Ukrainian Emergencies Minister Viktor Baloga has advised the public to run six miles every morning and bathe in cold water to keep winter illnesses at bay, which may sound like controversial advice after 100 people are reported dead in temperatures of -35c.

Car manufacturer BMW wasn’t faring much better in terms of PR, after sponsoring the cold weather front sweeping Europe and calling it the ‘Cooper’ after its Mini brand. The stunt backfired after dozens more cold-related deaths in Germany.

But a handful of Hungarian nationals have become trapped in warmer climes after the country’s national airline, Malev, ran out of cash and folded on Friday morning. Planes that are stuck overseas look set to stay there without enough cash to fuel up. The state offloaded the airline in 2010 to focus on other ventures, one of which came to fruition this week when a consortium formed by state-owned firms Magyar Posta, the Hungarian Electricity Works and a unit of the Hungarian Development Bank successfully bid for the biggest block of spectrum in the country’s 900MHz band auction. The move will bring a fourth operator to market alongside the existing three – Magyar Telekom, Telenor Hungary and Vodafone Hungary, which also won frequency blocks in the auction.

Moving next door and 3 owner Hutchison Whampoa has agreed to buy Orange Austria in a deal worth €1.3bn as the next round of industry consolidation begins to take hold. France Telecom recently agreed to sell its Swiss business, Orange Switzerland, to Apax Partners and has also indicated it is interested in disposing of its Portuguese holdings.

In the UK Orange has merged with T-Mobile under the banner of Everything Everywhere, the T-Mobile arm of which this week announced what it claims is the country’s first “truly unlimited” mobile phone plan. The “Full Monty,” which sounds to the Informer like a filling breakfast, allows unlimited internet browsing, unlimited SMS messages and unlimited phone calls with no fair usage restrictions. Tethering, VoIP and peer-to-peer file sharing are all allowed, with prices for the plan start at £41 per month, with a free BlackBerry 9900 handset, or customers can pay a £29 up-front fee to have an iPhone 4S 16GB handset with the deal.

While T-Mobile’s busy giving everything away, the Supreme Court of India has been busy taking everything back, controversially cancelling 122 telecoms licences that were awarded in a 2008 spectrum sale.

The government has claimed that corruption marred the sales process, with former cabinet minister Andimuthu Raja currently in jail awaiting trial for his role in the scandal. The Supreme Court has declared the licences are null and void and has ordered a re-auction to be held within four months. The existing licenses have been revoked, although operations may continue while a resolution is found, although it doesn’t look like the previous buyers will get their money back. Norway’s Telenor, which was allotted 22 pan-India licences during the sale, looks set to be one of the affected.

On the subject of abuse of power, a dossier appeared on the website of Research in Motion this week giving an insight into shareholder concerns that the top RIM jobs held by Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, who shared both the CEO and chairman posts, gave them too much control. With the firm struggling to keep afloat on choppy seas, both men have been replaced (although they remain on the board) by Thorsten Heins, former chief operating officer, as president and CEO, and Barbara Stymiest, as chair of the board.

On the subject of keeping things afloat, Facebook has finally come out with its long awaited IPO filing, which if you believe the breathless fervour accompanying it, will hit a region far north of silly money when it happens. The filing was accompanied by a saccharine cover note from Mark Zuckerberg about how the company “was not originally created to be a company” but was “built to accomplish a social mission.” Amid the blurb was something about the company’s business model, along the lines of “At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want.” No mention of advertising and profiling there, but here’s a tip from the curmudgeonly Informer – if you’re not paying for a service, you’re the product being sold.

Selling out to the glitzy marketing experts? Ask John Browett, who is transitioning from head of struggling UK electrical retailer Dixons to vice president of retail at Apple, where he will oversee the company’s plans for world domination direct to consumer.

And the fruity firm is doing something right, as Apple ousted LG as the third largest mobile phone vendor by volume following 4Q11 results up from number five just a year ago, putting it just behind Nokia and Samsung.

One thing that Apple is known for is excellent customer service, so keep your eyes peeled for our bumper MWC issue of MCI which tells you everything you need to know about managing the customer experience.

Japanese firm Sony, which has recently taken charge of its own mobile device arm, Sony Ericsson, is trying on some of these skills to reboot the company’s image by appointing PlayStation brand champion Kazuo “Kaz” Hirai as its new president and CEO. The former president of the Consumer Products and Services Group, credited with making PlayStation a household name, will assume his new role on April 1, replacing current president and CEO Sir Howard Stringer, who will become chairman of the Board of Directors in June.

That’s all for this week. Keep warm.

The Informer

Such is the regularity with which the iPhone vendor hoovers up mind-boggling sums of the folding stuff that the Informer has commissioned a new key for his office computer that says Applepostsrecordprofits, which will save him from having to type it out word by word every three months.

In the last 92 days of calendar 2011, Apple grossed $46.33bn, which is more or less equivalent to the GDP of Slovenia for 2010. Net profit for the quarter was $13.06bn, which exceeded by some distance the total revenue Google managed to gather for the same period, which was a dash over $10bn.

How long can this tremendous growth continue? Revenue was up 75 per cent year on year, while profit more than doubled. With 37 million iPhones sold, shipments were up 128 per cent year on year. And there was a 111 per cent upturn in iPad sales, with 15 million units shipped. The popularity of this increasingly mass market duo is filtering back to Apple’s desktop business as well. The firm’s PCs retail at a substantial premium to most Windows-based machines, but sales were nonetheless up 26 per cent at 5.2 million units.

With the iPhone 5 certain to come later this year, and a TV play also widely anticipated, you can expect the big numbers to keep on coming.

How others must envy such a performance. Nokia, still the handset market leader, leaked €954m for the final quarter of 2011, compared to an operating profit of €884m for the same period in 2010, and a €71m loss for Q3 last year. CEO Stephen Elop made a valiant effort to accentuate some positives, trumpeting sales of more than one million Lumia smartphones; Nokia’s new flagship handsets based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform.

But the firm’s struggles in the lower end of the market—which has sustained its leadership during wilderness years in the high end—show no signs of letting up. The long, drawn out demise of Symbian continues, with Elop confirming that the platform is losing out to low-priced smartphones. Nokia is revising its forecasts for Symbian-based unit sales downwards. Exactly how far, Elop didn’t say.

Nokia really has its work cut out. The Informer has had a good play with the Lumia800 and it’s a great device (the pre-commercial model that he has is a bit temperamental) but will it really spearhead a turn-around? The Finnish vendor also announced this week that it had flogged its 1.5 billionth S40 device, one of its new Asha feature phones. These will prove just as important as the high end product for Nokia in 2012.

Elsewhere in the device vendor community, Samsung netted $3.5bn for the final quarter, contributing to annual profit of $12.2bn. This is down 15 per cent year on year, and the Korean player’s endless legal spats with Apple are probably taking their toll. Motorola Mobility, meanwhile, lost $80m for the quarter, which was the amount it made in profit for the same period in 2010. Again legal fees played their part, with Moto also citing tougher competition.

Japanese vendor NEC is also feeling the pain, announcing late this week that it is to cut 10,000 jobs at home and abroad, on an expected annual loss of $1.3bn. Sales are down across both networks and devices, and flooding in Thailand last year hit a number of the firm’s factories, NEC said.

In operator land AT&T topped the losses table, spurting a monumental $6.7bn into the ether during the final quarter of last year. Revenues were up at $32.5bn and with 9.4 million smartphones sold, the firm had its best every quarter in retail terms. But its planned takeover of competitor T-Mobile, which was blown out of the water by US antitrust authorities, is now coming back to haunt AT&T, which for some reason that the Informer will probably never understand, agreed to pay T-Mobile $4bn if the deal didn’t go through.

And let’s not forget about the network vendors. Market leader Ericsson took a hit in Q4 last year – the last one it will ever take as a result of the performance of Sony Ericsson as the Swedish player offloaded its stake to Sony last year. But it was also affected by a slowdown in network spending in North America and Russia, and its decision to take lower margin business in Europe, according to CFO Jan Frykhammar.But the company showed good recovery for the full year, notching up a 12 per cent increase in revenues year on year to SEK226.9bn (€25.6bn), while profits rose 12 per cent to SEK12.6bn.

Now, Research in Motion has been in the doldrums for some time now, with a poor performance resulting in calls from shareholders for co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis to step away from the mess. Well, those shareholders got their wish this week as the two leaders tendered their resignation and RIM appointed insider Thorsten Heins to the chair.

