Duato wasn’t pussyfooting around, claiming that operators in Europe “can’t make a success of LTE unless we change the way we roll out networks.” With mobile broadband revenues falling faster than the cost of provision, Duato said Orange Spain was “unable to come up with a solid business case for LTE” if it was required to deploy a standalone network.

The technology itself is not the problem. Duato said that LTE “holds the promise of the future”, and noted that it offers twice the spectral efficiency of 3G, and a 30 per cent improvement on TCO. These improvements don’t make the numbers add up, though, especially as existing second and third generation networks have to maintained at the same time, he said.

The answer as far as Duato was concerned is to move into deeper RAN sharing to further slash the cost of deployment. As it stands, he said, “you have to do a massive  investment to make money from LTE”.

He compared Europe, with 100-odd operators, to the US, which is a comparable size and has only a handful of carriers with pan-regional networks. “It doesn’t make sense to have this many networks [in Europe], we have to move to LTE network sharing,” he said.

Duato called on national and European regulators to do everything possible to support operators intent on building pan-regional shared networks, as well as the vendor community. When asked how he thought vendors would react to the drop in network sales that such widespread sharing would inevitably bring about, Duato suggested they could make up the shortfall through larger managed services deals.

He also intimated that Orange might be prepared to give up spectrum to enable this strategy, given the right circumstances. While the operator has little to spare in urban areas, he said “we don’t need all the spectrum we have in rural areas.” He added that if operators were allowed to pool frequencies, then negotiations would be made easier.

It would be interesting to see what the group comms guys at Orange made of Duato’s take on the industry.

Over in Kenya, you might remember, Safaricom recently threatened to pull out of a JV LTE deployment if the government went ahead and mandated the use of spectrum in the 2.6GHz band. Safaricom wanted to be able to use 700MHz spectrum, which offers significant benefits in coverage and in-building penetration.

This week the Kenyan government told Reuters that the deployment would go ahead, whether Safaricom is involved or not. Deployment is due to start next year, when the Ministry of Finance has approved the $500m budget submitted by the Ministry of Information and Communication.

In other network sharing news, Everything Everywhere, which runs the UK arms of T-Mobile and Orange, said this week that it has completed a signal sharing project, dubbed Smart Signal Share, that allows for seamless movement of devices between the two networks, depending on which signal is the strongest at any point.

Smart Signal Share is part of a £1.5bn network evolution, with £1.4m being invested every day, the firm said. It added that HSPA+ 21, now reaches 95 per cent of the UK population. But if no 3G coverage is available, all Orange and T-Mobile devices will seamlessly switch to 2G signal and back on to 3G when either network comes back into range – even if a customer is browsing the internet. Customer charges remain the same when using the other network’s signal.

Everything Everywhere is also host to a new UK MVNO from China Telecom. CTExcelbiz, which CT said was the first service launch by a Chinese operator outside of China, will cater to the UK’s Chinese population with  Chinese language services and unlimited, on-net free calls.

Ethnic MVNOs have been one of the few niches to find success in the UK market, with Lebara and Lyca among the pace setters in the space.

Meanwhile, in a story of such interest that the level of traffic it was getting actually knocked Telecoms.com over this morning, EE has announced a mobile ticketing partnership with UK transport service provider Stagecoach Group. A trial is already underway in Cambridge and, subject to its success, EE and Stagecoach could deploy nationwide on selected services next year.

Nipping back to Eduardo Duato, he also told LTE World Summit this week that, when Orange Spain held it’s first ever call with Apple about securing a deal to offer the iPhone, Apple insisted that the call take place at 1am Spanish time. To the Informer this is a perfect snapshot of Apple’s approach to the mobile operator community, going out of its way to set its status from the outset.

That said, a couple of the Informer’s Twitter chums have pointed out at 1am is a perfectly sociable hour in Spain, and that perhaps Apple was just trying to be culturally sensitive to the notion of the siesta. Draw your own conclusions.

In any case, Yankee Group this week put forward evidence that offering the iPhone improves an operator’s rep among its customers. While US operators “uniformly report hits to their profit margins due to the device,” Yankee said, “carrying the iPhone immensely improves customers’ overall impression of the operator brand.” Yankee noted that brands such as Android and Samsung did not have the same effect.

Still, customers’ overall impressions won’t put food on the table.

Android may not have the same cachet as Apple, but that’s not putting Google off and the search giant this week rounded the last bend in its race to acquire Motorola’s handset division. The final stumbling block has been the Chinese competition authorities, which had similar concerns to the EC over whether or not Google would try and limit other vendors’ ability to deploy Android in a bid to give preferential treatment to Moto.

It’s difficult to imagine Google doing this, but the Chinese authorities wanted to make sure and so set down a list of requirements for Google. These include: Providing Android on a “free and open basis” for at least five years; treating all original equipment manufacturers on a non-discriminatory basis; and complying with Motorola’s current fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory patent obligations. Google must also commission an independent trustee to monitor fulfilment of these obligations, the Chinese authority said.

The deal should now close over the weekend. Moto’s CEO Sanjay Jha will not be around to see how things progress, as he’s been replaced by Google insider Dennis Woodside, who has managed the acquisition from Google’s side. While Jha will hang around until the integration has been completed, it falls to Woodside to build a new team for Motorola Mobility.

Woodside said that he aims to focus Motorola Mobility’s “remarkable talent on fewer, bigger bets, and create wonderful devices that are used by people around the world.” Woodside has already lined up a number of new execs, including former director of DARPA Regina Dugan, former supply chain VP at Amazon Mark Randall, former CFO of Marsh & McLennan Vanessa Wittman, former head of HR at Visa and Nvidia Scott Sullivan, and former Google VP of consumer marketing Gary Briggs.

“Motorola Mobility has many outstanding leaders, including people who were behind the original RAZR in 2004 and recent successes like the Droid and RAZR MAXX,” said Woodside. “Our colleagues joining the team come from varied backgrounds, from DARPA to Amazon and NVIDIA, but they all share a track record of leading innovation at speed, and a great deal of excitement about the mission ahead.”

One of Google’s biggest successes has been its browser, Chrome. Now there is another contender in the market, as Yahoo has decided to pitch its hat into the ring. Axis, a new browser aimed at iPhones, iPads and desktop PCs is, like all new browsers, designed to improve the user’s experience of searching the web. Yahoo claims it enables users to see and interact with visual search results without having to leave the search page. It also allows users to continue their browsing journey from device to device, the firm said.

Meanwhile Microsoft is making moves into the social networking space, targeting students with a new product called So.cl. The idea is that So.cl will help students share education-related information (hahahahahaha) and Microsoft is not looking to take on Facebook, apparently.

We started with LTE this week and we’ll come back to it in conclusion. Bharti Airtel has agreed to acquire 49 per cent of Qualcomm’s Indian BWA spectrum holdings for $165m. Qualcomm bought BWA spectrumin four Indian states in 2010 for $1bn, with the express intention of blocking the deployment and uptake of WiMAX services. It’s lost a bundle on the spectrum, but secured future revenues in the country when TD-LTE services are deployed.

Bharti is acquiring its stake by purchasing a 26 per cent share held by two Indian partners in the Qualcomm broadband venture, Global Holding Corporation and Tulip Telecom and by subscribing to fresh equity. Once commercial operations are launched, subject to certain terms and conditions, the plan is for Bharti to assume complete ownership and financial responsibility for the BWA entities by the end of 2014.

Qualcomm’s aims have been met where Augere Wireless is concerned, at least. The aspiring WiMAX operator fronted by former Orange and LightSquared CEO Sanjiv Ahuja has said it is leaving the Indian market, and disposing of the spectrum licences it holds in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, according to local press reports.

And that’s about it for this week.

Take care

The Informer

What makes this task more difficult, is that people just don’t click Facebook ads. That’s not just the view of the Informer, rather a survey by digital marketing agency Greenlight reveals that 44 per cent of respondents said they would ‘never’ click on Facebook sponsored ads. So how else can it hit those targets? One strategy appears to be to milk what it can out of its more insecure members – for which, the Informer notes, the network is not wanting. Facebook is trialling a ‘pay per post’ concept, which will put subsidised status updates higher up in their friends’ timelines. A bit like paying someone else to borrow the DJs microphone at a house party.

And the challenge of getting more money out of customers is one facing operators globally as well, particularly when it comes to trying to grow revenues in line with a surge in data traffic. The conundrum facing them all is: How do you make your customers think they’re getting better value for money? One way to do it could be offering shared data plans, at least that’s what Verizon and AT&T are hoping.

Shared data plans will allow multiple devices owned by an individual, or members of a family, to draw data from a single monthly allotment. The move is one of the first examples of innovation in data pricing and Mike Roberts, principal analyst and head of Americas at Informa Telecoms and Media, said that a precedent has already been set in the US with shared voice tarriffs already on the market.

He reckons it won’t be long before shared data becomes a key offering for all US carriers, but they need to address is how to move from individual to shared data plans in a way that would help, rather than hurt, data revenue margins. Sprint Nextel on the other hand, told the Informer this week that it intends to stick to its guns and continue offering its all-you-can-eat plans.

The Informer can’t help imagine that maybe the folks at Intel have all just had a Mel Gibson-like experience – no, not by getting drunk and throwing a foul-mouthed tirade at reporters, rather more like that film in which he began hearing people’s thoughts, but this time listening to “What Operators Want”.

Herbert Weber, EMEA marketing director for mobile and communications at Intel, told Telecoms.com that the firm has struggled with winning market share in the mobile space because it didn’t understand how operators’ businesses worked. It has since taken the time to understand the nuances between the PC and mobile business models and has adjusted its offerings and features accordingly to appeal to operators and consumers alike.

Perhaps now the chipmaker has finally understood how to provide  handsets that say: “Yes”, when operators ask: “Will my bottom line look big in this?”

