sales.”

Finally this week NASA sent three Android smartphones into space. The idea under investigation is that smartphones could be used as “the main flight avionics of a capable, yet very inexpensive, satellite,” NASA said. Given that the Informer’s G-Nex can be brought more or less to its knees by ten minutes’ of Solitaire, this seems something of a gamble.

Anyway, those Android devices are up there, watching you.

Take care

The Informer

Quite what prompted the business to play such dirty tricks, the Informer does not know, but his suspicions are that it stems from insecurity. When the Informer was growing up, it was often the most popular, prettiest girl in the class or the alpha male sports star of the year who would begin rumours about the student they secretly felt most threatened by, in order to keep their social status intact.

Samsung said its Taiwanese operation displayed “insufficient understanding of [the firm’s] fundamental principles” and has vowed to “cease all marketing activities that involve the posting of anonymous comments”.

“We regret any inconvenience this incident may have caused. We will continue to reinforce education and training for our employees to prevent any future recurrence,” the firm added in a statement to the press.

The Informer wonders what happened to Samsung Taiwan’s marketing director as a result of this scandal, but imagines it’s a word that rhymes with ‘hired’ but means the opposite.

Over in the Middle East, UAE operator Du and Chinese kit vendor Huawei this week signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), agreeing to exchange project management experiences, knowledge and research. The two will share best practice industry methodology, concepts, tools and techniques.

Wang Haitun, director at Huawei, said: “[The MoU] will facilitate a stronger relationship between our two companies as we work together to develop best practices that will be implemented in our respective project management offices for the benefit of the telecommunications industry.”

The news is not likely to be welcomed by Du’s rival Etisalat which has a MoU of its own with Huawei. In October 2011, Huawei agreed to work with Etisalat to help set the foundations for intensive internships. Senior officials from both firms worked together to tailor development of each trainee’s chosen career path. And just last month, Etisalat and Huawei signed a global consultancy services agreement, with Huawei’s business consulting team assisting the operator in developing the its mobile broadband services and its digital services portfolio.

With news of Huawei now getting into bed with its rival, the Informer can’t help but think Etisalat may have been put on its guard, unsure of whether the help it’s getting from Huawei is the same help going to Du. Then again, this model seems to work well enough in a managed services capacity.

But cast a look back to earlier this year, when at Mobile World Congress , Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs defiantly declared that “the internet should not be controlled by any one or two companies,” and that, “we shouldn’t have one or two companies that approve every bit of content [on smartphones].” He added that Mozilla wants to “level the playing field”.

What he should have said was: “You guys can do what you want because I’m out of here.”

Rather than see the firm’s Firefox OS project through in a David vs Goliath type battle to overcome the dominance of Apple and Google in the Mobile OS space, Kovacs will instead be stepping down from his role later this year. In doing so, he is not only abandoning the Firefox OS project, but also the web browser project the firm is collaborating with Samsung on called Servo.

With Kovacs departing, Mozilla has decided to make wholesale changes to its workforce. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla CEO until 2008, has returned to the firm to become its executive chair. Jay Sullivan, previously SVP of products, has been appointed COO. Harvey Anderson has been appointed SVP business and legal affair, and Li Gong has been appointed SVP for mobile devices.

Fans of reality TV singing show The Voice will be familiar with one Jessie J who famously sings: It’s not about the money, money, money, to fans spending £60 to see her in concert. Turns out that the lady who likes to do it like a dude, is wrong, because this week has been all about the money, mobile money specifically.

One announcement this week saw payment processing firm Visa Europe introduce a service allowing consumers to make mobile payments across the region immediately and using any European currency.

Visa Europe’s Personal Payments service enables Visa credit, debit or prepaid card users to accept payments from another Visa cardholder without needing to share any account details. Customers need to register for the service and know either the mobile phone number or Visa card number of the person they are sending a payment to. They can then make payments using a smartphone app offered by the sender’s bank.

Visa Europe announced the launch of its Mobile Person-to-Person payments back in September 2011, but it wasn’t until last month that RBS and NatWest became the first banks to launch the service via their mobile banking apps. The payment provider said its personal payments system now has 17 “live and committed issuers” across Europe.

Meanwhile, M-Pesa has been fully launched in India by Vodafone India and local bank ICICI, following a pilot which began in November 2012. By launching the service in India, Vodafone hopes to help approximately 700 million Indian citizens who previously had no access to conventional banking.

The service will now be launched in eastern areas of India by more than 8,300 specially trained and authorised M-Pesa agents. It will be rolled out across the rest of India in a phased approach, said Vodafone.

And the mobile money news doesn’t stop there. Turkish operator Turkcell and SIM card and mobile security solutions provider Gemalto have each found themselves at the hearts of two mobile payment projects that promise to transform the transport and retail sectors in Turkey and the USA respectively.

Turkey’s Turkcell has integrated the country’s public transport card Urfakart into its mobile wallet solution. Now Turkcell Wallet users are able to make contactless payments for transport services in the Sanliurfa province using their mobile phones. In addition, they can check and top up their Urfakart balances without having to go to a payment point.

The operator has been somewhat of a pioneer in the mobile payments space. It launched its wallet solution in October last year, which works on both smartphones and feature phones, and supports contactless payments on NFC-enabled phones. It has also struck deals with the Turkish Football Federation (TFF) to sell match tickets to fans via their mobiles across the country, and with local bank Akbank to introduce an NFC-based mobile wallet service incorporating location-based elements.