Recent times might have been tough for RIM but that should not eclipse the fact that Lazaridis and Balsillie had an enormous and positive impact on the industry and the global enterprise market. That said, the wording of the press release, in which the two sought to save face, was faintly ridiculous.

“There comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognise the need to pass the baton to new leadership,” Lazaridis was quoted as saying. In RIM’s case that time is clearly when things are going tits up, you’re losing out to the competition and shareholders are calling for your resignation.

Here in the UK there was a minor kerfuffle when it was revealed that O2 had been inadvertently providing owners of websites with its customers’ mobile phone numbers without telling them. Oops.

While this was caused by an error in O2’s systems, it did force the firm to reveal the fact that it deliberately provides number details to certain website owners that it counts as ‘trusted partners’. This, it said, is to enable them to manage age verification for adult content (yeah, right. Are you over 18? Yes? Ok then.), to bill for premium content and to use services like its Priority Moments voucher scheme. O2 customers hadn’t realised this and some of them were a bit perturbed, especially given that O2 didn’t want to reveal exactly who its trusted partners are.

Anyway, between the 10^th and 25^th of this month, this special privilege was extended to the owner of any website browsed by O2 customers. Although it remains to be seen whether or not any of these website owners actually realised it. Quite possibly not.

Under the section head News You Could Be Forgiven Thinking Had Already Happened, given how quiet the WiMAX Forum is these days, that body announced this week that chairman Ronald Resnick is to hang up his boots. Resnick was the standard bearer for WiMAX back when there were some who felt it had the potential to grow into a worldwide contender to LTE. In 2008 the WiMAX Forum predicted 133 million users by 2012. In August last year it announced that the 20 million mark had been passed.

Resnick leaves some big shoes to fill and stepping into them will be former Airspan marketing chief Declan Byrne.

And that’s about the size of it this week.

Take Care

The Informer

Sony-Ericsson posted a staggering net loss of €207m ($265m) for the final quarter of 2011. Only last year, the company posted a €8m profit for the same quarter. Sony executives must be sweating like George Lucas being told that his next film can’t be another Star Wars or Indiana Jones sequel, when they realise the uphill struggle ahead of them. They have the unenviable task of resuscitating this joint venture that the Japanese firm will soon own outright.

The terrible three months at the end of last year took Sony-Ericsson to a total loss of €247m for the full year – a stark contrast with the profit of €90m it made in 2010, and the firm’s revenue also dropped by over €1bn over the course of the year.

A new hope is also needed for aspiring US LTE carrier LightSquared, which received a blow to its ambitions of setting up a wholesale LTE network as a report by the executive committee for Space-based Positioning Navigation & Timing (PNT) declared that there are no practical solutions that would permit the LightSquared broadband service to operate in the next few months or years without significantly interfering with GPS

LightSquared claims that there are several measures that can be taken to mitigate or remove the interference between its licensed ‘L band’ 1600MHz spectrum and that of the GPS devices, but the PNT is having none of it, with the report concluding that, “as a result, no additional testing is warranted at this time.”

UK operator Everything Everywhere also received bad news this week too, after being told that regulator Ofcom has changed its mind about how to go about auctioning 4G spectrum in the country. Everything Everywhere, the resultant company formed from the merger of T-Mobile and Orange in the UK, will no longer be guaranteed sub 1GHz spectrum for its LTE services.

Ofcom outlined new proposals to extend 4G coverage to at least 98 per cent of the population, and is also keen to get at least four operators competing on 4G services in the UK and had previously planned to a assign a slice of the 800MHz spectrum band to Everything Everywhere for its LTE services. It has now withdrawn that pledge as it believes the benefits of operating LTE at 1800MHz, in some instances, are higher than operating at 800MHz, as the 1800MHz band allows more capacity.

The operator now plans to divest some of its 1800MHz spectrum, as instructed by the European Commission for antitrust purposes, ahead of Ofcom’s spectrum auction later this year. Competitor 3UK will be watching proceedings closely, as it has been guaranteed spectrum in the 800MHz band by Ofcom, unless it, or a new operator that enters the market, acquires some of Everything Everywhere’s 1800MHz spectrum.

Meanwhile, Yoda was not the only famous ‘green’ representing the telecoms industry this week. The Informer was invited to a ZTE event to launch its new Tania Windows Phone handset, where UK rap artist Professor Green performed. Just a few weeks ago, another UK artist, Plan B performed for Huawei’s launch, and after having witnessed both, the Informer would now very much like to see the artists perform a “rap battle” representing their respective sponsors, which is sure to throw up some epic rhyme patterns like:

“Don’t push me, I’m close to losing my head – I’ve got LTE, while you’re still struggling with EDGE.”

Perhaps next month in Barcelona?

And with that annual trip to Barcelona just over five weeks away, the Informer heard many mutterings from his colleagues that the Mobile World Congress website was often unavailable. Either it was struggling under the load of eager registrants or it had gone dark in support of protests against the controversial SOPA and PIPA bills under consideration in the US.

Wikipedia and Reddit lead the charge and with around 10,000 websites switching off for 24 hours. The effect seems to be positive, although the bills aren’t dead yet. The big concern, in case you missed it, is that while the bills are designed to curb online piracy, they potentially give Big Business leeway to go about censoring the web for its own ends.

Either by coincidence or design, the FBI shut down one of the web’s biggest file sharing sites, MegaUpload, on Thursday, citing copyright violations. Federal prosecutors have accused its founders of costing copyright holders more than $500m in lost revenue. Kim Schmitz, AKA “Kimble”, the co-founder of MegaUpload who is no stranger to controversy, has been arrested along with six others associated with the site.

Of course for every action, there is a reaction, and in this case it was notorious hacking group Anonymous that took up the mantle. There’s since been a flurry of attacks on government and music and film content producing industry websites as the Guido Fawkes mask wearers stick it to the man.

Also this week, Samsung chose to bite the hand that feeds it, one might argue. The firm is currently the market-leading smartphone manufacturer thanks primarily to its success with Android handsets, but it’s looking to ease its reliance on the platform and strengthen its own mobile OS, Bada, in order to compete more aggressively with Google.

The Korean manufacturer will merge Bada with Intel-backed open source platform Tizen, as it looks to consolidate its position in the global smartphone market. Tizen supports smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, netbooks, and “in-vehicle infotainment” devices, and the Tizen APIs are based on HTML5 and other web standards. The first release of Tizen and its software developer kit (SDK) is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2012.

European telecom operators were also told this week that they risk being sidelined in the global cloud computing market by aggressive North American and Asian operators spending billions on an international presence. Research from Informa’s Telecom Cloud Monitor revealed that European operators accounted for only seven per cent of the $13.5bn that services providers spent on cloud assets in 2011. North American and Asian operators accounted for 90 per cent, or $12bn of the total.

Uncertainty around European security and privacy laws, coupled with continuing economic weakness, are responsible for stalling investment, according to Camille Mendler, principal analyst at Informa. However, the European Commission aims to define a common legal framework for cloud computing in 2012. And European operators are supporting local innovation, with half the cloud services launched in 2011 relying on European cloud technology vendors.

Over in Asia, the Indian government has announced plans for all of its departments and agencies to develop and deploy mobile applications to provide all of their public services through mobile devices, to the extent that is feasible on the mobile platform. Meanwhile, neighbouring Pakistan’s Telecommunication Authority (PTA) announced plans to hold the country’s spectrum auction in March of this year. The body said that the licenses issued will be technology neutral and the auction winners will be able to deploy 3G or 4G-LTE technologies.

Elsewhere, research conducted by PayPal owner eBay also revealed that service revenues or fees from m-commerce transactions are expected to reach $37bn by 2016, bolstered by mobile remote payments for physical goods and services and international mobile money transfers. These two elements together will be worth over $25bn in 2016, accounting for two thirds of the total m-commerce market, according to statistics released this week.

There’s been another development in the ongoing patent wars that, quite frankly, has passed the point of embarrassing. Apple lost an interim ruling in the US, after the firm attempted to sue Motorola Mobility for infringing three of its patents. The Informer is encouraged by what he sees in Germany though and is hoping Ze Germans can set a precedent. Over there, there are ongoing lawsuits filed from both Apple and Samsung against the other, both gaining momentum and both arguing that the other’s products be banned from the marketplace. Hopefully, they’ll both “win” and neither will have their products on the market – maybe then they’ll learn a lesson and instead, just focus on innovation.

Apple has also publicly identified nearly all of its suppliers and invited an outside workplace conditions group to inspect them. The news came soon after 150 workers from Apple supplier Foxconn climbed to the roof of one of its factories in China and threatened to commit suicide.  Just under two years ago, a series of suicides committed by Foxconn staff shook the consumer devices world, so the Informer hopes this inspection might improve working conditions for staff clearly at their wit’s end.

