If there is one broad theme that sums up this year’s Mobile World Congress for me it is the idea of ‘the network as asset’, and the perception that CSPs could and should be doing a great deal more to leverage this their prime asset.
Customer experience also figured highly in the briefings and presentations I attended, but by contrast with last year’s heavy CEM-software product focus, this year customer experience was discussed just as much in the context of network performance and the need to make more effective use of network intelligence.
British Telecom TV ads of the ‘80s are fondly remembered. Their star, suburban housewife Beattie (geddit?), encouraged a nation to talk. In one famous ad, Beattie comforts her hapless grandson about his dismal exam results. Discovering he’s at least passed sociology, she exclaims: “You get an Ology, you’re a scientist!” Many telecom operators think the same about [...]
National Broadband Network CEO Mike Quigley opened up a huge can of worms when he said at the American Chamber of Commerce lunch in Sydney on February 22 that he was open to the NBN being re-designed using different last-mile technologies rather than the current full Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) model.
Almost twelve months after Vodafone Spain became the first mobile operator to officially launch Joyn, South Korea’s SK Telecom has announced a fairly impressive one million users for its Joyn.T service, just 50 days after it was launched in December 2012.
HTC’s latest handset, the HTC One, is undoubtedly a striking device, with an industrial design rivaling any handset previously released by the Taiwanese company, and the current crop of high-end smartphones on the market.
In the eternal chess match that is the German telecoms market, Vodafone may be readying a move to take its king out of check, by buying cable player Kabel Deutschland (KDG). If press reports are accurate, and Vodafone really does buy up Germany’s largest cable provider, it could break out of the fixed-broadband stalemate it finds itself in currently while jumping far ahead of incumbent Deutsche Telekom in the increasingly important TV market.
Last week Indian operator Reliance Communications announced a $1bn eight-year managed services deal with Ericsson, transferring network operations and management to Ericsson in Northern and Western states of India.
This follows hot on the heels of a parallel $1bn eight-year managed services contract announced in January with Alcatel-Lucent, transferring network operations and management to Alcatel-Lucent in Southern and Eastern states of India.
A while ago I was told by an executive from one of the big network equipment vendors that he had seen proof that a Chinese competitor was spoofing network performance in a competitive trial to try and win business. One conclusion can be drawn from this accusation, valid or not: Things are getting desperate in the infrastructure supply sector. Falsifying performance data would be a drastic act, after all—but then so would slandering the opposition.
There are likely to be a few last-minute adjustments to slides before this year’s Mobile World Congress, given that the industry’s most popular traffic forecasts were downgraded. Last week, Cisco released its latest mobile data forecasts, which show a significant decline from previous estimates. The company has lowered its figures by more than 30 per cent in the period 2012-2016 compared with their figures published this time last year.
Microsoft’s new drive to target Africa – the 4Afrika initiative, as the software giant’s marketing people have styled it –
highlights the growing and deserved importance of the continent to global technology players.
If a clear indication was needed that IT and networking firms are looking to extend their reach beyond mere IP specialisation and get deeper into the telco vertical, it came this week when Acme Packet said it had agreed to be acquired by Oracle.
The news that Liberty Global plans to acquire Virgin Media could signal a change atop the global pay-TV hierarchy – if a deal goes ahead, the long-time number-two cable operator and dominant European player will overtake US giant Comcast to become the world’s largest cable MSO.
It’s that time of year again. The time that industry professionals know only too well, as we see our schedules for the final week in February rapidly running out of space – we’re all preparing ourselves for the exhausting experience that is Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Well, unless you work at Microsoft or RIM, it seems.
It feels like 2006 once again: vendors are creating fanciful and colourful presentations about SDN and operators are discussing about the need to move from silos to horizontal platforms and networks. In a way, almost the same story was told six years ago for IMS, but deployments were far smaller than expected. So is SDN following the footsteps of IMS?
Sales above three million units of BlackBerry Z10 in the first three months on sale will send BlackBerry shares sky high, but anything below one million will not be well received by investors.
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