Capacity planning in mobile data networks experiencing exponential growth in demand

We are currently running a global 'Tiger Team' for the WEF on this topic. This is a vanguard group of global PD experts to stimulate the creation and adoption of international actionable agreements and partnerships that help fast track the implementation of the principles of the WEF's RPD project - helping to bring about the emergence of a personal data ecosystems where people are in control of the collection, use, sharing, and monetization of their personal data.

We held our first meeting with 40 experts in San Jose on 26th March to a.) agree on a common, shared language/taxonomy/terms of reference for describing the PD space, b.) Share latest examples of important new international developments, use cases, architectures and best practice in key areas and sectors (consumer, corporate and government), c.) Agree how to 'slice the elephant' in terms of coordinating next step international collaboration in a few high impact areas.

More photos here.

We'll share some of the output with readers of the Telco 2.0 blog shortly. We will be running our next meeting in London to coincide with our EMEA event on 12-13 June.

In the meantime here are some useful links (videos and documents) for those interested in the topic:

General Personal Data Concepts:

• World Economic Forum Re-thinking Personal Data project
• White House Consumer Data Privacy report (and other useful material)
• MIT Media Lab IDCubed initiative - how to join a trusted network
• Personal.com blog (output from SXSW conference)
• The Future of Privacy, LeWeb, Reputation.com blog
• Project VRM, Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• Volunteered Personal Information

Technical aspects:

• European Union TAS3 Trust project and architecture explained
• Tracking the Trackers, How our browsing history is leaking into the cloud
• Mobile Phones as secure personal infrastructure?
• Personal Data system model (Dazza Greenwood)

Business aspects (focused on advertising):

• Microsoft Advertising business - how the advertising intersects with a more user-centric personal data ecosystem
• Wall Street Journal on IAB Annual Leadership meeting

Do contact us for more details.

telco2.net | 25-Apr-2012 16:27

New Telco 2.0 Research: how to accelerate the implementation of new business model strategies

We've just published a free new report based on in-depth research among senior execs in 'upstream' industries (e.g. retail, media, IT, etc.) and telcos, that shows that poor communication of the telecoms 'Telco 2.0' value proposition and slow implementation by operators is frustrating upstream customers and operators alike.

A key premise of the Telco 2.0 Initiative is that opportunities exist for operators to support third-party businesses in Customer Profiling, Marketing offers, ID & Authentication, Network QoS, and Billing, Payments & Collection. We have previously published research outlining the high level opportunity framework for this in the 'Telco 2.0 Two-Sided Business Model Opportunity' report, and subsequently the strategy development activities required in the 'Roadmap to New Telco 2.0 Business Models'.

Our new analysis identifies strategic customer segments for telcos building new 'Telco 2.0' business models, key obstacles to overcome, six real-world implementation strategy scenarios, and strategic recommendations for telcos.

This report is free because it was kindly sponsored by Openet. The research, analysis and editorial were independently directed, managed and carried out by STL Partners. You can download the report here. We'll also be presenting headline findings at the EMEA Executive Brainstorm, 12-13 June in London. Call 44 (0) 207 247 5003 or email contact@stlpartners.com for more.

telco2.net | 24-Apr-2012 11:11

China Mobile slows; Voda buys C&W Worldwide; AT&T's new APIs -Telco 2.0 News Review

• Telco 2.0 Focus: Asia: China Mobile disappoints on subscribers, Indian 2G re-auction, semiconductor news
• Strategy & Finance: Vodafone, Verizon build up enterprise assets, and is 1 Instagram really = 1 C&W Worldwide?
• Broadband Connectivity: Free Mobile flips on WLAN roaming on all Freeboxes
• Cloud & Data Centre: AWS, the app store, L(3) turns up giant CDN
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: AT&T's speech-to-text API opens to developers
• The Sixth Bullet: 30 years of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

[Ed: It's the last week of the 'Early Bird' rate for the EMEA Executive Brainstorm, 12-13 June 2012 in London, so get in while you can. There's a great agenda in a smart new venue. Register here, call +44 (0) 207 247 5003, or email contact@stlpartners.com for more.]

After a big run-up last week, China Mobile shares took a knock after the huge carrier's Q1 subscriber numbers came in lower than expected. There were also reports that e-commerce star Alibaba.com's profits were likely to disappoint, as the economy slowed down, and that venture capital was getting harder to find for Chinese startups.

Meanwhile, Reuters has a detailed profile of Huawei CEO Ren Zhingfei. Like a lot of important people in China today, he started from the bottom after his family was disgraced in the Cultural Revolution (his father picked the wrong side in the civil war). This insight into Huawei's corporate structure is...interesting:

At the end of last year Ren gave some insight into the structure in place at Huawei, explaining a system in which eight executives took turns as chairman for six months.

Details of the roll-out of their Ascend P1 smartphone are here. (Meanwhile, a review of HTC's One S is here.)

Nokia's ASPs in China have fallen off a cliff in the last 12 months. Who knew the Chinese liked Symbian so much?

The political crisis in China is manifesting itself in unusual ways. Sina Weibo seems to have developed a Web platform for citizens to submit news leads, photos, etc to 70 or so newspapers and broadcasters around China anonymously, a stupefyingly radical idea in context, launched the site in beta, and then rapidly shut it down. And Fang Bingxing, architect of the Great Firewall and China's general Internet strategy, seems to have disappeared, or at least staged a diplomatic illness. It's hard to say what's going on, but something is...

In India, the government has taken advice about re-auctioning the 900MHz GSM spectrum affected by the now-famous 2G scandal. On the basis of the prices achieved in the 2010 3G auction, it looks like the operators are going to be asked to fork out much more. But many people in the industry think the 2010 auction descended into an irrational bidding war, with the prices paid being impossible to justify on the basis of Indian ARPUs.

One way to cope with this was to share the infrastructure, and Indian operators do more of this than anyone else. The tower outsourcing companies are rather unconvincingly trying to deny that they are involved in telecoms.

A huge business in Asia is making everyone else's semiconductors. Intel is trying hard to break into the strange, conflicted relationship between Apple and Samsung, and Paul Ottelini used their Q1 earnings call to explicitly pitch for Apple's business, while also bashing Qualcomm. Meanwhile, although Intel sold $13 billion worth of chips in Q1, its profits fell about 19 per cent across the board - for once, it wasn't a record quarter. However, Q1 is usually a seasonal dip for chip makers (AMD saw it too).

Intel's big new was that its Ivy Bridge chips introduce 3D transistors for the first time. If packing more of them onto the surface of a chip is getting harder, why not put on another layer of them over the first lot? That's basically the idea.

Vodafone has acquired Cable & Wireless Worldwide, adding a substantial portfolio of fibre and data centres around the UK to its already rather impressive fixed infrastructure. There's also a considerable enterprise unified comms business, which will no doubt help the growing One Net and Global Enterprise units. And it also means Vodafone can stop renting quite so much capacity from C&W.

It also, come to think of it, makes the former head of Vodafone UK, now the CEO of C&WW, a very happy chappy, as he doubled his money on his C&WW stock options. Terrifyingly, the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones points out, Instagram was valued at only slightly less than C&WW, a company with actual assets, employees, and profits (although Vodafone is paying in raw cash, rather than Facebook shares).

Verizon Wireless, meanwhile, was also looking after its enterprise customers, with a new Mobile Private Network product that provides a secure MPLS VPN over their LTE network (in fact, it's possible to do clever things with the radio element of LTE so it may be more than that).

They also noted that half the Q1 smartphone sales were iPhones.

Free Mobile's competitors have been complaining ever since they launched (or even before) that they haven't deployed enough cells and too much traffic is going via their roaming agreement with Orange. Typically enough, Xavier Niel and his engineering team had something up their sleeve, and of course the powerful Linux-based CPE they deploy to their fixed users gives them a lot of scope for rapid development.

On Thursday, a software update was pushed out to 4 million Freeboxes that made the WLAN router element of them available to any Free user, with SIM-based secure automatic log-on. That would be the world's biggest WLAN managed offload deployment, and an example to us all. FON users can also hop onto the wi-fi.

The 3G and 4G Wireless Blog does a report back from a conference on LTE optimisation, based on their twitter feed. It's rich in data points. Important take-away points: UMTS 900 is the "Heineken network" (it refreshes the parts others don't reach) but the refarming process is surprisingly slow and painful (18 months), "unlimited" LTE users can hit 55GB/week, but the average is 2GB/month, and even average uplink data traffic doubled in the past year.

Zahid's presentation is here.

Meanwhile, all the brand engineering about "4G", "3.9G", "Super 3G", etc comes home to roost in Australia. Apple gets sued for calling its iPad 4G, responds that HSPA+ is as good as 4G (where they have a point), court responds that the Aussie carriers only call it 3G.

Where the cloud meets the packet-pushing business, you find the CDNs. Level(3) has expanded its CDN further, and Dan Rayburn points out that the new posted capacity of 5.6Tbps is double what they had in 2010. They've also enlarged their geographic reach, adding POPs in Latin America, Saudi Arabia, and Canada.

Rayburn argues that L(3) has structural advantages in managing their economics of scale - some of them sound rather telco-like. He also argues that the monster Netflix account may actually make life easier, as it provides a large, highly predictable source of traffic to keep the gear fully utilised. And that's genuinely "large" - 60% of ISP traffic, he says, is video and 50% of that is Netflix. He also shares some interesting data from a "major UK operator", in this week's Chart of the Week.

The app that produces the pretty charts is Qwilt's transparent cache/video analytics product.

Netflix, of course, picked another fight with Comcast last week. Rayburn argues that this is a red herring, on the grounds that very few users indeed ever exceed Comcast's usage caps (which are set deliberately high) and that what Netflix is really concerned about is competition.

Amazon Web Services is of course the power behind Netflix, and this week they announced an app store for cloud software, the AWS Marketplace. As you might expect, it's closely integrated with EC2's management console and workflow.

Kaazing's messaging server for HTML5 Web Sockets is now out, and running in (of course) EC2.

Google's data centre king Urs Hölzle let slip that they are using Nicira's software-defined networking kit in a presentation that was then rapidly eliminated. And the IETF's Secure Interdomain Routing workgroup feels ready to propose solutions to the route hijack problem.

Oh yes, and the other 50% of the video? Two US academics analysed a year's worth of search terms on porno web sites, and drew conclusions.

AT&T has opened its Watson speech-recognition API to developers. Now that's more like it. More details are here.

Orange Business Services and Verizon have set up interconnection between their telepresence systems (helped by the fact they're both Cisco shops).

How on earth didn't we find out about the blog devoted to Voice 2.0 civic hacker apps?

Skype for Windows Phone is out of beta, but it still can't run in the background.

In other news, Facebook "needs to build a browser" because otherwise Google + could be its own version of Rockmelt. Scary! Apple Stores are 17 times as productive as the average retailer.

Google kills off a dozen products. Hack yourself with Google data before Google hacks you. Ticker-tape printouts of Instagram pictures. Exit, Chumby. Groupon not looking too well. Facebook's biggest secret: Zuck's specs. Fix your contention problems, with randomness. Enterprise unified comms, 1890s style.

30 years of the ZX Spectrum.

telco2.net | 23-Apr-2012 13:42

Nokia hiccups, Samsung roars, & Amazon disrupting search? - Telco 2.0 News Review

• Strategy & Finance: Nokia: back to the red ink, Basillie@RIM wanted wholesale BBM
• Smartphone Roundup: How Samsung made it to No.1
• Broadband Connectivity: US Broadband Plan makes progress, Brazil, Australian 4G auctions
• Telco 2.0 Themes:: M-payments, digital music, Netflix vs. Comcast 3.0
• Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon: Amazon CloudSearch: A9 for everyone

[Ed: Here's a 2 minute video from the Silicon Valley brainstorm. It conveys some of the sense of energy and progress that we saw there.

We'll be sharing more and building on the momentum from the Valley at the EMEA Executive Brainstorm, 12-13 June 2012 in London, with a great agenda in a smart new venue. Make sure you sign up while you can, SF was packed and London is heading the same way fast - please email contact@stlpartners.com for more.]

After a period of decent newsflow for Nokia and a reasonable MWC, the black clouds rolled back in this week. In a statement, the company said it would probably lose money in the first half of 2012 and that its margins in Devices & Services were -3%, although the Smart Devices unit was still getting around 16%.

Nokia sent out representatives to pursue their "smoked by Windows Phone" campaign on the streets, but it probably didn't help that the first flight of Lumia 900s for the US came with a handy bug that caused them to drop the data connection. A hotfix has been pushed out, or alternatively users can swap the broken devices for new ones.

That can be overstated, of course, as even Apple gets it wrong. iPad 3 users were complaining this week about their devices struggling to maintain a cellular data link.

IntoMobile points out that although the expectations game is well under way, it's unlikely that anyone will be able to make statements about Lumia shipments until Q2 numbers roll around in the summer.

And xda-developers has discovered a hack that lets you reflash the Nokia Lumia 710 with whatever you like. The first attempts seem to have been Android, but it's going to be tempting to load up the Maemo Linux-based OS from the N9, especially if you're in one of the markets where Nokia refuses to sell N9s...

There was some good news at the NSN half of Nokia, as they got the contract to build Softbank's LTE network and also to deploy HSPA+ in their newly refarmed 900MHz spectrum.

Elsewhere, it turns out that Jim Basillie wanted to wholesale RIM's network services, including its highly optimised VPN, accelerator proxies, BlackBerry Messenger, and device-management features, before being forced out as CEO. Meanwhile, YouMail has stopped further development of its BlackBerry app.

Samsung, of course, is the anti-Nokia. It looks like they pulled ahead as the No.1 vendor by shipments this quarter, and Horace makes the excellent point that where Nokia tried to keep selling "featurephones", Samsung concentrated on increasing the reach of their smartphone portfolio. Hence, Chart of the Week.