LightSquared on the other hand, is looking decidedly underfed, having not yet filed for bankruptcy, but filing for more time before declaring bankruptcy. The Informer wonders whether the firm will ever be asked to submit its assets, which is really just some unusable spectrum. Founder Philip Falcone would probably get more value from selling his old ZX Spectrum.

In France, Free Mobile ruined the other operators’ party by launching low-cost services that undercut all of its competitors’ offerings. And now, it’s bragging about how well it’s done it.

The operator has managed to acquire nearly four per cent of the country’s market share in just 80 days; it said during its first ever quarterly results announcement that it had acquired 2.6 million mobile subscribers by 31 March 2012. This was at the expense of its rivals. SFR, for example, admitted that it lost 620,000 mobile subscribers in the quarter. Orange France lost 615,000 mobile customers.

In the age-old marketing trick of giving celebrities, media personalities or sports personalities free things and taking pictures of said stars using them, Samsung has decided to give limited editions of its new Galaxy SIII handset to athletes at the Olympics to show off their mobile money services with Visa. The handset is “The Official Olympic Phone,” just so you know. But what exactly is an official Olympic phone? The Informer understands the concept of official sporting event merchandise, such as the official World Cup football, for example. It lets kids in the playground pretend they’re Messi or Rooney playing in front of thousands of fans. Is Samsung hoping kids take to the playground to re-enact the LOCOG committee phone calls with Boris Johnson? Maybe a new playground game of taking minutes of meetings using the device’s office software will catch on. Or maybe they’ll use the mobile payments functionality to buy burgers. Or maybe, just maybe, “official” and “Olympics” are valuable buzzwords that the Korean firm’s marketing team hopes will help stoke sales.

Also in the UK, O2 is playing a tease, and seems to be caught in a bit of a love triangle with Ericsson and Huawei. The operator has just chosen to entrust the planning and managing of core transmission, mobile access and core network build, to Huawei marking the first major managed services deal for the Chinese firm in the UK. Ericsson, meanwhile is left heartbroken as it has spent years in O2’s friend-zone, it has had a long-standing agreement with Telefónica to supply field maintenance services, but had also undertaken a core network modernisation initiative on some parts of O2’s UK network last year. Now though, Huawei will likely be managing a lot of Ericsson kit for O2.

In devices, research firm Gartner has revealed handset sales have declined for the first time in three years. Global unit sales reached 419.1 million units in the first quarter of 2012, with the two per cent decline being more than expected and attributable largely to a slowdown in demand from the Asia Pacific region.

For those that are buying however, Android retains its lead position as the most popular smartphone OS, with HTC and Samsung dominating the market between them. According to handset sales statistics released by research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Android’s global market share for the three months to April is just over 50 per cent, up from 44.6 per cent last year.

And finally, Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo has placed an offer to acquire all shares in Italian mobile internet content and apps provider Buongiorno for €224m. The bid has already gained partial acceptance as Mauro Del Rio, owner of approximately 20 per cent of the company’s stock, has entered into an undertaking with the operator’s German arm, DoCoMo Deutschland, to tender all of his shares for the offer.

Take care for now

The Informer

Telefónica claims its pan-European data roaming tariff is “up to ten times cheaper” than the price caps approved by Europe this week, with customers on the Movistar and O2 networks able to use up to 25MB of data anywhere across the 27 European Union member states for just €2 per day.

The tariff is being launched first in Germany in May and will be available this summer to roamers, wanderers, nomads, and vagabonds on the O2 and Movistar networks in Spain, United Kingdom, Ireland, Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The European Union approved legislation earlier this week, ruling that as of 1 July 2012, 1MB data usage should cost no more than 70 Cents – working out at €17.50 for the 25MB Telefónica is offering for just €2.

In the press release announcing its new data roaming tariff, Telefónica said: “Doing what is right by the customer has become our obsession”. This led the Informer to wonder what the company’s obsession had been prior to the tariff. Twilight hunk Taylor Lautner, perhaps? Tamagotchis? Desperately trying to find a picture of Coventry City’s Brian Kilcline so that it could finally finish its Panini Football ’86 sticker album?

That would be a bit weird, of course. But then the Collins English Dictionary does remind us that obsession is “often associated with mental illness”.

Not that the Informer is saying that everyone at Telefónica is psychotic. Rather its claim of obsession is just the latest in a long line of hysterical attempts from corporations to emphasise that they care more about their customers than anyone else could possibly understand. First it was a focus, then a commitment. Next it was a passion. Now it’s an obsession. What next – a crippling addiction?

Given that this is indeed a linear progression towards ever more ludicrous proclamations, the Informer offers up the following to any company that might like to use them to stress its commitment to the quality of the customer experience:

“Customer satisfaction matters more to us than the wellbeing of our own children.”

“We would gouge out our own eyes to see a customer satisfied. Although we wouldn’t be able to see them, because we’d have gouged our eyes out.”

“We would rather see a customer dead than unhappy.”

In other Telefónica news, the innovation arm of the Spanish incumbent has been somewhat less obsessive, finally getting around to offering its first retort to the third party messaging apps like WhatsApp, Skype and Viber that have been happily tucking into the operators’ lunch for the last couple of years.

The TU Me application, presumably named as such in foresight of the attempt to redirect traffic in some Chuckle Brothers-esque industry slapstick (to me, to you, to me, to you…) and not after Sainsbury’s own cheap pants clothing line, enables rich communications between app users on any network, not just Telefónica’s. It also has much in common with what is expected of the RCSe collaboration Joyn.

The Informer notes that the app will be “free to use at launch,” and “will continue to be developed with added value functionality,” which suggests premium functionality—and associated pricing—is in the post. As one of the Informer’s analyst chums pointed out, it’s not a particularly exciting prospect for consumers because it doesn’t offer anything that’s not already available and it’s not cross platform either. It is however, interesting to industry pundits like yours truly, in that the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger among other OTT services are set to take almost four per cent of voice and messaging revenues from the mobile operators in 2012.

TU Me may be app-based, but from a functionality perspective it foreshadows the network-based Joyn RCSe initiative, announced at MWC in February. TU today stands in direct competition with what is planned for Joyn, yet will likely in future be run in parallel. This is not the first time that Telefónica has pushed out its own version of a product on which a collaborative effort is in the works. O2 UK recently unveiled its mobile wallet service, while its Project Oscar JV with Vodafone and Everything Everywhere remains held up by EC investigation. Interestingly, TU, like the O2 mobile wallet, is designed to appeal to subscribers of competitor networks as well as Telefónica’s own customers. Looks like Telefónica’s playing both ends of the field.

And so is social darling Facebook, which sees its new App Centre as a revenue generator for its own platform’s applications by flagging up popular apps for mobile platforms. It’s one of those concepts that focuses on the discoverability of the diamonds in the rough, helping users sift through the mountains of rubbish to find the good stuff.

The App Center will showcase iOS, Android and HTML5 apps and if a mobile app requires installation, users will be sent to download the app from the App Store or Google Play. But the company will also be selling web-based HTML 5 apps for the Facebook platform, for which it will no doubt take a slice of revenues in a bid to demonstrate a solid revenue stream ahead of its monster IPO.

If you founded a multi-billion dollar valued business, the Informer suspects you can pretty much do what you want, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently demonstrated by splashing out $1bn on Instagram, purportedly without his board’s knowledge. The Zuck once famously met with initial investors hours late, still wearing his pyjamas. But he has lately come under fire for showing a lack of respect to money men by persisting in his hoodie and sneakers attire for meetings.

That doesn’t seem to have stopped him spending though, the firm added another acquisition to its books this week as it seeks to shore up its talent pool ahead of its imminent IPO. Glancee is another one of those mobile discovery firms. This one started in 2010 and claims that it’s not a dating app or a social network, but is designed to bring users into contact with others that share similar interests. The focus is on location enablement, with the app running constantly in the background and alerting users whenever others with similar profiles are in the immediate vicinity.

So doesn’t it tread dangerously close to the functionality that landed creeper app Girls Around Me in hot water not so long ago? Or is it different if you’re actively, rather than accidentally, giving up your location and profile details, bearing in mind that Facebook’s own obfuscated privacy configuration was to blame in the first place.

Things ain’t looking too rosy for the Instagram deal at the moment, though. Word is that the American Federal Trade Commission has begun a competition probe into the deal, which could delay it well beyond the expected IPO launch.

There was acquisition news from newly instated king of the handset hill Samsung as well, which has picked up US firm mSpot, a specialist in cloud storage and streaming of multimedia content. Having a strong services play is seen as essential for many handsets OEMs these days, and the deal will give Samsung a cloud-based services suite, catering to music, video and radio services for users of its devices. “mSpot’s entertainment services will be a key integrated offering on newly announced Samsung mobile devices,” the firm said. The cloud firm’s existing offerings are akin to digital locker services like Google Music or Amazon Cloud Player, allowing users to upload content and access it via a variety of web-enabled devices.

Digital content fell under the gavel in the Netherlands this week, as the Dutch senate passed a net neutrality law that makes it illegal for ISPs in the country to filter internet traffic. As a result, all traffic must be treated equally and may not be blocked or throttled. The Netherlands is the first European country to adopt such a law, and the second country in the world to do so after Chile.

The move ensures that end users have unfettered access to over-the-top services such as Skype, WhatsApp and Viber. What’s more, ISPs will not be allowed to alter prices to reflect the use of such services on their networks.

An exception clause to the law does allow for ISP filtering when requested by customers, a clause that remarkably was voted for accidently last year by the Dutch Labour party, after a sub-amendment was proposed by the Dutch Reformed Protestant Party SGP and Christian Democrat Party CDA. Senator Han Noten of the Labour Party said that this would be corrected by a further amendment, after fears that it could lead to internet censorship.

