Korean maker Samsung said that it has developed a core technology for 5G and intends to enable users to access 5G data services by 2020.

Korean manufacturer Samsung said that it has made headway in developing core technology for 5G networks with a view to bringing data services to market by 2020, according to local reports.

The firm said that 5G speeds will allow users to download an entire movie in less than a second, according to Korea’s Yonhap news agency.  It added that users will be able to download and upload data at speeds of up to tens of Gbps, compared with the 75Mbps speeds that 4G LTE services offer today.

The Korean firm also told the news agency it has successfully tested the platform using the 28GHz spectrum band to transmit data at a speed of 1Gbps.

With LTE network deployments now underway in many countries globally, the industry is gradually beginning to turns its sight to the provision of 5G services. In April this year, UK regulator Ofcom launched an industry consultation about freeing radio frequencies for 5G services.

In October 2012, the University of Surrey also received £35m research funding for its 5G Innovation Centre, from the UK government and firms including Samsung, Huawei, Telefonica Europe and Aircom International. And in March 2013, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) established a working group to research 5G technology.

The 5G Expo is part of the LTE World Summit, taking place on the 24^th-26^th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Click here to download a free pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take care

The Informer \m/

In a survey of 2,000 industry professionals carried out at the end of 2012, Telecoms.com Intelligence found more than two thirds of respondents in favour of BSS standardisation for international operators. More than 35 per cent of respondents, meanwhile, voiced their support for BSS centralisation, despite it being widely regarded as more difficult to achieve.

Centralisation was seen as easy or achievable by 35.6 per cent of respondents, while standardisation was viewed the same way by 44.9 per cent of respondents. Less than three per cent of respondents judged either to be impossible.

Reduced Opex was perceived to be the greatest upside of a centralised strategy, with a rating average of 3.79 out of five. Expressed another way, 65.7 per cent of respondents felt it was highly beneficial. Close behind, with 63.1 per cent of respondents voting the same way was the ability that centralisation of the BSS gives operators to offer consistent services to international enterprise customers.

Just how difficult operators would find it to centralise or standardise their BSS would depend on a number of factors. Respondents to the survey identified internal politics and conflcting business cultures as the stiffest challenge. In fact more than one fifth of respondents—21.6 per cent—rated this as having the highest level of severity. Operational risk, which placed second overall, had nowhere near as high a rating at the top end of the scale, with only 12.5 per cent of respondents giving it the highest level of severity.

The emergence of the cloud as an internal tool for operators may hold the key to enabling what is clearly a desirable BSS evolution in the face of what are equally serious challenges and objections. When asked if standardisation of the BSS function would be easier to achieve if the operator hosted a central, private cloud BSS installation which was accessed by the national opcos, 16.3 per cent of respondents answered that it would be “much easier” and a hurther 48.3 per cent “somewhat easier”.

Firms that fail to implement M2M technologies will fall behind competition, according to SAP’s survey

Smart cities represent the most beneficial outcome of machine to machine (M2M) technology, according to a survey of IT decision makers. The majority of respondents also believe that firms that fail to implement M2M technologies will fall behind competition.

A survey carried out by Harris Interactive on behalf of software firm SAP found that almost 30 percent of IT decision makers believe smart cities will be the most important outcome of the deployment of M2M technologies. The ability to increase mobility across the workforce was perceived as another big opportunity for M2M in the workplace.

The study, which surveyed respondents across Brazil, Germany, India, US, UK and China, also revealed a common view that firms failing to embrace the M2M movement will fall behind competition. This is because M2M technology can give companies greater insight into their business, according to the majority of respondents in China (96 per cent), India (88 per cent) and Brazil (86 per cent). The second most important benefit identified was that M2M enables businesses to respond to real world events.

Increased efficiency, productivity, employee collaboration and mobility represented the largest opportunities for M2M in the workplace, according to respondents. IT decision makers from all six countries were also insistent that the availability of network infrastructure, such as LTE services, will be instrumental in allowing M2M technologies to flourish in the future.