Over in the US, the Merchant Customer Exchange – a body representing a group of retailers with the aim of setting up a standardised mobile commerce platform across the sector – has selected Gemalto to build its mobile wallet.

The MCX cited Gemalto’s expertise in mobile financial services and its track record of working with banks, governments, merchants and mobile operators as its reasons for selecting the firm.

The MCX wallet will be primarily barcode and cloud-based, the body said, and will run on Gemalto’s Allynis Mobile Payment platform.

In other news, this week, Finnish handset manufacturer Nokia published it financial results, in which it posted a €150m operating loss for 1Q13. The loss is a fraction of the €1.338bn the firm lost in the same quarter in 2012, however, net sales for the same period dropped 20 per cent year on year to €5.85bn from €7.35bn in 1Q12.

How long the firm can continue posting losses and see its revenue and market share erode is surely in question. Nokia sold 61.9 million devices in the quarter, 25 per cent fewer than the 82.7 million it sold in 1Q12 and saw sales drop year on year in every geographic region it operates in, with the exception of North America, which ironically is the company’s weakest traditional market.

CEO Stephen Elop is always keen to focus on silver linings every time Nokia’s results are published, but when the Informer takes a look back at what he said about them each quarter, it doesn’t make for comfortable reading:

“The actual sales results have been mixed. Establishing momentum in certain markets including the UK has been more challenging.” – April 19, 2012

“While Q2 was a difficult quarter, Nokia employees are demonstrating their determination to strengthen our competitiveness.” – July 20, 2012

“We are determined to carefully manage our financial resources, improve our competitiveness, return our devices and services business to positive operating cash flow.” – Oct 19, 2012

“Our Mobile Phones business faces a difficult competitive environment, and we are taking tactical actions and bringing new innovation to market to address our challenges,” – April 19, 2013.

The Informer is hoping the Finnish firm can reverse its fortunes, just to see a smile on poor Elop’s face.

Now, there’s confident and then there’s downright audacious. US satellite TV provider Dish Network can be described as the latter.

In January, the TV player made an attempt to scupper the potential deal between US operator Sprint Nextel and Wimax operator Clearwire, and this week it went right for the source with a $25.5bn offer to merge with Sprint, which is already in advanced talks with Japan’s Softbank over a merger.

Dish claims its own $25.5bn proposal represents superior value to Sprint shareholders. The firm is offering Sprint shareholders $7.00 per share; $4.76 per share in cash and 0.05953 Dish shares per Sprint share, based upon Dish’s closing share price on Friday, April 12, 2013. Dish also said that its offer would give Sprint shareholders 32 per cent ownership in the combined Dish/Sprint entity. SoftBank is offering shareholders just 30 per cent interest in Sprint alone. According to Dish Network, its offer represents a 13 per cent premium to the value of the existing SoftBank proposal.

The Informer isn’t sure what has prompted Dish to make two offers so late in the day, but one thing is for sure, Softbank execs must be sat in their offices absolutely fuming at the antics of the satellite TV provider.

Meanwhile, Indian MNOs risk falling behind their counterparts in other Asian countries, , according to financial ratings agency Fitch Ratings. Over the next two years India’s operators plan to invest a significantly lower proportion of their revenues than operators in China, Indonesia and the Philippines, the agency said.

It believes the low level of investment is attributable to the weaker balance sheets of the Indian operators in comparison to other Asian carriers. According to Fitch, Indian operators’ balance sheets have become stretched due to intense competition and large spectrum payments between 2010 and 2012. It stated that Indian telcos have indicated that their capital expenditure will decline over the next two years, while it is set to increase in the three other countries.

And operator group France Telecom-Orange has said that its OTT communications app Libon will become Joyn-compatible and offer RCS services once it has deployed Joyn services across Europe.

The firm made the announcement as it launched Libon for Android devices. The service was launched for iOS devices in November 2012.The Android version is already available to Orange customers globally, downloadable from Google’s Play store, with the exception of the US where it will be launched next month.

Meanwhile, Spanish operator group Telefónica has completed a field trial of “flexible optical networking” technology, that it hopes could more than double its existing fibre capacity.

The trial, conducted on the operator’s live network in Spain, used technology supplied by kit vendor Alcatel-Lucent. The successful trial means that Telefónica España will be able to meet the growing capacity demand of its customers, according to the vendor. Alcatel-Lucent said that the trial is the first live network link running at 100Gbps, 200Gbps and 400Gbps speeds.

The technology allows Telefónica’s network to “operate at different combinations of line rate, reach, and spectrum width to provide the best balance between network performance and resource usage”, according to Alcatel-Lucent.

And Japanese vendor NEC has established a partnership with Portuguese incumbent operator Portugal Telecom that will see the two firms collaborate on SDN (software defined networking) and virtualisation technology for datacenters and carrier networks.

The two firms said that the agreement would “enable both companies to test and assess the commercial feasibility and benefits of SDN implementation for carrier datacenters”, adding that SDN and network virtualisation have “exceptional potential”.

As part of the programme the two will conduct a study into where SDN solutions might provide the most benefit within Portugal Telecom’s network infrastructure.

Internet hosting firm Rackspace is positioning itself as a supplier of cloud services to telcos and enterprises alike, as it seeks to integrate its own public cloud with service providers worldwide. As the OpenStack Summit kicked off in the US this week, Rackspace proposed to build and operate white label telco clouds within its own datacentre infrastructure.

The offering will be built on open source cloudcomputing software OpenStack, which is seen as an alternative self hosted platform to the likes of Amazon’s Web Services.

