Orange CEO Stéphane Richard

The board of directors of Orange has issued a statement in which it publicly asserts “full confidence” in CEO and chairman Stéphane Richard, who has been arrested in connection with a corruption investigation in France dating back to 2008.

Richard previously worked in the French Finance Ministry and he faces questions relating to his role in a 2008 payment made to businessman Bernard Tapie. He was arrested last week and his detention was extended by 24 hours on Tuesday by the Court of Justice of the Republic, which investigates ministerial misconduct in France.

In a statement released on June 17th, following a meeting with Richard in which he explained his position, the Orange board said: “The Board has decided to reassert its full confidence in Stéphane Richard and his ability to effectively meet the numerous challenges facing Orange with the same energy as ever in the best interests of the company, its employees, its customers and its shareholders.

“In particular the Board considers that the legal measures affecting Stéphane Richard do not impede his ability to fully and effectively lead Orange as its chairman and [CEO]“.

Votes of confidence are easily rescinded, however. In October last year TeliaSonera CEO Lars Nyberg was given public backing by his board only to be ousted in February this year. Today it was announced that his replacement will be Johan Dennelind, until now the CEO of South African operator Vodacom.

The collaboration was started by Deutsche Telekom and Orange in 2011

Telecom Italia has become the fourth European operator to join the Global M2M Association, a collaborative programme founded by Deutsche Telekom and Orange (then France Telecom) in February 2011. TeliaSonera joined in July 2011.

The project aims to clear the way for M2M applications to run across the combined footprints of the four operators. At the start of this year the three existing members had synchronised their M2M helpdesk solutions and their module certification processes, enabling modules approved by one carrier to be deployed across the networks of all three.

The operators are also looking to enable seamless, cross-border customer experiences for M2M and to jointly drive cross-sector M2M partnerships.

“The M2M market is already moving quickly, with customers demanding harmonized service architectures without borders,” said Mario Polosa, director of the M2M Project Office at Telecom Italia. “We are firmly convinced that the GMA model is the best solution to consolidate and develop domestic and global opportunities together with our partners.”

Earlier this year Jürgen Hase, head of Deutsche Telekom’s M2M Competence Centre told Telecoms.com that compatibility rather than scale was the driving force behind the GMA’s expansion.

“It’s important to grow the alliance but you have to do it step by step; quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality,” he said. “You have to really define the ways in which you’re going to work together, the propositions you can offer to the market and gradually increase the footprint and the value chain. It’s also really important that you add partners for additional services, beyond connectivity.”

Orange continued to disappoint its broadband subs in Q4

The UK’s communications regulator Ofcom has revealed the worst-performing operators in the country, with Orange generating the most complaints for broadband in the fourth quarter of 2012 and BT receiving the most pay-TV complaints.

In the three months to December 2012, Orange generated 0.70 complaints per 1,000 broadband customers, with complaints peaking in October as a result of the company’s decision to withdraw its free broadband offer unless customers also purchased line rental from the company.

TalkTalk came second with 0.33 complaints per 1,000 broadband customers, and BT also generated above average complaints levels at 0.30 per 1,000 subscribers. Sky’s broadband service attracted the fewest complaints – 0.08 per 1,000 customers.

BT generated six times the pay-TV industry’s average number of complaints in the fourth quarter of last year, thanks largely to problems with service provision and complaints handling issues, generating 0.24 complaints per 1,000 customers.

Orange has partnered with for Morpho for m-health mobile identity management

Operator group Orange, through its healthcare services subsidiary Almerys has created a mobile identity management system for the healthcare sector. The firm partnered with identity management solutions Morpho as it extends its existing health card solution portfolio.

The solution enables doctors to securely access patient files via a tablet or mobile device. A field trial is underway in France’s Clermont Ferrand University Hospital Center.

The system uses strong SIM authentication to establish a link between the device’s SIM card and the physician’s unique identification number via the identity management platform. Once the SIM card is registered, an applet is directly loaded onto the mobile device or tablet that contains the SIM card. The doctor can then access patient files via a secure web site by entering his or her phone number.

Orange sets up in the DRC

Spotting the opportunity in the African emerging market, France Telecom has launched the Orange brand in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The operator group acquired domestic operator CCT in October 2011 and has invested CDF87.4bn ($95m) since to expand and upgrade its network. The operator said it will bring its technical and commercial know-how to the country, as well as its research and development expertise.

According to Orange DRC, the operator will be able to offer extensive coverage across the country from the first day of its launch.  It has also deployed the country’s first HSPA+ network in the capital Kinshasa, and will switch the technology on in Lubumbashi and Matadi in the coming days. In early 2013, residents of Goma, Bukavu and Mbuji-Mayi will also be covered.

