The partnership will target enterprise users in emerging markets

América Móvil, the Latin American carrier owned by magnate Carlos Slim, has announced a deeper partnership with AT&T to deliver IP-based services to enterprises throughout LatAm and growth markets in Asia and the Middle East.

A memorandum of understanding will allow AT&T to deepen its existing reach in Latin America using América Móvil networks in 15 countries throughout the region; while América Móvil will be able to use AT&T’s global network infrastructure to provide IP services in the US and the rest of the world. One of the key services delivered by the duo will be VPNs for multinationals doing business in or with Latin America.

“As part of AT&T’s commitment to deliver consistent and seamless global services for our enterprise customers, we continue to evolve our strategy to establish alliances in key regions in the world,” said Roman Pacewicz, AT&T Business Solutions senior vice president of marketing and global strategy. “This, in turn will enable multinational companies to compete better globally.”

The Californian silicon and IP player saw revenues for the final quarter of its fiscal year up by 39 per cent year on year to $4.12bn, with profits up 22 per cent to $1.06bn. Profit for the full year hit $4.26bn on revenues of $14.96bn, an improvement over the previous year of 31 per cent.

Head honcho Paul Jacobs credited the growth in demand for smartphones as well as the strength of the firm’s legendary patent portfolio for the performance, predicting further growth of up to 27 per cent for the upcoming year. Revenues should hit between $18bn and $19bn, he said.

The firm clearly doesn’t expect any negative impact from the news that Nokia has offered a lifeline to ST-Ericsson, announcing that it’s planning to use the chip player’s NovaThor platform in Windows-based smartphones at some stage in the future. But Ovum analyst Nick Dillon poured cold water on the announcement, pointing out that WP7 doesn’t support dual-core chipsets like the NovaThor, with Microsoft having announced no plans to change this state of affairs.

Nonetheless, Dillon said that in time the deal would prove to be a “huge win” for ST Ericsson, especially if Nokia is looking in time to end its reliance on Qualcomm silicon altogether.

Meanwhile profits were declining at Indian and pan-African operator Bharti Airtel. Profits for fiscal Q2 were down by 38 per cent to $225m, the carrier said, partly due to currency fluctuations and the strength of the US dollar against currencies in the African markets where it operates. Zain, which sold Bharti all of those African properties, has been enjoying slightly more positive times, with a seven per cent increase in profit for the first nine months of 2011, hitting $762.5m.

Perhaps the Zain African portfolio is a bit like the video tape in cult Japanese horror flick The Ring. So long as you can pass the curse to somebody else, you’ll survive.

The same cannot be said for WiMAX, largely because nobody else seems to want to take it on. Israeli player Alvarion, which has carried the WiMAX can for what seems like more than its fair share of the relay, had more bad news this week, with the announcement that Q3 revenues were down year on year to $47m, with losses increasing to $7.5m from $6.1m a year ago.

Alvarion decided to console itself with the acquisition of a company with a vaguely similar name. Fellow Israeli outfit Wavion, develops wifi applications, and became part of the Alvarion stable for $30m in cash.

On the handset side of the fence, Motorola Mobility, which Google recently snapped up for an eye-watering $12.5bn, last week reported a shrinking net loss, but this week revealed plans to lay off around 800 workers, costing around $34m in related costs.

European and Latin American carrier Telefónica is doing some slashing of its own in a bid to keep future costs down. Matthew Key, former head of Telefónica Europe and current head of the newly formed digital unit, said the operator currently offers more than 240 handsets worldwide, of which just 12 are common in every market, but aims to cut that number down to less than 100. The move comes as part of a wider efficiency drive, and aims to allow the operator enhanced freedom to develop new products and services within its digital division.

The Informer recently saw Key talking about a “mindset shift” that would come about as a result of the creation of Telefónica Digital, during which he said: “The biggest factor in this mindset shift is that we have to move into the future and not protect the past. We can’t operate in a walled garden, we need to create the right products for people.”

With one eye on the future Korean vendor Pantech will be launching its Vega handset in South Korea this month, utilising gesture recognition technology provided by Israeli firm eyeSight. The device will enable users to answer incoming calls, activate their MP3 players, play games, and perform other tasks using simple hand gestures and without actually touching the screen.