At the top of that portfolio, the Galaxy S III is going to launch on the 3rd of May in London.

NTIA, which was given the responsibility for the middle-mile and public institutions' aspects of the US Broadband Plan, has a progress report out, and The Voice of Broadband thinks it's doing remarkably well, with the infrastructure program having rolled out almost three times as much fibre as this year's target foresaw.

Vodafone-Hutchison Australia weighed in on the Australian National Broadband Network this week, pointing out that it didn't make sense to treat mobile as an alternative to fibre, when the mobile networks were dependent on the FTTH project to meet the backhaul requirements LTE air interfaces bring with them. Meanwhile, the draft rules for the Aussie digital dividend auction are out.

Brazilian regulator Anatel has published the rules for their forthcoming auction of 2.5GHz and 450MHz, linking the deployment requirements closely to a crammed calendar of football (the Confederations Cup is next year and the World Cup is in 2014).

In France, SFR and Bouygues have been discussing a network-sharing agreement, but have apparently paused the process while both parties talk to the operator of France's TV broadcasting infrastructure about perhaps using their 7,000 repeater masts instead.

The owner of HKBN, probably the world's fastest residential ISP, is selling up in order to fund a content-buying spree in their TV operation. The story reveals some interesting data - in the hyper-dense environment of Hong Kong, it cost them only $200 to pass each potential customer, with a total bill of $400m to roll out the whole thing and deliver 1Gbps service. As part of the deal, they get guaranteed wholesale access to the fibre for the next 20 years.

The 3G and 4G Wireless Blog reports that BT's trial of IEEE802.22 white space broadband is turning out to be a disappointment, and might not even meet the government's 2Mbps target. At the link, there's a fascinating presentation on BT's WLAN network and why whitespace might be worth trying.

As usual, the Blog is a mine of information, with a detailed post on shared spectrum and whitespace initiatives at the IETF, and a great NEC presentation on small cells. Further, Ubiquisys has a presentation on their "smart cell" platform which is quite heavy on the mobile CDN.

Ovum reckons that telecoms revenues have recovered to reach $1.9 trillion in 2011. Dean Bubley points out on twitter that SMS is still a growing product in the US - so you can see why Myriad might want to buy messaging specialist Synchronica.

Now here's a challenging cable landing station: Al-Faw, Iraq. Bring your mine-sweeping dolphin. Apparently some people think it's handy as a bypass for Suez, which leads us to the conclusion that even war can be less disruptive than a sufficient concentration of insufficiently attentive seadogs.

T-Mobile USA is going to launch revolutionary business transformation - Carly is getting a leather jacket and a motorbike.

Safaricom and Qualcomm are staging a roadshow around Kenya to promote the possibilities of 3G.

In Telco 2.0 thematic news, the UK's m-payments joint venture, Project Oscar, is in trouble after the European Commission announced a 90-day antitrust inquiry into it. 3UK is of course delighted. The commission reports back on the 27th of August. The Royal Canadian Mint, meanwhile, has invited developers to try out its MintChip digital cash technology. Canada was of course where Enstream/Zoompass started intercarrier m-payments.

The UK's Department of Energy & Climate Change has reported back on its consultation on the privacy and security aspects of smart meters. This will be one of the world's biggest M2M networks, and the Department intends to tender for the role of "Data and Communications Company" to run it. Sounds like a telco, really. DECC says that access to the data for third parties must be opt-in only.

Security engineering legend Ross Anderson from the Cambridge University Computer Lab also contributed, making the point that hackers would love to get into such a system and proposing some ideas as to how this could be prevented. Krebs on Security, meanwhile, reports that the US has already seen some smart meter hacks and that one of them uses an optical probe you can buy for $150.

Epic row between Grooveshark and Tunecore. Meet Tomahawk, the app that searches everything for music. Dan Rayburn reviews D-Link's new streamer and finds it wanting.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has picked another fight with Comcast over net neutrality. Is Microsoft planning some sort of new Xbox Live pricing? And there's a Google TV hackathon on the 21st of April, just round the corner from Telco 2.0 Towers.

Here's a good piece on PaaS and the cloud as it relates to developers.

Up in the cloud, Amazon did something disruptive this week. You can now get their A9 search engine as a cloud service via the AWS management console and build your own search over whatever data you like. This bio-informatics startup is using it.

Sergey Brin, meanwhile, yells at mobile apps, government censors, and especially Facebook for closing the Web. (Interestingly, Google + has bowed to the inevitable and started supporting Twitter's hashtag syntax.)

Of course, Google's commitment to openness is selective. The epic Google-Oracle patent lawsuit is going to trial, and Ars Technica has an informative rundown on it, as well as a review of the new Aura UI for the Chrome OS. And Google's plan to create a class of non-voting shares is not at all popular.

So why not turn around and sell Motorola Mobility to Huawei? Rate that one as "wild rumour", but it wouldn't be that much more incoherent than a lot of Google moves. Data Center Knowledge has a useful time series of Google CAPEX.

Jeff Bezos writes to the shareholders, an author responds.

Sleeping in your data centre - one for the Real Geeks of Silicon Valley. Zimbabwean software company packages social networking updates as push messages for low-bandwidth networks.

And Turkcell declares war on MTN over their investment in Iran, alleging that they promised to help Iran get the Bomb in exchange for a GSM licence.

telco2.net | 17-Apr-2012 13:55

Telco 2.0 News Review

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Broadband Connectivity: UK LTE - EE at the starting gate
• Online Video: Cisco buys NDS, Avaya buys Radvision
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Facebook API to go paid-for? And "AdSense but with calls"
• Cloud Computing: 1 AWS = 450,000 servers
• Smartphone Roundup: Apple distributes spare banknotes

[Ed. Our Silicon Valley Brainstorm is next week (27-28th March) and two months to go till the London Brainstorm (12-13th June) - email or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003 to secure a seat]

The UK may be looking at its first LTE network, as EverythingEverywhere seeks clearance to deploy 4G in the 1800MHz band. Stand by for a hell of a row, though, as if this goes ahead EE will have a year's clear run with the new technology before the competition gets a crack. However, Vodafone and Telefonica get to keep their 900MHz GSM spectrum under this proposal, with the year's head start for EE as a quid-pro-quo. Only 3UK is left out, not having any legacy spectrum at all. Expect them to make a serious fuss, unless OFCOM and the government cook up some way in which they can be compensated when the 800MHz band comes up. Vodafone's not satisfied with this tacit deal, though - UK boss Guy Laurence accused OFCOM of being out of its mind, arguing that once EE launches it will tie up the main 800MHz auction in litigation.

As this post on the 3G & 4G Wireless Blog points out though with this week's Chart of the Week, there are still some very tricky problems to solve before we can break out the 800s and party like it's 2009, when the Digital Economy Act was being drafted and the spectrum was earmarked for a national minimum broadband service.

You'll note that nothing has more problems than cellular. The 3G & 4G Blog also has an interview with Andy Germano from the Small Cells Forum.

There's some useful discussion of Chinese 4G plans here. And FLAG Telecom is going for an IPO in Singapore.

The US TIA expects US mobile ARPUs to start rising again, after data overtakes voice sometime next year. However, it's possibly worth being sceptical, as the inflection point is exactly the point where the forecast takes over from the real data.

DTAG is planning a major new network architecture. Very interestingly, they want to make extensive use of software-defined networking and the emerging OpenFlow standards in order to be more flexible and more efficient.

And the European Commission is concerned about the E5 group of major European telcos, and specifically that it might be a source of anti-competitive collusion as well as cooperation.

Ovum has a data-rich blog post on Free Mobile - since they launched, the daily flow of requests for number porting has increased by a factor of four compared to the average for last year.

The Voice of Broadband reports that Cisco has acquired NDS, a major provider of pay-TV systems including DRM, set-top box software, electronic programming guides and the like. This is part of their broader "visual networking" strategy around video conferencing and IPTV, driving the IP video traffic that sells so many Cisco routers. NDS is especially strong in the emerging markets.

Elsewhere in video news, here's a Q&A with Hulu's CTO. It's certainly interesting that "device fragmentation" is high on his list of concerns - and that he wouldn't rule out white-labelling/wholesaling Hulu's backend and content delivery technology.

Wal-Mart announced its pricing for UltraViolet this week. For SD content, you pay $2 on top of the price of a DVD, for HD you pay $5. Dan Rayburn points out that the studio pays around 4 US cents to stream the HD movie from a CDN, so this isn't necessarily a great deal.

Is there an Amazon streamer app for the XBox Live?

Another video story this week is more about video as in video conferencing than as in movies. Avaya this week acquired Radvision, maker of video-conferencing and 3G video telephony solutions to the carriage trade, with the intention of integrating it into their unified comms platform.

Dan York points out that Radvision owns two very commonly used H.323 and SIP stacks, as well as stacks for MGCP and many other VoIP technologies, and wonders if they'll still be both available and under active development

Ars Technica asks if Facebook may be planning to charge developers for access to its APIs. There's a vibrant little industry in Facebook-based apps, many of which either use Facebook as a way of distributing themselves or rely on information from its Open Graph API, or both.

Two sides of e-commerce and voice: here's Freespee's new product, Freespee Performance, which sounds rather like Google AdSense but with voice calls - websites that carry their ads could get a percentage of the revenue from calls initiated on their pages. (We blogged on the importance of click-to-call for e-commerce here.)

On the other hand, YouMail, a visual voicemail app for Android, now has a spam filter so you can get rid of telemarketing noise easily.

And former Skype CFO Eric Salvatierra has died.

We briefly mentioned Amazon earlier on - moving to the cloud, we learn that if Akamai has 105,000 servers, Amazon Web Services has 450,000. You're going to need a bigger boat. Interestingly, 70% of the IP addresses used seem to be concentrated in their US-EAST region.

Elsewhere, OpenStack is making progress - you can now test applications in a sandbox at trystack.org and find development tools at (predictably) devstack.org. A Google data centre in Atlanta uses waste water for its cooling, but even that may not be as cool as the fact they colour-coded all the pipes and cable runs in Google colours.

ReadWriteWeb reports that Google wants to incorporate more Semantic Web technology into its search results, so the search engine understands your queries better. This field has been a notorious money pit so far, but perhaps Google can make it work. Not coincidentally, this year's Google Summer of Code is supporting DBPedia's semantic version of Wikipedia.

Amazon reckons one second's delay in page load times equals $1.6bn a year less money. And Microsoft's Windows Azure Blog has a forensic discussion of the major outage that hit their cloud on the 29th of February. Yes, you guessed it - it was a leap year bug.

Apple has problem - what on earth will it do with $98 billion in raw cash? That's the kind of problem we could all do with. The solution: make the shareholders very happy, with a $2.65/share divvy plus a substantial share buyback.

They may also use a few old fivers to settle with the Chinese authors who are suing them over pirate editions turning up in the App Store.

It turns out, meanwhile, that secret talks were held between Apple and Motorola late last year in an effort to end the patent wars. Forrester Research's Sarah Rotman summarises the upgrades to the iPad 3, which cost about 30% more to make.

Meanwhile, JD Power polled thousands of US smartphone users and discovered, not surprisingly, that iPhone users were the most satisfied with their phones. Nokia and RIM were the least. However, the most significant axis in the survey was "battery life", although Symbian and BlackBerry OS have always been good at that.

Ars Technica mocks "ladyphones".

While Apple clearly paid attention to the way the phone looks, both in software and hardware, the device is not in any way specially "tailored to women" and there isn't a separate "lady" version. Yet an iPhone owner is 18 percent more likely to be a woman than a man, according to one study, and women over the years have regularly expressed more interest in iPhones than men. Hence, it's probably fair to say women have bought more iPhones than any of the shamelessly underpowered pink substitutes.

Although if you really want to dispel pinkness, you might stick with Android and grab AIDE, the app that gives you the full Android SDK right there on your phone so you can (if you're really patient with small touchscreens) write code without using a PC. The Register's Bill Ray points out that you could do that on Psion PDAs.

Get a full virtualised desktop in your Web browser. Oink doesn't just let you export all your data, it lets you export anybody's data! Kim Dotcom gets a win in court. Hackpad, like a wiki but better? Using Morse code with your iPhone. Leave your mark on landmarks without getting arrested, using augmented reality. Sounds a bit like being a dog, really, as so many check-in apps do.

From the GSMA MMU Blog, a two-part case study on operators, water rates, and mobile payments in Africa.

telco2.net | 19-Mar-2012 14:25

New Apple iPad round-up; Nokia Money shuts; Android Market now 'Google Play' - Telco 2.0 News Review

• Apple: iPad 3 roundup, screamingly fast HTML5
• M-Commerce: Nokia Money shuts down, Android Market becomes Google Play
• Content 2.0: CDs disappearing, cable very much alive
• Cloud Computing: Akamai hits 105,000 servers
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Twitter #losingmoney, mystery Skype growth surge

[Ed. Just 2 weeks now to the Silicon Valley Brainstorm (27-28 March) and two months to the London Brainstorm (12-13 June) - email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003 for more.]

It's an Apple product launch week, and this story has all you need to know about the iPad 3 (in summary, it's slightly more shiny than the iPad 2). There are some interesting details on the battery, here. Apple also pushed out an update to iOS 5 that fixes some 80 security exploits.

Beyond the hypefest, the iPhone is now the biggest selling smartphone in Japan, and the only non-Japanese device to come anywhere in a market dominated by the locals.

The Apple TV also got an update, although Dan Rayburn is distinctly unimpressed - the device comes without a subscription content service, sideloading, a Web browser, or an open SDK for developers.

CanSecWest was heavy on the Apple - as well as a talk on the problems of jailbreaking iOS 5, Colin Mulliner presented his work scanning mobile operator IP blocks. About 2,000 out of 500,000 iPhones he scanned were running an SSH server, an indicator of being jailbroken - although a genuinely competent user would probably turn off sshd after completing the break, for fear of a wide variety of security threats.