From the outset, Orange DRC will have a chain of 22 own-branded retail outlets in the country and its products and services will also be widely available through 22,000 indirect points of sale.

The operator said it has rolled out an extensive program of 18,000 hours of training to maintain the group’s technical and commercial standards. It has also recruited extra employees to achieve its goals, bringing its total staff to more than 600 people.

“Our objective is to harness the power of a large group in order to benefit the Congolese population,” said Jean-Léon Bonnechère, CEO of Orange DRC.

“We think that there is a strong desire for simple, dynamic and innovative services in the DRC, a country with incredible development potential; it is the group’s ability to meet these requirements that makes Orange one of the most renowned brands in the world.”

Orange DRC customers will now join a global community of 183 million Orange customers. The group is now present in 33 countries globally.

Orange is providing broadband in remote areas of Niger using solar-powered base stations

Mobile operator Orange Niger has completed the first phase of its mobile connectivity deployments in remote regions of Niger to communities previously unserved by any form of telecommunications services.

The network rollout, which uses technology supplied by Altobridge, is entirely driven by sustainable energy sources. The operator said that the deployment has already demonstrated the significant benefits of rural connectivity through the delivery of mobile health services, improved mechanisms for money transfer and significantly higher levels of trade within the newly connected communities.

So far, over 50 off-grid village communities have been connected across Niger, allowing an average of 1,200 people in each village to benefit from mobile telecoms services for the first time. In such remote areas, network connection was previously limited due to the impracticality of terrestrial backhaul, the cost of fuel transportation and the high costs of deploying traditional tower structures.

Connectivity to the Orange network in each village is provided via solar-powered radio base stations, each with advanced satellite backhaul optimisation technology built-in.

“What Orange Niger has achieved shows just what can be accomplished by combining advanced communications technology with green-energy to deliver affordable mobile connectivity to some of the world’s most remote communities,” said Marc Ricau, country director for Orange’s Africa and Middle East division.

“Mobile communications brings services and growth to these communities who previously had no other option but to travel huge distances to simply make a phone call. Using renewable, low-cost energy sources to address this issue is a key part of our corporate environmental policy”.

Patrice Slupowski, vp of Digital Innovation & Communities, Orange – France Telecom

Patrice Slupowski is in charge of New Growth Activities and is VP of Digital Innovation & Communities for Orange, France Telecom. He is speaking on the Day Three of the Broadband World Forum 2012, taking place on 16 – 18 October 2012 at the RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre, Amsterdam. Ahead of the show we find out more about role is in bringing innovative solutions to market in the interactive TV space.

What does your role at Orange entail?

The team I’m running is in charge of bringing out innovative new products to mobile devices, tablets, and TVs. We are bringing things that are directly pushed to the consumer to see whether it takes 0ff or not and whether it makes sense to industrialise that. Either it works or it’s not working and we’ll try to modify that. We try to work as an internal start-up, directly facing the consumer.

So much that is happening is via OTT players. What is Orange trying to achieve with an internal team rather than just focusing on improving the network?

While our core promise to our customer is delivering a good network, we also consider that we have to play a role in the services area.  As a matter of fact we have 65 million unique customers around the different properties we have, and in some cases these properties are used by people that are not subscribers to one of our telco offers. This is the case for the users of the media portals we have in Latin America, or in some other companies that are in the digital space that are not directly related to our telco offer.

For instance, we have a product on social TV called TV Check, which is available in France and the UK – and this product is not an Orange branded product – it is open to all smartphone users in those markets. We intend to use that to use that to understand a number of things that are happening in the social and interactive TV space and the TV proposition we are providing to our subscribers.

What other innovations have you been working on?

To give you examples of things we are doing, there is TV Check, a social TV companion – and  second-screen application. It’s helping customers to socialise around TV programmes via Twitter and Facebook and discover new products via recommendations and playing around with things like quizzes. We are also about to release another product called Newsblend, an automated social magazine that automatically customises the news you’re seeing, by connecting it to your social networks. Then there is also BodyGuru, an Android eHealth application.

So is the strategy to encourage loyalty to the Orange brand?

The overall strategy is to be able to develop by providing interesting and attractive digital experiences for our customers. Most of these are too early to incorporate that into the Orange proposition.