On a lighter note, in an apparent show of generosity, UK broadband provider Virgin Media has announced that it is to double the broadband speeds of most of its customers at no extra cost. The ISP, which provides hybrid cable connectivity to four million households across the UK, said that it will double the top-line speeds of all those on its 10Mb, 20Mb, 30Mb and 50Mb packages, while increasing those already on its 100Mb package to 120Mb.

And with copper theft on the rise due to the value of the metal used in communications equipment, a component manufacturer has developed an alternative cable which uses less copper. This will hopefully result in less cable theft being committed, which is often cited by rail companies as the reason for the Informer’s trains being delayed or cancelled for his commute – so this news is doubly welcomed. And that’s about all for the week.

Peace out

The Informer

New York’s Equitable Life building, perhaps the world’s first skyscraper, was finished in 1873 during a five-year recession, while the Empire State Building was built in 1931, as the Great Depression was settling in. Then as the early 1990’s recession hit the UK, One Canada Square was finished in London, and as the dot com bubble burst, Taipei 101 scraped the skys. Most recently, the Burj Khalifa was finished in Dubai, just as the country started struggling. Now the Informer harbours some concerns as Western Europe’s tallest building, the Shard, is due for completion in May of this year.

But not to worry, there’s still gold in them mobile payment hills, or so online auction giant eBay would have us believe. The company, which owns payment platform PayPal, is predicting global sales of $8bn via mobile on eBay alone up from $5bn last year, while PayPal is projecting that its global mobile total payment volume will be $7bn in 2012.

“According to our research, mobile retail will be worth a massive £19bn to the UK economy by 2021,” said Angus McCarey, UK retail director for eBay.

Meanwhile Visa was trumpeting the opportunities in the space via NFC-enabled smartphones, having certified new devices from Samsung, LG and RIM for use with its PayWave mobile payments application. The PayWave application is installed on a secure SIM card and allows users to make payments at points of sale using a contactless payment terminal. Research house the Yankee Group predicts that the value of NFC-based transactions will grow significantly, from $27m in 2010 to $40bn in 2014.

EBay is banking on the rollout of 4G to help drive its mobile sales expectations, after UK regulator Ofcom published some revisions for its plan to auction 4G spectrum. The UK is lagging many other countries with regards to 4G deployments and latest plans to boost mobile broadband coverage to 98 per cent of the UK population could help with the adoption of richer services.

The Ofcom proposals have met with mixed responses from the operator community however, and there’s an awful lot of confusing information out there. But more on that here…

Sticking in the UK for a moment longer and MVNO Giffgaff is taking a hard line approach to users that it feels are taking the Michael. The organisation, which piggybacks on the O2 network, discovered that less than one per cent of its customers are accounting for over a third of its total mobile internet data use across its entire network. “The way in which these users are using their data is simply not economically sustainable for us – both in the cost of the data they are using, and in the business time spent on investigating and working with these cases,” the company said.

Those users who have been found to be among the one per cent responsible for the heavy data usage will first have a data bar imposed upon them, which they may elect to have removed. A second offence will result in termination of the service completely.

If you’re one of those people that just can’t help themselves, then Las Vegas is probably not the place to be, but that’s where most of the industry’s consumer facing pundits were this week, as monster gadget fest CES kicked off for another year.

Among the highlights were a rash of much anticipated LTE devices, which should help drive adoption in many mature markets, again with the exception of the UK. One such device was unveiled by Finnish handset giant Nokia, which showed off the latest in the Lumia Windows Phone portfolio – the 900.

But rather more interesting was Nokia’s acquisition of Norwegian start-up operating system (OS) developer Smarterphone, which makes Linux-based feature phone operating systems. There’s still plenty of opportunity in the lower tier markets, which is where Nokia still has a stranglehold, although since development of Symbian was farmed out to Accenture last year, the question now is what will become of the once mighty OS?

Much the same could be said of RIM, which was showing off the latest versions of its flagship operating systems for both smartphone and tablet devices. The struggling PlayBook tablet is to get a software overhaul with OS version 2.0, due out in February and the much requested native email application will finally make an appearance, alongside deeper integration with social networking tools and address book. On the handset side, BlackBerry OS 7.1, rolling out this week, delivers enhanced sharing functionality, with the addition of NFC-focused updates such as BlackBerry Tag; an update for the popular BBM messaging service; and mobile hotspot functionality via tethering.

Chip shop Intel is making a foray back into the mobile market proper through a multi-year deal with handset maker Motorola Mobility, which will see the companies work together on a range of smartphones and tablets over the coming years, beginning with an Android smartphone based on the Atom chipset later this year.

Intel also used CES to showcase an Android smartphone, the Lenovo K800, based on the Atom chipset, which will be available in China in the second quarter. The company better hope the launch goes better than that of the Apple iPhone 4S on Friday, which was cancelled at the very last minute after the crowd outside Apple’s flagship Beijing store got so big the police were called in to disperse the mob.

The crowd was swollen by large gangs hired to snap up as much stock as possible so unscrupulous dealers could then resell the devices at a markup when stocks were low. When Apple called off the physical launch due to security concerns the crowd pelted the store with eggs and the police were called in.

Stepping back to CES and LTE handsets for a moment, Sony dropped a bombshell, announcing that Sony-Ericsson will be renamed Sony Mobile Communications after its decision to part ways with Ericsson last year. The company also unveiled its first own-brand handset, the Xperia S, which will be launched globally in the first quarter of 2012. The handset will initially feature the Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, but will be upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS during the second quarter.

The move also gives a glimpse into Sony’s intentions in the smartphone market as it looks to offer an ecosystem of devices to consumers. The Xperia S is PlayStation-certified and benefits from access to Sony’s music catalogue, Music Unlimited, which offers 12 million songs, and Video Unlimited, which offers the latest Hollywood blockbusters and TV shows from major studios.

Erstwhile partner Ericsson meanwhile was busy pulling together an intellectual property commando squad, rejigging its line up so that the company’s chief intellectual property officer, Kasim Alfalahi, will now report directly to president and CEO Hans Vestberg. The Swedish company is also reorganising its Licensing and Patent Development department with the aim of creating a larger revenue stream from its IPR, targeting an increase in IPR revenues above the SEK 4.6bn ($662m) net revenue generated in 2010.

Ericsson claims to have the industry’s strongest wireless IPR portfolio with 27,000 granted patents covering a range of technologies, such as wireless access and WLAN. It has already signed more than 90 license agreements with firms in the industry and as wireless access is now being added in new types of devices.

And sure enough the patent wars are still going on, as Korean vendor LG Electronics this week signed a patent agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio for LG’s tablets, mobile phones and other consumer devices running the Android or Chrome OS platform.

These towers just keep getting taller and taller.

Take care

The Informer.

Without the usual early January news blast from gadget fest CES this year – the show has shifted back a week – the Informer was seriously considering a rambling review of his holidays. But fear not, early Januarys are apparently ripe for crystal ball gazers to peddle their wares and there’s been no shortage this year. Next year might be a different story however if you subscribe to the Mayan Long Count calendar, which apparently predicts some catastrophic event on December 21, 2012.

Such an event could turn out to be a good thing for struggling Canadian vendor RIM, allowing the Blackberry maker to save face perhaps. The word on the grapevine is that co-CEOs and co-chairmen Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie could be co-ousted from their roles by Barbara Stymiest, an independent director who joined RIM’s board in 2007. She is reported to be the leading candidate to replace the duo as shareholders seek to turn the company around. An internal review is due to be completed by the end of January and a decision will be announced by the end of February. The question now is whether RIM will last long enough to see any changes come to fruition. Another OEM merger on the cards perhaps?

2012 will also see Chinese industry players continue their international expansion apace, with China Telecom’s European arm becoming the first carrier to launch consumer facing services outside of China after striking an MVNO deal with UK carrier Everything Everywhere this week.

The deal was secured through Everything Everywhere’s mobile virtual network aggregator (MVNA), Transatel, and takes the company’s portfolio of MVNO partnerships to 24 in the UK. It will launch in the first quarter of this year and will specifically target Chinese residents and businesses in the UK, as well as Chinese students and tourists. France and Germany are next up for the carrier according to some quarters.

It’s going to be a big year for customer service, or rather more accurately, for the customer experience, as telecoms firms face the dawning realisation that the customer experience is not so much a differentiator as an actual enabler for the rest of the business. The Informer’s chums on telecoms.com are doing a big focus piece on the matter ahead of MWC, which has already begun its slow creep from the Desert of Dismissal to the Horizon of Impending Reality. With price pressures making the mobile market increasingly sensitive, operators cannot continue to invest and encourage innovation and so must reverse the trend and win back customer loyalty based not on price, but on service and brand value. Watch this space for more.