Meanwhile, Samsung has confirmed that it will be launching a smartphone with a flexible screen in 2012. The firm has been showcasing its flexible Super-AMOLED displays since last year and company spokesman Robert Yi confirmed in an earnings call that products utilising the technology will be on sale next year.

There was more future gazing from Square, the payments startup founded by Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame, which is working on a ‘pay by face’ functionality for its platform. The system knows which store you are in from the location of your phone, delivers your photo to the shopkeeper and allows him to verify you by confirming you are the person in the photo. Transaction complete.

Visa Europe meanwhile, has invested £24.7m in mobile payments platform Monitise, giving the latter a greater European presence through an 8.8 per cent holding in the firm. Visa Europe president and chief executive Peter Ayliffe, will join Monitise’s board of directors, and said that that the growth of mobile phone services and e-commerce, together with the evolution of the mobile handset into the smartphone, present two of the most significant opportunities for the payments technology industry.

In September, Visa Europe announced the launch of Visa Mobile Person-to-Person payments and Visa Alerts, two services designed to help consumers manage their money and make payments using their mobile phones. Monitise was involved in both initiatives.

Rounding up now and something the Informer’s long suspected – 97 per cent of all the traffic travelling through the network of mobile operator 3UK today is data. The carrier said that in the 14 months between June 2010 and September 201, it has seen a 427 per cent increase in data usage for smartphone customers. Phil Sheppard, director of network strategy at 3UK, said that the operator’s focus has primarily been on users’ online experience and that its 3G network was made for the mobile internet.

Perhaps pushing a solution to the “too much data on the network” problem, Nokia has teamed up with wifi network operator Spectrum Interactive and location based media firm Selective Media, to trial a free wifi offering on the streets of London.

The trial project, which runs until the end of 2011, takes advantage of 26 London hot spot locations from Spectrum Interactive’s portfolio of real estate, most of which will be based on payphone boxes. It’s intended to assess both the demand for free wifi access and the browsing behaviour of consumers using the service across the British capital. The hotspots are typically fed by a 20Mbps DSL backhaul link, while individual users will allowed a 1Mbps connection in order to keep bandwidth hogging down.

Usage will be unrestricted across devices, browsers and apps, with users confirming a terms and conditions check box before access is granted. Following a successful trial, Nokia said plans are in place for a large-scale rollout across London from early 2012.

The question remains as to how this initiative is monetised, which is where Chris Bull, founder of Selective Media, comes in, saying that mobile advertising is on the agenda. Presumably the reason for allowing open access to start with would allow Selective to build up an idea of who is using the service and what they’re using it for. The firm would then be able to use its ad network to serve appropriate ads to popular sites.

That’s about the size of it for this week

Take care

The Informer

The French government has launched its own patent investment initiative

Having recently earned its spurs proving the Streisand Effect for its banning of the use of the terms ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’ on national television, the French government is now looking to take on the role of National Patent Troll. Last week, government ministers Valérie Pécresse, Eric Besson and commissioner general for investment Rene Nicol launched France Brevets (‘Patents France’), a €100m project that will see the state buying up locally generated patents before turning broker and sub-licensing them on a global basis. One of the first signatories to the initiative is the country’s Institut Telecom.

According to the French government, patents filed for by universities and research institutions as well as private small-to-medium enterprises will be the primary focus of the initiative because they often don’t have the time or money to market their wares. While some commentators suggest that the initiative will provide a ready source of income to French universities and the like, others have been less welcoming, saying there’s no reason why research institutions shouldn’t capitalise more fully by retaining their intellectual property (IP) holdings.

At a potentially more controversial level, some observers have voiced concern that the initiative will merely encourage the over-monetisation of IP, creating a scenario similar to the US’s much-maligned patent system, where entire businesses have been built around acquiring patents and profiting from simply exercising royalty rights, rather than actually creating anything. Popular French online tech magazine Numerama claims that the number of patents granted in the country has doubled in less than 15 years – evidence, it says, of a commodity-style bubble rather than genuine creativity.

It’s a view that would appear to be borne out by the EU’s own Patent Office officials, who threatened strike action in both 2006 and 2008 over the ease with which patents were being granted. Protesters claimed that the European Patent Office was decentralising and granting as many patents as possible, motivated largely by the high fees that were generated each time a patent was granted.