With the products that are outside of the Orange footprint we can develop them by themselves.  and then they can help us understand. In France we have another app called TV Programme that is Orange branded that’s given to our broadband customers and on this application we are taking what we have learned from TV Check, such as when we should integrate social features. So when we do a product, the motivation is to learn and then see the potential to develop it further. We’ve always been very close to our customers in each of our markets and we want to keep this community. We don’t want to just be a carrier, it’s really important that we develop a relationship with our customers.

From what you’ve seen how is social media changing TV consumption?

Over the last 12 months we’ve seen the emergence of multi-tasking in front of the TV. We see in many geographies—not only younger people but also adults—using a phone, laptop or tablet, and increasingly they are doing things that are related to what they are watching on TV—not answering emails, but reacting to what they are seeing, which gave us the motivation to create tools that will simplify this. Now there are more second screen applications hitting the market and there are some players that think the second screen will be the most important. The TV ecosystem now considers social TV as a very important and probably in 2013 this will be something that will be completely part of the TV eco-system and we can expect maturity.

Do you think second screen will be more important than smart TVs?

We all thought that smart/connectableTVs would replace all the other propositions and set-top boxes but we’re seeing after two years of TVs that there are several ways you can connect your TV experience to the internet. It can be through the TV itself, the second-screen or it can be through the set-top box, or any other kind of devices such as a game console (we’ve released our service in France on the Microsoft Xbox). It’s still too early to say whether one form or another will take the lead, so we work on each of the segments.

What challenges will you be facing in the next 12 months?

As a telco, we have a challenge in the evolution of the networks. We have seen an enormous increase in usage and we’re happy to see that. It means that customers are using internet services from different devices but it’s a challenge to get the capacity. It’s a question of how we are going to finance the evolution of the networks in the mid-term, and how OTT players and network players will collaborate to develop and finance the development of the network.

For me, in my role, the challenges are in how we are going to see internet technologies change the way media is consumed. The customer will need to rely on services for their consumption experience and will feel more and more lost in front of an enormous amount of available material, and with the 30,000 VoD options, plus 300 TV channels, or the 800,000 applications in the store, they will feel lost if we don’t give some ability to get recommendations to help him get out of this tyranny of choice. So there is an enormous challenge to be able to master the technology, master the interface and experience to deliver the new media experience.

The Broadband World Forum 2012 is taking place on the 16 – 18 October 2012 at the RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Click here now to register your interest.

Orange has appointed seven new opco CEOs

French-headquartered international operator Orange has swapped out seven of its national chief executive officers in Africa and the Middle East, as part of a policy that sees senior positions allocated for fixed periods.

The firm has appointed new CEOs in Niger, Madagascar, Mali, Tunisia, Mauritius, Senegal and Jordan, with the appointments effective from October 1st.

Marc Rennard, senior executive vice president of France Telecom-Orange for Africa, the Middle East and Asia, said: “All of the new Chief Executive Officers have substantial international experience in the telecommunications sector. I am confident in their ability to continue to develop the activities of these seven subsidiaries, where we operate under the Orange brand. I also wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to each of their predecessors, who made significant contributions to the growth and solid economic performance of their companies.”

Rennard added that development in Africa and the Middle East, where Orange has a presence in 20 markets, is a top priority for Orange, which has targeted revenues of €7bn in the region by 2015.

• Brelotte Ba is appointed Chief Executive Officer of Orange Niger, succeeding Jean-Louis Branco;
• Michel Barré is appointed Chief Executive Officer of Orange Madagascar, succeeding Jean-Luc Bohé;
• Jean-Luc Bohé is appointed Chief Executive Officer of Orange Mali, succeeding Alioune Ndiaye;
• Didier Charvet is appointed Chief Executive Officer of Orange Tunisia, succeeding Thierry Marigny;
• Nathalie Clere is appointed Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Mauritius Telecom, succeeding Jean-François Thomas;
• Alioune Ndiaye is appointed Chief Executive Officer of Sonatel in Senegal, succeeding Cheikh Tidiane Mbaye; and
• Jean-François Thomas is appointed Chief Executive Officer of Jordan Telecom, succeeding Nayla Khawam.

The broadband industry is built on partnerships, and the first category of this year’s Broadband InfoVision Awards (to be held in Amsterdam on October 17th) will celebrate the most successful examples forged over the last 12 months.

France’s Bouygues Telecom has been shortlisted for this award for the various collaborations it formed to develop its new ‘Bbox Sensation’ home gateway. For the processor – the brains of the new Bbox – the telco selected Intel’s Groveland chips, with several Intel engineers joining its software development team. Wifi capabilities came courtesy of customised solutions from Israel’s Celeno.