Mulliner also reported being surprised by the number of M2M devices he found - and that most of them didn't even have passwords set.

While Tim Cook was basking in the adulation, it turns out that Steve Wozniak was taking part in an IBM-sponsored conference on data centres. Apple is building again at the huge iDatacenter in North Carolina, but nobody knows exactly what they are building - speculation ranges from renewable energy generation to - duh - another data centre.

Here's something interesting. HTML5 is often seen as a way of escaping from "Apple's walled garden", and therefore something a Web-obsessed company like Google would be very keen on. But it turns out that HTML5 performance on iOS is dramatically better than Android. Since the iPhone 4S arrived, the time Safari Mobile takes to render 3D graphics in the Canvas tag has dropped sharply, suggesting both improvements in the software and perhaps also hardware acceleration.

Mind you, it's impressive that someone built a Web page that implements tethering in HTML5 using Web Sockets, but why doesn't the device just behave like a USB modem, like a mid-2000s Nokia?

How to make a scanner with an iPhone and a cardboard box. An original Apple Newton up for grabs.

Horace expects the US to go majority-smartphone on the 28th of June. Nokia, for its part, is planning to bring out cheaper Windows Phones later this year and also to bring forward Meltemi, its Linux-based replacement for Series 40, which will probably render the smartphone/featurephone distinction meaningless.

However, the 808 PureView gadget that astonished MWC is not going to North America. And Telstra is labelling its smartphone offerings based on tests of their RF performance, the 3G & 4G Wireless Blog reports.

Nokia announced this week that Nokia Money is shutting down. Tomi Ahonen is predictably apopleptic, and rather oddly compares this with Google Wallet - which would make sense if Google Wallet was a success.

Telco 2.0's MWC M-payments post is here, spinning off the CEO of ISIS's presentation. ISIS, at least, has more of a chance of success. It's interesting that only 15% of the consumers they surveyed wanted an M-Wallet - although 70% wanted a safe way to manage their money and information.

Google, for its part, has started a crackdown on Android apps that use third-party in-app billing, trying to force them to use Wallet. This is because Google gets 30% of the transaction under Wallet (or indeed on the Android Market) and zilch otherwise. Arguing with the customers is not usually considered a great idea.

An example of alternative m-payments systems is Clover, which has sensibly enough focused on improving the user experience. To this end, they've pared down their protocol so that a transaction consists of one HTTP request and 2KB of data.

Beyond all this, the real m-payments hit, M-PESA, has grown so much in east Africa that it's been accused of causing inflation by the African Development Bank. The Bank of Tanzania disagrees and argues it's causing growth.

Back with Google, Android Market has been rebranded this week as "Google Play", and Google has folded Google Music and Google Books into it. Tellingly, this results in the manager of Android Market being replaced - although it's worth pointing out that Google is replacing two managers (one for developer relations and one for product management) with one. That leads us to this week's Chart of the Week from Apple Insider, tracking Apple alumnus and Android founder Andy Rubin's career through the mobile industry.

Elsewhere, AllThingsD has a post from SXSWi on the Google redesign, and on Google +. Don't hold your breath waiting for the API.

In the content world, Mark Mulligan argues that the music industry is facing a dramatic collapse in CD sales and it doesn't have a strategy for the digital late adopters.

Dan Rayburn sounds a warning that cord-cutting is overhyped and the cable TV operators are actually doing rather well (The Voice of Broadband agrees). He also rings round and factchecks the rumour that at least one big MSO is planning to bundle Netflix.

And if that isn't enough Rayburn for you, you can catch him presenting on CDN market trends here.

PaidContent argues that one of the biggest obstacles to smart TV is that the TVs typically don't have a WiFi radio, and therefore you have to plug them into a router as well as a set-top box.

You may be pleased to know that fisking a newspaper article is not a copyright infringement.

Content meets the cloud in the CDN. Data Centre Knowledge reports that Akamai is now operating 105,000 servers, more than webhosting giants like Softlayer and OVH, but many fewer than Google, which broke through the 100,000 server barrier back in 2005 and is now thought to be over 900,000.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services announced cuts to its prices on EC2, RDS, and Elastic Cache. And how to make sure your S3 storage buckets are efficient - don't, whatever you do, use a steadily incrementing counter as a key....

And here's some news about Dell in the cloud.

In voice and messaging news, a fascinating story about Twitter. It looks like they could safely replace their 10-K form with a Failwhale without losing any information - the company is still losing money, its revenues are tiny, they keep over-promising and then under-delivering (by a factor of five in 2010), and then there are the tiresomely frequent outages. Fortunately for them, their VC backers are still in love with the company and are pouring in cash. For now.

On the other hand, look at QQ go! More active users, and more peak-concurrent users, than Skype. And they're profitable.

Not that Skype is hanging around, either. Jim Courtney reports that Skype peak-concurrent users have suddenly begun growing rapidly again. And Dan York caught his Skype client sending 1280x720 HD video.

Orange's Unified Comms Security Blog discovers that there are more H.323 devices out there than you might think.

Live translation in your Apple FaceTime.

The Voice of Broadband reports in detail on Verizon Wireless' "cantenna" fixed-LTE offering.

China is holding back on issuing 4G licences until more 3G base stations are out there. Meanwhile, China Telecom is the latest in a long line (boom, tish!) of carriers to fall out with Cogent and get de-peered.

The Channel Tunnel is getting mobile coverage, but only in one direction. A rundown of small cell market forecasts.

And Level(3) is at war with the RBOCs, claiming that they are making special access conditional on buying their services. It's off to the FCC we go.

South Korean telco staff are caught selling private information. Blocked on Weibo - what words are blocked on Weibo, and why. After YouPorn, smut centre Digital Playground loses its user database to hackers. NSA releases its spec for a high-security Android.

After MWC's CBOSS shocker, SXSW uses the homeless as WiFi hotspots. Seriously. And we all need a browser plugin that checks facts.

telco2.net | 12-Mar-2012 14:40

MWC 2012 - M-Commerce: better than a cash filled wallet?

To achieve mass market penetration of mobile payments, the industry needs to produce something that's more useful than one of humankind's most sophisticated and personalised tools: the cash, card and memento filled wallet.

This is the view of Michael Abbott, the CEO of ISIS, the US operators' joint payments venture - and his view is that so far, the industry simply hasn't done it well enough, although it now appears to be recognising the scale of the challenge and the value of success. He said that to be successful, M-Commerce would have to be available to pretty much everyone, have fair pricing, be totally secure and private, work simply, and work everywhere. Not much to ask then...

Michael also shared research that showed that while only 15% of consumers 'wanted an M-Wallet', 70% wanted a safe way to manage their money and information. It seems from this that it is critical to focus on the benefits and not the product in the process of educating and recruiting customers to M-Commerce.

One seemingly paradoxical thing that we hear time and time again from M-Commerce pros is 'there's really not much money in it'. This can seem all the more surprising when seen in context of how much money there is flowing through the world economy, as shown in the following chart from Don Callahan's presentation (he's the COO of Citigroup).

[Ed. We'll be discussing more on M-Commerce 2.0 at both Silicon Valley (27-28 March) and London Brainstorms (12-13 June).]

However, Don also said that 'the information about money today is as important as money itself', which is another theme we see repeated around the M-Commerce industry (see e.g. M-Commerce 2.0: Report and analysis from our last London Brainstorm).

Other interesting stats he shared were that while there are 5bn mobile phones in the world, there are only 1.8bn bank accounts, and that only 15% of transactions were electronic, with 85% being in cash. So, in theory at least, with the majority of customers and the majority of transactions being unbanked and in cash, there is a vast untapped opportunity - although the practicalities of achieving that opportunity are extremely challenging.

Finally, Don shared findings from the KPMG's research that showed the relative standings of different industry players against different roles in M-Commerce. These showed that banks and credit cards came top, with telcos close behind in third place - which is at least some good news for telcos, though the tech and specialist companies are not far behind.

Join us to share more on M-Commerce 2.0 at both Silicon Valley (27-28 March) and London Brainstorms (12-13 June).

telco2.net | 07-Mar-2012 17:00

MWC 2012 - Facebook, Google and Apple: of Bêtes Noires and the Art of Evasion

While Google's Eric Schmidt has graced the stage of the Mobile World Congress for each of the last three years, it was Facebook who provided the new headline star draw speaker in Bret Taylor, its CTO. The approaches of these adjacent players to addressing the Congress, and that of Apple, reveal an interesting pattern.

We've said previously that in these large public events, the most interesting messages are often hidden in how things are said, what is not said, and indeed who is not there, and we offer as evidence our analysis of the three different styles of interaction of these so-called 'OTT' bêtes noires with the Congress.

(See Dealing with the 'Disruptors': Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype and Amazon for more about these players' business models and strategies, or join us at the Silicon Valley Brainstorm, 27-28 March).

Google: the 'Transcendent Evasion Play'

Dr Eric Schmidt is always an impressive speaker. We wrote two years ago in How Google's Chief Magician Stole the Show admiring his prowess on the stage, and ability to effortlessly glide through an hour long presentation and bedazzle a captivated audience.

He is now perhaps an even better speaker, articulate, knowledgeable and germane, warm and engaged, never flustered, easily handling questions from the floor on a range of topics including solar flares (yes, really), advertising and the US laws relating to Iran.

Yet there is a difference between today's Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google, and the former Eric Schmidt, CEO. There's still an occasionally abrasive edge to the high-achieving Stanford professor, but now it's tempered by a slightly saintly demeanour.

In this years' sermon from Mountain View, Dr Schmidt first got his assistants to perform a technological sleight of hand with the new superfast Chrome browser, drawing predictable 'woos' from the tech hungry crowd, even though last year, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer CEO pulled the 'look how fast we are' stunt to some effect too (see Mobile World Congress: Microsoft CEO fails to land all punches, but...).

Once this was over, the increasingly avuncular Schmidt turned to musing on how to connect the next 5 billion souls, lowering traffic accidents, and increasing the knowledge and wellbeing of the world's populace.

It was a great visionary talk, and a beautifully managed Q&A session. At one point, demonstrating empathy with his questioner on when Google would be available in Iran, he said 'hey, I'd like to help you, I'm on your side. But it's against U.S. law, and there's no bandwidth in prison'. Everyman, statesman, legal expert, geek and stand-up comedian in one line - as near to genius as you will get on any industry stage.

Yet after the beguiling magic, one was left with a feeling that's a bit like awakening from an anaesthetic: feeling sure that something important had happened but unable to remember what it was. Indeed, it causes us to speculate that this is Schmidt's real role these days - to keep the patients calm while the real operation is going on elsewhere.

We also wonder if Dr Schmidt is secretly relieved to be off on this away-team charm offensive while the kids back home mess around with driverless cars. (NB. We're just working on further analysis on Google's current strategy, so there will be more on this shortly.)

So to summarise, the 'Trancendent Evasion Play', as perfected by Dr Schmidt, is to draw the audience up, up and away from the pain and problems of the everyday world (such as the less comfortable realities of the reality of the complex relationship between Google and the telcos), and take their minds off to a warmer, nicer place where poor people learn and prosper and rich people have all they can dream of.

Facebook: the 'Special Forces Evasion Play'

The 'Special Forces Evasion Play' is to get in without being rumbled, hit hard, and get out as fast as you can before they know what has happened.

This is roughly the approach used by Bret Taylor, Facebook's CTO, who came, saw, threw a couple of technology flash-bomb use cases, gunned off a few lines of Silicon Valley speak, and then went without taking questions. It is only with the benefit of a week's professional post-shock counselling, and many cups of tea and sympathy, that the intrepid Telco 2.0 analysts been able to piece together the following account of his talk.

Facebook, while seen by Taylor as essentially a mobile product, is having difficulties monetising its 435 million mobile users (see Facebook: what the pre-IPO S-1 filing revealed and M-Commerce: can Voice 2.0 make mobile ads work at last?). He said that this was because the same ecosystems do not exist around the mobile web as they do online. There are three specific problems: 1) app discovery is difficult; 2) there is technological fragmentation with different HTML5 standards on different phones, and; 3) payment is 'broken', with a clunky process requiring SMS verification, and different deals needing to be done in different regions / countries.

He said that Facebook's ongoing solution to app discovery is 'Open Graph' (a way of allowing developers to associate recommended apps on the basis of a user's social graph), and then announced that Facebook would be:

• prioritising core mobile web standards for HTML5, with W2C and Ringmark - a test suite that shows how well a mobile app matches these standards;
• and entering into partnerships around the world Telefonica, Vodafone and others, to deliver a single step to confirm purchases charged to the phone bill.

Apple: the 'Not Being There Evasion Play'

Finally, Apple, the giant mobile device company with the highest valuation and biggest profit margins in the industry, manages its Mobile World Congress evasion strategy in the most cunning, outrageous and unanswerable way possible: it does not make an appearance (although Apple execs were allegedly there).

At Telco 2.0 however, we found it to be a genuinely useful and enjoyable show, and being just a little behind Apple in turns of market cap and revenues, we'll see you there next year. We would also like to thank our partners at the GSMA for what turned out to be a busy and memorable Congress.

Last but not least, congratulations to Huawei, who produced the genuinely striking and beautiful promotional figure of the winged horse made of smartphones atop the fountains of the Fira featured at the top of this article, and farewell to CBOSS, who would do well to learn from Huawei's example on how to do marketing that's memorable for the right reasons.

telco2.net | 07-Mar-2012 16:50

M-Commerce: can Voice 2.0 make mobile ads work at last?

One of the things that our Facebook pre-IPO analysis highlighted was that Facebook has 425 million mobile users and isn't making a penny from them. It's a top priority for them to change that, and the constraints of designing a good mobile user experience mean that it will take all their ingenuity to shoehorn adverts into the mobile client.

