Telefónica has announced a new pan-European data roaming tariff for customers, which it claims is up to ten times cheaper than the new price caps approved by the European Parliament this week.
Customers on the Movistar and O2 networks will be able to use up to 25MB of data whilst abroad, anywhere across the 27 European Union member states, for just €2 per day.
Despite seeing stability in revenue over the course of the first quarter of 2012, Telefónica has seen its net income plummet to less than half of what it recorded in the same period last year. Revenue for the quarter stood at €15.51bn, a 0.5 per cent increase on the €15.44bn generated in the first quarter of 2011, while net income fell 53.9 per cent from €1.62bn to just €748m.
There is an interesting parallel between today’s announcement that Telefónica is launching an app-based rich communications play—TU Me—and the unveiling two weeks ago of its O2UK arm’s mobile wallet offering. In both situations, Telefónica is simultaneously leading collaborative efforts along similar lines with the very operators on which it is attempting to steal a march by being quick to market.
Telefónica subsidiary O2 has become the first operator in the UK market to launch a mobile wallet offering. The service offers price comparison for online shopping, person to person money transfer and allows the user to digitise cards linked to existing bank accounts, or load money onto an O2 stored value account.
Given my whinge yesterday about data roaming charges it was good to hear Starhub CEO Neil Montefiore say that they´re too high and they need to come down. Montefiore said that 80 per cent of his customers disable data when overseas, and that´s probably a typical figure for the industry.
Mobile operators need to go short if they want to go along with their customers. RCSe can rejoin the broken links between operators and their customers, at a cost.
Japanese electronics vendor Fujitsu has announced its intention to launch smartphones and tablets into the European market just as mobile operators are looking to reduce the number of device vendors they work with. Fujitsu has a 20 per cent share of the Japanese mobile device market, according to Robert Pryke, director of Fujitsu’s European device business.
Telefónica’s UK operation O2 has told Telecoms.com that it is not fulfilling orders for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone until Google and Samsung have fixed a bug that sees the phone spontaneously lose audio, affecting voice calls and audio alerts. The Galaxy Nexus is the first commercially available handset to sport version 4.0 of the Android smartphone OS, which Google has dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich.
Nokia’s high end smartphones are “too expensive” according to the European general manager for devices at international carrier Telefónica. Simon Lee-Smith told Telecoms.com that Nokia’s premium devices are “not yet at the right price point,” adding: “If Nokia wants to sell in volume, they need to bring out devices which are cost-competitive.”
Cayetano Carbajo Martin, GCTO, Telefonica
A step in the right direction but does it go far enough?
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Over The Top providers have become the staple wildcard in almost any sector set on a collision path with mobile. By and large they are very good at what they do: connecting a user with their chosen content or service by whatever means available.
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