A strategic decision was made by Bouygues to master the middleware placed on the devices, and it thus partnered with foundation software suppliers Bewan and Sagem. Sound specialist DTS was recruited to ensure the best audio, and cloud gaming innovator Playcast was called in to offer its games catalogue on the devices. French broadcaster TF1 was added its extensive VOD library, and the units were finally developed and produced by Samsung in Indonesia.

By involving all partners in every phase of the project, from conception to launch, Bouygues managed to cut six to nine months off a typical development cycle. The telco did this by bringing all teams under one roof in a dedicated office space to facilitate communication and problem solving, and allowed it to convert working methods into a software factory, involving daily development cycles and nightly tests

US firm Axia has been nominated for the public-private partnership it has built with the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) to design, build and operate a 1,300 “middle mile” fibre optic network across western Massachusetts, to be completed in June 2013.

Once finished, the network will connect 123 rural, hard-to-serve and economically challenged communities in western and central Massachusetts and directly hook up to over 1,300 key community anchor institutions. The project service area includes over 1 million residents, 44,000 businesses and comprises over 25 per cent of the state’s geographic area.

The partnership formed between Axia and MBI sees the latter retain ownership of the “middle mile” network, while Axia will own any network extensions where it invests its own capital to connect additional sites.

This model is designed to ensure that MBI has funding from a sustainability perspective to remain focused on the primary mission to connect unconnected residents and businesses in the most rural and hard to serve regions of the state, while Axia remains focused on the business of operating the network, engaging with wholesale service provider customers, and making capital investments to extend the network where applicable.

Another French telco has also been nominated for this award – Orange – which launched a ground-breaking interactive TV experience last April, Orange TV on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 with Kinect. The service is exclusive to Orange, with no other operator having this exclusive partnership with Microsoft in France.

The service is available to existing Orange TV customers and Xbox LIVE Gold members, and lets customers use both their body and their voice to change channels (among 60 live channels available), set personalised alerts, select favourite channels and get useful programme information.

Working with Microsoft, Orange’s R&D Software engineers (already familiar with the Microsoft’s technical framework from previous collaborations on Windows Phone development) devised this feature ‘in-house’, applying Kinect’s inherent motion and voice capabilities to TV navigation. Orange also drew on its experience of developing interactive TV (in TV programmes, catch-up TV, interactive TV advertising, games on TV etc.) through its IPTV offering.

After only ten days following the launch, the Orange TV app had been downloaded 100,000 times, giving a solid indication of appetite for the service. In addition, the average time spent on each Orange TV session via Xbox is one hour 40 minutes – a significant proportion of the total average time spent watching TV of around 3 hours 47 minutes.

Finally, Swedish broadband operator Wexnet has been shortlisted for the partnership it created with Chinese equipment vendor ZTE to build a new access network which enables customers to choose different content providers/service providers that suit their individual needs, with all services being delivered over a single network.

The network needed to be smart enough to self-organise: all necessary configuration of the network equipments (access/aggregation/core switches) had to be done automatically when customers submitted subscriptions for specific services, allowing users to provision themselves.

After many rounds of in-depth discussion between Wexnet and ZTE, several ZTE solution engineers stayed in Sweden for around six months to help develop the network solution and do field trials. Back in Beijing, ZTE’s switch R&D centre also devoted lots of energy to the project, developing new features for switches.

On Wexnet’s side, the operator provided detailed information about its local network as the project progressed, and is still working with ZTE on an expansion project to increase the capacity of the network and bring in new network features.

All aboard! France’s SNCF wants your cheeks on a seat – but not necessarily on a train.

With Olympics trade in mind, the French rail giant just launched a Paris-to-London coach service. Branded idBus, the service claims a four-star experience at a two-star price.

An odd move for a global leader in rail transport?