Further, even within the online version of Facebook, customers are in 'social' rather than 'shopping' mode, and many mobile users are on third-party apps that talk to the Facebook API, so Facebook doesn't control the user interface "chrome" that surrounds the content.

JCPenney's Facebook store - now closed. source

Facebook's big idea is to inject "sponsored stories" into the content itself. But will anyone accept that? And might the integration of Voice 2.0 communications into mobile advertising help turn it into a lead generating business? There's starting to be some signs that it could.

[Ed. We're looking at local advertising and commerce strategies at the Silicon Valley Brainstorm (27-28 March), and at Voice 2.0 strategies both there and at the London Brainstorm (12-13 June).]

Mobile is a medium of immense opportunity which the advertising, tech and telecoms industries have not yet cracked at scale. There's an interesting discussion of this in this Quora thread. 64% of the British and 67% of Americans find receiving advertising on their mobile annoying, and 77% of them find banner ads in mobile apps annoying. 27% of Brits say they would stop using an application if it started to push adverts. And one of the drivers of mobile Facebook usage is that the mobile client is cleaner, less "noisy" with additional features and, of course, ads.

Bloomberg recently reported that several big retailers have shut down their Facebook "storefronts", basically because the return on investment was poor. The problem is summarised by Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru:

Facebook, which this month filed for an initial public offering, has sought to be a top shopping destination for its 845 million members. The stores' quick failure shows that the Menlo Park, California-based social network doesn't drive commerce and casts doubt on its value for retailers.

"There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop," Mulpuru said in a telephone interview. "But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they're hanging out with their friends at the bar."

Both retailers and advertising agencies Bloomberg spoke to said the same sort of thing. Selling on Facebook duplicated their existing Web sites (and probably worse, as their design has to conform to the platform's limitations). Meanwhile, advertising on Facebook might generate brand awareness, but it didn't generate leads.

"We just didn't get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly," Sheetz (a US convenience store and gas station chain) said in a telephone interview. "For us, it's been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell."

This is hugely important, as online advertising's big advantage - well, let's be clear, Google's big advantage - is that it delivers hot sales leads, and you can see them, count them, and analyse them to improve your site design. The energy-efficiency expert Amory Lovins famously said that nobody wants energy, instead they want cold beer. That is to say, "energy" isn't valuable in the abstract, but only because of the work that can be done with it. People value the cold beer, not the electricity used to make it cold. In the same way, businesses don't want "advertising". Advertising is a means to an end - sales.

And the great thing about online advertising from the advertising vendor's point of view is that because it delivers leads and they are tracked and counted, the buyer's budget for online is defensible in a way that display ad budgets never are.

Now consider this case study (PDF) from the Google Mobile Ads official blog. The client, Starwood Hotels, decided to make use of Google's search-based advertising to get at customers who were looking for a hotel, and therefore potential leads.

The really interesting element, though, is the call-to-action. Starwood, and their agency (Razorfish) decided to emphasise click-to-call. This turned out to work very well indeed - rather than getting worse click-through rates on mobile, they got better click-to-call rates than they got click-through rates on the desktop. And click-to-call customers were more likely to go through and spend money.

No wonder call-tracking analytics firm, Freespee blogged it.

The other half of this is the power of Voice 2.0. If you're looking at the mobile Web site, clearly your phone has a web browser (and the ones with no web capability are vanishing).

If we use a web-based voice API with a call-back architecture (like Fonolo, Tropo, Twilio, Jajah et al), we can send along a rich variety of data with the call request. That in turn lets us identify the customer, intelligently route the call in the call centre, and pre-populate the customer service agent's screen with information, hints, and offers.

Further, we can make sure the callback originates from a local phone number, so if the customer rings up again they go to the right place, and we can also make the Web site serve the right phone number by location. We can send reminders and authenticate the customer via SMS. And we can analyse our customer interactions with statistics in order to refine the process.

This is another reason why you need Voice 2.0. Obviously, you could implement this using one of the various API providers, but perhaps there's an opening for a specifically ad-focused click-to-call product, with a Google Ads-like two-sided business model? Advertisers could buy x number of calls, or pay per-conversion. We can certainly see potential for operators here, especially those who've recently created a "digital" division. And it offers the chance to price this as advertising rather than just as minutes.

For their part, Facebook have a chat product, and a deal with Skype. These days you can run Skype into a PBX, so it ought to be possible to make something of it that way. Or, of course, they could make use of one of the voice APIs themselves. Either way, though, this depends on the fundamental advertising model of Facebook on mobile actually working. If people don't go on Facebook looking to buy things, replacing web links with click-to-call won't necessarily make them - but it might.

So, if this is potentially such a good deal in terms of lead generation, why, then, are there only two entries regarding click-to-call on Google's mobile ads blog?

Carriers tend to think of mobile advertising as a product in itself, which makes sense because they are sellers of it. Similarly, the ad agencies who dominate mobile marketing discussions consider the product to be ads themselves. But advertisers don't want ads, they want leads. No wonder it's only the Web-voice insurgents who've cottoned on so far.

But Google's business is built on this insight. The question is surely "Could Google's core ad business do with some more investment?"

We'll be discussing this in a forthcoming Google analyst's note. Meanwhile, check out this classic Telco 2.0 blog post from 2009.

telco2.net | 07-Mar-2012 10:51

MWC 2012 - Top CEO Strategies: increasingly Telco 2.0, despite tones of 'Goodfellas' and 'sex or smartphone?'

At the opening session of the Mobile World Congress 2012, the CEOs of the world's largest telcos highlighted the pressures on the 'Telco 1.0' business model, and showed some encouraging glimpses of Telco 2.0 thinking.

There was also at times a comical tone with the US and European operator CEOs inadvertently putting one in mind of a Hollywood depiction of a group of underworld bosses at the annual clan meeting, complaining of the city police's crackdown on the racket (Mobile Termination Rates - MTRs), wanting more development land (spectrum) from the government, wanting more 'protection' (from regulators), and complaining about the new gangs in town (the OTTs).

President Li Yue of China Mobile delivered his presentation entirely in Chinese. While what he talked about - China Mobile's platform 'Mobile Market' - was extremely interesting (see China Mobile: mindbogglingly big and interesting), the use of Chinese to deliver the presentation to the almost entirely non-Chinese speaking audience carried perhaps the major unspoken message of the session: now you must come to us.

The theme of his presentation also underlined the different dynamics of the relationships between these telcos and their governments. China Mobile is effectively executing government policy, whereas the others are pursuing shareholder value while increasingly being reined in by governments and regulators in pursuit of economic and sometimes political goals. (See also Telecoms: too important to leave to telcos? and The Roadmap to Telco 2.0 Business Models.)

Serving half the world's mobile customers

As well as President Li, the grandstand opening session featured Vittorio Colao, CEO Vodafone, Ralph de la Vega, CEO AT&T Mobility, and Franco Bernabe, CEO Telecom Italia and Chairman of the GSMA. Between them, these companies have half of the world's mobile phone customers. The session was opened and chaired by Anne Bouverot, Director General, GSMA, who framed the debate by saying that the key challenge facing telecoms operators was how to adapt their business models given the challenges they face.

We will be analysing this theme further, including the need for new dynamics in the relationship between telcos and their regulators (see more below), at our Silicon Valley Executive Brainstorm (27-28 March), and the London Brainstorm (12-13 June).

The beginning of the end of Telco 1.0?

Franco Bernabe, CEO Telecom Italia and this year's GSMA president, picked up the baton and started promisingly, talking up the growth in developing markets, and the promise of new technologies like NFC, RCS-e, and mobile cloud.

However, despite the many wonders of innovation that are coming from the industry, significant investment is needed ($800Bn in the next four years) but revenues are not growing. He then moved on to one of the main messages of the session that was aimed at governments and regulators - that the industry needs a mixture of protection and benevolent 'hands-off' regulation to thrive. He said that 'OTT players', despite an admirable focus on customers, had unfair advantages - they don't have to serve everyone, and are enviably free from regulation.

This was a theme picked up later by Vittorio Colao, CEO Vodafone, and Ralph de la Vega, CEO AT&T, both of whom also called for greater and faster releases of spectrum, again a message aimed at governments, policy makers and regulators. Colao in particular criticised what he called 'auto-pilot' regulation in relation to decisions on mobile termination rates (MTRs).

Neelie Kroes, the redoubtable EU Commissioner, felt strongly enough to issue a statement in response to Colao after the session:

"Message to Vittorio and Vodafone: I call your bluff, and indeed do not respond well to threats. I take the side of the Vodafone customer."

Colao's cries appear to have fallen on further unsympathetic ears as the ministers at the European Parliament's Industry, Telecommunications, Research, and Energy Committee (ITRE) passed a bill capping European MTRs later in the week.

(See also: The Register Mobile net kingpins v the world: 'Why should we pay the 4G tab?')

While we understand the struggle that telcos face fighting pressures on their business models from all directions (see below), it is hard not to view the combat over MTRs and data roaming rates as ugly and regrettable skirmishes in the gradual retreat of Telco 1.0.

And despite the slightly satirical tone of this note, we also understand that the telco CEOs have obligations to their shareholders to defend their sources of value, and that investments in lobbyists and top regulatory lawyers have long held some of the best returns for telcos. But it's becoming increasingly clear at the highest level that telcos need to find new sources of value, and this means embracing the difficult and risky process of business model innovation.

A corollary of this is that the dynamics of the relationship between operators and regulators needs to change too. Particularly in western developed economies facing a period of austerity, and with telecoms operators needing to evolve new business models, a new dialogue needs to begin, moving on from the 20 year 'cold war' of ever tighter regulatory clamp-downs and fostering a new understanding and sustainable regulatory climate for innovation and investment.

While it is certainly encouraging that the supertanker of telco strategy appears to be starting to turn, it is also slightly chastening that Hamid Akhavan, the then CEO of Deutsche Telekom, said back in 2007 that it was the 'year of the business model'. So another 5 years have passed and relatively slow progress has been made in many areas, whereas other business models are have evolved rapidly through innovation (see our report Google, Apple, Facebook - Dealing with the Disruptors).

At least some telcos, now including Singtel, are starting to respond by setting up 'Digital' units, seeing so-called 'OTT' business models as an opportunity as well as a threat.

Some encouraging signs of Telco 2.0

In this vein, and moving on from the regulatory slugfest, Vodafone's Colao talked about 'open infrastructure and co-investment in networks', although he said discussions in Europe had not so far not succeeded. He also said that collaboration was needed to create standards for new services, and mentioned the RCS-e brand 'Joyn' (of which more in further analysis), M-commerce SIM based NFC services, and payments as important areas.

De la Vega also talked about how to keep the innovation cycle going. He said that the keys were to:

• make new services effortless, citing a video call as an example of something that is very difficult to do today;
• enable ecosystem innovation, embracing developers and treating them like customers (also a theme for China Mobile).

In this context, AT&T is targeting developers by building developer foundries in Israel, Texas and Palo Alto, and taking APIs and other tools to them, such as how apps use power and bandwidth.

CEO 'wisdom bites'

Two interesting lists emerged from the CEO presentations that gave the distinct impression of being the latest top-level insights from their consumer research teams.

First, Vodafone's Colao said that customers expect telcos to deliver four things that can only be delivered together by operators (although others can deliver parts):

• 100% ubiquity of data;
• Excellence in service;
• Security and privacy;
• Convenience and trust.

Second, AT&T's de la Vega described themes of emerging consumer behaviour, relating to the adoption of new technologies today across generations compared to two years ago:

• 'Digital Intimacy' - sharing moments and being continually connected;
• 'Digital Kinship' - creating new rituals and fostering shared interests;
• 'Digital Guardianship' - keeping track of family, and never being out of touch;
• 'Digital Heroism' - helping other people use their devices to do things and access information when they need it most.

Sex or Smartphones?

Finally, among a blizzard of investment and penetration figures, perhaps the stat of the day came from Colao, who said that Vodafone's research had revealed that 70% of smartphone customers would rather spend a week without alcohol rather than without their smartphone.

If this is correct, our observations of MWC life in Barcelona imply that many of the attendees may have left their smartphones at home.

We did not research the validity of his other statistic that, to keep their smartphones, 33% would give up sex for a week.

[Ed. Don't forget: for more on Telco 2.0 strategies, join us at the Silicon Valley and London Brainstorms.]

telco2.net | 06-Mar-2012 13:20

MWC 2012 - China Mobile: a mindbogglingly big platform

President Li, CEO China Mobile, used the Mobile World Congress 2012 stage to talk about China Mobile's 'Mobile Market' initiative, a countrywide platform for mobile internet service development which he described as China's largest job creation platform.

He said that Mobile Market, while still some way short of Apple's stats in China, had 3.7 million registered developers (though only 115k apps so far), 169 million registered users and 670 million downloads.

Paraphrasing the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, China Mobile is a vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big company. It has 655 million customers - or about 2x the population of the US and nearly 10% of the world's population. So, despite President Li's modesty on Mobile Market's numbers to date, 169 million registered users is a quarter of China Mobile's customer base - and only just less than the population of Pakistan, the 6th most populous nation on the planet.

In 'Mobile Market' China Mobile's approach to innovation is a fascinating blend of state lead, industrial scale centralised investment, and a classic two-sided business model to create value for China Mobile, and jobs and skills for the Chinese Economy.

Finally, it's intriguing to note that there are 12 functions and 159 APIs available to developers via Mobile Market (see chart below), and we will be taking a further look at China Mobile's strategy and approach in subsequent Telco 2.0 analysis.