Customer management specialist WDS is putting its bets on more creative, and generous, data sharing policies; smartphones from new market entrants; and consumers turning to more over the top (OTT) type services.

While hardly earth shattering predictions, they make sense, the Informer thinks, having met with Arieso CTO, Michael Flanagan, this week, it’s clear that already hungry handsets are getting even hungrier. Findings from a company report identify that the typical Apple iPhone 4S user is equivalent to two iPhone 4 users and three iPhone 3G users in terms of data demand, while Android is picking up the pace with the Google Nexus One by HTC, which has twice the data calls per subscriber compared to the iPhone 3G. Moreover, ‘extreme’ users are becoming even more extreme, with just one per cent of subscribers now consuming half of all downloaded data. The vast majority of these are dongle users treating their connection as they would fixed line broadband but 33 per cent are smartphone users and the remaining three per cent are tablet users. Usage in these cases tends to be stationary rather than mobile, so Flanagan suggests that these users might be prime targets for femtocells, or in some cases, just getting rid of.

Interestingly, Flanagan suggested an application of such data mining as Arieso is performing, is one helping them recommend devices to customers. “Say a certain customer comes in to upgrade his device to a smartphone and tells you where he spends most of his time. The operator looks on a map and sees the usage profiles for that particular area. The result might mean some devices are more appropriate ones for this person to move towards than others. It’s an informed piece of advice and can be used to manage expectations at the point of sale.”

The likeness is really rather good

Back to WDS’s predictions though and the firm expects Google might lobby for a patent laws overhaul, keeping one of the biggest headline grabbers in 2011 at the top of the columns in 2012. WDS predicts that Google will orchestrate a mass collaborative lobbying effort to bring about regulation of software patents to restore competitive technology design and evolution in the smartphone market. After all, the web giant has just acquired a further 188 granted patents and 29 published pending patent applications from IBM, following a similar acquisition of 1,023 patents from IBM in September in order to combat lawsuits from rivals such as Apple and Microsoft.

On the subject of patent and copyright, those crazy Swedes, always in the news over the Pirate Bay or some other copyright issue, have officially recognised the Church of Kopimism as an actual religion. According to the faith, information is holy and copying is a sacrament so the churches members argue they should be free to copy material without fear of persecution.

And finally, the ever litigious Apple has taken affront at a Chinese built action doll, which, the Informer thinks, bears an uncanny resemblance to the firm’s late leader, Steve Jobs. The doll was due for release in February but Apple claims it owns the rights to the likeness of Jobs and is taking the Chinese firm to court. Of course, the dolls are already all over eBay and selling for upwards of $135. Barbie’s Ken must be quaking in his plastic loafers.

Take care

The Informer

The phones were originally slated for delivery in the first quarter of 2012, but they’re plain not ready, according to the firm’s co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, because of delays in chipset availability. The whole concept of co-CEOs reeks of internal strife and the two revealed that they would be paid an annual salary of just one dollar in recognition of the firm’s travails.

Vodafone’s group head of marketing for terminals, Peter Becker-Pennrich, offered an unsentimental assessment of the firm’s prospects and leadership recently, when he told Telecoms.com: “If you have strong leaders who take credit for taking  company to where it is now, they really struggle to see that they shouldn’t be the ones who take it further forward. We’ve seen the same thing with Motorola, we’ve seen it with Nokia and now we’re seeing it with RIM. I’m not sure whether RIM entirely understand the magnitude of the problem that they have. I don’t think it has completely sunk in.”

Quarterly profit of $265 million looks bleak in comparison to a figure of $911m for the same quarter in 2010 and it’s anyone’s guess what that number will be in a year’s time. Such a lengthy delay in the new devices’ availability could be disastrous for RIM, with the iPhone 5, further product from the rejuvenated Nokia/Microsoft pairing and undoubted advances from the Android camp sure to fill the gap between now and late 2012. It might not be a matter of ‘when’ so much as ‘if’.

It’s pretty cold in Canada right now – and in London – but it’s warmer in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, the new fiefdom of Ericsson CTO Hakan Eriksson. From February next year, Eriksson – a company lifer with 25 years notched up, the last nine as CTO – will be the head of the firm’s operations in the three southern hemisphere markets.

It’s hardly what you might call a sideways move, so the only question is whether it’s a reward for time served, or an admonishment for some unspecified misdemeanour. Almost certainly it’s the former; Eriksson has an Aussie wife, perhaps making him one of the few Swedes familiar with the rules of cricket, and in a statement said that he had long harboured a desire to move closer to the region.

It will be a big change in pace as he swaps responsibility for global technology leadership and a Silicon Valley uniform of khakis and polo shirts for a regional market where total population is some distance below 30 million and a pair of thongs.

In other personnel news, former CEO of Safaricom, Michael Joseph, has joined Vodafone to head up a new mobile payment unit. Under Joseph’s leadership, Safaricom famously developed and launched the genre-defining M-Pesa mobile payment scheme in Kenya. Joseph told UK broadsheet the Telegraph that Vodafone’s plans are focussed on the Indian market.

Australian carrier Telstra announced this week that it has secured new operating licences in Singapore and Japan, enabling the expansion of its regional ambition. The company will deliver services directly to customers in both markets, rather than teaming up with local partners, as its licences allow it to own infrastructure facilities in each of the countries.

In Singapore, Telstra can own and operate voice and data networks, systems and facilities infrastructure within the country, after it secured a ‘Facilities Based Operator’ licence offered by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. The licence will also allow Telstra to build the local backbone required to support its plans for new cable submarine capacity to Singapore.

It is now also able to own and operate large scale telecoms circuits and facilities in multiple sites in Japan, after Telstra Japan K.K., has been approved by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications for a ‘Registration Type’ licence.

The company was also recently awarded three licences in India, to provide customers with international long-distance telecommunications and ISP services. Within the next six months, it will begin offering services in seven cities with a network tailored to suit the individual needs of local business.

“For international customers, Telstra will now have greater control over its services. Specifically customers will enjoy access to a more comprehensive suite of connectivity and managed services, better network performance, complete monitoring, local contract billing capabilities, and in-country service centre support,” said Tarek Robbiati, group managing director for Telstra International Group.

Telstra CEO David Thodey recently told delegates at an event in Melbourne that the operator no longer sees itself as an Australian company, and wants to begin being recognised as part of the Asia community.

Staying with the regional theme, Nokia Siemens Networks – which  no doubt would prefer to be recognised for something other than its current weight loss programme – announced this week that it is deploying circuit switched fallback to enable voice services for Japanese carrier KDDI, which is planning to launch LTE by the end of 2012.

But it also announced that it is selling its broadband access unit to US firm Adtran. The deal, which is expected to close by April 2012, will see 400 NSN staff move over to Adtran. This is in addition to the 360 heads moving over to Dragonwave, which bought NSN’s microwave business, and the 300 workers off to NewNet Communication Technologies, which is taking a gamble on the firm’s WiMAX unit. All of which are on top of the 17,000 cuts announced in November.

There’s not a great deal left in the global WiMAX pot, as indicated by historical standard bearer Clearwire’s gradual shift to LTE. Clearwire is a financially thirsty organisation and so it was with a light heart that the firm announced this week that it has managed to squeeze $715.5m dollars from new and existing shareholders to fund its LTE deployment.

A public offering launched earlier this month pulled in $384.1m, while shareholder Sprint has purchased a bunch more shares, bringing in the remainder of the haul.

Once upon a time Google was a backer of the Clearwire plan, but it withdrew to a discreet distance by opting not to invest further in 2009. This week Google’s tabled acquisition of Motorola’s handset business hit a minor obstacle, as the European Commission suspended its review of the deal. An EC spokesperson confirmed to Telecoms.com that it “needs certain documents from Google that are essential to its evaluation of the transaction”.

The EC was set to make a decision on Google’s bid to acquire the business on January 10, but has suspended that deadline until it receives the necessary information. Upon receiving it, it will re-start the clock and publish a new Phase I deadline on its website.

Google responded to the news claiming the request for more information was routine. “We’re confident the commission will conclude that this acquisition is good for competition and we’ll be working closely and cooperatively with them as they continue their review,” a Google spokesperson told Telecoms.com.

And that’s about it for this week – and this year – as the Informer is putting his feet up for Christmas.