It’s actually an important object lesson in fighting OTT that telecom operators can learn from.

~~~

• LESSON 1 – If you can’t beat them, join them

This is OTT realpolitik: SNCF is fighting disruptive competition on many fronts. Low-cost airlines like Easyjet and Ryanair, Megabus and Eurolines coaches offer cut-price travel to students and other budget-conscious travellers. Sweeping changes in EU transport rules mean that various passenger and freight routes are now up for competition.

• LESSON 2 –  Make it simple

No confusion marketing here: SNCF’s idBus prices are fixed with no hidden extras. Paris to London costs between Euro 49 to 65. Until the end of 2012, a third of seats on all idBus European routes will cost 5 Euros. SNCF thinks this will attract up to a quarter of a million passengers and 75% occupancy in 2012.

• LESSON 3 – Focus on customer experience

It’s not cattle herding: The idBus fleet offers luxury coaches with generous legroom, wheelchair access and customers can choose their seats. Technology is a critical differentiator: Each bus offers totally free Wi-Fi with in-seat power sockets for connected devices (Eurostar won’t limp into the Wi-Fi era until 2013*). Customers get real-time information on their route since each coach is tracked via GPS.

• LESSON 4 – Think outside of your box

Driving this initiative is a new recruit: Barbara Dalibard (pictured below, far right). Now boss of SNCF Voyages, she helmed Orange’s Euro 7.1  billion enterprise division Orange Business Services until 2010. She’s injected fresh ideas into the incumbent of a mature industry.

CONNECTED VERTICALS

Sound familiar? This kind of lateral thinking is exactly what the telecom industry needs to embrace.  As SNCF’s example underscores, telecom innovation can bring dynamism into adjacent industries – but telecom can also learn by interacting beyond its traditional borders. Understanding this is the real fast-track to success in OTT and Connected Verticals.

*Working with Bouygues Telecom, Orange and SFR, Alcatel-Lucent has just implemented technology for Eurotunnel to support mobile connectivity – but only in the Channel Tunnel.

For further discussion of these issues, the white paper: Connected Verticals: Opportunities in Transport and Energy is freely downloadable from Slideshare, along with other content from Informa’s Enterprise Verticals research and consultancy practice.

Orange claims this is the first nationwide deployment of NFC-enabled SIM cards in Europe

French incumbent Orange has begun offering NFC-enabled SIM cards nationwide in preparation for what it calls the “mass deployment”  of mobile contactless services. The UpTeq NFC SIM cards are supplied by Gemalto and  are the first SIMs on the market to offer the same security level as chip-based payment or smart cards, the firms said.

Orange, which claims to be the first European operator to roll out this technology on a national scale, said it plans to rent slots on the SIMs to service providers, including banks, retailers and transport providers, which is in line with the GSMA’s suggested model of NFC service operation.

“The solution will allow any service provider to dynamically manage its own security domain in the card and to load, personalise and update its related NFC applications remotely over time,” Orange said.

In adopting this stance, Orange places the burden of innovation and uptake on the service providers. Earlier this year the firm’s director for contactless services, Vincent Barnaud, told Telecoms.com that Orange had run successful trials with hotels, airlines and car rental companies and that the firm believed the “service providers are ready to go if and when there is a customer base ready to use [NFC].”

Orange

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The total value of mobile money transfers in Africa is expected to exceed $200bn in 2015

Mobile operator Orange said Monday that is has reached a total of four million mobile payment customers across its operations in Africa and the Middle East.

Orange Money, the group’s mobile payment service, was first launched in Côte d’Ivoire in December 2008 and has since been made available in Botswana, Cameroon, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Niger and Senegal. In the last few weeks the service has also been launched in Jordan and Mauritius. Eventually, the operator aims to launch the service in all 22 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the group operates.

In Madagascar, over a third of all customers have opened an Orange Money account, while in Côte d’Ivoire daily transactions now exceed one billion CFA francs per day. Users can already pay their electricity bills in Senegal or their water bills in Jordan, while users in Madagascar can sign-up to a life insurance scheme.

The three key services of the offering include: money transfers, where users can send money using their phone to any Orange Money customer in the country; financial services, including solutions facilitating savings and insurance; and payments, giving users an easier way to pay their bills and buy mobile phone credit.

In related news, India-based Bharti Airtel has collaborated with Ecobank in Chad to launch its Airtel Money service in the West African nation. The service will allow subscribers to carry out financial transactions on their mobile phones and enhance the delivery of financial services at affordable costs.

Salia Gbane, CEO of Airtel Chad, said: “This service allows customers to send money to their relatives, pay essential bills such as electricity and water, tuition fees, bookings and even buy groceries without having to carry cash. The phone essentially becomes an electronic wallet.”

Gbane said that recent studies have suggested that the total value of mobile money transfers in Africa is expected to exceed $200bn in 2015 due to the growing confidence of users in the system, coupled with a wide range of services on offer.