And we've not even touched on their plan to deploy 1 million WLAN hotspots, with roaming between them and networks in South Korea and Japan. Even if that does sound a little like an effort to get over the government's imposition of TD-SCDMA technology on China Mobile and the massive re-org of the industry that followed, it's still very impressive.

telco2.net | 05-Mar-2012 13:08

MWC 2012 - Apps & Devices: Telco 2.0's tech highlights

This entry in our mini-series on this year's Mobile World Congress covers smart devices and the apps that love them. The key organising concept, for us, was a comeback for the mobile Web, and we'll be looking in depth at future device strategies at our Silicon Valley Executive Brainstorm at the end of March. The article covers:

• Mozilla and Telefonica;


• Google Gadget Watch;


• Nokia Resurgence;


• Deep Web Development;


• and Telco 2.0's Tech 'Shiny of the Show' award.

Mozilla & Telefonica

I know what we need - another mobile OS! Came the cry. But Mozilla's Open Web Device (impressively, they are working with Telefonica on this - another score for one of the world's most innovative telcos) is actually quite cool.

It is an effort to create a purely web-based mobile device, which strips out any software that attracts a royalty in order to squeeze down costs. A minimal Linux kernel loads a headless version of the Gecko web rendering engine at the core of Mozilla Firefox, which then loads a suite of Web widgets that comprise the phone's user interface. (Mozilla has a very clear explanation of the system architecture in their Wiki.) On the demonstration devices, you can hit the "view source" option on everything.

Having tried it out, it was remarkably snappy for a 600MHz CPU, pretty ho-hum in these days of quad-core gadgetry. Telefonica's interest probably has something to do with getting low-cost smartphones out into its Latin American markets, while Mozilla is both historically committed to a Web fundamentalist world view, concerned about the direction of mobile platforms, and excited about providing a unified user experience across different machines.

One of Mozilla's biggest funders is of course Google, which is therefore now supporting no fewer than four operating systems, in this case at one remove. That would be ChromeOS, Android, Boot to Gecko, and the specialised Linux server distribution they use internally - or as many as IBM supported in its pomp. Is Google spreading itself too thinly? We'll be discussing this in a forthcoming Google analyst note.

Google Gadget Watch

Much of the hottest gadgetry running Android is powered by NVIDIA's Tegra chips. We couldn't help noticing that Asus's new Tegra-driven tablet-with-a-keyboard (don't call it a netbook), running Android 4.0, is both very shiny and used by many, many Googlers. Almost as if they had been issued by Google's IT shop. Are they trying to tell us something about Asus?

Nokia Resurgence?

The mood in the Nokia stand was better than last year - it could hardly have been worse without getting into lashings of cyanide-laced KoolAid - even if the jury is still out on the Lumias. Like everyone and their dog, we went to play with the shinies and were suitably impressed. However, the Metro UI takes some getting used to and we wonder if it might work better in Shoreditch than in consensus reality.

But perhaps this was a distraction from the increasingly powerful and impressive Asha phones - not only do they look very much like the classic E71, they're rather further on functionality (Moore's Law is collapsing the distinction between featurephones and smartphones into one between the very latest smartphone and one from 18 months ago) and have a less hostile UI. Expect the investment going into HTML5 in mobile to save a new generation of developers from enjoying the Symbian experience or the joy of J2ME.

Speaking of Symbian, it was a surprise to see it used as the base for Nokia's Pureview 41-megapixel super-cameraphone. To be honest, it's more of a camera that happens to make phone calls and surf the Web than a smartphone with a really good camera, which may be why they did it that way. Did anyone expect that the GSMA's best-in-show award would go to a Symbian device, though? Looking at the phone is missing the point, in a sense - you can see some photos taken with it here

In general, photography is a Nokia strength and one they've never really capitalised on - Anssi Vanjöki was always keen to push it, but it got caught in the confusion as everyone ran for the lifeboats off the burning platform. Beyond that, they seem to be preparing a push on media of various kinds, especially music. (Compare RIM's BBM Music, which their stand didn't even demonstrate beyond having a sign saying BBM MUSIC.)

Deep Web Development

There was a time when JavaScript was considered a toy language that real programmers didn't bother with. Khronos Software's session on Monday morning should have finally killed that one. Technology is being driven by the demands of gaming and of augmented reality here, and silicon, software, and standardisation are responding. WebGL lets you program 3D graphics with hardware acceleration inside a Web page. OpenCL, which now gets bindings to JavaScript and hence to the Web, lets you work with all the computing resources on the device, so you can make use of the graphical processor's parallelism from inside a Web page.

Further projects are trying to provide a united and standardised view of all the device's sensors - at the moment, developers need to build alternative versions of their applications depending on what sensors a given device offers, a royal pain as more and more Android devices of all sorts roll out. The term of art for this is apparently "magical awareness", or alternatively the disturbingly military "sensor fusion".

Telco 2.0 Tech 'Shiny of the Show' Award

Our award for shiny-ness goes to Canonical and 'Ubuntu for Android'. Install the app, plug your Android phone into a monitor, and it launches Ubuntu Linux, giving you instant access to a full desktop environment, with your Android apps. Unplug it, the Linux session is suspended and you can walk away with your 'droid. If you use Ubuntu One, their cloud storage, you could even sync it with another machine.

telco2.net | 05-Mar-2012 11:10

MWC 2012 Network Tech: Edge Power, Super WiFi, Van Jacobson

It's been Mobile World Congress again. To tide you over until we've finished the traditional period of fasting, sleeping, and using no technology invented more recently than the sundial, we've put together a mini-series of blog posts about major trends we noticed. This one covers what's happening in networks and infrastructure: Edge Power; Super WiFi; and Telco 2.0's Top Network Tech moment - a Living Legend on QoS vs. QoE.

(NB For further Telco 2.0 research on future broadband strategies see 'The value of "Smart Pipes" to mobile network operators', and our broadband research stream.)

Edge Power

Last year's network buzzword was "het-net", and there was plenty of that about, but this year's was "small cells". The original femtocell concept foresaw a device with a similar form factor and deployment pattern to a SOHO wireless access point, but this ran into quite a few problems, notably that not many people actually saw a need to have one in their home, that the relationship with other network operators was never really worked out, and that the smartphones are always more than happy to move over to the wireless LAN. WLAN equipment being cheaper by an order of magnitude and more common in the home and office by several orders of magnitude, it got used. Also, deploying significant numbers of devices that wouldn't be radio-planned was a problem.

Small cells are a difference of emphasis rather than kind - typically, they are used to provide public rather than homezone coverage, they are available in more sizes (anything less than a full scale macro-cell, really), and they usually pack more features.

But it's worth looking through the radio issues. Ubiquisys' new range of small cells, for example, have moved over to Intel x86 hardware in the interests of cost and also of general-purpose programmability. Using PC-like hardware means that it should be much easier to develop applications to run on them. They also typically include a large solid-state disk, like the ones in Apple MacBook Airs, which provides mass storage with very fast input-output.

(Source: Ubiquisys on Flickr)

The obvious use for this is to integrate content-delivery networking as deep into the radio network as it's possible to get - in fact, you could just make out command-line output in Keith Day's slides logging cache-hits and misses for YouTube videos. The former Femto Forum, now the Small Cells Forum, is working on a standard API for these devices in order to facilitate building services like operator CDNing.

In the same field, but more radical, is Quortus, a British startup that implements mobile core network functions in software in order to port them to devices other than the giant switches they usually run on. That could mean bog standard IT gear, which in any case some networks already run on, or it could mean femtocell or PC-scale devices pushed out to the network edge.

This has a huge range of potential applications. For example, it makes it possible to build a network with a distributed architecture, spreading the core functions and data around and therefore avoiding the need for expensive specialised gear, reducing single points of failure, and eliminating sources of network latency. One reference application is a rural deployment, using big high power radios for coverage, but getting rid of the high capacity RNCs that go with them and instead using a Quortus node to control the radios. Being an MSC in its own right, speaking SIP and MAP to the rest of the network, it can keep providing local calls if the backhaul goes down.

Alternatively, such a device could be used as part of an enterprise network, providing in-building coverage and also acting as a fully mobile PBX for advanced voice features. We note that PABX capability is on the Small Cells Forum roadmap, as well. When you look at what Vodafone has achieved with One Net, it should be clear that there are big possibilities here.

Super WiFi

Another element of this is, of course, WLAN. Our Managed Offload use case sounded radical when we published, but as one of the GSMA panellists said, "operators have discovered that WiFi is something they can trust" and now they can't get enough of it - a quick-deploying source of high speed data connectivity with zero spectrum costs and no core-thrashing signalling load. Operator WLAN is surging up onto the productivity plateau, and as a result, vendors like Ruckus Wireless and (inevitably) Cisco will be taking more of the telcos' capex dollar in future.

Many of the same points about edge power apply to WLAN equipment as well. A lot of small cell products have a WLAN radio as an option, and the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) at least talks a good game about additional services and applications via the Hotspot 2.0 initiative.

However, the biggest barrier to moving more data traffic off the cellular network is the same one that has always dogged WLAN. If the authentication is secure, it's not usable, and if it's usable it's not secure - and to be honest, most landing pages aren't very usable. As a result, the WBA is trying hard to get more SIM-based automatic authentication (EAP) deployed, and some big names are expected to announce progress quite soon. Although EAP only helps devices with a SIM, this may not be as big a problem as all that - after all, smartphones and tablets are the main drivers of traffic growth.

Tellingly, even the conference WiFi worked this time.

A Living Legend On QoS vs. QoE

Telco 2.0's Top Network Tech moment came rather discreetly in an anonymous, little advertised seminar room deep in Hall 5 on Wednesday afternoon, while the world's attention was focused on Microsoft's lavish Windows 8 preview and trying to get invited to the Google party.

As a graduate student back in the late 1980s, Van Jacobson solved the congestion collapse that crippled the nascent Internet, by inventing TCP/IP's congestion management features. If it hadn't been for that, the US academic and military research communities might have given up on IP and used something else (a lot of networking technology was tried and abandoned in the 80s and 90s), and the world would be very different. (Actually it might be even more different had he left a toilet out of a classic 1999 paper.)

Later, he helped to start Cisco Systems, invented traceroute and the Multicast Backbone, before returning to research at Xerox PARC.

Someone to listen to, then. But we didn't know that he studied FedEx's network of trucks moving around the world looking for insights into networking in general.

"I asked FedEx how they managed to make money when they were stuck in the same traffic jams I was. The answer was that there are traffic jams, but a lot of the time, there aren't, and FedEx operates 24 hours a day and never loses an opportunity to move a packet."

Van also thinks a lot of our problems are down to the way we've ended up using the Internet. It's a medium that is designed around one-to-one interaction, via the famous end to end principle, and it's often running on top of access networks designed for one-to-one phone calls...but it's mostly used for either one-to-many broadcasting (like the top 10 on YouTube) or many-to-one aggregation (like thousands of coders throwing commits into Github, or hundreds of thousands of photographers pouring images into Flickr).

His proposed solution is to embed content and applications into the Internet, bringing it much closer to the user. Rather than a cloud solution, though, he argues that this should be much more distributed, with applications and caches in every network domain. (The potential significance of those SSDs and Intel Atom processors in small cells ought to be clear at this point.)

And, fascinatingly, he thinks that there is a lot to learn from logistics companies like FedEx in general. Faced with widely diverse, shared, and unreliable transport links of different speeds, they manage to provide reliable delivery and differentiated service, without moaning about "over-the-top transport providers (i.e. cars) hogging our roadwidth".

Van also pointed out that there's not much money in owning a road. Perhaps there's a vision here - of a shared or public macro-infrastructure, with differentiated providers of digital logistics operating on it, and a wide range of different access technologies at the edge.

telco2.net | 05-Mar-2012 10:56

Disrupting Cloud; privacy gaffes; UK M-payments collaboration, M-termination rates; & LightScrewed? - Telco 2.0 News Review

• M-Commerce 2.0: UK m-payments moves closer, M-PESA wins again
• Cloud Computing: Can telcos "disrupt enterprise cloud"? Plus CDN roundup
• Personal Data: How Facebook invented and forgot a privacy fix, plus Google row, Target datamining
• Voice 2.0: UK MTR cuts coming, Rogers launches One Number
• Broadband Connectivity: LightSquared in crisis

[Ed: We'll be at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week - see our article on Seven Good Reasons to Go to MWC. After that, the New Digital Economics Brainstorm in Silicon Valley is on the 27th-28th of March, and our spring EMEA event is in London on the 12th-13th of June. Last but not least, apply here to view vdieos now available from the free, invitation only New Digital Econmics Online virtual event. Email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 for more on any of the above.]

Four UK mobile operators have filed for regulatory clearance from the European Commission for their joint mobile payments initiative. They plan to create a company to manage the technical platform and act as the point of contact with merchants and banks, on the model of Zoompass/Enstream in Canada and ISIS in the United States. 3UK has not been invited which may spawn a regulatory complaint.

Elsewhere, Vodacom Tanzania reported that its user base has grown by a third, and that the main driver of subscriber growth was the M-PESA mobile payments platform. Managing director Rene Meza said that their next strategic priority was to expand data services, with Internet penetration in Tanzania being much lower than in Kenya.

Orange, meanwhile, selected Myriad's USSD-based platform to deliver Facebook and other social networks in Africa.

Opera Software is continuing its efforts to build more services around its mobile Web browser and its associated infrastructure of accelerator proxies. The company has acquired two mobile advertising networks.

And Faultline points out that, if Google Wallet has been a decided flash in the pan, Apple's iAds venture into Google's online advertising territory has been a big disappointment too.

Information Week reports back on telcos' increasing involvement with the cloud and argues that they have a major opportunity to disrupt the enterprise market for cloud computing. We think Cloud is important too - in case you missed our recent content on this, see Cloud 2.0: winning the next phase, and why 'PaaS' / 'NaaS' are important, and Cloud 2.0: what is it, why it matters, and what's next.

KT apparently saw a major reduction in churn after launching a range of cloud services. They also note that CDNs are in some ways a special case of cloud computing, and one that's likely to get very important. Brightcove floated on the stock market this week and saw an immediate 32% run-up, valuing the video platform at $382 million. Meanwhile, Cedexis is a French web optimisation company that specialises in CDNs and the cloud, and owns a dynamic load balancer solution.