And Qatari consumers can now begin enjoying 4G services, as the country’s incumbent operator Ooredoo announced the launch of its LTE network. Ooredoo’s 4G service will initially be available via mifi and dongle devices, and the operator is currently working on making 4G available on smartphones in Qatar.

And finally, as much as we all love and rely on our smartphones, let’s face it, they can be a little annoying sometimes. That’s especially true when you forget to silence your smartphone in an important meeting, or even worse, during a court case. And that’s exactly what happened this week in a Michigan Court when a smartphone interrupted proceedings asking the owner for voice commands. The owner? Presiding Judge Raymond Voet. Consistent with his policy of fining such culprits for contempt, Judge Voet issued a fine to himself. As a first time offender, the judge only fined himself $25, but the Informer appreciates the gesture nonetheless.

And that’s about all for the week.

Take care,

The Informer

It caused trouble then and it still does now. Over in Canada this week three of the country’s smaller operators quit industry body the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA), with the claim that the association consistently shows bias towards the country’s three largest operators.

Wind Mobile, Public Mobile and Mobilicity are dwarfed by the country’s leading players in terms of subscriber numbers and voiced their mounting frustration with the CWTA’s “consistent bias” in favour of Rogers, Bell and Telus on a wide variety of issues.

Gary Wong, director of legal affairs at Mobilicity said: “There seems to be a blatant disregard of the new entrants in favour of acting in the best interests of the Big Three carriers and it is unacceptable.”

The move marks a growing frustration among smaller operators and new entrants towards the power wielded by the industry’s big players. According to trade body the European Telecoms Association (ECTA) the situation is no different in Europe.

“There are more that a 100 operators in Europe and the ones that are most represented in the industry are the ones with the biggest market share,” said a spokesperson.“The views of the bigger operators are normally the most influential in industry bodies.”

Microsoft, Oracle and Nokia aren’t typically names you hear in reference to the underdog (well, Nokia more so these days, perhaps), but that’s what these guys were straight-facedly claiming as they filed a complaint under the united brand ‘FairSearch’ with the European Commission asserting that Google has used anti-competitive practices to dominate the mobile space.

The Informer isn’t sure if the group’s ‘FairSearch’ moniker is ironic but the trio claim that Google has unfairly cemented its control over consumers’ mobile internet experience and in online advertising for mobile.That’s right, Microsoft is anti-monopoly.

Google’s Android platform runs on 70 per cent of devices shipped at the end of 2012, according to Strategy Analytics, FairSearch noted, and Google has a 96 per cent share of the mobile search advertising the market, according to research agency eMarketer.

“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolise the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” said Thomas Vinje, Brussels-based counsel to the FairSearch coalition, demanding the search giant’s suppression.

For which read: “Google has achieved something we haven’t achieved. And that makes us angry!”

But if you suppress something, your actions often have the opposite effect. In an example of one kind of emotion Maggie Thatcher inspired in society, sorry, ‘people’, the big closing number from the 1939 film the Wizard of Oz – ‘Ding dong the witch is dead’ – has made a comeback and is currently threatening to take a top spot in the British music charts. As a result, UK broadcaster the BBC will be obliged to play the song during the official chart show on Saturday, to the glee of the nation’s Thatcher-haters.

Surprisingly, UKIP leader Nigel Farage – a staunch supporter of Thatcher’s – was calling for the song to be played on the basis that: “If you suppress things then you make them popular, so play the bloody thing. If you ban it, it will be number one for weeks.”

Chinese infrastructure vendor Huawei appeared to benefit from a similar attitude this week, when the Australian government was seen to offer an olive branch to the firm. Last year Huawei was told not to bid for any contracts relating to Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) project, reportedly due to security concerns harboured by the government.

Yet this week, Huawei chairwoman Sun Yafang was pictured grinning into camera with Aussie Prime Minister Julia Gillard in Beijing and the company says it is working with Australia’s ICT industry and has established a local board of directors in Australia. Huawei Australia has grown from a company with 20 staff in 2004 to over 700 staff today, the firm said, over 85 per cent of which are locals.

The Chinese firm saw its net profit for 2012 increase by almost a quarter year on year to reach CNY15.38bn ($2.47bn), while revenue for the year stood at CNY220bn, up from the CNY203.9bn recorded in 2011 due to growth across all three of its business groups: carrier network, enterprise and consumer (devices).

The Iron Lady would have approved no doubt, one of the main tenets of the free market system is that the lowest bidder always wins, and this is something that, over the years, has helped Huawei win a lot of business—at least in the early days. The Informer was reminded of a comment by Mercury-Atlas 6 astronaut John Glenn, who became the first American to orbit the Earth (three times) in 1962. When asked how he felt during his flight, he replied deadpan: “As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind: Every part of this capsule was supplied by the lowest bidder.”

Huawei’s founder and chairman Ren Zhengfei, is clearly buoyed by the turnaround in Australia and is hoping that a similar reversal might be on the cards in the USA. In a statement released to coincide with the results announcement he revealed that “With lofty aspirations and esprit de corps, we are striding across the Pacific Ocean”. In a call to arms message called “Might from a Small Hole, Benefits from One Source,” which the Informer suspects might have been ghost written by Eric Cantona, Zhengfei called for his employees to be more passionate about their work, “then there will be nothing we cannot conquer.”