Orange is planning to switch on the first Spanish FTTH connections this year

Orange Spain has revealed plans to invest around €300mn over the next four years in a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network which will deliver speeds of up to 100Mbps to around 1.5 million homes and businesses in the country’s biggest cities, with the first connections to be switched on before the end of this year.

The telco name checks the usual applications to be enabled by the new high-speed network, including HDTV, cloud services, home automation, video calling and online games.

Orange adds that the project is open to other operators joining the project, whether as co-investors in the FTTH network, through commercial agreements, or through network sharing.

Since entering the Spanish market, the company has invested over €3bn in the country and accumulated around 1.3 million customers, served by a mix of telephony, broadband and TV services.

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Vodafone has launched the Smart II smartphone, priced at £70 in the UK

Vodafone has launched a self-branded £70 smartphone in a bid to appeal to consumers who are currently priced out of the “smartphone revolution”.

The Vodafone Smart II handset (pictured) runs on the Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system and has a chipset manufactured by chipmaker Broadcom, with an 832MHz processor and 512MB of RAM.

It has a 3.2-in HVGA capacitive touchscreen, which supports 64 million colours, supports 3G HSDPA and wifi connectivity, has a 3.2-megapixel camera and uses AGPS technology for accurate mapping and navigation functions.

According to Vodafone, the handset has “twice the processing power of the most expensive and sought-after smartphones available three years ago”.

The Smart II will be available across Vodafone markets and partner markets this summer and will be priced under €99, launching first in the UK priced at £70.

“The Smart II is one of the most important devices we have ever introduced,” said Patrick Chomet, group terminals director. “We believe the Smart II could represent a tipping point in the evolution of the market, bringing a new wave of consumers to the supermobile world for the first time.”

Rival Orange has also unveiled its own Intel-based smartphone for the UK, which will be priced at £200 on a PAYG tariff.

The San Diego handset was manufactured by Chinese firm Gigabyte and runs on Intel’s single-core Atom Z2460 processor. It will go on sale on June 6 in the UK and will be released in France shortly after.

Free Mobile reveals it has won 4 per cent of the French market in just 80 days

French low-cost 3G operator Free has managed to acquire nearly four per cent of the country’s market share in just 80 days.

Having launched on January 10, 2012, the operator said during its first ever quarterly results announcement that it had acquired 2.6 million mobile subscribers by 31 March 2012. Free offers coverage to  about 30 per cent of the population via its own network and relies on a roaming agreement with Orange for extended coverage.

Success came at the expense of its rivals – SFR, for example, admitted that it lost 620,000 mobile subscribers in the quarter. Orange France lost 615,000 mobile customers.

The operator offered two low-cost commercial mobile plans at launch: the €2 per month no-contract offering (€0 per month for Freebox subscribers) for 60 minutes voice and 60 SMS per month; and the €19.99 per month no-contract offering (€15.99 per month for Freebox subscribers) with unlimited voice, SMS, MMS and internet, with a 3GB fair use policy.

Parent group Iliad, said in a statement: “With its commercial and price innovations, Free Mobile has liberated conventions and galvanized a market that had been at a standstill for many long years.”

Everything Everywhere says that service revenues would have grown were it not for the impact of MTR cuts in the UK

Everything Everywhere, the company formed by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK, has posted a drop in service revenue of 2.5 per cent to fall to £1.5bn in its first quarter earnings statement.

The firm blamed the drop on the impact of regulated mobile termination rate (MTR) cuts. Last year, the UK’s Competition Commission decided to increase the speed at which mobile termination rates must fall, from 4 pence per minute to just 0.65 pence per minute by 1 April 2014. It said that, excluding the impact of these cuts, revenue would have grown by 2.9 per cent.

Nonetheless, CEO Olaf Swantee was buoyed by the performance, and described its current churn rate, which stands at 1.2 per cent as “industry-leading”.

“We are seeing improved underlying service revenues, driven by rapid data revenue growth, as we successfully upgrade customers to smartphones and higher value postpaid agreements,” he said.

He added that the firm expects to make “major strides” improving its network experience, such as better signal sharing and faster 3G data services, when it launches its LTE services, which it is hoping to bring to market by the end of this year by refarming its 1800MHz, pending approval from regulator Ofcom.

“We continue to make progress in reducing costs and simplifying the business.  In the first quarter we initiated our network optimisation programme to streamline the number of network masts.

During the quarter, Everything Everywhere also completed on a series of other business integration projects including restructuring its head offic, the consolidation of the Orange and T-Mobile warehouses and handset supply chain and improved product availability. The firm plans to reduce its head office space by 38 per cent and Swantree said the operator remains on track to achieve its targeted £3.5bn  net present value (NPV) in cost savings by 2014.