“The benefits of M2M are undeniable but there are barriers toward the adoption of M2M solutions, such as the lack of complete multi-industry offerings, management, security and big data issues, and deficiency of suitable global connectivity solutions that are needed by multinational enterprises,” said Sanjay Poonen, president of technology solutions and mobile division at SAP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take care

The Informer

Glenn Booth, Alcatel-Lucent

We speak to Glenn Booth, VP of wireless portfolio & strategy at Alcatel-Lucent, about winning last year’s Broadband InfoVision Award for ‘Best Broadband Access – Wireless’ for the lightRadio solutions portfolio.

This year’s Broadband InfoVision Awards will take place in Amsterdam on October 23rd. For more information and to register, please visit: www.broadbandinfovisionawards.com

Can you bring us up to speed on where development of the lightRadio portfolio is now?

We are thrilled with the progress we have made with lightRadio and its three pillars of LTE, small cells and cloud architecture.

In terms of the progress that we have made in the market, the LTE lightRadio solution is shipping today, we have 38 LTE wins around the world, so a lot of these are service providers that are leading the market in LTE, including the biggest networks in the world like Verizon and AT&T.

We have customers in Europe who are starting to move more aggressively, including Orange, and we have really a dominant position with the two biggest builds that will happen in 2013 for LTE with Sprint and China Mobile.

So it’s been an exciting time for us, we’ve got excellent traction with our lightRadio small cells portfolio as well, which has won more than 50 customers to date, and a lot of those are with new customers, so we are seeing that adoption rate continue to steadily increase.

That adoption rate is being fuelled by the lightRadio product portfolio, on which we have driven a number of new products to market in the past 12 months, such as baseband products, wideband radios, an IP management system.

On small cells we have continued to add new band classes, new form factors, from enterprise and our metro portfolio in particular.

In what ways has winning the Broadband InfoVision award helped raise lightRadio’s profile?

It’s been important for us, third-party validation of lightRadio has really been very good across the industry.

We have won more than 20 industry awards in the short time since we launched lightRadio, and winning the Broadband InfoVision Award is really an honour.

We take it as a strong proof point recognising that the innovative vision that we have for the mobile broadband market is actually being realised in our product deliveries and in our market traction.

This really reinforces our image and our identity in the marketplace as an innovator in mobile broadband.

What has been the most surprising feedback you have had from winning the award?

The feedback has been reassurance from our customers that we’re innovating and delivering our products. We went out with a big vision 18 months ago with lightRadio, and are seeing this really now as a real proof point that we have delivered against that vision.

That’s been very important for us and it’s reinforced the idea that we have for the market that as we develop the next generation of infrastructure with LTE and small cells, it gives operators this unique ability to drive multimedia services that they can use to win in their markets and really differentiate against their competition.

So that feedback loop has been very positive for us as a result of the awards.

How do you plan to further improve the portfolio this year?

If you look at the strength that we’ve had, it’s been really focused on having success with the first movers and those that want to win in their markets by deploying next-generation broadband – and that’s at the heart of lightRadio.

So that’s high-speed data, high capacity for LTE and for small cells, and it’s those that want to deploy in a decisive manner, which means a complete deployment versus a complement to what they already have in their network.

So if you take that into account for our lightRadio portfolio plans, we will be dramatically adding capacity to our new BBUs, so that we can support the data explosion and success that our biggest customers have had with LTE.

We will also have a strong emphasis in terms of broadcast and carrier aggregation, and also voice over LTE, which we believe is going to be tremendously important to carriers that are driving this new world of voice and data blended together.

We will continue to drive the completion of our small cells lightRadio portfolio so that we can augment this capacity, there is an almost infinite number of bands that we are getting demand for from our customers, as well as different form factors.

So we will be increasing the completeness of our portfolio and using that as a complement of the macro portion of lighRadio through the remainder of 2013.

The LTE World Summit, the premier 4G event for the telecoms industry, is taking place on the 24^th-26^th June 2013, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. Click here to download a brochure for the event.

