German carrier Deutsche Telekom reported a significant drop in net profit for the first half of 2011, from €1.2bn a year ago to €828m this year. Revenues were on the slide as well from €31bn in H1 2010 to €29bn in H1 2011.
Orange’s Polish operation, PTK Centertel, and T-Mobile’s PolskaTelefoniaCyfrowa this week signed an agreement to share their radio access networks. The network will be managed by a new joint venture called NetWorkS! owned 50-50 by the two operators and responsible for the management, planning, support, development and maintenance.
UK mobile broadband users accessing the web over dongles and datacards are getting average throughput of 1.5Mbit/s, according to research released Thursday by UK regulator Ofcom. But there were significant differences between the five carriers’ performance, with O2 delivering the best performance, and Orange the worst. 3UK outperformed T-Mobile, with which it shares a 3G network.
To a man with an iHammer, everything looks like an iNail, as the Informer’s great friend Mark Twain once said. And just to prove the old man right, the powers-that-be at Cupertino are suing Samsung, HTC, Mother Theresa, Adam and Eve and growers of mostly green, rather tasty pieces of fruit for infringing on its intellectual property. Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter, who wouldn’t have been able to attend legal proceedings in person as she couldn’t get the time off from kindergarten, settled out of court.
America’s third-placed carrier Sprint has released a statement officially opposing the proposed $39bn merger of AT&T and T-Mobile. Senior vice president for Sprint’s Government Affairs division, Vonya McCann, said that “Sprint urges the United States government to block this anti-competitive acquisition,” adding that the transaction would “harm consumers and competition at a time when this country can least afford it.”
The pending deal between AT&T and T-Mobile USA is symptomatic of growing market maturity in the US but will be better for the American telco than it will for Deutsche Telekom, according to Ovum analyst Steven Hartley.
Rene Obermann has pulled off one of the most spectacular bluffs in recent history by engineering the sale of Deutsche Telekom’s US subsidiary to AT&T, a move predicted by few, but one that will dramatically alter the structure of the US mobile industry if approved.
O2 Germany will launch commercial LTE services on July 1st this year. The announcement, which was made at a CeBIT press conference yesterday, was sketchy on details regarding speed and pricing. The new network will reportedly offer speeds in line with an “average DSL connection” and run on Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei kit.
Net losses of high-value contract customers – to the tune of 318,000 – have put a dampener on an increase of 295,000 prepaid users and a 0.9 percent on year increase in revenue for the last quarter of 2010.
Everything Everywhere, the joint-venture between T-Mobile and Orange in the UK, has reported losses of one million pay-as-you-go customers since its formation in April last year. The company, which is jointly-owned by France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom, said that the results reflect consolidation and an increased focus on more profitable postpaid customers rather than full-on churn, citing contract adds of 752,000 over nine months.
Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile have announced their intention to launch NFC mobile payment services in the UK by 2012. Near-field communications (NFC) has been building a head of steam in recent months, with the likes of Google, RIM and Visa announcing their support.
UK operator T-Mobile, now part of Everything Everywhere, piqued the consumer press on Tuesday with a new mandate to curb multimedia downloads and save its network from congestion. But the all-you-can-eat data party has been over for some time already and with no adverse effects to users.
Ericsson has announced that the project to merge the UK 3G networks of T-Mobile and 3 has been completed, with more than 12,000 sites consolidated. The two carriers created a third party organisation, Mobile Broadband Network Ltd (MBNL) in 2007 to run the joint network, with Ericsson the primary service provider to MBNL.
T-Mobile USA has joined the FreeMove alliance between Deutsche Telekom, Orange, TeliaSonera, and Italy’s TIM.As part of this move, T-Mobile USA plans to offer the FreeMove Alliance’s advanced solutions to multinational clients, especially those requiring communications both in the United States and Europe.
T-Mobile USA is to make wifi calling available on a wide selection of its Android-powered smartphones including the recently announced T-Mobile myTouch and Motorola Defy. Customers wifi access points are powered by Kineto’s Smart Wi-Fi Application. T-Mobile said it hosts approximately 40 million wifi calls per month.
The newly merged mobile operations of UK operators T-Mobile and Orange, Everything Everywhere, reported 27.9 million subscriptions at end June, up 3.4 per cent year-on-year. EBITDA came in at £309m, down from £379m in 2Q09 as service revenues decreased over the same period, mainly due to termination rates. Everything Everywhere confirmed that it will meet its synergy net present value target of at least £3.5bn.
Swedish infrastructure player Ericsson has announced that the MBNL network shared by T-Mobile and 3 in the UK now has 10,000 active shared sites. MBNL (Mobile Broadband Network Ltd) was created as a joint venture between the UK arms of T-Mobile and 3 in 2007, with the aim of consolidating the two carriers’ networks into one. The completed project will see an active shared network of 12,400 cell sites.
The UK arms of Orange and T-Mobile began promoting the consumer benefits of their mammoth merger on Monday. But the service improvement promises made by the newly created company—Everything Everywhere—seemed to carry an acknowledgement that the coverage profiles of the two networks individually were previously somewhat lacking.
US carrier Sprint this week launched WiMAX in a handful of new metropolitan areas amid speculation that the firm is also considering an LTE strategy that could pave the way to a merger with T-Mobile USA.
Four of Europe’s largest mobile operators – Vodafone, Telefónica O2, T-Mobile and Orange – lost their battle with European authorities on Tuesday, after the European Court of Justice ruled that roaming caps can stick.
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.