Here's another new CDN. Yottaa (not to be confused with YoTa) provides a Web application acceleration solution for SMBs.

Some context about just how much data Twitter users generate and Google has to index.

Red Hat has been building an Apache server that interfaces with basically all the clouds you can think of, to provide a unified management API over them.

Who moves massive amounts of video and user data? YouPorn.com, and via High Scalability, here's some details of how they manage it. In other video news, Dan Rayburn at Streaming Media discusses Barry Diller's Aereo OTT TV play and isn't convinced.

Is Amazon going to build a TV?

On the frontier between the cloud and privacy, the Cambridge Computer Lab's Light Blue Touch Paper blog notes an interesting approach to protecting user data in social network applications. What if you could tell the platform to put data into named fields in your application without showing you? Until quite recently, that's precisely how Facebook's FBML worked - and it was originally engineered to provide high performance rather than privacy as such.

It turns out that Google deliberately defeated security precautions in certain Web browsers (notably Safari), by adding an invisible Web form input that reloaded any DoubleClick.net display ads on the page and therefore letting the ads set a tracking cookie. The EFF explains, and demands that Google apologises.

Here's a fascinating story about the use and abuse of personal data - US retailer Target discovered they knew which of their customers were pregnant, but they had to add random items to their special offers to conceal the fact they knew, which tended to scare the customers. And they accidentally informed one girl's father. It goes to show that yes, normal people do care.

We think it all goes to show that the guidelines we've been working on with the World Economic Forum and others really matter.

Groupon buys a ton of data.

In the UK, the voice market is heading for a disruption as OFCOM imposes a dramatic cut in mobile termination rates. MTRs are going to fall from 4.18p a minute to 0.65p a minute by April 2015, after the competition appeals tribunal decided that the original cut wasn't enough.

Rogers Wireless brings One Number, its integrated mobile-softphone VoIP product, out of beta. Rogers is partnering with Counterpath, an OTT developer specialising in HD voice, and offering a web-based version of the service.

Interesting technology from NEC - they've patented a smartphone app that works out from context which would be the best way to handle an incoming call between telephony, videotelephony, messaging, voicemail, etc. Synchronica, meanwhile, plans to demonstrate a hosted RCSe server at Mobile World Congress, to permit operators to use RCSe without deploying an IMS core network.

And RevK at Andrews & Arnold is integrating a SIP server into his homebrewed Firebrick CPE router, in order to get rid of the pain of SIP NAT traversal.

US lobbies fight over whether to keep sending out phone books. And it only gets easier to hack GSM voice.

In broadband news, Ars Technica reports that LightSquared's GPS problem is likely to be fatal, with the FCC convinced that their operations will essentially jam chunks of the service after NTIA carried out tests. LightSquared retorts that the GPS manufacturers could put in better filters, but then there are enormous numbers of GPS receivers out there and some of them (indeed many) are in safety-critical applications.

Inmarsat, meanwhile, announced that LightSquared had failed to make a $56m payment to them, and investors in Philip Falcone's fund are suing him. What a mess.

NSN thinks deploying fixed-wireless TD LTE in Brazil would be a dramatically cheaper option than VDSL. Look for more of this in any market where FTTH or modern cable plant isn't available.

Patents: Apple won a lawsuit in Germany regarding "slide to unlock", but it looks like Google might have published earlier. But it's not that amazing a feature, and of course touchscreens existed before the iPhone. Android Central has video of a Windows CE device from 2005 with the feature.

A study shows that 55 per cent of the most important mobile patents belong to Nokia, Samsung, Qualcomm, and LG.

And new HP boss Meg Whitman is surprisingly bullish about now-open-source WebOS.

Apple's latest results included quarterly figures for app payouts, which permits Horace to conclude that on average, each iOS device brings $12 in revenue to the developer community, and that Apple is selling about $1bn a year of apps.

Apple's contractor, Foxconn is going to raise wages by as much as 25% after the combination of a wave of outrage among customers and the continuing wave of labour militancy in China put pressure on them. Meanwhile, ZTE ordered $5bn worth of chips from Qualcomm and Broadcom.

Microsoft's decisions about Windows 8 and WinRT are controversial thanks to this diagram, our Chart of the Week. Is Microsoft really trying to take Windows development back to 1999, before .NET and Java? Or is something else going on? Detailed discussion at the link.

Some details about the forthcoming PlayBook OS 2.0. Crackberry's ideas for RIM.

Sony embeds 3G connectivity in its new PlayStation mobile gadget.

How i-Mode and Flash failed. And O2 will buy your pizza and beer for 36 hours in Silicon Roundabout if you're willing to develop an NFC app

telco2.net | 20-Feb-2012 13:32

Cloud 2.0: winning the next phase, and why 'PaaS' / 'NaaS' are important

Cloud Services are a valuable and growing market area in which there are opportunities to grow both Telco 1.0 and Telco 2.0 business models.

The chart above is from New Digital Economics Online, a free virtual event for CSPs (click here to register), and shows the potential for telcos to gain share in different parts of the Cloud market and in particular in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The following videos are now available to view online in the Cloud section of the event:

• Cloud 2.0: winning the next phase, and why 'PaaS' is important. Telco 2.0's Research Director outlines key projections for the Cloud market, market views on what telcos need to do to succeed, and the importance of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to Telco 2.0 business models.


• Mobile Cloud and 'Network-as-a-Service' (NaaS). Ericsson's CMO describes the convergence of mobility and the cloud, the new partnership with Akamai, and how telcos can open up their assets to provide a 'Network-as-a-Service' (NaaS) platform to developers and upstream customers
  

These themes will be explored further in our Silicon Valley and London Brainstorms, and in our ongoing Cloud 2.0 research programme.

telco2.net | 17-Feb-2012 12:58

Facebook: what the pre-IPO S-1 filing revealed

New figures released in Facebook's S-1 filing for its IPO stack up with Telco 2.0's previous analysis of Facebook's performance for our report 'Dealing with the Disruptors'. This further strengthens our views that many mooted valuations are overblown, and that Facebook will seek new sources of value in communications - our analysis is here.

telco2.net | 17-Feb-2012 12:52

Strategy 2.0: Facebook's strategy in the 'Great Game'

The 'Great Game' is the battle between the industrial giants of the digital economy, including the telcos, Facebook, Apple, Google and Skype, and is summarised in the chart above, extracted from our report on 'Dealing with the Disruptors'.

The chart outlines the battles by player and by strategic market, and shows where the businesses make their primary profits (Core Businesses) and where they operate 'Synergic Businesses' which support them.

Facebook's core business is advertising, supported by synergic businesses in online content and payments, and we believe it will move into further into communications in an attempt to bolster its value. (See also our research articles on Facebook: moving into telco space?, Facebook: worth $30Bn max, and Facing up to Facebook.)

Further detail on the chart can be found here, and there is an explanatory presentation by Chris Barraclough, Chief Strategist, Telco 2.0, at the New Digital Economics Online Event next Tuesday 14th February (apply here for this free, invitation only event).

telco2.net | 09-Feb-2012 06:25

M-Commerce 2.0: Operator Billing - 'it's the merchants, stupid'

In this guest post, Telco 2.0 partners SLA Mobile argue that operators must focus on merchants' needs to make Direct Operator Billing (DOB) work, and unlock and monetise new assets through M-Commerce.

"It's the economy, stupid" was the mantra of Bill Clinton's successful 1982 Presidential Campaign - this simple message cut through the fog of political rhetoric and helped Clinton win. SLA Mobile say operators must adopt a similar single-minded focus on merchants' needs to succeed in the growing M-Commerce market, forecast by Informa to be worth US $37BN in fees by 2016.

What is 'Direct Operator Billing'?

Direct Operator Billing (DOB) enables merchants to charge the payment for goods and services to the consumer's mobile phone bill rather than their credit card.

It is SLA Mobile's view that mobile operators in both developing and developed markets have a strategic opportunity to use DOB to drive digital commerce revenues and address the ever present 'Over-The-Top' (OTT) threat.

However for a DOB strategy to succeed, operators need to embrace the reality that making it work will be "all about the merchants".

Some operators are already making plans to get their slice of this market, e.g. Vodafone Group CEO, Vittorio Colao, briefed analysts in the Q2 FY2011/12 earnings conference that Operator Billing is a significant opportunity. He described it as a "very intuitive and easy way of enabling digital commerce".

It's all about the Merchants

Consumer research suggests that consumers in developed markets preferred method of payment for goods on the mobile phone is the mobile bill, above using either their credit card and Paypal (see chart below). In emerging markets there are often no other means of payment beyond cash.

However to fully monetise this opportunity, operators need to take a merchant-centric view of the opportunity. This is because it is merchants who create the innovative services to drive the market not operators.

Operators also need to recognise they are competing with a well-developed financial services ecosystem in many markets.

One option is for mobile operators to choose to leave the merchant relationship to others in the value chain as they do in the Premium SMS market. However operators can build deeper relationships through engaging directly with merchants and aligning common goals of maximising growth. There are a few key success enablers:-

1) The barriers to entry for merchants must be low. Operators need to ensure that the technical effort of integration is low by providing 2.0 APIs and self-service portals. This is a far cry from the manual 1.0 world of Premium SMS (PSMS).

2) Operators should support merchants in growing the market. Operators need to work with merchants and provide them with the tools to make operator billing easy for web sites, mobile websites and apps.

3) The rewards for using operator billing must be high. Operators should use a commercial model that maximises demand for the widest range of products both digital and physical.

This means payouts to merchants that are at least 85% plus - much higher than for Premium SMS. Although operators have the challenge of the 'cost of cash' in running the pre-pay network where retailers get a commission on airtime top-ups, they need to get payouts much closer to those of credit cards and Paypal to be competitive.

This will create new market opportunities not just for digital but also physical goods and services. Merchants will see DOB as a fantastic business opportunity when operators make it easy to use and with attractive terms that enable them to reach new markets - for example those who do not have credit cards.

4) Ease of use and great service experience are essential. Merchants must know in real time, what's been sold, what they get paid and when. Customer care and refund policies etc. need to be of a high standard. For consumers to use the service a lot, the purchase experience needs to be simple, secure and convenient.

Operator concerns can be addressed

There will be those internally in operators who fear the cannibalisation of PSMS and voice revenues. However PSMS is already in decline and DOB presents a growth opportunity.

Others may challenge the lower margins in a DOB M-Commerce strategy than telcos' current core businesses. However the real strategy should be one that maximises the level of demand, builds significant revenue, and engages consumers who are more loyal.

Operators must get onto the front foot to address the OTT threat and DOB is central to that. We predict that the operators who will succeed in the long term in M-Commerce will be those who embrace a merchant focussed strategy with DOB.

SLA Mobile helps operators unlock and monetise network assets, and will be at Mobile World Congress MWC12 in Barcelona 27 Feb - 1 Mar 2012 Hall 2.1 Mobile Money Pavilion Stand 78.

telco2.net | 08-Feb-2012 07:19

Cloud 2.0: what is it, why it matters, and what's next

In the lead up to our free online event on 14th February where we look at Cloud strategies in the telco space (and our more detailed exploration of the opportunities in Silicon Valley and London), here's what we think 'Cloud' means, why it's important to telcos and Telco 2.0 in particular, and what we're going to be researching on it over the next few months.

Cloud: woolly words and nebulous concepts

The word 'Cloud' is becoming incredibly prevalent and increasingly meaningless.

One seemingly common element of its intended meaning is that whatever it is associated with is incredibly smart and sophisticated, regardless of what it actually is. Another common element of 'Cloudspeak' is to make anything sound ten times more complicated than it needs to be.

As a notable counter-example of getting it right, AT&T deserves credit for this remarkably clear and jargon free bit of cloud marketing copy. [NB To view the images in this article full-size, either click on the image or follow the associated links.]

Indeed, here at Telco 2.0, we think the sprawling fog of misdirection and ambiguity is one of the biggest barriers to greater customer acceptance and adoption of a lot of Cloud-y things that would probably be quite useful and get a lot more traction - if only anyone without a degree in Cloudspeak could understand them. So, in the interest of the greater good, here's our attempt to disperse some of the, er, clouds of confusion. (Sorry, we find it quite hard to resist 'Cloudpuns'.)

Where did the Cloud come from?

Derived from the cloud shapes decorating every whiteboard in every IT department around the globe, the cloud symbol originally meant 'you stick this wire into the Internet, then this wire (or perhaps a bolt of lightning) comes out here'.

Hence at first the cloud (note the small c at this stage) came to mean something akin to the Internet.

The next development was 'Virtualisation', which is the ability to make lots of computers work together as one, giving massive computing power (in a 'Virtual' computer made up of lots of linked computers) at a much lower cost than building one really big computer. Huge online players like Amazon and Google were among the pioneers of this approach.

These massive virtualised computers can now run lots of applications at the same time, and are ideally suited for sharing between more than one user as there's usually masses of available capacity. The costs are so low that, unlike 'hosting' where you have to reserve a specific bit of computer hardware that someone else owns, the computer's owners can afford to let other businesses use parts of their capacity on a low-cost, pay as you go basis.

Why might 'Cloud' matter to customers?

Over time, the huge increase of available, remote computing power, and the growing ubiquity of digital connectivity, has resulted in the evolution of two rather different Cloud concepts - this time with a capital C.

• The Enterprise Cloud provides a way to make a company's IT cheaper and more scalable. It makes it easier to do more - or less - of whatever computing is needed at any one time without permanently increasing IT costs or losing the functionality. It is provided by 'virtualised' computing, either across a company's own computers, or on a third party's computer and network, on a flexible / pay-as-you-go basis. "It's just managed IT services with a nicer interface and more flexible options to pay" in the soothing words of a Cisco Exec at a recent event we moderated. (NB This video of an Oracle presentation at our December 2010 Brainstorm Seven Clear Cloud Examples may help put this in context.)