The Informer would like to wish all of our readers on Telecoms.com a happy and prosperous close to 2011, overly optimistic as that may be in some cases.

Hope you all have a decent break, and a happy new year.

Take care

The Informer

Much of that technology has gone into curation tools for the application stores Vodafone supports, a concept the Informer finds slightly amusing as he imagines consumers trying to climb back into the walled gardens they were so keen to escape a few years ago. It’s a jungle out there in the app wilderness and increasingly likely you’ll get eaten alive without some form of guidance.

What we’ve found is that there’s lots of stuff getting into the Apple App Store that we don’t think Apple would be happy with,” Epting said. “We don’t know why; maybe they’ve dropped the bar. But when we quality check these apps they fail our standards, mainly for using APIs not required for the application. So we’re more stringent than other application stores,” she said.

But with so many apps now flooding the market, it’s easy to see how quality is falling. Google this week announced the ten billionth download from its Android Market application store, having racked up no less than four billion downloads in the past six months.

Android Market hit the six billion downloads mark in July of this year, up from one billion in July 2010. By contrast the Apple App Store hit 15 billion downloads in July, suggesting that Android Market is catching up on iOS in terms of numbers.

The latest version of Android, numbered 4.0 but known as Ice Cream Sandwich, also hit the market recently, making its debut on the Samsung Nexus Galaxy, and will soon arrive as an update on in-market high end Android phones. Usually when a major update takes place, there is impatient clamouring from the user community eager to get their hands on the latest version, but to calm the excited masses, Android handset vendors Motorola and Sony Ericsson have released information about the process for deploying operating system updates to in-market handsets.

The OS, which brings together features from the smartphone and tablet worlds, is in great demand as an update, having already made it to rooted devices via the custom ROM and phone hacking community. But it may take a couple of months to hit existing devices like the Samsung Nexus S and Motorola Xoom via the official channels.

The bottleneck, according to Motorola and Sony Ericsson, is the carriers, which have to certify each and every change before an update can be rolled out to users on their networks.

Motorola said it is currently assessing the source code, and over the next month will be determining which devices will get the upgrade. From there the vendor merges and adapts the new release for different device hardware architectures and carrier customisations as well as integrating all of the Motorola-specific software enhancements into the source code. Next, vendors stabilise and ‘bake’ the result to drive out bugs before submitting the upgrade to the carriers for certification. This is the part that takes the longest as the carrier’s lab has to qualify and test the upgrade, so there may be a two-month preparation cycle to enter a carrier lab cycle of one to three months, Motorola said.

In related news, US carrier Verizon Wireless said this week it will not be supporting Google’s m-commerce app Google Wallet when it launches the Galaxy Nexus in the US market this week.

Verizon was keen to stress that it is not “blocking” the application – contrary to what reports in the US have stated – but rather, is saying that it is just not making it available until it can offer “the best security and user experience”.

Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesperson for Verizon, said “Google Wallet does not simply access the operating system and basic hardware of our phones like thousands of other applications. Instead, in order to work as architected by Google, Google Wallet needs to be integrated into a new, secure and proprietary hardware element.”

But one reason for Verizon’s stance could be its own m-commerce interests. Verizon and rivals AT&T and T-Mobile USA are part of a consortium called ISIS, which is planning to launch its own payment system in the US soon.

On the subject of commercial interests, Verizon Wireless has also announced that it will be acquiring Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum from a number of other US carriers in a bid to boost its LTE offering. Verizon intends to buy 122 AWS spectrum licences  from SpectrumCo, a joint venture between cable companies Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. The firm will pay $3.6bn for the spectrum.

Verizon claims that by buying this AWS spectrum, it can bring even better 4G LTE products and services to its customers—and according to Sara Kaufman, an analyst at Ovum, the deal puts the carrier in a much stronger position to compete on LTE.

“Acquiring spectrum that it can use for LTE is a key objective for Verizon, and this deal gives it a lot of spectrum that it can use for its 4G services,” she said.

Meanwhile, rival Sprint Nextel will make use of 800MHz spectrum for its LTE network during 2012, in addition to the 1900MHz frequency on which it plans to launch the network, it was revealed this week by Sprint CFO Joseph Euteneuer. The use of the lower frequency will be made possible by moving of its iDEN customers onto its CDMA push-to-talk service.

Sticking in the US, and Apple has been denied a preliminary injunction to block the sale of Samsung’s touchscreen smartphones and tablets in North America, after a judge in California ruled that the Korean manufacturer’s products would not severely impact Apple’s sales.

The ruling means that Samsung will be able to sell its devices in the US during the traditionally lucrative Christmas season.

US District Judge Lucy Koh in said in a court in San Jose, California: “It is not clear that an injunction on Samsung’s accused devices would prevent Apple from being irreparably harmed.”

Samsung responded to the ruling, with a spokesperson saying that the ruling “confirms our long-held view that Apple’s arguments lack merit. In particular, the court has recognised that Samsung has raised substantial questions about the validity of certain Apple design patents.”

Koh’s ruling only relates to an interim injunction that Apple had been seeking, and there is still a chance that Samsung could see an eventual ban imposed on its devices, when a full trial commences in July 2012. However, Samsung remains optimistic that it will come out victorious in the main trial as well.

Apple has been seeking a ban on Samsung products – most aggressively on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet – in various countries across the world. It won its bid to ban sales of the device in Germany, where a Düsseldorf court upheld Apple’s preliminary injunction, which claims that Samsung had infringed its intellectual property and copied the iPad’s design.

But while Apple’s having trouble stopping Samsung selling tablets, Blackberry vendor Research In Motion is having enough trouble shifting its own hardware. The Canadian firm has warned shareholders that it has a large inventory of PlayBook tablets sitting in its channels at the moment, amounting to a provision for this quarter of around $360m.

RIM said it sold approximately 150,000 PlayBook tablets into the channel in the third quarter and believes sell-through to end customers was higher than this amount. Yet the company isn’t shifting its stock as fast as it would like. Clearly there won’t be many Playbooks under Christmas trees this year.

The company also suffered a legal setback after a ruling that prevents it from using the BBX moniker for its forthcoming flagship operating system. BBX, unveiled in October, is a hybrid of the BlackBerry platform and the QNX operating system that the firm uses in its tablet offering, but software firm Basis is claiming it infringes a trademark on its own OS, also dubbed BBx.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced that it will miss its target of launching its Windows Phone 7 handsets in China, stating that the devices will be available in the country in the first half of 2012, rather than by the end of 2011, as originally planned.

China is a key market for Microsoft, as penetration of its Windows smartphones in the country is expected to grow more than 20-fold over the next five years, from just 800,000 devices on the market today, to 18.92 million units by the end of 2016, according to forecasts from Informa Telecoms & Media.

The company had has been in discussions with Chinese handset makers including Lenovo, ZTE and Huawei Technologies about developing Windows Phone 7 devices for Chinese consumers, and it is not currently clear which handset manufacturer will launch the first handsets on the OS in China.

Microsoft bedfellow Nokia, might be looking to offload its bling, if rumours are correct. The company has long harboured a little unit called Vertu, which makes ridiculously expensive phones, encrusted with gold and diamonds, for luxury markets in places like Dubai. The handsets themselves are technologically mid-tier, but the use of precious metals and stones can push prices into hundreds of thousands.

For a company that excelled in the low end mass markets, Vertu was never a good fit, but it did apparently deliver profits. Now, it could be a useful way of rustling up some cash as private equity firms are reported to be sniffing round the asset. Offloading also fits with CEO Stephen Elop’s vision of trimming the fat.

There’ll be a lot of fat to trim come January, the Informer fears. That time of year is almost upon us and the mince pies have already made an appearance in the Informer’s diet. Lovely.

Take care

The Informer

It seems Samsung has been given the green light to sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 Down Under after all, as an Australian court has ruled that the device does not infringe on patents held by Apple.

Regular AWIW readers may remember that, just a few weeks ago, Apple was granted a temporary injunction that stopped Samsung from selling the device in Australia, much like the injunction it has secured in Germany.

Apple has been insisting that its Korean competitor had “chosen to slavishly copy its innovative technology, distinctive user interfaces, and elegant and distinctive product and packaging design.” The firm asserted to US anti-competitive authorities in April this year that Samsung’s tablet violates Apple’s intellectual property rights, and has been trying to stymie the sale of the device by taking its grievances to courts in various different countries.

Upon hearing the news of the ruling, Samsung’s people were in joyous celebration – or at least they would have been – but it looks like there could be a sting in this Christmas tale. Apple has no plans to make life easy for the Korean manufacturer with reports suggesting that it is likely appeal this latest decision, which could stop Samsung from being able to capitalise on the potentially lucrative Christmas sales period in Oz.