Ah, internet censorship, that old bugbear. Exactly one day after the net neutrality bill was passed, the Court of the Hague ruled that the Netherlands’ leading ISPs must block access to the Pirate Bay. The same ruling has been made in several other European countries of late, but the Informer is not quite clear on the beneficial impact of such a stance. It’s well known that maintaining such a block, technically, is impossible. There are always workarounds available for the pirates (Yarr!), which are charged with doing so much damage to the content industry. So this move doesn’t fulfil that objective. Moreover, if it is so easy for sites to be blacklisted, then why is there a need for controversial proposals like ACTA at all?

Anyway, the Netherlands was also in the crosshairs of Latin America’s own Daddy Warbucks, Carlos Slim, who tendered a bid for KPN via his operator America Movil. The LatAm firm is currently the third largest operator group in the world, in terms of subscriptions, according to Informa’s World Cellular Information Service (WCIS) and sought to take its stake in KPN from 4.8 per cent to 28 per cent, as it aims to expand its geographic reach.

Increasing the scope of its business in Europe would improve innovation within the business, and given that Latin America is a prepaid-dominated market, moving into Europe would help create more postpaid users for the firm.

The offer is symptomatic of the shift of power going on in Europe, where the regulatory environment is arguably hostile to telcos, weakening them sufficiently to make them quite an easy acquisition target.

Yet Slim’s offer was roundly rejected for “undervaluing the company,” although the chase may not be over yet. The Dutch firm undid another shirt button and said it will “seek further clarification as to America Movil’s intentions” and will “explore all strategic options.”

Slim after all, is a man with a big appetite. And so are readers of AWIW according to a certain application developer who contacted the Informer this week. After four months in development, the hotly anticipated and first-of-its-kind ‘Superfood-powered’ weight loss app for iPhone is expected to launch, the release harks, before jabbing an accusatory finger into your wobbling paunch, dear reader:

“We believe that your readers in particular would find our app of great interest.”

Never mind. The Informer understands; it’s your glands.

Take care

The Informer

For most of the industry that’s just not the real world. Motorola Mobility chalked up a loss of $86m for the first quarter of this year, $5m worse than its performance for the same period a twelvemonth back. There was a slight upside in a two per cent improvement in net revenues to $3.1bn and a three per cent hike in device revenues to $2.2bn, with 8.9 million devices shipped in the quarter, 5.1 million of which were smartphones.

Google’s acquisition of MoMo (a deal the handset vendor describes as a merger, which is a bit like saying the Informer merged with three slices of toast this morning) is still on for completion before the end of the first half, according to CEO Sanjay Jha.

But all the focus in the Android space this week was on South Korea’s Samsung, which unveiled the latest addition to its superphone portfolio, the Galaxy SIII. Word from the Informer’s analyst chums is that the new unit delivers its innovation in the way it integrates familiar functions, rather than with any new capabilities.

This is a phone that can tell when you’re looking at it, and doesn’t allow the screen to time out so long as your eyes are on it. A phone that knows it’s being watched—and likes it. It’s a voyeur’s dream. Take a photo of a friend and it can recognise that person from other images from a variety of environments and tag and store it accordingly. It will also offer one-click options to send or post it to a person or feed.

This is the handset vendor’s view of what users want, but anticipation and disappointment are frequent bedfellows and some analysts suggested that encouraging enthusiasm for the phone’s intuitive interface will be more of a struggle than its creation.

“If users try these features once or twice and they don’t work – they will say it’s useless,” said Informa handset specialist Malik Saadi. “That’s the risk Samsung is taking, as does any company that tries to be innovative. Added intelligence in the phone is very good, but it comes with risks.”

Saadi likened the concerns to the reasons that hindered the take-up of “predictive text”, noting that when predictive text was first introduced, many users opted to turn the feature off, and it only became popular when the technology was fine-tuned and became more intuitive.

Tony Cripps, Saadi’s oppo at Ovum agreed that the challenge that lies ahead for Samsung is how it is able to get users acquainted with the new functionalities.

“These are new types of features that people aren’t really used to – it’s going to depend on how Samsung is going to walk people through the out-of the-box experience,” he said. “You’d hope there’s some sort of wizard that helps people understand what these functions are about otherwise they could easily be lost.”

However, he added that, despite that, the phone will “almost certainly turn out to be the biggest-selling smartphone Samsung has ever produced”.

The Informer’s had a few out of the box experiences in his time—although he’s never had a wizard appear and help him through them, more’s the pity.

Samsung wasn’t the only handset vendor having a bash this week, as RIM’s Blackberry World event kicked off in Orlando. RIM dished out thousands of prototype versions of handsets built on the new Blackberry 10 platform to developers in a bid to get them busy on a range of services to complement the commercial iterations of the phones when they arrive. The firm also said it would give developers a minimum payout of $10k for any app that gets certified and meets a number of conditions, including generating $1,000 of income in its own right.

The obvious question is whether all of this enthusiasm and commitment is too little too late. It’s a brand new direction for the company. The new platform is not backwards compatible with the old one (the new phone doesn’t even have a hard keypad) and such a sweeping reposition is not easy when things are going well, let alone when they’re not.

In other handset news, a cross platform developer called Xamarin has announced that it has ported Android to C#. When Google built Android, the application environment was designed in Java, the language first developed by Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle. But in building the virtual machine called Dalvik that actually runs the application inside the host OS, Oracle claims that Google infringed upon some of its Java-related patents.

The court case is grinding on and could get very inconvenient and expensive for Google. Meanwhile Xamarin has spent nearly a year porting much of the Android foundations to C#, an alternative object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft. The big difference is that C# and the .Net runtime are covered by strong patent commitments preventing Microsoft from suing anybody that implements the technology.

The result, which Xamarin has made available this week, is a C# version of the Android OS called XobotOS. However, the developer said that XobotOS is only a “research project” and it does not intend to maintain it as a standalone project. So the OS is not likely to make it any further than the developer community any time soon. Xamarin said its research has yielded many tools necessary to replace some chunks of Java code with C# code where performance is critical and when C# can offer better solutions than Java has. The result is that much of the hard work is done should anyone want to fully develop a Java-free and potentially patent-infringement–free version of the Android OS.

Let’s have a look at some personnel news now, and Vodafone’s head of Europe is off to take the helm at second-placed French carrier SFR. Michel Combes will join SFR in August at a time when the French market is commanding a reasonable amount of attention because of the growth in popularity of punk MVNO Free Mobile, which does exactly as its name suggests.

Meanwhile Telenor chairman Harald Norvik has resigned following criticism of the sale of the country’s main commercial television channel from a Norwegian government minister. Telenor subsidiary A-Pressen held half of TV2 and sold it in January to Danish group Egmont, which already owned the other half. The Norwegian G, apparently, was unhappy that the stake didn’t go to a domestic organisation.

The Informer thinks it likely that Telenor’s travails in the Indian market might have contributed to the pressure on Norvik as well, with the firm forced to write down its Indian assets last month.

This week Telenor said that it is making plans to get out of the Indian market, as it is “almost impossible” for the firm to participate in the auction that the Indian regulator TRAI has planned to redistribute 2G wireless spectrum in the wake of the high profile licensing scandal. It may just be hot air, as a spokesman told Telecoms.com that it was waiting for information on the final design of the auction.

Sticking in India Bharti Airtel reported a 29 per cent drop in quarterly net profit to $189m for the three months to end March 2012. The firm blamed the costs of its 3G deployment as well as tax charges for the period.

For the UK operator of the T-Mobile and Orange brands, Everything Everywhere, the bogeyman was downward regulatory pressure on mobile termination rates. The firm’s service revenues dropped by 2.5 per cent to £1.5bn for the first quarter of 2012. CEO Olaf Swantee kept things upbeat, though, claiming industry-beating churn of 1.2 per cent.

In any case, the firm is far more focused on LTE, which it wants to launch ahead of the rest of the market later this year by refarming its 1800MHz spectrum. This will require Ofcom approval, and has already got a bristling response from EE’s competitors in the UK market.

The firm launched a publicity campaign to back its cause this week, publishing research that it commissioned from Capital Economics that 4G rollout will attract private investment worth £5.5bn into the UK economy, create or safeguard 125,000 jobs and add 0.5 per cent to UK GDP by the end of the decade (or £7.5bn.year). The Informer has no idea how these figures were reached. What jobs? What investment? Can the findings of this research that EE commissioned to support its bid to steal a march on competitors actually be verified or cross checked?

“The research shows that rolling out 4G will kick start a new cycle of investment and innovation in internet services and mobile devices for consumers, and productivity benefits for businesses,” said Mark Pragnell of Capital Economics, the report’s author, in accordance with his commission. “It also shows how giving Britain a world class digital infrastructure will make it more globally competitive and attract new business start-ups.”

It’s nothing to do with tax, then.

Take care

The Informer

One legend about the origin of the Olympic Games revolves around Zeus. It was said Zeus fought his father, Kronos, for control of the world, and when he won, the Greeks celebrated by holding a sporting event of the grandest proportions. And this week, with the proposed purchase of Cable and Wireless Worldwide (CWW), Vodafone is also looking to inherit the world.

For the £1bn that the operator is splashing out, it stands to obtain CWW’s fibre network, which covers 56 per cent of the UK population and an international cable network that stretches to more than 150 countries.

Vodafone reckons the deal will enable it to fulfil its international growth ambitions as the firm claims that by acquiring CWW, Vodafone’s Global Enterprise (VGE) unit will increase the scope of services it can offer enterprise customers.

It claims that its tie-up with CWW will create a “leading enterprise-focused operator” in the UK that will would capitalise on the growing opportunity in unified comms and offer UK enterprises the opportunity to purchase comprehensive services from a single service provider.