• The Consumer Cloud is a safe place in the Internet in which consumers' digital 'stuff' gets kept, as popularised by Apple's iCloud service.

Why is Cloud important to telcos - and Telco 2.0?

1) Cloud services rely on communications to work, and need both internal networks to connect the many machines that make up a cloud computer, and external networks to connect these machines to the people and other, remote computers, that want to use it. As a minimum therefore, telcos have the opportunity to be an enabler of cloud computing systems using their communications networks - although an increasing number of specialised players such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), like Akamai, can also do this.

2) Telcos also have the opportunity to participate in providing Enterprise cloud computing services, such as storage and processing. They can do this by owning and operating cloud computing facilities, or by partnering with other parties possessing them. Enterprise Cloud Computing was a c.$25Bn market in 2011 and is forecast to grow by 25% yearly for the next two years at least, so it is a sizeable market.

To this end, for example, Verizon acquired Terremark, Qwest acquired Savvis and Equinix (speaking at the Silicon Valley Brainstorm , and Orange partnered with Cisco, VMWare virtualisation, and EMC2 storage (and spoke at the EMEA Brainstorm in May 2011).

3) From a Telco 2.0 point of view, Telcos can also participate in Consumer Cloud Services, (becoming known as the 'Personal Cloud') providing safe storage for both consumer identity data - see Telcos must vie for a slice of the $Multi-Billion PIE (Personal Information Economy)' and digital entertainment services. Some think that this is essential for telcos wishing to remain relevant to consumers in the post-PSTN voice era where data-centric services will be much more important to customers. Here's a video interview with AT&T on this.

4) The Enterprise Cloud, particularly a variant called Platform-as-a-Service (Paas), also potentially provides an important delivery strategy for Telco 2.0 '3rd Party enablers', (see below) where telcos provide information such as location data in a secure and appropriate form to other businesses to help improve the design and delivery of business processes. This theme was explored by Vodafone at the EMEA Brainstorm in November 2011.

Next Steps

At New Digital Economics Online, February 14th (apply here for this free, invitation only online event), we'll discuss more on market size and share forecasts, the key challenges for telcos in the cloud, and hear Ericsson's views on how they could be addressed.

At the Silicon Valley Brainstorm on 27-28 March, we'll hear from Bain, Cisco, Equinix, Ericsson and Parallels in the Digital Infrastructure 2.0 session, where we'll be exploring latest market forecasts, and how should telcos and other Cloud players: 1) address cloud services as a whole; 2) partner / enable / compete with each other; and 3) use Cloud Services as an enabler for Telco 2.0 business models. We'll be following up on this from an EMEA perspective at the London Brainstorm in June.

We'll also shortly publish further research in our Telco 2.0 Executive Briefing Service on the key changes ahead for telcos to unlock the cloud opportunity, including case studies from key telco practitioners and views from thought-leaders in the field.

Email us at contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003 for more.

telco2.net | 07-Feb-2012 06:17

Mobile World Congress 2012: seven good reasons to go

The Telco 2.0 team will be at the 2012 GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona in force - let us know if you'd like to meet. Here are the seven good reasons why we'll be there:

1. Networking. Apart from our own brainstorms, MWC is one of the few places where we can meet most of our key clients as well as new innovators. This year we've partnered with European Leaders on a 'Hot Topics' evening networking event on Monday 27th February, where our latest analysis on M-Commerce and OTT-player impacts on Voice and Messaging will stimulate two panel discussions comprising senior execs from Foursquare, Groupon, Vimplecom, Telefonica, Skype, Visa, Telenor and others. There will be over 250 invitation-only guests for the event.

2. Keynote speeches. In the last two years, the keynote speeches have been made by Google and Microsoft (see How Google's Chief Magician Stole the Show and Microsoft CEO fails to land all punches, but...). It is always fascinating to see which CEO pulls off the best performance and the biggest story, although Facebook looks like this year's major new face (see below). We'll also be interested to hear about the progress on NFC, what the US telcos say about LTE and all the other important 'Three Letter Acronyms'. We'll be analyzing and reporting back as usual.

3. Facing up to Facebook (and Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.). Bret Taylor of Facebook may temporarily take the spotlight as a keynote live speaker, but we're pretty sure that he'll be eclipsed within minutes by Telco 2.0's Chief Strategist, Chris Barraclough, who'll be interviewed by our friends over at Telecom TV in the post speech analysis. Chris was one of the authors of our extremely popular Strategy Report "Dealing with the 'Disruptors': Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype and Amazon", and also the article "Facebook: really 'worth' $30 billion max - $100 billion is hype". We're also be talking privately to a number of our clients on this topic, so please let us know if you'd like to meet us on this too.

4. Taking the industry's temperature. Something gives each Congress its own memorable identity. Three years ago, it was the arrival of the Chinese companies en masse. Two years ago, it was Google's charm offensive, and last year it was a combination of App frenzy and Microsoft's new Windows Mobile operating system. There's also a palpable vibe of the health and ambitions of the industry from the number and quality of the attendees.

5. Spreading the Telco 2.0 Word. We are running several workshops for clients, and in particular, sharing our new analysis on the Telco 2.0 Customer Experience Flywheel for sustainable industry growth. Let us know if you'd like to join us.

6. That 'Telco 2.0 Moment'. From being accidentally invited to and then ejected from the reception with the King of Spain, the delights of sharing accommodation with one's colleagues, and various surreal after-conference experiences in the bars of Las Ramblas, there's always something special about going away with Telco 2.0's analysts. It's certainly never ordinary...

7. Discounted tickets. We're delighted that, via our partnership with the GSMA, we can offer discounted tickets to the Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona. In today's 'austerity' climate, travel and conference budgets are increasingly under pressure, so if you haven't yet booked, do get in touch, and we hope to see you there.

For more on any of this, email us at contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003.

telco2.net | 30-Jan-2012 17:17

Telco 2.0 / European Leaders 'Hot Topics Mobile' @ MWC 27th Feb

Telco 2.0 and European Leaders are running the 'Hot Topics Mobile' senior panel and networking event at this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC) on the 27th February 2012 at the Hotel Omm, Barcelona.

At this invitation only event, 250 thought leaders of the mobile industry will talk to a select group of wireless influencers about what's on their mind, stimulated by the latest Telco 2.0 analysis.

• Debate topic #1 Mobile Communications - Is Facebook the Future? Panellists: Dennis Crowley - Foursquare, Co-Founder; Joachim Horn - Tele2 AB, Group CTIO; Rob Conway - VimpleCom (Former CEO GSMA); Andreas Bernstrom - Rebtel, CEO; Dave Williams - Stoke, CTO; Rick Osterloh - Skype, Vice President - Product Management & Design; Tom Christian Gotschalksen - Telenor, SVP Global Services.


• Debate topic #2 Mobile Commerce - Changing the way we shop. Pannellists: Ghassan Hasbani - STC, CEO - International; Neil Montefiore - StarHub, CEO; Bill Gajda - Visa Mobile, Global Head; Michael Shim - Groupon, VP Mobile Partnerships; Shaun Gregory - Telefonica Digital, Director of Advertising; Pieter Knook - Serial Board Advisor (ex Microsoft & Vodafone).

Drinks from 6pm, Panel starts at 7pm.

This is an invitation ONLY event: to express an interest please email contact@stlpartners.com or call us on +44 (0) 207 247 5003.

telco2.net | 30-Jan-2012 15:48

Joy for Apple, Samsung and Verizon FiOS; pain for AT&T, Google, Nokia and O2 - Telco 2.0 News Review

• Strategy & Finance: Smartphone Q4s: Apple, Samsung, Nokia, AT&T
• Broadband Connectivity: Verizon, AT&T, TWC Q4s: fibre and cable beating VDSL soundly
• Google: Wallet chief quits, troubled fibre project, privacy row, search criticised, chromebooks don't sell
• Customer Data: O2 tells everyone your phone number, Facebook IPO watch
• Technology Disruptions: Must-read - are we risking a repeat of the 1986 Internet congestion collapse?
• The Sixth Bullet: Why can't you have the MWC agenda in your calendar?

[Ed: This is the last week that 'Early Bird' rates will be available for the New Digital Economics Brainstorm in Silicon Valley on the 27th-28th of March, so book now if you can. After that, our spring EMEA event is in London on the 12th-13th of June. We'll also be at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of February, so let us know if you'd like to meet there - email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 for more on any of the above.]

After last week's bumper crop of results (Microsoft, Intel, IBM up; Google disappoints; RIM's two CEOs go), it was another results manic Monday. Apple's Q4 led the way, almost dripping with success.

"We are very happy to have generated over $17.5 billion in cash flow from operations during the December quarter," said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO.

Well, yes.

Not only did the iDevices go out very well, Macintosh sales were up 26% year on year, and all three product lines saw their biggest ever sales quarter. Margins were up. The company is sitting on $97bn in cash, and probably won't be fool enough to do anything like buying a telco. Horace charts their evolution and points out that the company has been growing earnings over 50% annually since 2009. The only product that isn't selling like hot cakes is the iPod, basically because it's directly in the path of the iPhones. (He also points out that Apple pricing is remarkably stable.)

Elsewhere in Q4s, Samsung missed taking the top spot for smartphone shipments by a hair, with 36.1 million gadgets to Apple's 37 million. However, they could still report sales up by 30% on the third quarter, and profits growth of 19% in the broader mobile sector, with average selling prices rising. Telecoms products accounted for half Samsung's profits in Q4 on about a third of its turnover.

Nokia, meanwhile, saw its smartphone market share fall from 29% to 12%, dragging the company into a loss for Q4.

Apparently, "well over 1 million" of the Lumia Winphones were sold in the quarter - a soft number many found suspicious. Tomi Ahonen points out that Symbian S^3 shifted some 4 million phones in its launch quarter. There's also another number lurking in the Nokia disclosure - how many N9s were sold, something the new regime is not particularly keen to emphasise. Analysts' efforts to quantify them produced a substantial range of estimates, but they converge on "well over 1 million". To put it another way, the N9 may have outsold the Lumias.

And the results would be worse if it wasn't for $250 million from Microsoft. Andrew Orlowski, usually a Microkia fan, is getting a bad feeling about this.

Elsewhere, AT&T was in the red in Q4, largely due to the T-Mobile break fee, various accounting adjustments, and the cost in handset subsidy of selling 7.6 million iPhones out of 8.2 million smartphones.

HTC has decided to change from a (Nokia- or Samsung-like) product range strategy to an (Apple-like) hero product strategy.

Unsurprisingly, given that it's much cheaper, the Kindle Fire is the best-selling Android tablet. HP is releasing WebOS into open source, while Jon Rubenstein quits HP. Meet AT&T's product managers - you'll be pleased to know that the reason they won't let you eliminate all the rubbish apps they put on your phone is that they're not on the Android Market, so you might not be able to get them back.

More results: Verizon reported that it made a net gain of 98,000 broadband subs in Q4, but the breakdown is substantially more informative. Its FiOS FTTH service gained 201,000 new subscribers, while DSL lost 103,000 - showing the public voting with its feet for fibre or cable rather than another round of copper upgrades. And the FiOS Digital Voice VoIP product is on fire - not in a Stephen Elop sense, though, with 424,000 new subscribers in Q4. All of which is summarised by this week's Chart of the Week.

AT&T saw a similar pattern, with customers churning off DSL. Significantly, though, they aren't simply transitioning to AT&T's VDSL-based FTTC service - about 50,000, just under 10%, of the churners leaked from AT&T and probably moved to the cable world, where Time Warner saw 130,000 Q4 net adds.

Meanwhile, BT asked for residential buildings to volunteer for a trial of their FTTH product. Perhaps, maybe, one day...meanwhile, the Israeli electricity grid is looking at building a national dark fibre network like the Australian NBN.

Ericsson, for their part, buys a WLAN specialist, BelAir Networks - note the special dual mode radio head designed to hang off a metro cable network.

In UK mobile, T-Mobile brought back unlimited tariffs, at a price. £41 a month buys you a BlackBerry 9900 and all the Internet, texts, and calls you can contrive to use, and if you go up to £61 you get an iPhone 4S. T-Mobile UK has form for this - back in the mid-2000s they were the first British operator to provide a flat-rate open Internet tariff, and if you paid the full £59/month whack you could even run your own VoIP from your Nokia E61's built in SIP client to that German hosted Asterisk website...

A fascinating story: so a market stallholder imported 400,000 cable set-top boxes that let you watch Virgin Media's whole pay-TV lineup without paying a penny. Killer detail: Virgin paid the police for the costs of investigating him. Didn't know you could do that!

Telco 2.0's Keith McMahon notes that Sky's Sky Anytime Internet-TV service is now available as a pure OTT service, and theorises that they're hoping to induce churn to Sky Broadband. On the other hand, it might well work better on Virgin's cable broadband network.

How can Amazon beat Netflix? Probably not yet by taking lessons from the studios - Dan Rayburn is scathing about Paramount's UltraViolet-powered streaming site.

After last week's Google results, there's still a lot of news coming out of Mountain View. Google is very keen to talk about Chromebooks in schools, but 27,000 of them doesn't sound like a lot in the light of the Napoleonic vision of browser-based cloud computing and hardware as a service. There's some more here.

The head of Google Wallet resigned this week, as the initiative struggles for relevance, being only available on one phone, on Sprint.

Meanwhile, Google Fibre in Kansas City is bogged down in something about as telco-traditional as you can get - an arcane regulatory dispute about access to passive infrastructure. Google has a promise from the city government that it can run fibre on the city's electricity poles for free, so long as it uses the section of the pole reserved for electricity. Telco and cable lines have their own sector. Not only do the cable operators object, but it turns out that installing the fibre next to the live power lines is tricky, and requires the services of electricians rather than cable installers. Who command much higher wages. So the Google would like to run the fibre in the slot for telecoms instead, but wants to keep the freebie. And with that, it's off to the courthouse.

