UK mobile operators Telefónica and Vodafone on Thursday agreed to extend their existing network sharing deal to create one single national grid providing 2G, 3G and eventually 4G services to 98 per cent of the UK population.
Spanish carrier Telefónica has indicated that it will install fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connections across the Spanish capital this year, with 1.3 million homes and businesses in Madrid to be provided with 100Mbps connections.
Chinese equipment vendor Huawei said Monday that it has won a five year agreement from Telefónica’s UK operation, O2, to manage the operator’s multi vendor core transmission and mobile access network.
It’s not often in the telecoms world that operators go above and beyond the requests of the regulatory authorities. But that’s exactly what happened this week when Telefónica launched an affordable roaming plan just one day after the European Parliament voted to bring rates down within the EU.
Telefónica has announced a new pan-European data roaming tariff for customers, which it claims is up to ten times cheaper than the new price caps approved by the European Parliament this week.
Customers on the Movistar and O2 networks will be able to use up to 25MB of data whilst abroad, anywhere across the 27 European Union member states, for just €2 per day.
Despite seeing stability in revenue over the course of the first quarter of 2012, Telefónica has seen its net income plummet to less than half of what it recorded in the same period last year. Revenue for the quarter stood at €15.51bn, a 0.5 per cent increase on the €15.44bn generated in the first quarter of 2011, while net income fell 53.9 per cent from €1.62bn to just €748m.
Telefónica Digital, the innovation arm of the Spanish incumbent telco, has offered its first retort to the third party messaging apps like WhatsApp, Skype and Viber that are threatening operator business models. The TU Me application enables rich communications between users on any network, mimicking the functionality of OTT applications and tying them to the subscriber’s phone number.It has much in common with what is expected of the RCSe collaboration Joyn, which was announced by Telefónica with other leading operators in February.
Telefónica subsidiary O2 has become the first operator in the UK market to launch a mobile wallet offering. The service offers price comparison for online shopping, person to person money transfer and allows the user to digitise cards linked to existing bank accounts, or load money onto an O2 stored value account.
It’s about time for a shakeup. And for a mere £1 billion (US$1.7 billion) in cash, Vodafone may pull it off.
If successful, its bid for Cable & Wireless Worldwide creates nothing less than a new top-tier player in the global enterprise telecoms market.
Operators pushing out Android OS updates are doing so without notifying users that the download will take them beyond their data limits. A number of Android handsets running on older versions of the platform received updates to version 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, this week. However, when the notifications were pushed out, users who were not connected to wifi networks at the time had the 211MB download taken out of their data allowance.
Telefónica Digital has entered into a strategic agreement with games developer EA Mobile, a division of Electronic Arts, which will enable Telefónica customers to access a range of games on their handsets. The digital business unit of Telefónica will launch the service initially in the UK, through O2, before following with other regional markets.
The European Commission’s competition watchdog has opened an in-depth investigation into the proposed creation of a mobile wallet joint venture by UK carriers Vodafone, Telefónica and Everything Everywhere (T-Mobile and Orange).
Mobile operators are communicating to their OEMs that support for RCSe/Joyn is now a key criterion for their devices to be included in the operators’ portfolios, though it is not yet mandatory. Telefonica has said that if a device does not support RCS/Joyn, it will not be dropped from their handset portfolio. But Vodafone is taking a tougher stance, saying that devices that do not support RCS/Joyn will find it tough to get into the operator’s handset portfolio.
The Digital arm of Spain-based carrier Telefónica clearly sees opportunity in the mobile payments space, on Thursday announcing investment in, and a strategic agreement with, m-payment firm Boku.
MWC 2012 provided further evidence of an escalating war between operators and device manufacturers, according to analysts at Informa Telecoms & Media. Apart from those launched by Nokia, there was only one device unveiled that ran on the Microsoft Windows Phone platform, which was one of the many launched by ZTE. Meanwhile, one of the announcements that caused waves in the industry was Telefónica’s news that it has teamed up with Firefox browser-maker Mozilla to create a new mobile platform, B2K.
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