Jean-Pierre Bienaimé, is the senior vice president of strategy & communications wholesale for Orange and chairman of the UMTS Forum

Jean-Pierre Bienaimé, is the senior vice president of strategy & communications wholesale for Orange and chairman of the UMTS Forum. Ahead of the LTE World Summit, taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 at the CCIB, Barcelona, Spain, Telecoms.com catches up with him to get his views on the future of the mobile industry.

Orange has recently put down its LTE marker by pledging that it will bring LTE to Europe across the countries of France, Spain, Belgium, Luxemburg, Armenia, Moldova, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. In light of the 2015 coverage date some have viewed the move as a little sluggish but Jean-Pierre Bienaimé, senior vice president of strategy & communications wholesale for Orange and chairman of the UMTS Forum, is keen to defend Orange’s here. “Orange’s philosophy has always been ‘not always first, but first time right, with the best quality of experience for the customer with the best coverage and terminals for the customers.”

The availability of terminals is often the blight of the industry and it has been no different for LTE. However, Bienaimé is satisfied that it will not be a problem for Orange in Europe. “The terminal market has grown quicker than expected from one year ago, and probably the US launches have played a role as an accelerator for 4G. It has helped mature the ecosystem. I’m sure by December we will have some 30 smartphones that will have LTE capability. You’ll have also tablets, notebooks and within one year I’m sure this number will multiply. In Japan, DoComo has just announced two million LTE customers it will be also quick in the Japanese market.”

A bigger problem he believes is the spectrum situation, which, as chairman of the UMTS Forum has long been one of his concerns. “It has been our job for a long time in the UMTS forum to fight for frequency spectrum for mobile. We have been active at worldwide radiocommunication conferences with regard to the digital dividend and C band and also harmonisation.” The latter is directly tied into the success of the LTE eco-system he explains. “In the coming years, with the digital dividend at 700 and 800MHz we should have harmonised bands, so that there will be enough economy of scale.”

Bienaimé is looking forward to the launch of LTE, particularly in his native France. “In France we have just done the auction process at the end of the previous year, so as was in the case in Germany, at 800Mhz, mainly for rural, and 2.6GHz for urban areas.” He is also happy with the way the auction went for Orange. “[We] obtained the best compromise in terms of quantity of MHz and price – it was a good calculation. But I expect that there will be refarming of 1800MHz.”

One of the benefits of LTE over UMTS is that it is able to operate over a wide band of frequencies, but at the same time it is this that causes issues in terms of the lack of harmonisation. However, he is confident that technology will be able to overcome this. “We have seen encouraging signs at the recent Mobile World Congress with some interesting announcements in terms of LTE launches, particularly from chipset vendors: notably from Qualcomm who showed 3G/LTE multimode and multi-band chips, supporting 2G/3G/LTE with 14 LTE bands. So I think it’s quite encouraging.”

However, he still insists that that a combination of talented multi-frequency chipsets and limited spectrum fragmentation is what is required to encourage roaming.  “With LTE, more so than with previous generations, if you want to have international roaming you need to add several LTE bands, so you must have GSM, UMTS, CDMA2000 and LTE- both high and low frequencies.”

Most of the attention of roaming recently has been around cost issues, with the EU in particular recently making moves to lower these for consumers. On the costs issues Bienaimé comments that, “there are some discussions at European level for roaming trends in terms of tariffs and we will soon see the result of those discussions. We can say that for the customers it will be more and more interesting.”

What excites Bienaimé about LTE is its potential to transform connected devices of all types. “At the UMTS Forum we think that mobile broadband and consumer electronics are two worlds that will meet very rapidly. I don’t know if it will be the 50 billion connected devices predicted by Ericsson by 2020 – we more moderately predicted, in addition to traditional smartphones, one billion real consumer electronics devices by 2016.  These will be divided into four categories: home, portable, car and health. We foresee that broadband LTE will favour low latency activities such as real-time streaming, video conferencing and interactive gaming.”

M2M however will take a good while to enter the LTE fold he says. “Concerning the real traditional M2M, we will think it will come a bit later. Many M2M communications are happy with not such high-speed [connections], such as smart metering. But definitely for video, and in-car applications we are sure that LTE will accelerate the phenomenon. The promise of in-car entertainment and telematics will finally be fulfilled with new generation networks. One forecast has more than 200 million cars connected to mobile broadband networks by 2016.”

In his role at Orange, Bienaimé has his eye on the wholesale market, and he believes that the limitations behind LTE spectrum will enable this business model to grow in France. “The limited bandwidth available for LTE will encourage networks sharing to develop. Concerning wholesale, there are interesting initiatives. We know that in the US Clearwire announced at MWC that it will move for LTE and LTE-A and will turn themselves to the wholesale model. I think we see a lot of development in this.”