The EU is currently planning to implement a cross-border patent system in which applicants will only have to lodge one application with the European Patent Office (EPO) to secure protection across 25 of the 27 EU member states that have signed up to the plan. The two sticklers are Italy and Spain, who have objected to the proposal that successful patents will be published in English, French or German. The objections are likely to slow down the enforcement of the agreement – a complaint has been lodged with the European Court of Justice, which is obliged to hear the case.

There are no more IP addresses to be had from version four

Early Tuesday morning, internet address authority IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) handed out two of the last blocks of freely available IPv4 addresses to APNIC, regional internet registry of the Asia Pacific. The move triggered an automatic distribution of the remaining five blocks to each of the regional registries. There are no more IP addresses to be had from version four.

Over the next several months the internet registries will distribute these last addresses to network operators and service providers. According to RIPE NCC, the regional internet registry for Europe and Middle East, this is “the biggest event in the history of the internet”. On Thursday, IANA and the regional internet registries will hold an official press conference to discuss the plight of the internet following the exhaustion of IPv4.

According to RIPE, the proliferation of internet-connected phones, ereaders and other devices has accelerated the depletion of IPv4 addresses worldwide, forcing an early adoption of the next generation of IP addressing, IPv6. IPv6 includes a modern numbering system that provides a much larger address pool than IPv4, as when cellular devices come online en masse, only IPv6 will be able to provide a sufficient number of addresses.

IPv6 with its substantial address space of 128 bits as compared to 32 bits in IPv4 will provide virtually unlimited IP addresses for the future, expanding the number of possible addresses from approximately four billion with IPv4 to roughly 340 trillion trillion trillion with IPv6 .

Cisco exits WiMAX market. Well, almost...

IP and core network equipment vendor Cisco has pulled the plug on its WiMAX base station operation, further highlighting the ill health of the sector.

Cisco has been stepping up its game in the telecoms sector ahead of the shift to all IP next generation networks, since it missed the boat during the rollout of 3G. The US company has a presence in both the WiMAX and LTE sectors but more as a provider of packet core networking equipment as well as edge technologies like wifi and femtocells.

Well, make that only as a provider of core and edge infrastructure. “After careful review of our mobility strategy and investments, we have decided to discontinue designing and building new WiMAX base stations,” a company spokesman said this week.

The move raises some questions over Cisco’s $330m acquisition of WiMAX kit maker Navini Networks in 2007. Texas-based Navini develops smart beamforming technologies with MIMO (Multi-Input Multi-Output) antennas, making it a strategic player in the Mobile WiMAX 802.16e space.

But Navini might be just as at home in Cisco’s edge technology portfolio where it extends the company’s wifi and wifi mesh portfolios to include WiMAX.

“We are committed to continue with our current service provider mobility strategy to provide a radio-agnostic approach to focus on the packet core and to also focus investment in radio technologies such as femtocell and wifi,” the company spokesman said.

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Broadband Forum launches certification programme

Industry forums love launching certification programmes, and the Broadband Forum is no different. On Tuesday, at the MPLS & Ethernet World Congress in Paris, the forum announced its first ever certification programme to help drive multi-service network architectures and equipment interoperability testing.

The programme is designed to verify adherence to critical IP/MPLS, broadband and digital home and business specifications – areas of vital importance to the networking industry.

This should give service providers assurance that different vendor products conform to globally recognised and adopted technology standards promoting interoperability, as well as deliver a single industry-approved, and therefore more cost effective, test and certification process.

The Broadband Forum said Tuesday that five companies have already participated and their products have passed the BBF.248 test suite; Alcatel-Lucent, Axerra, Cisco, Huawei, and Juniper.

“The increase of mobile data traffic is putting a lot of challenges on mobile backhaul to provide the required capacity in a cost-effective way. We see MPLS as a viable option for meeting this challenge, and believe this certification program will advance the deployment of MPLS-based backhaul solutions in the market,” said Alain Maloberti, VP of network architecture and design for Orange.

Less than 10 per cent of available IPv4 addresses remain unallocated

Last week analysts predicted that global mobile data revenues will rise from an estimated $208bn in 2009 to over $330bn in 2013, driven by explosive growth in smartphones and dongles. But with legacy internet addresses almost exhausted, the internet community is running out of time to prepare for future demand.

At present, 2G mobile technologies still account for 90 per cent of the world’s subscriptions, but by the end of 2012, this figure will fall to 70 per cent, and by the end of 2014, over half the world’s 6.7 billion mobile subscriptions will be moving onto 3G and 3.5G+ technologies giving an enormous number of mobile devices internet connectivity, according to Informa.