Samsung hasn’t had a lot of luck taking its products out of its factories and into consumers’ homes lately. For a couple of days this week, Telefónica’s UK operation O2 was not fulfilling orders for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone. The carrier was waiting until Google and Samsung fixed a bug that saw the phone spontaneously lose audio, affecting voice calls and audio alerts. A fix from the vendor saw deliveries reinstated towards the end of the week.

It always amazes The Informer how handset vendors often spend millions of dollars and months of man-hours on research, development and quality control, only to release a product which is found by consumers to contain fundamental flaws in its first days of availability. Especially when you take into account that operators themselves will often claim to conduct rigorous testing on devices, with internal friendly user trials designed to expose any issues.

Last week, we heard Nokia-Siemens Networks announcing that it will lay off 17,000 staff. This week the divestments accelerated, with the vendor revealing that it is selling off the WiMAX equipment portfolio acquired from Motorola Solutions as part of a wider deal earlier this year. The division will be sold to messaging and infrastructure player NewNet Communication Technologies for an undisclosed (and probably not too sizeable) sum, along with around 300 employees, as well as active customer and supplier contracts.

NSN picked up the unit as part of its $975m purchase of Motorola’s network infrastructure assets in May, but is now cutting back on non-core activities to focus on end-to-end mobile network infrastructure and services, with a particular emphasis on mobile broadband.

Meanwhile, Siri, the talking “assistant” in Apple’s iPhone 4S, is pro-life, it appears. When asked to point users to the nearest abortion clinic, the principled bot flatly refuses to. In one test, in New York’s Manhattan district, a Siri search for abortion clinics in the area turned up no results, but a similar Google search for revealed seven potential clinics in the area. Apple responded to the news, explaining that it hasn’t, of course, programmed Siri to have a socio-political agenda.

“These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks,” an Apple rep told the New York Times.

The Informer is not an Orange customer – and this week, he’s quite glad for it. The operator has hiked prices for UK customers on pay-monthly deals – mid-way through their contracts – with fees rising by 4.34 per cent. And customers cannot now cancel those contracts – their options: to put up or shut up.

The operator claims it can get away with this move as it states in the fine-print of its contracts that the monthly terms and conditions allow it to increase charges by up to the Retail Price Index (RPI) figure in any 12-month period.

As the increase in the price plan charges is less than the 5.4 per cent rate, Orange is within its rights, it said. However, UK regulator Ofcom‘s rules say that any change in contract must not only be made clear to customers in plenty of time, but must also come with a free opt-out option, so we’ll see if Ofcom clamps down on the operator.

Over in the Middle East, Cherie Blair is fighting the cause for women who want to work in mobile phone shops. Confused? Well, the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women has carried out research which reveals that Middle Eastern and African mobile operators stand to make gains from employing more women in their retail chains.

According to the report, mobile retail sales present a flexible and relatively easy business opportunity for women entrepreneurs, although the findings reveal regional variations in women’s participation in the mobile value chain.

Commenting on the findings of the study, Mrs Blair said: “Women entrepreneurs stand to gain a great deal from selling mobile products. Setting up a mobile sales business is relatively easy and has a flexibility that suits the way many women live their lives. But there is also a real business case for mobile operators to include women in mobile value chains, as they offer significant advantages such as better branding and access to new markets.”

The findings were announced at Informa’s Middle East Telco World Summit, where many other announcements were also made.

For instance, Saudi operator STC declared that it has expanded its LTE network to reach another five cities. Makkah, Madinah, Abha, Khamis Mushayt, Dhahran now have access to LTE, in addition to the cities of Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Jubail, Al Khobar, Al Ahsa.

The carrier said that there were now 600 specific locations within these cities where LTE could be accessed and that it also offers HSPA+ to maintain high data speeds outside of the LTE areas.

And Middle Eastern operators have been told to grow up – or rather, they’ve been told they need to evolve. A report published by Informa this week warned that the convergence of media and telecoms is creating new challenges, all over the world, and particularly in the Middle East. Operators need to develop new business models if they are to succeed, and the analyst has identified strategies to reap success in the rapidly-growing market for online and mobile content in the region.

Another Informa report has revealed that the number of mobile subscriptions in the Middle East will cross the 250-million mark during 2012, as mobile penetration tops 100 per cent. This will see the region exceeding the mobile penetration rate in North America for the first time. Iran will continue to be the biggest mobile market in the Middle East by subscriptions, with Saudi Arabia the next biggest mobile market in the region.

Over in Africa, Orange’s reputation is only improving, as its own mobile money offering has reached three million customers, after tripling its user base in the last year.

Orange Money is designed to meet the needs of customers in Africa and the Middle East, where general figures suggest that less than ten per cent of the population have access to a bank account but more than 60 per cent have a mobile phone. Key services include money transfers, utility payments and top-ups and financial services like insurance.

Back to the UK, and Vodafone Group has acquired communications consultancy Bluefish Communications. The consultancy will form part of Vodafone’s Global Enterprise division, which manages communications technologies for its largest multinational customers.

The firm said that Bluefish will form the nucleus of a new unified communications and collaboration practice within Vodafone Global Enterprise, which will focus on advising multinational companies on how to get the most from their mobile, fixed line and IT services. It will also offer guidance to clients on the adoption of cloud services.

And the results of the Portuguese spectrum auction have been announced, with Portugal Telecom, Sonaecom and Vodafone coming out victorious. Portugal Telecom and Sonaecom’s mobile phone units, TMN and Optimus respectively, both announced that they had placed winning bids in three frequency bands. They each paid a total of €113m ($152m) for nine blocks. Meanwhile, Vodafone Portugal announced that it has also won a total of 123MHz spectrum in the 800MHz, 900MHz, 1800MHz and 2600MHz frequency bands, for which it will pay a total of €146m.

Meanwhile, social site Twitter has acquired a small mobile security firm, Whisper Systems, which specialises in secure tools for Android. The acquisition may seem a little seem a strange from the outset, but it has been suggested that the firm’s in-house talent is what Twitter is really after.

Whisper Systems became somewhat famous during the Arab Spring, when it released an encrypted voice communications system called RedPhone specifically to aid those involved in the Egyptian revolution. However, much to the disappointment of protestors worldwide, post acquisition, Whisper’s tools have all been taken offline, during a “transition period”.

In India, the world’s largest mobile infrastructure and services provider Ericsson has announced an extension of its managed services deal with Indian carrier Bharti Airtel. The new, five-year deal will see Ericsson manage Airtel’s multi-vendor, multi-technology network across 15 Indian telecom circles, which together account for 70 per cent of Airtel’s Indian network.

Sticking with infrastructure, Samsung is set to take the lead for the number of LTE macro base stations deployed by the end of 2011 across the Asia Pacific region. The forecast is from NPD In-stat, which expects Samsung to dominate the region with a projected 10,000 base stations; a quarter of all LTE macro base station deployments in Asia Pacific.

And in Spain, cloud telephony provider FonYou has announced that its XtraLine solution is now available to mobile operators as a white-labelled iOS and Android app. Spanish incumbent Telefónica is the first carrier to launch the app, which it deployed in a trial earlier this year. The app enables mobile operators to provide consumers with a second phone line bundled with a range of rich services, such as visual voicemail, call registers and advanced voice screening.

And finally, the UK government has announced a plan to invest £100m ($156m) to create ten ‘super-connected’ cities equipped with high-speed broadband in the country. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osbourne made the announcement in his Autumn Statement, and this forms part of a general £5bn increase in infrastructure spending, as the UK attempts to boost its stalling economy.

The ten cities included in the plan and include London, Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff, with the other six cities to be announced in the 2012 Budget. The aim is to provide fixed-line broadband on between 80-100Mbps and also ‘high-speed’ mobile connectivity.

That about wraps it up for the week – take care.

The Informer

Analysts speculated that the firm is gearing up for an IPO next year and that the cuts are designed to make it a more attractive prospect to potential investors. Certainly it is widely believed that Siemens has been looking to exit the JV pretty much since it was established in 2007. The two parents abandoned their search for investment in June this year, opting instead to inject $500m apiece into the firm at the end of September.

In between times NSN was dealt a heavy blow by a strategic shift from LightSquared, which pulled from underneath it a contract reported to be worth in the region of $7bn to deploy the aspiring US carrier’s network.

It’s hard times indeed in the infrastructure market, as usual. Market leader Ericsson reckons it has twice the business of its nearest competitor, Huawei. Meanwhile Alcatel Lucent is gaining traction in the LTE space while NSN continues to struggle.