While it would be unfair to characterise the relationship between  BT and Vodafone as one akin to a father and son, the two share a rich history and BT can be perceived as the king of the UK’s telecoms market. BT recorded revenues of £15.6bn in 2011 – more than twice as much as the leading mobile operator – and is the provider to all of the country’s mobile operators’ fibre, for which it is paid vast sums to lease.

After Zeus defeated his father, a temple and immense statue were built in the valley below to honour him – it is one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Informer doubts, however, that Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao will be quite as lucky as that.

Of course, some things have changed drastically over the centuries. In those days, “money” was actually cattle, lambs, goats or pigs – live money that you could actually eat. But just as society moved from using livestock to metal coins and paper notes, it is again evolving to use digital money, and this week was O2UK’s turn to make headlines by announcing a mobile wallet service.

The operator has become the first 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 is available as an app for iOS, Android and RIM devices but has not been optimised for the iPad, and is not available for Windows Phone. Mobile and desktop web versions of the service are also on offer.

O2 is establishing partnerships with the UK’s top 120 online retailers (with offers from four available at launch) and will charge those retailers a per transaction fee. P2P money transfer will be free for an initial six-month period but the operator is considering levying a £0.15 transaction fee thereafter.

Latin American operator group América Móvil also launched a mobile money service in Mexico, aimed to serve the nation’s underbanked population. The service, called Transfer, will be launched by a joint venture between the operator and its banking partners: Citibank´s Mexican unit Banamex and local bank Banco Inbursa.

The firms said that their aim is to transform the mobile phone into a payment instrument for carrying out transfers, cash withdrawals and air time purchasing, in real time, 24 hours a day, through SMS messaging. Gemalto´s LinqUs mobile payment platform will underpin Transfer and the firm said it will also be responsible for the service development, support and operation of the service.

Staying with the historical theme, like Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, T-Mobile USA is getting its pound of flesh from AT&T, after the FCC approved the transfer of $1bn worth of radio spectrum as part of the break-up fee owed following AT&T’s failed $39bn takeover bid.

This transfer provides T-Mobile with a large package of AWS mobile spectrum in 128 Cellular Market Areas (CMAs), including 12 of the top 20 markets. AT&T is also obliged to give $3bn cash to its fourth-placed rival after the firms agreed to abandon the merger due strong opposition from regulators and competitors.

T-Mobile USA said it plans to use the spectrum to help it upgrade its network for higher-speed data services and has committed to spend $4bn on network modernisation to improve existing voice and data coverage, and to deploy LTE in 2013.

In India, we’ve seen a fable play out that even Aesop would be proud to tell. The telecoms market mired by corruption, is still paying the consequences of its 2008 2G scandal. The regulator TRAI has set a new reserve price for 2G spectrum for when it will be re-auctioned later this year.

The TRAI has now recommended an auction base price of Rs 36.22bn ($687m) for every MHz of nationwide spectrum in the 1800 MHz band. The reserve price is close to ten times more than the reserve price of the Rs 3.8bn paid in 2008, when the country held its initial spectrum sale, and is also more than prices set for the country’s 3G sale.

The announcement led to shares of leading operators falling on fears that the big potential payouts will have major consequences on their profitability. The moral? If a deal seems to ggod to be true, it probably is.

Nigeria’s telecoms market would do well to pay heed to such a tale, as it risks finding itself caught up in a similar corruption scandal, according to local reports.

The Nigerian Senate has opposed the Federal Government’s plans to liquidate Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (Nitel) and Mobile Telecommunications Limited (Mtel).

Director-general of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), Bolanle Onagoruwa, argued that Nitel/Mtel owes N351bn ($2.2bn) in debt, adding that the organisation has been dormant for over three years and its market share is almost zero.

However, Senator Gbenga Obadara, chairman of the Senate Committee on Privatisation, claimed that government officials have only made public the liabilities of Nitel and Mtel, while not disclosing how much the organisation is worth or the amount of debtors it has. He has accused the government of deliberately undervaluing Nitel and Mtel in order to sell them at discounted prices to personal associates.

Elsewhere, international operator VimpelCom is to exit the Vietnamese mobile market, selling its 49 per cent share of fifth placed mobile operator Gtel Mobile for $45m. VimpelCom, which is headquartered in The Netherlands, said the stake would be bought by Gtel Transmit and Infrastructure, “a related party” of Vimpelcom’s local partner, Gtel.

Meanwhile, Swedish operator group TeliaSonera has said it will begin charging for VoIP services by the end of May. The firm said that changes in customer behaviour and increasing pressure on voice revenues have led to the decision.

Lars Nyberg, president and CEO said that the firm needs to develop its business models and how it charges for services going forward, and there must be a stronger correlation between usage and pricing of data. The policy will be introduced in Spain within a month and in Sweden for new subscriptions during the summer, Nyberg added.

Back to Greek mythology, and King Midas is popularly remembered for his ability to turn everything he touched into gold. He appears to have shared an affinity with Apple, which once again, rather predictably, announced strong results for its quarterly results. Interestingly though, it appears that it has come at the expense of operators’ bottom lines.

Apple’s momentum has not been suppressed and it has once again posted sharp year-on-year increases in revenue and profit in its latest quarterly earnings. The firm’s revenue grew by almost 60 per cent year-on-year, from $24.7bn in 2Q11 to $39.2 in 2Q12. In addition, net profit almost doubled, rising to $11.6bn from the $6bn recorded in the same quarter a year ago.

Analysts said that Apple owes a great deal of its success to the substantial markups that it attaches to its products. David McQueen, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, told Telecoms.com of operator frustrations at the huge markups they have to pay on iPhone devices. “It costs Apple about $200 to make a single iPhone, but they’re selling to operators at around $600 to $700,” he said.

According to Aristotle, legend held that King Midas died of hunger as a result of his “vain prayer” for the gold touch. Apple’s reign, however, shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

Other firms that posted quarterly results included Ericsson, AT&T, Sprint and Etisalat.

Ericsson’s first quarter sales dropped four per cent to total SEK51bn ($7.55bn). The firm blamed an expected major decline in CDMA sales as well as lower operator network spending in regions with macro-economic or political uncertainty.

The vendor’s net profit, however, doubled to SEK8.8bn due in part to the one-off gain from selling its 50 per cent stake in handset joint venture Sony-Ericsson to Sony.

AT&T saw its consolidated Q1 revenues rise 1.8 per cent to $31.8bn.Operating expenses rose year-on-year to $25.7bn for the quarter, up from the $25.4bn sent in 1Q11 but operating income margin increased to 19.2 per cent from 18.6 per cent. Rival Sprint didn’t perform quite so well, reporting a net loss of $863m, almost double the net loss of $439m it recorded in 1Q11.

UAE-based Etisalat saw its first-quarter revenues increase by two per cent year-on-year to reach AED8.204bn ($2.23bn). Net profit declined by 0.5 per cent, however, to AED1.809bn. The rise in sales was due to an increase in revenue from international operations, which more than offset the decline in revenues from domestic operations.

Chip vendor ST-Ericsson was so disappointed by its quarterly performance, it seems to have chosen the drastic measure of axing a quarter if its workforce, and announcing it will and take a new strategic direction after posting a major drop in revenue and recording a deeper loss in the first quarter of 2012.

The joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Ericsson generated just $290m in net sales in 1Q12, 35 per cent less than the $444m it posted in the same quarter last year. The firm’s net loss for the quarter stood at $312m, which is 75 per cent higher than the loss it made in 1Q11, which totalled $178m.

The firm has now announced new directives to guide its future, which include slashing 1,700 jobs, transferring application processor activities to STMicroelectronics and taking additional measures to accelerate time-to-market.

Nokia has officially been dethroned as the world’s largest handset vendor, after Samsung posted  figures showing that it shipped 93 million devices in the first quarter of 2012, compared to Nokia’s 83 million. It’s the end of an era and can only get tougher at the top.

Finally, web giant Google has launched its long anticipated consumer cloud storage product, Google Drive. Building on its existing offerings, the service lets users create, share, collaborate on and save files in the cloud.

Cloud office software suite Google Docs is built into Google Drive, allowing users to work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Users can use their Mac or PC to access their cloud storage and can also download the Drive app to their Android phone or tablet. Google said that it is also working on a Drive app for iOS devices.

And that about wraps it up for the week – take care.

The Informer

Late this week, Nokia’s executive vice president of sales, Colin Giles, was offered up to those very Gods. Or in the parlance of the 21st century: “After many years of travel, Giles has decided to leave the company to be closer to his family.”

With the departure of Giles, Nokia said it will restructure the sales organisation by “reducing a layer of sales management” to ensure greater customer focus. It appears this ‘layer’ of sales management was exclusively occupied by Colin Giles. And just like with onions, the more layers you peel off, the harder it is to hold back the tears.

The pyre was built in the wake of first quarter results in which the beleaguered Finnish handset vendor continued to fight a battle on three fronts – smartphones, mid tier and low end devices. Operating loss for the quarter topped €1.34bn, down from a profit of €439m in the same quarter last year and a loss of €954m in the fourth quarter of 2011. Net sales were down to €7.4bn, from €10.4bn a year ago.

CEO Stephen Elop, said: “We are navigating through a significant company transition in an industry environment that continues to evolve and shift quickly. Over the last year we have made progress on our new strategy, but we have faced greater than expected competitive challenges.”

What this means is the company is out of its depth. Sales in the smartphone space stood at just 12 million units in 1Q12, less than half of the 24.2 million it shipped in 1Q11. While the feature phone space sales fell from over 84 million in 1Q11 to 71 million units in 1Q12.

Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media blamed the poor performance in the feature phone space on the proliferation of the grey market goods and competition from China. Meanwhile, the adoption of Windows Phone as the primary OS has not yet paid off.