“We want direct relationships…” Jan Frykhammar, CFO, Ericsson

Ericsson’s first quarter profits fell year on year to SEK1.2bn (€139m) from SEK8.8bn for the same period in 2012, largely due to the boost given to 1Q12 numbers by the firm’s exit from the Sony Ericsson device JV. While the vendor recorded a two per cent uptick in sales to SEK52bn it was hit by currency fluctuations and a disappointing performance from its network rollout business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s about all for the week.

Take care,

The Informer

Nokia has posted a €150m operating loss for 1Q13

Finnish handset manufacturer Nokia has posted a €150m operating loss for 1Q13. Viewed in context this should be encouraging; the loss is a fraction of the €1.338bn the firm lost in the same quarter in 2012.

However, net sales for the same period dropped 20 per cent year on year to €5.85bn from €7.35bn in 1Q12.

The handset vendor sold 61.9 million devices in the quarter, 25 per cent fewer than the 82.7 million it sold in 1Q12 and saw sales drop year on year in every geographic region it operates in, with the exception of North America, which ironically is the company’s weakest traditional market.

CEO Stephen Elop claimed Nokia is executing its strategy with “urgency” and managing costs “very well”.

“We have areas where we are making progress, and areas where we are further increasing the focus,” he said. “For example, people are responding positively to the Lumia portfolio, and our volumes are increasing quarter over quarter.”

He acknowledged that the firm has a tall order trying to reclaim one of the top spots in the handset market.

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

According to Fred Huet, managing partner at Greenwich Consulting, Nokia has been performing well in emerging markets, but the challenge ahead of the firm is sustaining its momentum as those markets become increasingly competitive.

“Everyone is now spotting that the emerging market space is strong in terms of growth in smartphones; the projections for smartphones in those regions are quite high, so now everyone’s turning their attention to them,” he said.

“In India, for example, Nokia has performed well but it’s becoming a more competitive market, because of the Chinese and Korean handset manufacturers.  Samsung has now launched some handsets specifically designed for emerging markets. China is very good at producing low cost and mass production handsets, so the question is how long can Nokia keep momentum?”

Huet added that Nokia’s decision to rely heavily on Microsoft as its OS partner for smartphones is not paying off.

“Two years ago, I thought it was interesting proposition; Nokia is good with hardware and Microsoft is good with software. But Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is not getting the traction the firm was expecting and in the meantime, Blackberry is slowly turning round its fortunes after consecutive quarters of market share loss in developed markets.”

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Indian telcos plan to invest a significantly lower proportion of their revenues over the next two years than their Chinese, Indonesian and Philippine counterparts

Over the next two years Indian operators plan to invest a significantly lower proportion of their revenues than their Chinese, Indonesian and Philippine counterparts, according to financial ratings agency Fitch Ratings.

The firm believes the low level of investment is attributable to the weaker balance sheets of the Indian operators in comparison to other Asian carriers. According to Fitch Ratings, Indian operators’ balance sheets have become stretched due to intense competition and large spectrum payments between 2010 and 2012.

The Indian, Chinese, Philippines and Indonesian telecoms markets are at approximately the same stage of data penetration, according to the agency. However, it stated that Indian telcos have indicated that their capital expenditure will decline over the next two years, while it is set to increase in the three other countries.

Capex per subscriber for Indian operators stands at $6 per subscriber, much lower than in China where it is over $50 per subscriber and in Indonesia and the Philippines, where both are spending $16 per cent subscriber.

Operators in these markets plan to invest in data infrastructure to expand their 3G and long-term evolution (LTE) networks over the period. Chinese telcos, for example, have raised their 2013 capex forecasts by 12 to 15 per cent, Fitch noted.

The agency also found that India is the most congested market of those studied. Subscribers per MHz of spectrum per operator for Indian telcos stands at around 10 million to 15 million, compared with five to six million for Chinese, Philippine and Indonesian telcos. This indicates that Indian telcos may need to invest more to decongest their network, Fitch Ratings concluded.

The LTE Asia conference is taking place on the 18^th-19^th September 2013 at the Suntec, Singapore. Click here to download a brochure for the event.