But this week the Number Resource Organization (NRO), the official representative of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) tasked with ensuring the fair and equitable distribution of iInternet number resources, said that less than 10 per cent of available IPv4 addresses remain unallocated.

“With less than 10 per cent of the entire IPv4 address range still available for allocation to RIRs, it is vital that the internet community take considered and determined action to ensure the global adoption of IPv6,” said Axel Pawlik, Chairman of the NRO. “The limited IPv4 addresses will not allow us enough resources to achieve the ambitions we all hold for global internet access. The deployment of IPv6 is a key infrastructure development that will enable the network to support the billions of people and devices that will connect in the coming years,” he said.

There are currently two versions of IP in use, IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 includes a modern numbering system that provides a much larger address pool than IPv4. With so few IPv4 addresses remaining, the NRO is urging all internet stakeholders to take immediate action by planning for the necessary investments required to deploy IPv6.

According to the organisation, IPv6 allocations increased by nearly 30 per cent in 2009, suggesting that the problem is being addressed by the internet and communications industry. In a white paper on the subject last year, leading handset vendor Nokia said that when cellular devices come online in a mass, only IPv6 will be able to provide a sufficient number of addresses.

“As the mobile broadband becomes increasingly available, sharing of the mobile broadband connection to other devices, such as PCs, is becoming an increasingly attractive use case. In the IPv4 domain, sharing can be implemented by using network address translators on a sharing device, but for IPv6 more advanced solutions should be used in order to avoid introducing IPv6 network address translators. Cellular operators should take this use case into consideration when designing and building their IPv6 networks,” Nokia said.

Ericsson management reshuffle continues

The executive reshuffle continued at Swedish vendor Ericsson on Thursday, with incoming CEO Hans Vestberg nominating CTO Håkan Eriksson as head Ericsson in Silicon Valley, the centre of the company’s important IP business.

Eriksson will lead Ericsson’s development of fixed, mobile and internet convergence technologies from January 2010. He will succeed Bert Nordberg, newly appointed president of handset manufacturer Sony Ericsson.

Eriksson will keep his current role as CTO and head of group function technology & portfolio management and will remain as member of the group management team. He was appointed senior vice president and CTO in 2003 and was responsible for development activities carried out in Ericsson’s core network development, radio network development and service network and applications, as well as for Ericsson Research. Prior to this, he served for five years as head of Ericsson Research.

Ericsson CTO, Håkan Eriksson

Last month Vestberg nominated his successor to take the position of chief financial officer. Jan Frykhammar, who took the role from November 1, was formerly head of the global services business unit and senior vice president. Frykhammar will remain as head of global services until a successor has been appointed.

Carl-Henric Svanberg announced in June that he was standing down as president and CEO of the Swedish infrastructure vendor to become chairman of BP.

Ericsson took a beating during the third quarter of 2009, watching its net income dive 74 per cent year on year, dragged down by poor demand and further hits from its joint ventures.

Net income for the period shrank to SEK800m, down from SEK2.9bn in the third quarter of 2008. Net sales were also down 6 per cent year on year to SEK46.4bn, compared to SEK49.2bn in the third quarter of 2008.

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Cisco acquires IP and multimedia expert Starent

Networking giant Cisco reaffirmed its presence in the telco space, on Tuesday announcing an agreement to acquire IP and multimedia kit vendor Starent Networks for $2.9bn.

Starent provides multimedia intelligence platforms for core network functions and services on any 2.5G, 3G, and 4G network between the radio and the packet core networks. With the increasing focus on mobile internet, Starent has been picking up deals for 4G networks such as Verizon’s LTE rollout in the US and Freedom4’s WiMAX deployment in the UK.

Cisco reckons that global mobile data traffic is set to more than double every year through 2013, justifying the acquisition.

When the deal is completed, Starent will become Cisco’s new Mobile Internet Technology Group and will be headed up by Starent’s president and CEO Ashraf Dahod.

“Cisco and Starent Networks share a common vision and bring complementary technologies designed to accelerate the transition to the Mobile Internet, where the network is the platform for Service Providers to launch, deliver and monetize the next generation of mobile multimedia applications and services,” said Pankaj Patel, senior vice president and general manager for the company’s service provider business.

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