However, in the view of Tony Cripps, principal analyst with Ovum, there is little objectively wrong with many of the Nokia products competing with Apple, Samsung and Google/Android that greater customer awareness and a big budget marketing drive could not cure. “And European carriers need to do a great deal more to assist the underdogs if they aren’t to be the engineers of their own self-fulfilling prophecy of handing all power over their subscribers to the duopoly of Apple and Google,” said Cripps

Vodafone and Telefónica were seen this week to be making a bid to keep their power, by communicating to their handset suppliers that support for RCSe/Joyn is now a key criterion for devices to be included in their portfolios. Telefónica has not quite gone balls out, saying that if a device does not support Joyn, it will not be dropped from the range. But Vodafone is taking a harder stance, saying that devices that do not support RCS/Joyn will find it “very tough” to get into the operator’s handset portfolio.

It could still take two to three years before all of the devices available in a market where there is already a high penetration of smart-phones and where all of the mobile operators have launched RCSe, are Joyn-capable, said Pamela Clark-Dickson, analyst with Informa. Also, device manufacturers are yet to reveal their plans. Yes, nine of the top ten OEMs by global sales have officially stated their commitment to enabling RCSe, but Apple has not yet indicated that it will participate in the initiative and the vendor has traditionally held all the cards when dealing with carriers. How this plays out will be interesting to see.

In terms of features, likely launch services will be contact capability discovery; chat; and file or video sharing. Richer features like video calling (how many times has this service been pitched now?) will come later.

Or sooner, if Orange has anything to say about it. According to chief executive for Orange Business Services, Vivek Badrinath, the crucial difference of the firm’s latest crack at video calling, over previous iterations of the technology is that this time it’s cloud-based.

There you go, stick two hyped up visions together and you get a business model. Badrinath continues: “Video as such is become much more important in interaction. The fact that people watch short videos means that the taste for video communications has increased.”

Eh?! Unfortunately, Mr B, the Informer believes there is a crucial ingredient missing from your recipe here: Cats. People have an appetite for watching short videos of cats caught in situations that deflate their typically arrogant and superior attitude. That doesn’t prove their desire to use video for talking to other humans.

Apparently, the service performs best when a dedicated telepresence room is used as these offer uniform conditions that optimise lighting and audio, which enhance the meeting experience. So will these rooms be available direct from Orange in 106 countries as part of the running costs of between €400-€4000 per month.

It’s like some throwback to 50′s advertising propaganda. Just imagine: in the future, there will be one in every home, right next to the fallout shelter and the landing pad for the flying car. “Oh George, darling, are you in the Telepresence Room again? What are you doing in there? You’re not video calling with Leslie Grantham again, are you?”

The Informer read an interview with science fiction author Neal Stephenson this week, with whom many AWIW readers are no doubt familiar. He was struck by a comment from the writer, who is apparently worried that the dark and gloomy outlook prevalent in many works of science fiction is undermining the genre’s ability to inspire engineers. Stephenson now describes himself as a pessimist trying to become an optimist and said: “If every depiction of the future is grim…then it doesn’t create much of an incentive to building the future.” It would, however, make for less gripping reading if Snow Crash were set in a harmonious future free from the effects of anarcho-capitalism.

Trying to distribute the future in an altogether more palatable fashion, financial services provider Barclaycard is pushing contactless payments via the futuristic medium of a sticker.

Yep, in light of the complete lack of NFC or contactless infrastructure in place, the PayTag sticker allows Barclaycard customers to make payments with any mobile phone – or object they put the sticker on – by tapping the device to a reader at the point of sale.

Barclays made its entrance in the mobile money space in February this year with Pingit; a person-to-person service for sending and receiving money using mobile phone numbers but has long been a champion of contactless payment services. Although the PayTag is a one trick pony, it may well help embed the concept in the minds of consumers.

As long as it’s actually used that is. Orange’s director of contactless services warned this week that near-field communication technology may struggle to gain consumer acceptance if retailers and service providers do not harness it to provide compelling services to end users.

Vincent Barnaud, said that while there is a long term need for technologies such as NFC to be used for authentication, there is no guarantee that NFC will become the technology of choice. This is despite increasing momentum behind deployment of the technology. Orange Group made a commitment last year to sell 500,000 NFC handsets – an ambitious target given the dearth of NFC-enabled handsets on the market at the time. Although it met that target, Barnaud cautioned that this offers no assurances that NFC will become widely used, and retailers and service providers offering NFC-based services will be the ones responsible for its take-up.

There’s also competition concerns about early movers in the space. The European Commission’s competition watchdog this week 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). It seems likely competitive concerns were raised by the one UK operator absent from the joint venture, 3UK, which would find itself shut out of the party.

The Commission VP in charge of Competition policy, Joaquín Almunia, is looking at the venture under EU Merger Regulations and said that the Commission’s initial investigation revealed that the joint venture – known as Oscar – and its three parent companies may have the technical and commercial ability and incentive to block future competitors from offering their own mobile wallet services to customers in the UK, or to degrade the quality of these competing mobile wallets so that they become less attractive.

Almunia’s colleague, “Steely” Neelie Kroes, vice president of the EC’s Digital Agenda, was up on stage at a summit in Lyon this week, dangling a pair of handcuffs sent to her by the Free Software Foundation. No, this wasn’t Richard “RMS” Stallman showing his kinkier side, this was Kroes and the FSF moving to “get rid of digital handcuffs” to protect the “openness of the internet”.

Kroes wants to make it easier for public authorities to use open standards online and said that the EU is working on providing guidance to do that. “We can deliver choice, competition, innovation, opportunity, freedom and democratic accountability. Look at what we could do if we opened up public sectors and put their data online.” The Informer, sceptic that he is, foresees lots of embarrassing data privacy gaffes if this comes to pass.

And on the subject of future gazing, Vodafone Ireland has agreed to refund customers a total of €1.2m after overcharging them for premium calls over the past three years. The company was found to have overcharged prepaid mobile customers for calls to premium phone lines, such as psychic hotlines, during the period from December 2008 through to December 2011.

“I see into your future…you will lose some money. But then you will come into some money.”

Take care

The Informer

But money talks and brand campaigns walk, so they say, and the Finnish vendor offered a reality jolt this week with the news that it is expecting to report a loss for the first two quarters of 2012. The firm said, in the roundabout way that firms like to deliver gloomy financial news, that the Q112 operating margin for its Devices & Services unit was “approximately negative three per cent,” which is approximately three per cent worse than was anticipated. Q2 will be similar or more approximately negative, it added.

Continuing the doublespeak, the statement added that Nokia’s Q2 could be affected by “timing, ramp-up, and consumer demand related to new products.” This may or may not mean that the phones are late, Nokia can’t build them at volume and nobody wants them. It added that “competitive industry dynamics” have damaged net sales for the Mobile Phones and Smart Devices units, particularly in MEA, India and China.

If competitive industry dynamics are harming your sales, it means you’re struggling to compete. And the fact that Nokia highlighted key emerging markets suggests that its lower end product is still being trumped by cheaper handsets from Asian vendors. Nokia’s stated strategy is to catch the upgrade wave in emerging markets with its Asha range and create a new generation of loyalists who will one day move onto its smartphone products. This aim appears, by the firm’s own admission, to be seriously challenged.

Stephen Elop, architect of Nokia’s renewed bombast, said the results were disappointing but reflected a company that is still “in the midst of transition”. This is a fair point and, on the upside, the Smart Devices margin is running at around 16 per cent. The firm reckons it will have shifted 12 million smartphones in Q1, once the counting’s done, but the ASP is just €220, so there’s not a lot of room for manoeuvre if those pesky competitive dynamics don’t ease up.

On the back of these results, Bloomberg called some analysts as part of a “News Survey” and asked them if they thought Samsung might have overtaken Nokia as the leading handset vendor in the world during Q1 this year. The analysts conceded that it was possible, leading to the headline “Samsung Probably Overtook Nokia in Phone Handset Sales”.

Now, call the Informer an old stickler, but the inclusion of the word “probably” in a headline such as this rather takes the story out of the news realm. It’s like some journalistic version of cyber-squatting, covering the bases of possible outcomes in the hope of future profit, in this case enabling the writer to triumphantly proclaim “I said this would probably happen!” if and when the event that is predicted as possible does indeed come to pass.

It certainly opens the door for a great deal more stories that are similar in nature. If, like the Informer, you subscribe to the philosophical belief that anything is possible and that precedent is useful only as an indicator of likelihood, then the world is your news oyster.

You might like to report that Microsoft will probably invest a few billion in Research in Motion; certainly there’s a persistent rumour doing the rounds. RIM can’t shake its black cloud at the moment, although that was given some shocking perspective this week when one of its senior channel managers in the UK died from injuries he received after being stabbed on April 3rd at a London party thrown by the company to mark the launch of its new messenger product.

Sony is another handset vendor looking to effect a turnaround and this week it announced that it is to cut 10,000 jobs as part of a streamlining designed to refocus it on core product lines, including smartphones. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and the firm had to first concede that it expects to lose $6.4bn for the twelve months to March 31st this year.

It tried to cheer itself up with the launch of a touchscreen watch that connects to the wearer’s Android device via Bluetooth, offering updates on things like incoming calls and text messages. Sony said that a number of apps specific to the watch are also available in Android’s Play store.

For anyone who grew up in the 80s and regularly tuned in to KnightRider, the idea of a watch that can be used to control other things retains considerable fundamental cool, despite the show now being so obviously crap. So, too, does the idea of a sentient, talking ’82 TransAm. Oddly the third leg of this televisual stool, Michael Knight/David Hasselhoff, is no longer so appealing, neither as an idea nor in reality.