As though in reference to Glenn’s rocket, Zhengfei said: “As we know, water and air are among the most gentle stuff in the world…We also know that this same gentle air can send rockets into space. The high-speed exhaust that results from the burning of rocket fuel can generate tremendous thrust through a small hole in a device called a de Laval nozzle; the air expanding out of the nozzle can propel mankind into space.”

It’s probably not so little known a fact since this week, but a young Mrs Thatcher was part of a lab team that developed emulsifiers for ice cream, effectively allowing outfits like Mr Whippy to sell less frozen comestibles to sunburned Brits for more money by inflating the product with air.

And on the subject of air expanding out of nozzles, we come to the lawyers of Apple and Motorola Mobility, which were this week held in check by a Floridian judge who accused them of using their litigations around the world as “a business strategy that appears to have no end.”

Declaring the litigation an improper use of the court – a case which now includes over 180 claims asserted from 12 patents, the meaning of over 100 terms of which are disputed – Judge Robert N. Scola of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, said the parties are asking the Court “to mop up a mess they made by holding a hearing to reduce the size and complexity of the case. The Court declines this invitation.”

Apple’s operator management strategy won some support from an unlikely quarter this week in the form of UK operator EE. Since Telecoms.com broke the news that Apple is vetting networks for LTE capability before activating the technology on the iPhone 5, more and more carriers are speaking out about it.

But EE’s CEO Olaf Swantee believes that the practice is good for the industry and good for consumers. The operator launched its 4G network in September 2012, with the iPhone available at launch as an LTE-capable device.

“We work very closely with Apple and other manufacturers to ensure the device experience is right, because we agree with Apple,” Swantee said. “You really need to make sure, as we move away from pure voice and text, that the mobile internet experience is good and solid.”

“We have seen many 4G operators that are not announcing the leading 4G handsets on their network because their 4G network does not support a good customer experience, so we absolutely support [Apple's policy],” he added.

This week EE also said it is doubling network speeds for all of its 4G LTE subscribers, after gaining permission from Ofcom to refarm its 1800MHz spectrum for LTE. Making the most of its competitive advantage, EE has now doubled the amount of 1800MHz spectrum bandwidth that it dedicates to LTE services — from 10MHz to 20MHz. This, the firm said, will double the average speed 4G customers experience to more than 20Mbps, offer increased capacity on the network and boost headline speeds to 80Mbps.

LTE speeds will be introduced in ten UK cities by summer: Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield. The network currently covers just over 50 per cent of the UK population in 50 cities across the nation.

Coverage has always been a contentious issue, and this week industry body the GSMA called for national governments and regulators to review their approach to Universal Service Fund (USF) levies, which it has labelled as inefficient and ineffective.

Designed to extend rural coverage or lower the cost of mobile ownership, USFs are collected by imposing a levy on a country’s operators to be used for providing communication services to the underserved.

But the GSMA surveyed 64 USFs and concluded that most of them remain inefficient and ineffective, with more than $11bn waiting to be disbursed between them. “USF levies and taxes have been established without any substantive analysis regarding the actual service funding or subsidy levels needed, if at all,” the GSMA said in a statement. “Many funds continue to request operator contributions that appear to be in excess of the actual USF needs or capabilities even though they seem unable to use the levies collected.”

And there’s nothing that unsettles the GSMA more than millions of dollars sitting around unaccounted for.

How are you accounted for? That’s an interesting and timely question posed this week by Google, which looks to be the first major company to deal with the tricky subject of what happens to your online information after you die.

A set of features applying to Google-owned email and social services will give users the option to set their information to be auto-deleted after a certain period of inactivity, or to have that data passed on to specific people.

“We hope that this new feature will enable you to plan your digital afterlife – in a way that protects your privacy and security – and make life easier for your loved ones after you’re gone,” Google said. There was no mention of what will happen to people who emerge from a persistent vegetative state that has lasted several years.

“Yay! I’m awake! What? My Gmail’s been deleted? Put me back under!”

Facebook has tackled this same issue to an extent, by allowing users to “memorialise” the account of the deceased, thereby continuing the reality distortion that is its most fundamentally appealing feature to the dead and gone.

The Informer’s not sure if Thatcher had a Facebook page, she only slept four hours a night so she presumably had time for social media, but he expects there are ‘memorial’ pages aplenty out there.

And at that natural conclusion it seems fitting to reach another conclusion, so the Informer will wrap up this week’s AWIW and see you next Friday.

Take care

The Informer

The Informer’s not the only one getting old, as the mobile phone turned 40 this week with the anniversary of the first cellular phone call, made in New York by Motorola Engineer Marty Cooper in 1973. “New York, just like I pictured it: skyscrapers, emerging wireless communications technologies and everythang,” Stevie Wonder would sing later that same year on the original demo of his biting social commentary ‘Living for the City’.

That this begin-again birthday should come so close to Easter, a time that for many signifies the cycle of renewal, is a nice coincidence—so what kind of rebirth can we expect for the mobile phone? After all, it can hardly embark upon the kind of desperate, sports car-buying, younger woman-dating and hair transplanting activities that are traditionally expected of the western male on reaching this milestone (even if, like many of these males, phones at 40 are a lot wider than they were at 30).

Anniversaries such as this often bring forth the kind of evolutionary speculations that, in the industry’s decadent past, were the output of well-paid ‘futurologists’ or ‘imagineers’. So we’ll all have our eyes modified to project the web directly onto our corneas, live with the constant internal chatter of a virtual assistant that nobody else can hear, and conduct our phone calls through jawbone implants that have done away with the need for external devices (all of which predictions the Informer has encountered over the years).