In the immediate term NSN’s biggest problem is going to be convincing its carrier customers that it can continue to meet their requirements. Managed services are a key part of the infrastructure supplier market today and operators would be justified in asking NSN how it plans to carry on running their networks with only three quarters of its previous human resource.

Ericsson, meanwhile, had another contract win to announce, inadvertently rubbing NSN’s nose in it. Mind you, the Informer’s not sure he’d want to be one of the engineers assigned to the new Iraqi outsourcing project that the Swedish firm is now going to be running.  The deal, with Zain, is worth $650m to Ericsson over five years and extends into the Northern region of Kurdistan. Some Zain staff will transfer to Ericsson but it’s not known how many.

From deals on to deals off and the situation is looking a little bleak for US carrier AT&T, which has been trying for much of this year to seal its acquisition of competitor T-Mobile. This week the two firms withdrew their filings to the FCC regarding the proposed merger, deciding to regroup and offer a renewed proposal that addresses the concerns of the Department of Justice, which objected to the deal on competitive grounds.

Earlier in the week Verizon had announced that it had no issue with the deal, removing one significant obstacle, but the US authorities were not so affable. AT&T is still liable for a whopping $4bn breakup fee – payable to T-Mobile – if the deal doesn’t go ahead. And yet even such a sizeable sum may not be sufficient to sustain Deutsche Telekom’s interest in participating in the US market.

Things are happier south of the border where AT&T has partnered with America Movil to deliver enterprise services throughout the Latin American market, as well as parts of Asia and the Middle East. The two firms gain access to one another’s markets as part of the deal, enabling them to offer the same services to enterprise customers operating in spheres wider than their own.

Sticking with operator alliances, there was word of another mobile financial services collaboration on Monday, this time in Sweden. A mobile payments JV is to be formed by Telia, Tele2, Telenor and 3, which will own equal shares in the organisation.

It was interesting to see 3 participating in this JV given the righteous indignation with which it greeted the formation of a similar play in the UK market last week. Hutchison-owned 3 wasn’t invited to the party in Britain, and so dismissed it as “a cosy collaboration that would  control nearly all mobile wallets in the UK and control and sell adversiters and card issuers’ access to its mobile subscribers.”

The firm’s regulatory director, Stephen Lerner, told Telecoms.com that: “This is anticompetitive and akin to a joint selling arrangement which creates a monopoly in several markets, including mobile push advertising and mobile payments and should not be approved under any circumstances.”

But this kind of deal is ok in Sweden, apparently. Well, a little bird told the Informer that the scope of the two ventures is entirely different in nature, because the Swedish initiative supports a common platform.

Over to the ever-vibrant handset sector now and the news that Vodafone is to be the preferred partner to Sony for the connectivity of the Japanese vendor’s new Vita portable gaming console. The device will be available as wifi only or wifi and 3G, which has become standard for consumer connected devices. It will also have Twitter and Facebook onboard.

Most people look over their shoulder before they say something negative about Apple, but not Bengt Nordström, CEO of industry consultancy NorthStream. Nordström stuck his head above the parapet this week and told Telecoms.com that mobile operators across the world are angered by the way that Apple treats them, despite the reverence with which carriers generally talk about the smartphone market innovator.

““When we hear about operators and how Apple treats them – they’ve never seen anything like that before in the industry,” he said  ”It’s always been a buyer’s market. Carriers have been the kings of the hill; they have been ruling everything, and when somebody comes around and begins to dictate the situation, questioning whether operators should be approved for selling iPhones and asking: ‘Are you good enough to sell our products?’ – that conflicts with the view operators have of themselves.”

It was interesting to hear Nordström voicing a well-known but rarely spoken observation. A couple of weeks ago a spokesman from a heavyweight consultancy told the Informer that. “There is a lot of anti-Apple sentiment among the operators. Apple have treated operators, even on an individual, personal basis very rudely over the past three or four years and they’re all sick to the back teeth of them.” Unfortunately these comments were taken off the record after the fact on the grounds that attribution “wouldn’t be very good for us”. It just goes to show how scared people are at a personal and corporate level, of saying anything against Apple. So well done Nordström.

This week the Informer also spoke with Peter Becker-Pennrich, a man who really knows his onions in the mobile device space. Not surprising really, as he’s director of marketing for Vodafone’s group terminals division.

PBP said that, while the firm has the best product delivered through the best processes in the handset market today, there is a question mark over whether they will continue to have that in the future. “You could argue that the iPhone 4s was a disappointment to many people,” he said.

“The big question will be whether they can replace the genius at the top, keep enough empowerment in the system and at the same time maintain the rigour in their processes. If they can’t you can imagine that all their marketing guidelines, which are very strict and are quite clear on what the different channels can do and cannot do, will be impossible to enforce. And you can already see that in some markets at the edge of Europe or outside of Europe, they are starting to really struggle to maintain the level of control they used to have.”

Could this be the beginning of the slide for Apple? PBP had some fascinating insights to offer on the handset sector as a whole, so keep your eyes on Telecoms.com next week for the full interview. It will be well worth reading.

The Informer was most interested this week to see that a company he’d never heard of before – which is not surprising because it’s the leading bookseller in South Korea – had quietly become the first organisation to bring to market a device featuring a Mirasol display. Mirasol, you may or may not know, is a Qualcomm acquisition from a few years back that has been developing a display technology that promises to offer outstanding savings on battery consumption and improvements in visibility under traditionally difficult conditions like direct sunlight.

Qualcomm has been passing round small, static examples of Mirasol displays for some time at press meets now and has always fended off questions of availability. So it was a little surprising that the market debut should happen in near silence.

“I think it’s clear that the technology has been trickier to develop than Qualcomm first envisaged, given the time it has taken to come to market,” said Ovum analyst Nick Dillon, by way of explanation. “I think they are using the Kyodo product as a soft launch to test it out and to try and generate some interest from other manufacturers.”

Dillon said that the technology is not yet at the stage where it can offer comparable colour and video performance to the TFT and LED screens that dominate the current mobile device market. But as it improves, Mirasol will likely be deployed in smartphones and tablets, he said. “It should lead to some interesting new products,” he added, “there is definitely room for innovation in this area.”

There is definitely room for innovation in the area of operator customer experience management, too, as the Informer found out this week when he tried to renew his private mobile contract. He feels duty bound to point out that, from here on in, this edition of AWIW contains no news, and only an account of frustrating interaction between customer and provider. So feel free to stop reading HERE.

Still with me? Ok, well it’s Japanese Twitter account holder 02 that the Informer feels sorry for. Poor old 02 (that’s zero-two) must get lots of angry messages from people whose clarity of vision is clouded by the red mist of consumer rage. Keen to vent their frustration at the hapless customer services of UK mobile carrier O2 (that’s o-two), they must be forever skewering 02 by mistake.

In keeping with the Japanese reputation for politeness and calm, 02’s Twitter feed gently points out the difference between him/her and the Telefónica-owned wireless operator, making people like the Informer feel like foolish hotheads.

But still, what a palaver. The Informer’s 24-month contract is up next week and, in the absence of any kind of proactive retention contact from O2, he thought he’d see what’s what.

The first port of call was the carrier’s interactive online chat service. This isn’t something you can just find on the website; it magically appears when something you type into a dialogue box seems to indicate a problem. So if you type “I want to leave O2, how can I get a PAC code?”, you can summon a conversational partner.

Interestingly it seems as if, once you’ve complained about something, the chat facility remains available as an option when you log into your account online, which is pretty clever.

O2’s dial-in customer service menu stresses that all of their call centre reps are UK-based, but there appears to be no such guarantee with the online chat facility. After being shunted around a bit, the Informer was connected to a retention specialist with the promise of a “great deal”. Here’s a cut and paste of one of the comments the Informer received when he mentioned the handset he was interested in:

“Yes that the phone great in demand and very nice phone to pocket in, you can see that this phone is free on £51 tariff Unlimited Minutes and Texts, whereas it cost some one paynet on lower tariff.”

Now the Informer knows that it’s common enough for customer service staff to be based a very long way away from the customer. But surely the Dagoba System is pushing it a bit? And yet reading and re-reading it, the structure of that sentence can only be the work of Yoda.

“There is no try, only do” the Jedi master said in the film. When he’s working for O2 customer service, though, it seems that actually there is no do. What’s more, try appears to be out of stock, as well.

The promised deal didn’t materialise, so it was onto the phones, and a conversation with another retention specialist, this one not lurking behind a dodgy online alias. There wasn’t much of a deal to be had here either, but on the understanding of a next day delivery and a bit of a discount on the device, the Informer signed away another two years of his life.