Back to Android, though, and the Informer discovered to his chagrin this week that he is being charged for OTA updates to the OS. Last weekend a system message popped up on the Informer’s Samsung Nexus S asking if he wanted to upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich. The update was made following the yes-click and, shortly after installation, the Informer received a text message from O2 saying that he had now exceeded his monthly data allowance.

The update was 211MB and the Informer has a monthly 500MB limit. Having used almost half of this just upgrading his OS—an upgrade controlled by the operator—the Informer found himself throttled! Some people like being throttled, but this is a family weekly wireless round up, so we won’t go there. But the Informer does not like being throttled and was pretty irritated to find that he was given no option to delay or divert the upgrade to save some of the data for which he pays O2 every month.

The only upside is that, this being O2’s network in central London, the Informer didn’t really notice that he was being throttled, because the data rates he usually gets are so poor. It was only when he tried to use the uplink that it became deeply frustrating, as nothing would move. It raises an interesting question over whether users should have to foot the bill for their OS upgrades. It certainly feels unreasonable from a consumer’s perspective.

Lots of things do, which is why global churn has hit its highest ever level at 44 per cent for 2011, according to Strategy Analytics. The average mobile customer switches service provider every 27 months, more than twice as frequently as they did a decade ago, the firm said this week.

Among the more fickle consumers in the prepaid market, churn has increased dramatically, as promotional SIM activity in developing markets has made customer loyalty virtually obsolete in some countries.

Strategy Analytics said that average prepaid customer lifetimes have halved over the last five years, to only 17 months. By contrast, average postpaid customer lifetimes of 67 months have improved from the depths of the global recession in 2008/09, since customers show an increased propensity for upgrading with their current provider instead of switching to better deals elsewhere.

But with smartphone subsidies stretching operator resources, the postpaid market is where churn is more expensive to manage and the researcher notes that operators are finally looking at new device purchasing models, like instalment plans or leasing, that can alleviate pressure. But of course, consumers have become ‘addicted’ to the subsidised handset model, and the researcher notes that it will be difficult to change this.

Looking at the rise in churn levels on a more granular basis, statistics from Informa Telecoms & Media show that prepaid churn levels for operators worldwide, rise from 5.52 per cent at the end of 2010 to 6.33 per cent at the end of 2011. Postpaid churn is much more stable, at 1.4 per cent at the end of both 2010 and 2011, with blended churn at 3.8 per cent end-2011, up from 3.4 per cent end-2011.

That’s a global ‘Oh No!’ for the industry, so here’s a global ‘Yay!’: Ovum reckons that operator revenues – fixed and mobile – exceeded $1.91tn in 2011, up from $1.79tn in 2010. The firm added that while carrier capex also rose in 2011, late-year economic jitters depressed growth rates.

Economic worries caused budget cuts in the final part of the year, which affected service provider capex. Overall for 2011, capex grew nine per cent to $306bn, due to double-digit percentage growth in the first three quarters, however, capex declined by one per cent year-on-year in 4Q11.

The top ten spenders were AT&T and Verizon from North America, China’s three big carriers, NTT, and four European operators with multinational operations: DT, Telefonica, Vodafone, and Orange. Principal analyst Matt Walker said that things continue to look cautiously positive: “Signs have emerged in 2012 of a slowly improving economy, and further improvement should help reach the revenue goal and capex growth targets of three and six per cent respectively,” he said.

Let’s go and have a look at India now, where some players just want out. In the wake of the recent 2G licensing scandal, S Tel and Etisalat have announced the closure of their operations, and advised their users to find someone else to carry their traffic. But the Indian regulator, TRAI, has told them – along with Loop Telecom – that they must continue offering services until June 2^nd this year.

Meanwhile Bharti Airtel’s going nowhere, and has announced India’s first LTE service, in Kolkata. In 2010, Airtel won BWA license spectrum in Kolkata, Karnataka, Punjab and Maharashtra and is currently working towards rolling out LTE networks in these territories as well.

Naturally the service will be dongle-only, with the dongles supplied by ZTE, which is also rolling out the 4G network and managing it for Airtel’s Kolkata operations.

In other LTE news, Nokia Siemens Networks has found its way to the top of the ABI 2012 LTE base station vendor matrix, above Huawei and Ericsson in second and third, and Alcatel Lucent in fourth. The matrix aims to measure overall leadership in LTE networks, and tracks sales as well as contributions to IP. “Nokia Siemens Networks was number one in our implementation score on the back of their impressive number of LTE/RAN contract wins and they were also number one in our score for innovation thanks to the extension of their Liquid Radio roadmap to now encompass Flexi Zone,” the firm said.

NSN also announced a contract win with StarHub in Singapore, that will see it deploy LTE infrastructure in re-farmed 1800MHz spectrum. The firm said it expects the first phase of the network to go live by the end of this year.

In other spectrum news, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), has issued draft guidelines as it prepares to allocate spectrum for its digital dividend auction. The regulator is selling spectrum licences for blocks in the 700 MHz and 2.5 GHz bands in the biggest spectrum sale to be held in the country in a decade.

The 700Mhz spectrum will be sold in nine 10MHz blocks and will cover the entire country, while the 2.5Ghz spectrum will be sold in 14 lots broken into 11 regional blocks.

Stakeholders have until Wednesday, 9 May 2012, to submit their responses to the draft rules. A further discussion paper will be published in the second quarter of this year, which will focus on licence commencement matters, including when the spectrum will become available.

Finally this week, the Informer noticed as he printed something from the website of UK newspaper The Guardian that Kodak is sponsoring the site’s print function. Kodak, in 2012, is a printing firm and not as it was in the Informer’s youth, the gateway by which many people entered the world of photography. Kodak is now in Chapter 11, while Instagram, the digital photo sharing platform that encourages users to add filters to mobile phone images making them look like they were taken on old Kodak point and shoot camera, has been valued at $1bn by the acquisition team at Facebook. That’s the difference between actual faded memories and pretend faded memories.

Take care

The Informer

Aussie PM Julia Gillard, commented this week the Government is obliged to “do its utmost to protect [the NBN’s] integrity and that of the information carried on it.” This includes barring Huawei from any participation.

Gillard isn’t the only one who has doubt over Huawei’s restraint when it comes to sensitive national information. Last year, the Chinese firm was locked out of the tender process for the US nationwide emergency communications network, and banned from acquiring server firm 3Leaf. Its joint venture with Symantec was dissolved last November because the US company feared losing out on information from the US government, according to the New York Times.

There have been similar situations in Taiwan and India, and Huawei’s offer to supply the infrastructure for cellular coverage in London’s underground rail network was also dismissed.

Of course, these countries could just be plain paranoid. Or maybe people just don’t understand China, which is the view of Huawei’s Australian spokesman, Jeremy Mitchell.

“If we were found to do one thing wrong, to have one back door in any of our equipment, our company would fold overnight. There’s no way in the world that we would ever risk that… I think anyone who would argue that the Chinese government would ask us to do that shows a…lack of understanding of modern China,” he told ABC’s daily current affairs radio show AM.

Informa analyst Tony Brown wrote in a comment that is well worth reading that Huawei’s treatment stemmed from the Australian government’s desire to be closely aligned with its US counterpart. But Brown pointed out that Huawei has plenty of other business in Australia, making this latest decision inconsistent at least, and that the anti-China stance over the NBN could have repercussions down the line for Chinese-Australian trade.

Here in the UK, operators have been hitting out at regulator Ofcom’s proposals to allow Everything Everywhere to use its existing 1800MHz spectrum to offer LTE services ahead of its competitors. O2, Vodafone and 3UK are not happy that they will likely have to wait until 2013 before they can deploy LTE services, while, under the proposal, Everything Everywhere will be able to do it this year.

O2 makes one interesting argument; that once Everything Everywhere is in a position to offer LTE services, it could attempt to delay the 4G auction, while it has a monopoly position for LTE in the UK. Vodafone UK CEO Guy Laurence, meanwhile, accused Ofcom of “taking leave of its senses”, by accepting the application from Everything Everywhere.

Meanwhile, the European Commission continued its war on prices for roaming across the EU. The European Parliament and Danish Presidency of the Council of Ministers provisionally agreed a deal to revamp the market, forcing operators in Europe to lower costs when their customers use their devices abroad.

The plans, which will be voted on in the European Parliament in May, could see roaming prices lowered to 29 Cents per minute for calls and 70 Cents per MB for internet access in July 2012, if approved. They will then decrease further to 19 Cents per minute for calls and 20 Cents per MB for internet access by 2014. The European Parliament aims to bring roaming tariffs into line with domestic prices by 2015.

And smartphone bedfellows Microsoft and Nokia have pledged to each invest up to €9m in a development program to drive training, support and startup business opportunities through the AppCampus program at Aalto University, Finland.

The AppCampus program will cater to the Windows Phone ecosystem, as well as Nokia’s legacy platforms, including Symbian and Series 40, “to create a new generation of self-sustaining mobile startups.”

From May, AppCampus intends to attract thousands of application proposals from students and entrepreneurs from all over the world and will supply support, training in mobile technology, design and usability, and funding to create innovative new mobile apps and services.

With mobile money a hot topic in the industry right now, UK payment provider Monitise has got a lot of tongues wagging with its attempt to create the “world’s largest pure-play mobile money company”. The firm will pay $173m to acquire its US counterpart Clairmail, conditional upon US regulatory and shareholder approvals.

“The future of payments, the internet, retail and social networking is all mobile,” said Alastair Lukies, group chief executive at Monitise, whilst rubbing his hands, presumably.

Should the carriers be in charge though? Especially when they have squandered more than $58bn due to inadequate billing systems. The accusation came from Juniper Research, which warned that the figure, which represents over six per cent of operators’ global revenues, is only going to grow, unless carriers address the issue.

The report suggests that under a ‘nightmare scenario’ whereby operators fail to implement any remedial measures over the next five years, the scale of losses could rise five-fold by 2016.