In short, we’ll be seeing things that aren’t there, hearing voices in our heads and talking to ourselves—which sounds a lot like madness.

These suggestions are sufficiently whacky to be comforting for the industry’s incumbents, as the change they represent does not feel imminent. But what if the change is of a different nature? If the mobile phone’s life begins at 40, should the industry be concerned that it was on this very anniversary that Facebook should decide to enter the device market…?

There was widespread expectation that Facebook’s announcement on Thursday this week would centre on the launch of a branded handset but, in the event, the move was somewhat subtler. Facebook unveiled an Android compatible launcher called Home—a prism UI layer that makes the phone you have look like the phone Facebook would have created had it gone down that route.

It’s a neat approach that signifies the shifting times in which we live. Why go to the lengths of designing, commissioning and building a single device that you then have to sell to end users when you can simply occupy the millions of devices that are already in the market? It reminds the Informer of classic B-movie Invaders from Mars—a film that will be celebrating a birthday of its own, 60 years old, in this case, later this month.

Or, if you prefer a naturalist analogy, Facebook is a cuckoo in the nest. This was the observation from Danish consultancy Strand Consult, which warned that “not only are OTT companies such as Facebook rendering mobile operators into dumb pipes, they are making all smartphones into dumb terminals”. Strand went on to suggest that Facebook’s objective is not simply to feed its tracking and advertising business model, but to move into operators’ core services.

“The key for Facebook is to monetise its users for the very communication it offers: SMS, voice, and data-enabled services,” the firm said. “Should Facebook monetise these activities, it would be bigger and richer than any telecommunications operator.”

Never mind the operators, though: what does Google make of all this?

Facebook also announced that an upcoming HTC device—called the First—will feature Home as a native UI, which chimed with another device/OTT story this week.

Such is the concern raised by Facebook’s designs on the spaces occupied by traditional operators and device vendors that the Informer finds it hard to believe the timing of this week’s Joyn device announcement from the GSMA could be coincidental.

Ahead of the Facebook launch on Thursday GSMA announced that Spain’s three Joyn chearleaders—Vodafone, Orange and Telefónica—had made the commercial debut of Joyn as a native service on a number of high-end devices from Samsung (SIII), LG (L9), HTC (One S), Sony (Xperia Z) and Nokia (Lumia920). Existing devices can be upgraded over the air with a software update but all new versions of the handsets will have Joyn embedded at the point of manufacture.

You don’t have to be an imagineer to read into GSMA’s statement an implicit criticism of aggressive moves from the likes of Facebook. “To enable them to use the Joyn brand these devices will pass a rigorous certification process and interoperability testing to ensure quality, privacy, security and ubiquity of services,” the group said.

Now, it wasn’t just Easter this week, it was also April Fools’ Day. The Informer once knew a journalist who was sacked in his first week writing for a leading UK broadsheet website for publishing a story about an upcoming film featuring a meeting between the leading characters from Star Wars and Star Trek. Needless to say the press release promoting this film was a Fools’ Day hoax, so the Informer has always had his wits about him (such as they are) on this particular day of the year.

“You’ll have to try harder than that,” he chuckled to himself when he got the release from Blackberry announcing that it had turned a $94m profit in the first quarter of 2013. Turns out it was true! For the same period in 2012 the firm recorded a loss of $118m and in the final quarter of last year it managed a profit of $14m. For the first three months of this year the Canadian vendor shipped one million of its new flagship Z10 devices, described by Ovum’s chief telecoms analyst Jan Dawson as “a good start for the platform,” although he added that the second quarter would be a more reliable indicator of success or failure.

It wasn’t all about the devices this week; there was also a new industry coupling in town on the infrastructure side. Were this Hollywood and not Telecoms we might be referring to the deal as UbiquiCisco.

Small cell technology provider Ubiquisys became the object of Cisco’s desires this week, with the US giant making a $310m move for the UK firm. Cisco aims to add Ubiquisys’ indoor small-cell and software expertise to its own radio and wifi portfolio to create a small cell solution for operators that supports their transition to LTE networks, the firm said.

“Cisco is no stranger to small cells, but that has been primarily through its carrier wifi efforts,” said Daryl Schoolar, principal analyst at Ovum. “In the licensed spectrum small cell space Cisco has basically been reliant on its femtocell relationship with AT&T. Outside of its work with AT&T, Cisco’s licensed small cell experience has been hard to find.”

Schoolar added that in contrast, Ubiquisys has over 50 customers including Japan’s Softbank, France’s SFR, and Network Norway. “Ubiquisys’ small cell experience greatly bolsters Cisco’s small cell position,” he said. “Small cell vendors should take Cisco very seriously. Not only is Cisco greatly improving what it can offer mobile  operators  in terms of a licensed small cell, Cisco can also offer those mobile operators other tools, like data analytics, SON, and evolved packet core needed to build a mobile network.”

In other LTE-related news, French challenger Bouygues Telecom has revealed that it will launch LTE “in the next few weeks”.  The firm will use 2.6GHz spectrum to deploy the service across eight cities, CEO Olivier Roussat told local press.

The announcement follows last month’s declaration from the nation’s telecoms regulator ARCEP that Bouygues Telecom will be allowed to refarm its 1800MHz spectrum for LTE services. Bouygues Telcom will be permitted to switch on the LTE1800 network from October 1, 2013 although it must relinquish a portion of its spectrum holding before it does so.