Obviously the phone didn’t turn up the next day. And the Informer was told by another call centre drone that, in fact, that phone was out of stock and there was no information as to when it would again become available, other than the insight that it would be “at some point in the future”.

At some point in the future. What are we talking about here? I mean, at some point in the future the Informer might think: “bugger this for a game of soldiers, I’m going to go and get my crappy customer service from one of the other UK operators”. At some point in the future phone in question will become obsolete. At some point in the future the Informer will splutter his last and drop dead. At some point in the future the sun will implode, sucking everything in our solar system into a black hole. At some point in the future the human race, having hopefully colonised the planetary systems of other stars in a bid to avoid being caught in the death of our own sun, will have evolved to the point where it is capable of time travel. If this is when the phone will be available, then perhaps future O2 could just pop back to 2011 and deliver it now.

It got worse, because the drone said that the Informer could indeed have the phone if he ordered it online. There were plentiful stocks of the device in question available to fulfil online orders.

But for call centre orders – the only type of order with which you can secure a retention discount – they were coming up empty. There was no explanation as to why the Informer was misled by the retention specialist as to the availability of the handset at the point of contract sign up, possibly because it doesn’t sound too good when the agent has to say:

“I’m sorry sir, they lied to you because they’re incentivised on retentions.”

Whenever the Informer talks to OSS and BSS vendors, they stress the importance of connections between the various back office systems. And boy did this experience highlight the problem. Stock systems weren’t talking to customer service systems. Stocks weren’t being dynamically managed. The Informer had to prove his identity to every person he interacted with, and there were six of those in total. And the end result was O2 getting the sign-up and failing to deliver what it promised.

And this from a company whose motto is “Connected better we are”, at least when Yoda writes it.

Take care

The Informer.

Intel this week teamed up with MasterCard in a drive to provide more options for a safer and simpler NFC-based check-out process for online merchants and consumers using netbook type devices and future generations of Intel-based PCs.

Intel’s Identity Protection Technology (IPT) enables consumers to use two-factor authentication and hardware-based display protection, and when used with an Intel IPT-enabled reader, consumers will be able to pay for online purchases with a simple tap of their PayPass-enabled card, tag, or smart phone on their computing device.

It’s exactly the kind of thing the Informer expects to read about just before Black Friday and there’s no need for the developing nations to feel left out either. Visa has launched a mobile banking product developed by South African mobile money platform Fundamo, which Visa acquired in June, designed to offer an “open loop” system that provides a connection between local mobile money services and the Visa network, in order to bring global interoperability and new features into play.

So called “closed loop” mobile money services are those provided by financial institutions and mobile operators, which are confined to their local markets. Consumers of existing mobile money services will be able to use more features if their mobile money providers sign up to the product, such as withdrawing money from a Visa ATM, transferring funds internationally and performing e-commerce transactions over the web. African and Middle East operator MTN plans to offer the product across its markets.

Keeping with the theme, the Informer has been chatting this week with lots of people responsible for apps and content, conversations which often led to the growing adoption of social networks, particularly Facebook, as an applications platform. Ebay’s digital payment platform PayPal was getting involved in some action here, having launched a Facebook application that lets users of the social networking site send money to each other. According to the firms, almost 80 per cent of active PayPal users are on Facebook.

Facebook is also keen to keep involving itself in carrier pricing strategies, which Facebook’s head of mobile, Henri Moissinac, cited as one of the three pillars of the firm’s mobile strategy. The social network announced a collaboration with Orange on a range of sub-€100 handsets described by Moissinac, as featuring “the best set of integrations so far” of any device the social networking firm has co-developed.

Consumers who buy the handsets, which are built by Alcatel, will also get “unlimited” access to Facebook as part of their data plan, although both Orange and Facebook denied that there is any financial relationship behind the programme. Patrick Remy, VP devices at Orange, told the Informer that Facebook is subsidising neither the handsets nor any related traffic, and that Orange is not zero-rating that traffic.

Orange has not yet finalised the pricing for the devices in any market other than Romania, where the most expensive handset of the new range, the One Touch 908F, will retail at less than €100, unsubsidised, on a monthly contract of €9. Amusingly, the 908F, will be sold as the Orange Vancouver in markets where the Alcatel brand is perceived to lack value. The Informer is only aware of Alcatel as a handset brand that has very recently introduced colour screens.

Speaking of which, the Mirasol wonder display technology incubated by Qualcomm looks like it will finally get to see the light of day, pardon the pun, with small scale commercialisation of the technology set to take place before the year is out.

Mirasol was developed by a firm called Iridigm, which was acquired by Qualcomm in 2004. The technology is pitched as a low power alternative display, which reflects ambient light back at the viewer to conserve energy and is based on the same principle that causes butterflies’ wings to shimmer and works in both daylight and darkness.

The applications could be a game changer. Using less than a tenth of the energy consumed by a comparable LCD display, the expectation is that Mirasol will enable an environment in which the device screen never needs to power down, as they are today programmed to do in order to conserve battery life. The problem is that, since Qualcomm acquired the tech, it has never got out of the prototype stages because it’s too expensive for the mass market.

Yet earlier this year the firm announced an investment of $975m for the construction of a new fabrication facility in Longtan, Taiwan, and this week, Qualcomm confirmed that it is expecting commercialisation of Mirasol before the end of 2011, with smaller volume products in non-US markets before the end of the year. These initial batches will be delivered by the pilot fabrication plant, which is a relatively small facility. Higher volumes will be in the offing around the time the new, much larger, fab comes online later in 2012.

But when a butterfly flaps its wings in Taiwan, vivid displays of ridiculousness occur, such as US smut merchant of the same name, Vivid Entertainment, suing Taiwanese handset hot shot HTC for calling its latest smartphone the Vivid. In its cease and desist letter Vivid argues that, as its adult content is viewable on mobile phones, there could be confusion between its content and the HTC device.

Sigh.

Right, back to those conversations about apps and content and both Telenor and Vodafone have identified an opportunity in the own-branded Android Market experience. Both carriers will have a branded and fully curated sector within the app store that will allow them to step in and hold the hands of users that might be new to the smartphone concept and overwhelmed by the thousands of apps available.

As a bonus, both operators have also enabled carrier billing within their shops, which again, makes it as easy as pie to purchase content and then pay for it with your prepay credit or monthly bill. By way of supporting evidence, Vodafone said that in the five months since it launched in Android Market, the uptick of downloads of its selected apps has risen to between 60 per cent and 400 per cent.

The Big V’s news this week was more about the launch of an own branded and curated app store that exists in its own right. According to Lee Epting, Vodafone’s director of content services, who the Informer was chatting to, this allows the company to go one step further for what it calls “new smartphone users” – those customers that are cautiously migrating from a feature phone experience.

In this domain, which will be pushed out to existing users and pre-installed on new devices, Vodafone will focus on the top 100 apps from any store, and will test them against its network before promoting them. There will not be an archive as such and the content will be refreshed every few months to spare users from an overwhelming number of apps. Pricing will be along the lines of the big app stores although Vodafone will be at liberty to run special promotions.

Rolling with the content theme, Google just launched a music locker service for Android, which allows users to buy, share and stream music on the go for free. The company launched a Beta version of the service last May, but has now launched a full version, which enables users to purchase new music through a music store via Android Market and share music using the Google+ social network. Users can also upload their music collection of up to 20,000 songs into their personal cloud, so that they can stream their music from any Android device.

Not one to miss out on the action, Canadian handset vendor RIM also officially launched its BBM Music service on a commercial basis following a successful beta trial. Again, BBM Music is a cloud-based social music service which allows users to discover and share songs from the likes of Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI with BBM contacts. The service was launched in Canada, the US and Australia earlier this month and was launched in the UK Tuesday, for a monthly subscription of £4.99.

RIM is one of those desperate companies still supporting mobile Flash, even though Adobe has called time on the mobile version of Flash Player. The BlackBerry vendor clearly sees Flash as a life support tool for its Playbook. Yet jumping on the political bandwagon of the Occupy movement, an online programmer protest, Occupy Flash, is calling for a global boycott on the technology in a bid to get everybody to move over to HTML5 once and for all.

However the protest rather meekly admits that uninstalling Flash Player may be a bit much right now, after all. Flash content is still very popular, so the suggestion is that supporters let content creators know they’d prefer to see HTML5 used in the future.

Take that oppressive and cumbersome web technology!

We are the 36 per cent (who use mobile Flash Player according to Strategy Analytics)!

The Informer