“Despite their initial costs, revenue assurance and fraud management systems demonstrate a strong case for return on investment,” said Windsor Holden, the Juniper report’s author.

Talking of nightmare scenarios, RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins has said that the Canadian firm will conduct a strategic overhaul aimed at refocusing the company on its enterprise service roots.

He said that he had spent the last ten weeks conducting a “personal reality check” on the business, concluding that “substantial change is what RIM needs”. But Heins conceded simultaneously that many of the firm’s traditional strengths are no longer valued as highly as they once were by its customer base. This represents rather a serious issue, doesn’t it?

A rush of stories appeared online claiming that RIM was planning to ditch the consumer business altogether, despite Heins saying that he intended to redouble the firm’s efforts in the high end consumer space. But the firm’s decision to refrain from offering any quantitative guidance from here on in does not exactly smack of confidence.

And that about wraps it up for the week.

Take care,

The Informer

Far more interesting, the Informer was thinking when Stephen Elop unveiled the PureView at MWC last month, would have been some evidence of a tablet strategy. This week a tiny snippet of interview material from a Finnish magazine called Kauppalehti Optio was taken by many news outlets to constitute some such evidence, with Nokia design chief Marko Ahtisaari quoted as saying he is spending a good portion of his time working on a Nokia Windows tablet.

Based on the quality of the Lumia 800, the Informer would very much like to see such a device in the market, although surely the key metric by which its desirability would have to be judged is the extent to which people would be prepared to stand outside retail outlets through the night in a bid to be among the first to get their hands on it.

This has become the norm for Apple product launches, and so it was this week, just around the corner from Informer Towers, at the Apple Store on London’s Regent Street. In fact there were two queues of diehard brand loyalists mingling, with another bunch of lonely weirdos waiting overnight to buy some new plimsolls from NikeTown.

The folks at London PR agency Dynamo like to get up early to quiz the queue constituents about why they’re queuing and provide an exit poll. This week they announced that the queue, with 397 people in it at 07.58, was significantly smaller than that for the iPad 2, which drew 632 people.

There are some great stats here. The Informer’s favourite is that, while 54 per cent of people said they had queued just “to be there” (which is a similar to the reason many people give for attempting to climb Mount Everest), a substantial number – 28 per cent – said they didn’t know why they’d queued. Presumably they’d spent the last few days inexplicably and obsessively fashioning iPad shapes out of mashed potato and shaving foam.

The other interesting figure was that, while 61 per cent of respondents said they were motivated to buy the new iPad because of its retina display, 12 per cent said they wanted it because it had “4G”. The fact that there are no LTE networks in the UK apparently didn’t bother them.

The Informer’s own extrapolation suggests the people in the sneaker queue are more grounded and honest. He doubts that any of those youths were under the impression that their new shoes would make them run faster, or that they would deny their motivation was simply to look a bit cooler in front of their peers.

But perhaps there will be LTE in the UK sooner than we might have thought. Local regulator Ofcom has accepted an application from Everything Everywhere to refarm a portion of its 1800MHz spectrum to be used for LTE. Ofcom said the move would not distort competition and could benefit consumers, especially in rural areas. The rest of the UK ops have got four weeks to respond to the Ofcom decision.

Let’s not forget about UK Broadband, though, which has pledged to launch a TD-LTE service in May this year.

In other LTE/spectrum news, Kenyan operator Safaricom has threatened to pull out of a project to build an LTE network in collaboration with its domestic competitors if the market regulator insists that the network runs in the 2.6GHz band. Safaricom wants to use 700MHz spectrum in a bid to save deployment costs. It’s my way or the highway, the firm’s corporate affairs director Nzioka Waita told the African Business Daily.

Over in Italy, Ericsson has scored an LTE deal with 3 Italia that will see the carrier launch the new technology before the end of the year. The deal will also see 3’s HSPA network upgraded, by the end of this month, to support theoretical highs of 42Mbps. Ericsson spread its services wings a little further this week, with the acquisition of the broadcast services division of Technicolor €19m.

3’s competitor Telecom Italia is among a group of leading international operators that could find themselves under investigation for collusion by the European Commission, meanwhile. Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, TI and Telefónica. There were reports that the alleged collusion began in 2010, with GSMA confirming that it had received correspondence from the Directorate General for Competition.

The suggestion is that the ops were motivated by the threats from OTT players. Perhaps they should look to Sony to solve their problem, as the firm is one of the only “credible alternatives” to the dominance of Apple, at least according to Pierre Perron, head of Sony Mobile in the UK and Ireland.

Perron told Telecoms.com that “who owns the living room will win the war” and that the future of success in the smartphone space will be dependent on the integration of that smartphone with a coherent experience across television, PC, tablet and gaming devices

Sony has end to end capabilities that are unmatched, Perron said, quoting outgoing group president Howard Stringer’s assertion that the firm’s footprint allows it to do everything from producing a mobile phone to winning an Oscar for its film content.

The difference between Sony and Apple, he said, is that Sony is happy to work with the operator community to help it maintain relevance in the value chain. This, of course, owes much to Sony’s dependence on operators’ retail channels as a means to sell handsets to consumers. In the UK, Vodafone has decided not to range the firm’s new Xperia product, although the rest of the carriers are backing them.  Read more of the interview here.

Mobile financial services is big news at the moment, and this week was no different, with a flurry of relevant announcements. The Digital arm of Telefónica demonstrated its commitment to the mobile payments space on Thursday, announcing investment in, and a strategic agreement with, m-payment firm Boku.

The move is set against the background of Telefónica’s plans to introduce an m-wallet serviceand the carrier has labelled the investment in Boku as a “significant development”. The partnership opens up access for Boku to Telefónica’s global footprint of 25 markets and 300 million customers. In return, Telefónica gets access to Boku’s network of merchants, specialist knowledge in mobile payments, and carrier billing functionality for virtual goods.

“Payments are going mobile and we want to be at the forefront of this trend,” said Matthew Key, chairman and CEO of Telefónica Digital.

As Telefónica was getting stuck in, Nokia was getting the hell out. The firm announced this week that it is to withdraw from the mobile financial services space as it has been judged non-core. Initially the news related to services that Nokia has been running in India. But it emerged that the decision relates to the group’s wider MFS strategy.

“Things have changed for us,” said Mark Durrant, comms director at Nokia.  “We’ve renewed our corporate strategy over the last 12 months or so and that, combined with the business environment we find ourselves in, has meant that the mobile money services would not be core to differentiating our products in the future. We certainly see the value of being able to facilitate mobile payments, but the need for us as Nokia to be driving a service really wasn’t core.”

Later in the week Paypal announced a mobile payment solution aimed at small businesses. The solution, called PayPal Here, which resembles Square, allows businesses to accept payments by swiping cards with a fully encrypted thumb-sized card reader, use a phone camera to scan and process cards and cheques and also allows businesses to invoice directly from the PayPal mobile app.

According to David Marcus, vice president of mobile at the firm, the solution’s key differentiator is that it comes from a trusted brand in the online payments industry with more than 100 million customers around the globe. The service is available in the US, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong. It will open to all other merchants in those countries next month, and PayPal said it will announce the availability of the solution in more countries soon.

The eBay subsidiary recently also unveiled a newly re-designed and re-architected digital wallet at US arts and digital festival SXSW, which it will start to roll out from spring this year.

Finally this week, down-but-not-quite-out US wholesale  player LightSquared has hired a celebrity lawyer to try and overturn the FCC’s decision not to let it launch service. Theodore Olsen represented George W Bush in the Supreme Court case against Al Gore and is now onside at LightSquared, presumably not on a no-win-no-fee basis. He started his attack with some long words, calling the FCC “egregious” and adding: “On the face of things, it looks to me like the government has acted arbitrarily after inducing the expenditure of an enormous number of resources,” a statement which probably earned him thousands of dollars.

Take care

The Informer

CBOSS, for those who missed the story, is a Russian OSS/BSS company that has exhibited at MWC for the last 12 years. Throughout that time the firm has used attractive young women, often scantily clad, as its sole marketing tool—with undeniable success. The CBOSS stand, featureless as the Siberian tundra when the girls aren’t on display, has usually got a solid crowd of suited execs standing around it, salivating.

This year, though, CBOSS went a stage further and offered delegates the chance to have a sit-down glass of champagne with one of the girls at its party, in exchange for the delegates’ views on the OSS market. The stunt was blunt and seedy in its promotion—and it inspired a muscular challenge to the old assertion that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

The only place busier than the CBOSS stand was the Twittersphere’s moral high ground as @OutragedOfTelecoms jostled with @InThisDayAndAge and @Won’tSomebodyThinkOfTheChildren as they sought to publicly decry such exploitative antics.

In the wake of the furore, GSMA revealed that it had paid a little visit to the CBOSS stand at the end of this year’s show and torn up the firm’s 2013 contract. The company, and the girls, are not to return. This allowed The Outraged to puff out their chests and clap one another on the virtual back as if they’d personally driven a stake into the vampire heart of the global sex trafficking industry. The original objections may not have been attention seeking but the celebration was self-aggrandisement more naked than the CBOSS girls.

Worthy of special mention is UK broadsheet The Telegraph, which paid tribute to its reader stereotype by spewing insinuation and moral righteousness while completely disregarding some key facts. The paper’s site ran a story with a headline that utterly without justification implicated BT – presumably in a bid to summon a modicum of relevance to its readership, and despite a somewhat bemused quote from BT at the close of the story – and referred to GSMA as the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association!

It also ran a video of the dancing CBOSS girls with an ad in front of it, thereby actually making money from the very girls it purported to defend and the very activities at which it had taken such offence. The next day, revelling in the news that CBOSS had been booted out of MWC, it claimed to have “revealed” CBOSS’ scheme, which is hilarious given how much publicity the scheme generated.