Bienaimé focuses in on the case of Free Mobile entering the French market and putting price pressure on Orange, while at the same time using Orange for its network.“On the one hand, Orange’s consumer retail brand is challenged by the tariffs of Free mobile, but on the other hand Orange is earning some wholesale revenues. Moreover I think more and more we will see the appearance of data MVNOs. I think the operators will have to look at new sources of growth, particularly in Europe where the growth rate is not the same as in emerging markets. In terms of new territories, data MNVOs present new opportunities for the operators with strong partnerships”.

The LTE World Summit is taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your http://ws.lteconference.com/interest.

Orange has introduced a new cloud-based Telepresence service

Orange Business Services, the France Telecom owned brand, has announced the latest attempt to revitalise video conferencing, saying that conditions are now right for the technology to succeed.

At a press event that connected London, Paris and Beijing through its cloud-based video conferencing solution Telepresence Pass, the chief executive for Orange Business Services, Vivek Badrinath, said that a crucial difference of over previous iterations of the technology was that it was cloud-based enabling it to be fully managed by Orange.

Badrinath said it is attractive to users as it is very easy to use and that modern video usage had increased the appetite for video based communications. “Video as such is become much more important in interaction,” he said. “The fact that people watch short videos means that the taste for video communications has increased.”

Badrinath said a key benefit of the Telepresence Pass service was that it was compatible with multiple carriers and vendors such as Polycom and Cisco. He said Orange has 300 video staff trained to support the service worldwide and that it is backed by a 24/7 concierge service.

Orange said the service performs best when a dedicated telepresence room is used as these offers uniform conditions that optimise lighting and audio, which enhance the meeting experience. However, all conferences can also be accessed over the public internet using mobile devices such as PCs, and iOS powered phones and tablets.

To enhance the service, Badrinath said that Orange has invested €750m during 2011 to extend network coverage and improve QoS. Asia Pacific, Europe and U.S. are now interconnected using dual 10G belts, while Europe was enhanced with a 40G/100G optical network. Emerging countries meanwhile had benefitted from a 20 per cent increase in network capacity and coverage.

Pieter Schoehuijs, of Dutch paint company AkzoNobel, spoke at the launch to explain how it had successfully introduced the Orange technology to help connect its 80 global offices. In response to a question on whether there was any resistance from staff on using telepresence considering it would reduce the opportunity for travel, Schoehuijs responded that senior executives who would otherwise have to travel very frequently actually welcomed the technology. “The travel is fun to start with, but that chewing gum loses its flavour real quick,” he said.

Schoehuijs also highlighted the green credentials of the Orange service, stating that AkzoNobel had made an investment of €7-8m in the Orange Telepresence service but that it had saved the company about 50,000 hours a year based on 4,000 people participating in the teleconferencing, equating to 25 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year. “Not only is it financially attractive, but from a sustainability perspective, it’s quite frankly a no brainer,” he said.

The service is available now available directly on an Orange dedicated MPLS network in 67 countries, and up to 106 countries using leased lines. Costs range between €400-€4000 per month depending on the number of screens and requires 2Mb/s of bandwidth per screen for 1080p connectivity.

The Broadband World Forum is taking place on the 16 – 18 October 2012 at the RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Click here now to register your interest.

Orange has announced a commitment to cover Europe with LTE by 2015

International carrier Orange/France Telecom has committed itself to rolling out LTE networks across ten European countries by 2015. France Telecom’s CEO Stéphane Richard made the announcement at a meeting with the European Commission in Brussels this week.

The move is designed to help the EU reach its targets set out in it Digital Agenda, which aims to ensure that everyone in Europe has access to broadband by 2013 assisted by the release of harmonized band of radio spectrum for use with LTE. It also forms one of Orange’s “10 commitments”, which the company has set for itself in regards to networks and services.

“”[Orange will] roll out 4G/LTE networks in all Orange European Union markets by 2015.” Richard said. “We welcome the EU decision to make more spectrum available, in a timely and harmonised manner, to wireless services in the EU, and look forward to further, similar initiatives to help us cope with the massive growth in public data use.”

However, Richard also added that, “Europe could do a great deal to promote a more favourable environment for the roll-out of radio access networks”.

In the UK, Everything Everywhere, the joint venture between Orange and T-Mobile, has already announced that it wishes to have a live LTE service running by the end of the year, by refarming spare 1800MHz spectrum, a proposal that the regulator Ofcom has said that it is considering.

The other countries scheduled for LTE are France, Spain, Belgium, Luxemburg, Armenia, Moldova, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.

Orange is a host parter of the LTE World Summit taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Eduardo Duato, CTO, Orange, Spain is giving a keynote speech on Day Two of the conference. Click here to register your interest.