According to the report, Bouygues Telecom will price 4G at a premium “of about €5″. Apple’s iPhone 5 will operate on the 2.6GHz LTE network as soon as Apple provides an update, Roussat said.

Telecom Italia Mobile’s Brazilian outpost TIM Brasil revealed this week that it has lined up Nokia Siemens Networks to supply an LTE network, also in the 2.6GHz band. Marco di Costanzo, head of networks at TIM Brasil was bubbling with praise for NSN. “Our long-term partnership with Nokia Siemens Networks has been excellent, and the 2G and 3G equipment installed by the company is performing so well that it was a natural decision to deploy an LTE network with the same vendor.”

LTE is everywhere now, and deployments are ramping up fast—it is the global standard for which the industry has always yearned. Apart from the fact, as the Informer learned from speaking to Qualcomm’s senior director of marketing Peter Carson this week, that Q has counted 17 different ways to do voice from an LTE handset. More than ten of these are commercially available, Carson pointed out. Fragmentation will always be with us.

Let’s have some operator M&A news now, or not, as the case may be. TeliaSonera announced this week that it will keep hold of Spanish subsidiary Yoigo, as nobody wanted to pay a price that satisfied the Nordic player. There was more luck for TeliaSonera’s regional competitor Tele2, which has sold its Russian operation to banking group VTB for £2.4bn in cash and £1.15bn in debt. Meanwhile Russian player Altimo has made a bid for Egyptian firm Orascom

Finally this week another story that could well have been filed under April Fools’. Fast food outlet KFC is to begin trials of a mobile payment service, enabling iPhone users to manage their fried chicken preferences, remote order and make one-click payments, as well as check in to stores. It occurs to the Informer that, for many iPhone users, checking in to KFC would be akin to coming out, as it were.

Unfortunately for the headline writers—not to mention fans of the AWIW pithy finish—there is no NFC in the KFC trial at the moment.

Take care

The Informer

The fourth most hungry app over the period was a fun geo-marketing demo from Devicescape that the Informer downloaded at MWC and hasn’t touched since. This one consumed 2.01MB in the same period, again all in the background; a neat, if slightly cheeky way of demonstrating need for the kind of wifi offload strategy that Devicescape advocates.

So the Informer was primed for the results of a study released by Actix this week which found that 70 per cent of smartphone data sessions are not initiated by the end user. While the observation that apps consuming resources unbidden threatens network performance and customer experience is nothing new, Actix offered another point of interest. Operators looking to optimise their networks based on KPIs like dropped sessions might be basing their activities on misleading data.

One UK operator that was part of the study was seeing a high number of dropped data sessions in a particular location, which turned out to be the entrance to an underground rail station. These dropped sessions weren’t user initiated, they were just background requests being interrupted by users’ moving out of coverage.

All of which reinforces how important it is for applications to be designed with the network in mind. The network cops most of the flack for poor performance but app design that doesn’t consider network impact is often the bigger problem. One of the most interesting demos the Informer saw at MWC was Ericsson’s app verification platform; a solution designed to let the operator vet applications on exactly this basis.

Ericsson has long struggled with its silicon JV ST Ericsson (STE) but now those struggles appear to be over. Last week we had the news that STE’s CEO Didier Lamouche had thrown in the towel, while STMicroelectronics has made no secret of its desire to exit the JV. This week the two firms finally conceded that, in the absence of a buyer, there is no way forward and the operation is to be dismantled.

Ericsson will take on the design, development and sales of the LTE multimode thin modem products, including 2G, 3G and 4G multimode while STM takes on the existing ST-Ericsson products (excluding LTE multimode thin modems) and related business as well as certain assembly and test facilities. STM also gets the pair’s collection of Neil Sedaka albums, which is a secret source of relief to Ericsson because it hates Neil Sedaka and has always had to pretend otherwise. STM will play Breaking Up Is Hard To Do repeatedly for the next few weeks.

After the split it is proposed that Ericsson will assume approximately 1,800 employees and contractors, with the largest concentrations in Sweden, Germany, India and China. ST will assume approximately 950 employees, primarily in France and in Italy, to support ongoing business and new products development within ST. The dismantling is expected to be completed during the third quarter of 2013, subject to regulatory approvals.

In a bid to move on, Ericsson announced a five-year managed services deal with Telekom Austria’s Serbian subsidiary Viptel. The deal is an extension of a partnership signed between Ericsson and the Austrian incumbent last year. It also announced that it has won a three-year exclusive supply deal with Chile’s Entel, which old-timers will remember was once the sole GSM outpost in Latin America.

In other Austrian news the market’s regulator TKK has announced that it will auction spectrum at 800MHz, 900MHz, and 1800MHz in September this year for the provision of LTE services. It is the largest spectrum auction the market has ever seen and the TKK is reserving two blocks of prime 800MHz real estate for a new entrant. This seems a bit loopy to the Informer, given that at the end of last year, according to Informa’s WCIS, four operators were doing battle for 13.4 million subscribers.

TA rules the roost, with Deutsche Telekom in second place. Orange in third and Hutchison’s 3 in fourth are both some way off the pace. What do they need a fifth player for?

Meanwhile local firm Kapsch Carriercom has bought NEC’s Portuguese GSMR business, moving into terminal production (which will be moved to Austria) and taking over contracts with rail operators in Spain, Saudi Arabia and Finland.

