Chinese kit vendor Huawei has taken on the field and civil maintenance and management of Vodafone’s xDSL and mobile networks in Spain. The five year contract sees Huawei taking on 103 Vodafone employees who will be put on the vendor’s payroll.
Telefónica has partnered with Spanish banks La Caixa and Santander to deliver mobile payment services and a digital wallet. Users of the new service will be able to gather all their credit cards into the new digital wallet; they will also be able to send and receive funds via their mobile phone. Bank account details will not be necessary; all the sender needs is the recipient’s phone number.
Swedish operator group TeliaSonera has announced that its Spanish subsidiary Yoigo will launch LTE services in July. In doing so, it will become the first in Spain to offer 4G services.
Swedish operator group TeliaSonera will retain its Spanish subsidiary Yoigo as it has not received a suitable offer for the business from prospective buyers, the firm has said.
Spanish operator group Telefonica has bolstered its mobile content portal in Spain, in a bid to stave off competition from over-the-top service providers.
The Spanish subsidiaries of operator groups Vodafone and Orange will co-invest in fibre to the home (FTTH) deployment in Spain, the former has announced. The two intend to reach six million households and workplaces across 50 major cities by September 2017.
Global operator group Vodafone is today holding talks with labour unions in Spain regarding its plans to cut its workforce, a spokesperson has told Telecoms.com. The news comes as Vodafone struggles in a challenging economic climate in Europe.
In a move aimed at strengthening its position in the Spanish market, Orange has acquired 100 per cent of MVNO Simyo. The MVNO, which has around 380,000 subscribers, was previously owned by Dutch operator group KPN.
Vodafone has announced a loss of £1.89bn for the six months to the end of September 2012 on the back of write downs for its Spanish and Italian operations totaling £5.9bn. The international operator recorded a profit of £6.64bn for the same period in 2011 and chief executive Vittorio Colao said the 1H12 results reflected “tougher market conditions, mainly in Southern Europe”.
In a frank assessment of the challenges facing European operators in deploying LTE networks, the chief technology officer of Orange Spain recently issued a rallying cry to the industry to collaborate on deep network sharing. Only by embracing this strategy, he told his peers, can operators hope to make LTE profitable.
In a frank assessment of the challenges faced by European operators deploying LTE, Eduardo Duato, CTO at Orange Spain, told delegates at this year’s LTE World Summit that operators “can’t make a success of LTE unless we change the way we roll out networks.” Despite the improvements that LTE offers over previous generations of network technology in terms of cost and spectral efficiency, Duato said that operators “have to make a massive investment to make money from LTE.”
Spain’s antitrust regulator, the National Commission Competition (CNC) has taken disciplinary action against Telefónica, Vodafone and Orange, accusing the operators of abusing their dominant positions.
Spain’s leading carriers shelled out more than €1.65bn between them in the latest round of LTE spectrum auctions to take place in Europe. Telefónica, Orange and Vodafone walked away with spectral spoils in the 800MHz and 2.6GHz band after an auction process last week.
Spain has begun its wireless spectrum auction process with operators bidding to take a chunk of the valuable radio waves that will be used to provide next generation mobile services. The Spanish government hopes the auction will raise €2bn (US$2.9bn), which would help Spain reduce its heavy budget deficit, which is currently the third largest in the EU.
France and Spain are to be taken to court by the EU over telecoms taxes. According to reports from Reuters, the EU executive will take legal action over taxes imposed on telecoms companies aimed at compensating for the end of advertising on public television stations. An unnamed source has said that such taxes are deemed to be incompatible with EU telecoms rules, which require specific charges on telecoms operators to be directly related to meeting the costs of regulating the telecoms sector.
Only 3.7 per cent of the Spanish population has browsed the internet on their mobile phone but those consumers who have done so are spending 30 per cent more than the average Spanish mobile user. And of the operators vying for that business in Spain, Vodafone is leading the pack. The findings come from data supplied exclusively to telecoms.com from Kantar Worldpanel’s ComTech survey.
Spanish carrier Telefonica said Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire 21 per cent of local satellite TV player Prisa, which operates under the Digital + brand.
Vodafone has confirmed plans to deploy the MiFi mobile broadband hotspot in three markets but may face a challenge in marketing the hard to explain device.
At Informa Telecoms & Media, we don’t often use charts, graphs or diagrams to illustrate our thought pieces, but sometimes a picture can paint a thousand words, as the old saying goes.
Mobile operator Orange has struck a deal with dispute resolution tool and fact finding site Wikipedia in a bid to boost mobile data traffic.
Consolidation, convergence and competitionCalls for consolidation in the European mobile market grow louder by the week and four-operator markets look increasingly challenged. Now, those mobile operators that have already built scale seem to be suggesting that there is no option but to expand yet further through diversification.
It is testament to Telstra’s aggressive approach to mobile broadband that an operator in a country of just over 23 million people should rank in the top ten operators worldwide in terms of LTE subscriber numbers. Mike Wright, Telstra’s executive director for networks and access technologies talks to Telecoms.com about the firm’s plans for further enhancing its LTE operation with fresh spectrum and LTE-Advanced capabilities.
Jonathan Bell, VP of Marketing at OpenCloud, discusses how policy and pricing are just two dimensions along which telecoms operators can differentiate their propositions. By adding a third dimension, the service behaviour itself, operators can define and bring true innovation to the market that surpasses the traditional approaches of the past, he says.
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With summer supposedly fast approaching, many look to trim some fat and get in shape for the sunny months. The Informer has never been a huge fan of gyms; in fact his favourite machine in the gym is the one that sells chocolate. Telefonica’s UK arm O2, is one business that is looking to get lean for the holidays, though, and this week it announced that it is to trim 3,500 UK employees.