But just how busy was the moral high ground in reality? This is the thing about Twitter; it’s pretty easy for retweets to simulate volume of opinion. But a retweet doesn’t necessarily represent advocacy of the opinion retweeted. Furthermore, some of the Outraged even admitted they hadn’t even seen the CBOSS stand and were experiencing their disgust at a remove; thanks to other people alerting them to something salacious that they needed to be disgusted about. Indeed a quick search shows that, on Twitter at least, not too many people were sufficiently repulsed to make it known. One agent provocateur even launched a Twitter campaign to get the Russian firm reinstated.

And for those who were moved to protest: where was all that heart-on-sleeve outrage last year? Or the year before that? CBOSS is guilty of what CBOSS has always been guilty of; shamelessly using attractive girls to try and drive brand awareness in a tacky, lowest-common-denominator kind of way. It’s not very nice and it never has been. But when crowds of suits with SLRs were leering and photographing the CBOSS girls in previous years it was, apparently, acceptable.

There may well be rumours of more going on behind the scenes of this and many other industries. But until anyone wants to substantiate them, it’s legally pretty brave of the Outraged to talk so publicly about ‘pimping’.

Nor has there been any censure of the many other companies that—this year and in years past—employed attractive young women from modelling agencies as stand decorations, or to stalk the halls in high heels and suggestive outfits designed to compensate for the drab utility of the products and solutions they were promoting.

The Informer isn’t defending CBOSS, before anyone in Camp Outrage spasms to that conclusion. It was a tasteless stunt. But there is a double standard at play here: If a stand is going to be taken – in both senses – then perhaps there should be a rule that only full-time, industry-relevant employees of each exhibitor can be allowed to populate booths. No hired-in glamour. It would get the Informer’s support if the GSMA wants to put it in place.

GSMA hasn’t actually offered a public condemnation of CBOSS’ promotional activities, saying only that there were “a number of things” that led to the contract termination. What those things were is between “our two companies”.

It should be noted, though, that Thursday this week was International Women’s Day, and that GSMA has a high profile mWomen initiative that deals with some very serious issues. So perhaps CBOSS fell foul of its own bad timing – and the openness with which it employed a sleazy kind of hospitality strategy of which it is surely not the only proponent.

But International Women’s Day is only once a year, while Make as Much Money as You Can Day happens every 24 hours, so the Informer wouldn’t be surprised to see a meeker, less glamour-based CBOSS stand next year, with less exhibitionism and more contrition.

Back to the mWomen initiative, though, and GSMA found that women in emerging markets have an especially raw deal, as outlined its report, ‘mWomen Portraits’. The report shows that, in developing nations, women have not been able to take advantage of mobile communications, largely due to cultural reasons. In many cases, simply because their husbands won’t allow them to have a mobile phone. According to the GSMA’s research, 74 per cent of married women in developing nations who did not want a mobile phone said it was because their husbands would not allow it. Furthermore, 64 per cent of married mobile owners were concerned that their mobiles “make their husband suspicious.”

The report also included case studies of women who had been fortunate enough to be “allowed” to have a mobile phone, and those participants spoke of how it allowed them to keep in touch with friends and family, saving the time and effort to travel for face-to-face interaction, in countries where there is little road infrastructure and public transport. Those women also spoke of the peace of mind a mobile phone offers them, knowing that they can contact loved ones, and be contacted by them, in the case of an emergency.

In developed markets, among the most interesting findings to do with IWD came from the GMI Ratings’ Women on Boards Report, which undertook research looking at the differences between men and women in the world’s boardrooms, using data from more than 4,300 companies in 45 countries. It revealed that, in the telecommunications industry, just 12.27 per cent of representatives in companies’ boardrooms are women; something adequately reflected by the population at events like MWC.

This week the industry has been catching up on the sleep it lost at that event, nursing their aches and pains and using the week to recover—but the news has not stopped.

NSN has found itself in the headlines quite frequently of late, due to its ongoing restructuring programme, which sees the firm cutting 17,000 roles and aiming to reduce operating expenses and production overheads by €1bn by the end of 2013. At MWC, CEO Rajeev Suri explained how the vendor infrastructure market has been consistently underdelivering on expectations, and outlined plans for change, and now, the firm has announced that it has sold its fixed-wireless broadband business.

The vendor announced this week that privately held Spanish firm, CN Tetragen, has bought the business, although no financial terms were disclosed. It also revealed plans to outsource a portion of its own activities to Finnish managed services player Tieto.

NSN said that 240 employees from its OSS and Subscriber Data Management divisions based in Tampere and Espoo will transfer to Tieto, which it described as a long-term partner. Pekka Soini, head of NSN’s Finnish operations, said that the move was in line with the firm’s aim to refocus on a smaller number of core operational areas. The transfer is expected to be completed in April this year.

Meanwhile the conclusion of one of the vendor’s own outsourcing deals, with Brazilian mobile operator Oi, has allowed it to cut another 3,500 workers from its roster.

Spain-based carrier Telefónica has launched a European talent incubator – Wayra –  in a move clearly designed to try and align the brand with young people and the start-up community.

José María Álvarez-Pallete, chairman and CEO of Telefónica Europe, was on hand at Wednesday’s launch event to talk about Europe’s “lost decade,” where over the past ten or so years the regional GDP has been moving backwards. He spoke of a “lost generation,” of rising unemployment and lost innovation in the face of stellar growth from the US and China, creating a ‘brain drain’ of migrating talent, while Europe struggled with an entrepreneurial deficit and an environment where people are reluctant to start new businesses.

In the vision put forward under the Wayra initiative, which is already incubating its first batch of start-ups in Latin America, Telefónica will open academies around Europe, starting in the UK in May, then moving into Dublin, Germany and the Czech Republic, catering to education and apprenticeship options for teens and upwards.

Google has stepped up its efforts to cater to users in a multi-screen environment with a cloud-based entertainment portal, Google Play, that pushes music, movies, books and apps on the web and Android phones and tablets. The marketplace will form an umbrella over existing services including Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore.

“Google Play is entirely cloud-based so all your music, movies, books and apps are stored online, always available to you, and you never have to worry about losing them or moving them again,” said Jamie Rosenberg, director of digital content at Google.

Over in Asia, the Telecoms Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released fresh guidelines ahead of the country’s 2G (re)auction, after the Supreme Court of India cancelled the 122 licences that were awarded in 2008, due to corruption in the spectrum sale process.

The consultation paper follows draft guidelines that were issued last month, and aims to simplify licensing rules, encourage mergers and acquisition and provide greater transparency in the spectrum allocation process.

Across the border, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has announced that it is delaying its 3G spectrum auction, which was due to be held on March 29, 2012, due to “great interest shown by operators through their representatives in World Mobile Congress”. The PTA said that it will announce the new dates for the auction in due course.

The Informer remembers a time long ago, when as a lad, he used to play football in the school playground. Sometimes there would be a stroppy child, grown frustrated from being on the losing team.These children would have done well to learn their limitations, like Orange which announced this week its intention to pull out of the emerging markets it operates in unless it can become a market leader in those countries.

Marc Rennard, Orange’s executive VP for Africa, Middle East and Asia, said at a roundtable briefing at MWC last week that Orange is looking to increase revenues from its emerging markets to €7bn by 2015, compared with €3.4bn today. However, if the firm cannot become the number one or two operator in those markets, then Rennard said it will pack up and head for the airport.

Financial services provider Visa Europe said on Wednesday that it intends to take a 15 per cent stake in the Mobile Money Network (MMN) – a joint venture between Monitise, Best Buy Europe and Carphone Warehouse, and telecoms entrepreneur Charles Dunstone (as a private investor).

During MWC last week, The Informer spent some time with Bill Gajda, Visa’s head of global mobile, and Alastair Lukies, CEO of mobile money enabler Monitise, where he heard that Visa Europe and MMN will implement a number of m-commerce initiatives in the UK in 2012. The main thrust here is to bring a platform for bank-grade mobile shopping to the mass market.

The Informer saw that, at MWC, mobile commerce was an area that got a huge amount of focus at the show, and is looking forward to reading the April issue of MCI, which will concentrate on the topic and promises to provide an in-depth look at what the future holds for m-commerce.

Sticking with this area, A survey carried out at MWC by mobile commerce and messaging specialist Sybase 365 has found that 81 per cent of mobile industry executives believe that NFC will not emerge as a driver for mass adoption of mobile payment services for another two to five years. Less than ten per cent of delegates polled said they believed that NFC payments would become mainstream in the next year.

The firm said that 38 per cent of respondents believed that consumer concern over the security of personal financial information exchanged during mobile transactions will represent the most significant barrier to widespread adoption of mobile payments.

The same number expressed concerns around the development of standards and the need for collaboration between the different stakeholders in the mobile payment ecosystem.

“Material advances for mobile payments will only come about when banks, operators and retailers can converge on a business model, and with it true industry interoperability, leading to a widely embraced mobile payments system,” said John Sims, president of Sybase 365.

Telecoms.com and Mobile Communications International will be running a special focus on Mobile Financial Services in April. To get involved tweet the team at @TelecomsHibberd, @TelecomsJames and @TelecomsSahota or email them at firstname@telecoms.com

We started this week with MWC present and we’ll end with one of the all-time high points of the show’s past. The Informer wonders who else has fond memories of Douglas Adams’ keynote speech back in 2001. Adams would have been 60 this year if he was still around and you can bet he would have had a great deal of interest to say. You can read a transcript of his 2001 speech here but if you haven’t got time, here’s an interesting quote from it:

“I don’t want a diary and an address book in my cellphone and another one in my PDA and
another one in my computer. I just want one and I don’t care where it is. I just want
everything I use to be able to get at it.” Sound familiar?

Take care

The Informer