A little further North East, Vodafone has announced a partnership with Polish operator Polkomtel. A few years back Vodafone decided to trim its portfolio by offloading non-controlling stakes. The firm’s 24.4 per cent of Polkomtel was sold in 2011 but the bond clearly remains. Polkomtel now becomes a partner operator, and will offer dual-branded services with Vodafone in Poland.

Also cosying up to Polkomtel this week was Nokia Siemens Networks, which has supplied the operator with a CSFB solution to enable voice alongside LTE.

LTE continues to gather momentum and the Global Mobile Suppliers Association put out its latest figures this week, with the number of networks in operation now standing at 156. GSA chairman Alan Hadden said that almost 100 operators had launched LTE in the past year, with LTE1800 proving the unifying band. Some 69 operators are using LTE at 1800MHz and Hadden said it is “likely to remain the prime band for LTE in the foreseeable future.”

Getting ready to join the fray are the four Hong Kong operators—SmarTone, Genius Brand, China Mobile Hong Kong and CSL—that have just secured 50MHz of spectrum in the 2.5/2.6GHz band in that market’s recent spectrum auction. The total amount bid was $200m.

Hong Kong, like Austria, has 13.4 million mobile subscriptions. There are five operators in the market, however, one of which opted not to bid. A prospective new entrant to the market did participate but failed to win any spectrum. Take note TKK.

Now, much has been made of the disruptive impact of Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE on the mobile market. But as far as the Informer’s concerned they’re never going to take over the world unless they can set aside their differences until the market has been sewn up.

There are all sorts of funny stories about the two firm’s attempts to get one up on each other at trade shows; directing each others’ deliveries to the wrong places, intercepting one another’s customers en route to meetings and so on. These are great in a Harold Lloyd sort of a way but now it’s all getting a bit serious and they’re going toe to toe in the court rooms of Europe.

Huawei claims that ZTE has infringed its LTE and terminal patents and has filed against it in Germany, France and Hungary. ZTE says it’s all bull. By way of response ZTE has filed 18 suits back at Huawei in Europe and China.

The two vendors’ compatriot operator China Unicom reported a net profit increase of 68.5 per cent year-on-year this week, to RMB7.10bn ($1.14bn). The firms said service revenue growth outstripped the industry by 4.1 per cent. Mobile accounted for 60 per cent of service revenue and non-voice for 53.1 per cent.

Low cost smartphones are key to the firm’s improvements. In its earnings report it said that one of the ways it had driven “rapid growth in mobile data business” was to “further improve smarpthones’ quality to price ratios.” Mobile data consumption on its network grew by 92 per cent in 2012, year on year. Low cost devices also enabled the firm to cut its handset subsidy cost from 17.7 per cent of total 3G service revenue in 2011 to 10.2 per cent in 2012.

It used to be felt that there was no way out of a dependency on handset subsidies but research from Informa Telecoms & Media released this week suggests that European operators are increasingly distancing themselves form subsidies, instead looking to sell smarpthones on instalment plans. Some 30 operators have moved to leasing or financing schemes in Europe, Informa found, reducing their financial burden while still keeping high end devices in the market.

“The keys to a successful financing program are transparency, simplicity and flexibility,” said Francesco Radicati, a research analyst within Informa’s European Operator Strategy team. “The rising cost of devices like the iPhone means operators have to pay increasingly large subsidies to offer ‘free’ phones. Financing allows operators to continue offering phones for a low up-front price without subsidising them; as an added bonus, it makes it easier to market smartphones to consumers on pay-as-you-go.” You can find out more about it here.

Data isn’t the only game in town, however, and HD Voice has been in the news again this week, with Telenor claiming a Norwegian first with the deployment of the technology throughout its network. The service is not being priced at a premium, but users do require a compatible device.

“During the last few years, there has been a rapid development of mobile technology and soon there won’t be anything that you can’t do with your mobile phone,” Berit Svendsen, CEO of Telenor Norway, told Telecoms.com. “But one area has been lagging behind. Sound quality during calls has not seen any significant improvements since the introduction of GSM in the early 90s.” You can read the full interview with Svendsen here.

Finally this week they’ve been shuffling the deck at France Telecom. Vivek Badrinath, formerly the head of Orange Business Services (read an interview with him from last October here) becomes deputy CEO, with responsibility for innovation, technology and customer experience. Thierry Bonhomme moves into the space vacated by Badrinath…

And the Informer moves into the space between editions of AWIW. He’ll be back the first week of April, after the Easter break.

Take care

The Informer

Android co-founder Andy Rubin – the man whose name has been synonymous with the platform since its inception, has stepped down from his role as Google’s senior VP of mobile and digital content. In his role, he oversaw development of Android, which within a decade became the most popular handset OS in the world, accounting for 52.3 per cent market share in January 2013, according to stats from Gartner.

The firm looks to be bringing Chrome, Apps and Android closer together. When the smoke turned from black to white at Google Towers, it was Sundar Pichai who was unveiled as the man set to become the busiest in the industry, taking on the responsibility of overseeing Android, along with Google’s web browser Chrome as well as Google Apps.

Rubin will remain on Google’s payroll though and CEO Larry Page was quite vague in his announcement of the news, stating merely that Rubin would be “starting a new chapter at Google”, before adding: “Andy, more moonshots please”.

The Informer isn’t sure if Page made his announcement in a Mountain View bar, or whether he may have been implying Rubin would now join one of Google’s space programmes.

Google has indeed been busy Spring cleaning this week – the firm has dropped some of its less memorable services in the past, such as the unsuccessful Google Buzz and the awful Google Wave, but the announcement that the firm is retiring Google Reader – the firm’s RSS feed aggregator tool – in July sparked unrest among thousands of users. In fact, a Change.org petition pleading for Google not to retire the tool attracted 50,000 signatures the day after the announcement.

Google engineer Al Green (a different one) crooned: “Usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.”

Green also admitted he was sad to see Google Reader go, and that he was tired of being alone.

Google wasn’t the only firm to announce a change of leadership this week. ST Ericsson CEO Didier Lamouche appears to have successfully jumped from a sinking ship, handing in his resignation on Monday. Lamouche will leave the company on March 31 “to pursue other opportunities”, and it’s not hard to find more promising opportunities elsewhere. One of the JV’s partners, STMicroelectronics, has already announced it is trying to exit the joint venture, but Ericsson doesn’t want to be left holding the loss making business either. ST Ericsson has not named Lamouche’s successor, which is worrying as it only has two weeks before Lamouche leaves. But, whoever it is that takes on the role has a tough time ahead.

The consensus is that Lamouche did a pretty decent job, considering the circumstances. Hans Vestberg, chairman of the ST-Ericsson’s board of directors, said: “Didier Lamouche came into ST-Ericsson when the company was in a very challenging situation and has been instrumental in bringing the company to the point where it is more focused on strategy execution, a much lower breakeven point and positive momentum where the new LTE modem-based products are ready for market introduction this year.”

So not only will the new CEO be in charge of a firm that lost $169m in 4Q12 alone, his predecessor is generally believed to be a tough act to follow. It’s a shame Pope Francis has just taken a new job, as ST Ericsson needs more than just a new leader, it needs a miracle.

Elsewhere, the Czech Republic’s telecoms regulator CTU has pulled the plug on an auction for 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2600MHz spectrum after bids rocketed out of control.

At the time of cancellation, bids had already topped CZK20bn (€780m) and were still rising. This may sound like good news for the Czechs, but the regulator has decided to reign in spend to stop the charges being passed on to consumers. That’s some good regulating, CTU.

“Such excessive prices of the auctioned frequencies would have to negatively translate into excessive charges for fast mobile internet,” the CTU said. “We therefore consider it necessary to step in and prevent future negative consequences for the customers.”

A new auction will likely take place within a couple of months, when the CTU has had to opportunity to put pricing safeguards in place.

Over in the US of A, the FCC has let the proposed T-Mobile USA and Metro PCS merger be. The regulator has ruled that the two operators would not likely result in competitive harm to consumers.

“It also appears that this transaction could lead to benefits such as greater deployment of advanced Long Term Evolution (LTE) services, the expansion of the MetroPCS brand into new geographical markets, and the development of a more robust, nationwide network,” said FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn.

The deal now hinges on MetroPCS’ shareholders sanctioning it, who have voiced their disapproval since the potential deal was announced in October 2012. They will be holding a vote on the matter in April.

And staying on the topic of regulation, UK regulator Ofcom wants to work with the mobile industry on a series of measures to address the problem of bill shock. It’s a problem that seems as old as Methusaleh, but Ofcom, following its review into the causes of bill shock, believes it can tackle the issue by recommending that UK mobile providers voluntarily introduce roaming financial caps and alerts prior to the EU’s new legislation taking effect.

The regulator has also written to mobile providers asking them to do more to develop and promote ‘opt-in’ measures, such as tariffs that allow consumers to set their own financial caps or receive alerts about usage. And the regulator now intends to work with providers to explore the feasibility of limiting the amount consumers would be liable for if their phone was stolen. If all that recommending, suggesting and letter writing doesn’t produce results, Ofcom said that it would consider mandatory options to tackle the problem.

Meanwhile in Africa, Sweden’s Ericsson has secured a five-year deal to manage mobile networks across Africa. The firm has signed a managed services contract with Atlantique Telecom, part of the UAE-headquartered Etisalat Group, for the operator’s Western and Central African operations.

Atlantique Telecom has operations in Benin, Central Africa Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Niger and Togo. The contract covers network operations, field maintenance, network optimisation and spare parts management for Etisalat’s multivendor mobile networks, including access, core and transmission, as well as value added services.

The firm said that it aims to develop offerings based on value-added services to its growing subscriber base. During the past decade, the number of mobile connections in Africa has grown an average of 30 per cent per year, the firm noted.

Lars Lindén, head of Ericsson in region sub-Saharan Africa added that managed services is a proven business model to support operators in growth.

“It is one of the most dynamic areas in our industry. Our work together will support Atlantique Telecom in defining a new generation of operators in Africa,” he said.

And finally, operator groups Vodafone and Orange have announced they will co-invest in fibre to the home (FTTH) deployment in Spain. The two intend to reach six million households and workplaces across 50 major cities by September 2017.

Under the terms of the agreement, Vodafone and Orange will each deploy street-level fibre in complementary geographies. The fibre will be owned independently but will share the same technical specifications to ensure compatibility as a single network. Each partner will have guaranteed access to the whole infrastructure, according to Vodafone.

The combined capital expenditure is expected to reach €1bn. Vodafone and Orange believe the agreement will increase fibre deployment efficiencies and maximise returns on investment for both operators. The agreement is also open to third parties willing to co-invest.

“This agreement demonstrates Vodafone’s commitment to provide high-speed unified communications services to our customers coupled with our willingness to invest when there are positive returns,” said Vodafone Chief Executive for the Southern Europe region, Paolo Bertoluzzo.

And that’s about all for this week. Take care,

The Informer.