Benoit Felten blogs on a similar issue in India.

Elsewhere, Dan Rayburn reports that Sony has cancelled its Google TV product.

Google announced a new privacy policy this week which lets them integrate data on individuals between different services. This sort of de-anonymisation and data fusion tends to be the privacy third rail (which is exactly what you'd expect if you'd read this paper) and there's a great big row going on. Google's slightly hurt response is here. The main purpose of this is to support the integration of Google + into Google Search, which is a controversial issue in itself.

telco2.net | 30-Jan-2012 13:44

'Under-The-Floor' (UTF) Players: threat or opportunity?

Our latest research examines 'Under-The-Floor' Players - the strategic threats and opportunities presented by wholesale providers, outsourcers and government-run broadband networks.

The telecoms industry often puts so-called OTT (over-the-top) players like Google and Facebook at the forefront of its concerns, as they pose new competition for services and applications. But what about encroachment of companies "underneath" the telcos, displacing them from their core asset, the network?

To read an extract from the report, please see our research portal here.

telco2.net | 19-Jan-2012 15:14

Up to a 1/3 decline feared in Voice and Messaging revenues in 3 years

This chart highlights the serious concerns we're now seeing for messaging and voice revenues across the telco industry.

The c.300+ Telco 2.0 community members we asked in late 2011 across our EMEA and APAC Brainstorms predicted remarkably similar declines, which were also in keeping with our findings in the 'Dealing with the Disruptors' report.

While it's difficult to take these views as a definitive absolute guide to the ultimate revenue impact, many telcos worldwide are starting to see real impacts from so-called 'Over-The-Top' (OTT) services, which were unambiguously identified by delegates as the main cause of these predicted drops. One senior participant commented that some telco finance folk would be shocked to see these views so widely held in the industry, although others said that such scenarios were already being considered.

As can be seen above, delegates from our APAC brainstorm feared more for mobile voice revenues than their EMEA counterparts, who were more concerned about messaging revenues. This is in part because a higher proportion of APAC voice revenues are pre-paid and not in-bundle, and the lower smartphone penetrations in the more prevalent emerging markets in APAC compared to EMEA (more on the brainstorms here).

This leads us on to two developments for 2012: we'll be looking in-depth again at strategies for optimising voice and messaging in 2012 (more on our research agenda here); and members of the Telco 2.0 subscription service can now access slides, charts and reports from the two most recent brainstorms here.

Email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 to find out more about our research or the next brainstorms.

telco2.net | 13-Jan-2012 17:21

The BlackBerry that wasn't; is it industrial design or service design?

A BlackBerry design concept from 2009 has been leaked and divides opinion at Telco 2.0.

Perhaps the really interesting question is whether the state-of-2009 BlackBerry OS, hardware, and service experience would have benefited that much from more exciting industrial design. After all, a very big chunk of the iPhone's appeal has been concentrated in the software and in the supporting cast of iTunes features and services.

While other vendors (naming no names) came up with some very complex streaming models, Apple concentrated on keeping your content in sync between different devices and making sure you could get it from any of them to any playback device that might be hanging around. Not many users know what Multicast-DNS Service Discovery is, and a lot of network engineers hate it for various reasons, but they do like having all their stuff on their Mac on their iPhone.

And it's not as if the Bold 9900 isn't a pretty handsome chunk of shiny. Is RIM's real problem service design rather than industrial design?

telco2.net | 12-Jan-2012 18:27

Free Mobile: Very Telco 2.0 Indeed

The web is agog about the launch of Free.fr's mobile network, long awaited. Om Malik interviews CEO Xavier Niel, and it's quite impressive how much Telco 2.0 comes up.

"Since it is our own set-top box, we can innovate around it," he says. "In the U.S., they buy their set-top boxes from other providers." That's a mistake and lost opportunity, Niel says and proceeds to outline how pivotal these set-top boxes are for his company and its future.

They're referring to the Freebox Revolution devices Free pushed out last year. We've long been arguing the importance of better CPE, and pointing to Free as a case study of how to do it (they engineer them in house, based on open-source software).

For example, Free.fr used the set-top box for automatically sharing a portion of one's broadband connection via Wi-Fi with other Free.fr customers. Over five million set-top boxes means Free.fr has a free Wi-Fi cloud enveloping major cities such as Paris. Even when away from home, you can easily get broadband instead of resorting to an expensive 3G network.

This Free.Fr free Wi-Fi network is going to play a pivotal role in the soon-to-be-launched service, which will be using 42 Mbps HSPA+ technology. The company has built a network of 15,000 macrocells, but those 5 million "nano cells" are going to be the key difference maker, Niel points out.

Free.fr's newer set-top boxes will have built-in femtocells. On top of that, Free is going to be beefing up its macrocells with high-capacity fiber connections being fed by Iliad's dark fiber. And when the time comes, he is going to embrace LTE and include that in his network as well. "We will go to wide area network (3G and 2.5G) when we are not in Wi-Fi coverage," he tells me.

WLAN offload, multiple radio networks, and small cells? Telco 2.0 has been covering this ever since we first encountered FON.

He believes telecoms should charge for access and make money by selling the ID and payment services, not voice and SMS. It's one of the reasons he loves Square, Jack Dorsey's payment company, where he is an angel investor. "It is crazy to pay for voice by the minute as voice is so cheap," he says. Even SMS texting is a lot of money and he finds that crazy. "We are trying to be the cheapest mobile service in France," he adds. Don't be surprised to see Google Voice-type services built into the service itself.

ID, personal data, and mobile payments as services to upstream customers? And better voice and messaging? You heard it here first.

The really big question is whether the cost savings from providing so much connectivity via the Freeboxes will be enough for Free to keep its promises on price. Then we'll see whether there really is more to the disruption than just another round of commoditisation. And if so, Free will again be a world example of Telco 2.0 best practice.

telco2.net | 11-Jan-2012 17:47

Smart TV@CES, Netflix, Samsung's Q4 No.s and Apple's odd forecasts - Telco 2.0 News Review

• Technology Disruptions: CES - another push for smart TV, more DISH/VZW rumours
• Online Video: UK Netflix is go for launch, pricing above Lovefilm's
• Smartphone Roundup: Apple loves Flash storage, Samsung Q4 - impressive or just soft numbers?
• Strategy & Finance: Vodafone announces a new partnership strategy, Free.fr mobile launch
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Cisco quietly exits consumer telepresence

[Ed: 'Early Bird' rates are available for the New Digital Economics Brainstorms in Silicon Valley on the 27th-28th of March, and then in London on the 12th-13th of June for our spring EMEA event. Email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 to join us.]

It's CES week, and expectations are high because early sales numbers for Christmas are depressing. Overall consumer electronics sales, according to NPD, were down 5.9% year on year. The bright spots were "streaming devices" (like Roku and friends), home cinema kit, and flat-panel TVs, while everything else suffered and devices whose functions are integrated in the iPhone suffered disproportionately.

TV innovation was a big theme this week. Lenovo showed a 55 inch TV running Android 4.0 on a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU. (A dual-core TV?) It also has a built-in 5 megapixel camera to support face recognition. There are those of us who remember stories about East German TV sets that supposedly contained a CCTV camera so the local Party representative could check you were watching the TV you were supposed to be watching...

DISH, the US satellite TV station that's been featuring in the Review for a while now, is going to announce something major at CES today. AllThingsD suggests that they are planning a new DVR/STB with seriously huge storage, and also an "Internet service that will be marketed to 8 million customers, most of whom can't get fiber or cable broadband". That sounds a lot like the rumoured Verizon Wireless LTE collaboration to us. (See Reviews 78 and 87.)

In content news, Netflix launched in the UK, at a price point slightly above Lovefilm's, implying that they are hoping that their strength in design and user experience will prevail.

Facebook users can look forward to ads in their news feed this year. Chinese authors sue Apple. And here's some mobile content for you: a SIM preloaded with Taliban ringtones and video propaganda, so you can swap it in before making a journey where you might encounter their checkpoints.

Another crack at mobile TV. And in this week's Chart of the Week, Horace Dediu tries to understand Hollywood finances. The really baffling data point, to our minds, is not so much that Spider-Man 2 spent more money on the script than Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines but that either of them spent any money at all on the script...

Telco 2.0's Shoreditch neighbour Zeebox, the social-TV companion start-up launched by former YouView CTO Anthony Rose, has some major news this week - BSkyB is its newest investor, taking a £15m stake in the company, and will build Zeebox's social networking functionality into it's popular apps.

Another UK start-up, Picochip, which makes base station systems-on-a-chip for small cells, has been acquired by Californian semiconductor firm Mindspeed.

And NTT DoCoMo, NEC, Fujitsu, Panasonic, and Samsung have announced a joint venture to develop new baseband chips as an alternative to Qualcomm products.

In Q4 2011, Apple bought some 23% of the world's supply of NAND Flash memory chips. When they used some of that to put an extra 16GB of storage into an iPhone, they were able to sell it for precisely $100 more. The cost of the additional storage? $10.72. Nice work if you can get it. In fact, it's so nice that Apple derives more profit from reselling extra NAND than the entire semiconductor industry does making it.

So you might wonder why they just bought a NAND company. The answer is that it's yet more Apple vertical integration. Buying PA Semiconductor gave them the capability to design their own processors (within the ARM framework, of course), buying Anobis gives them the ability to design their own storage chips as they standardise on Flash across the whole product line.

Samsung, meanwhile, reaped the rewards of the smartphone boom, with its best ever quarterly results, up 73% year on year at $4.5bn in profits after they managed to increase their shipments of smartphones by 20%. Or perhaps they didn't - The Guardian points out that these aren't final results and Samsung doesn't actually break out smartphones in its segment analysis, so you have to trust Strategy Analytics' modelling. Did I get the mark, darling?

On the other hand, although HTC had already warned on profits, its numbers beat the spread in the wrong way, with its Q4s down 26%. It looks like the industry's great commoditiser has commoditised itself. Meanwhile, Nokia has denied, again, selling its smartphone division to Microsoft. Microsoft, for its part, is offering a cash bonus to retail workers who sell Windows Phones - $15 a phone. They've also stopped publishing details of updates.

Speaking of commoditisation, Horace Dediu reverse-engineers some Apple forecasts and concludes that they only make sense on the assumption that Apple gets commoditised in the near future. Regression to the mean is one of those things that works...until it doesn't. Meanwhile, here are details of China Unicom's iPhone 4S pricing.

Motorola Mobility warned that its Q4s were looking disappointing, naming a sales figure of $3.4bn and 10.5 million units (or should that be 10.5 megaphones?).

And Newbury-based radioplanning experts Arieso have some data on user behaviour and smartphones. Apple iPhone 4S users pull twice as much data as iPhone 4 users. But the really interesting finding is that people with HTC Android phones uplink more data than anyone else - notably the Desire S. Which is surprising, as the camera isn't obviously better than the iPhone's. And the Google Nexus One is the noisiest of them all, generating 2.2 times as many data calls on the network as an iPhone 3G.

Vodafone announced a new wave of partnership agreements with local MNOs, as a substitute for expensive acquisitions. Even if Vodafone's given up on M&A, that doesn't mean everyone else has though - Goldman Sachs analysts were suggesting a VF-VZ deal again, and this blog post points out why it's silly. Vodafone would like to own 100% of Verizon Wireless. Verizon would like to own Verizon Wireless as well. Given those two, mutually incompatible preferences and roughly equal bargaining power, the rational solution is to co-operate, as both 55% and 45% are substantially greater than zero.

Elsewhere in North American mobility, Sprint has refused to put any more money into LightSquared until the wholesale-only operator resolves its dispute with the FCC over whether its network can function without breaking GPS. And T-Mobile USA's towers may be up for sale.

Rudolf van der Berg's twitter feed says what a lot of people are thinking - Free.fr's mobile network launches tomorrow, and if they are as disruptive as usual, it's going to be interesting.

Telefonica has picked a building for its new digital unit, off Regent Street.

Ben Verwaayen says that Alcatel-Lucent isn't planning job cuts like the ones at NSN, and that they may try to bring some of the pile of cash at Alcatel Shanghai Bell home if they can find a way of doing so under Chinese banking rules. Aussie operators crank up the lobbying war ahead of decisions on the 800MHz band.

Meet the winner from US inter-carrier reform, Neutral Tandem, a bit like an IX for voice interconnection.

And RevK discovers something weird in BT Wholesale.

Cisco has quietly shut down its Umi consumer telepresence line, Business Insider reports. After all, Skype is free.

Phil Wolff notes that Skype is shutting down GroupMe's conference calling features, although any user who made a conference call in the last month gets grandfathered. That suggests that the problem is that nobody used it, and Skype has no reason to maintain two voice conferencing systems.

Phil's wishlist for 2012 is here. Note that, by our count, 8 out of 15 wishes involve APIs or developers. His (semiserious) predictions are here. Meanwhile, Dan York argues that Skype is now boring.

What happens when an Amazon Availability Zone fills up? EC2 Reserved Instance customers are served first, it turns out. Meanwhile, AWS adds much more cloud-networking capability to EC2 and Virtual Private Cloud via Elastic Network Interfaces.

Acer clones iCloud. Eliminating e-mail. Jack Ma's Alibaba.com hires top Washington lobbyists to help them buy Yahoo! BBM messages decrypted, mafia disappointed.

A series of posts on complex image transforms in HTML5. Patchday for HP printers. Mayor Bloomberg learns to code. Another slow-TCP DOS attack.

And it's not the mobile phones killing bees, it's the brain parasite flies turning them into zombies.

telco2.net | 09-Jan-2012 12:17

Asia & Middle East: 'can do' Telco 2.0 Strategies

In 2011 we've really been struck by the 'can do' attitude of companies in the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions towards Telco 2.0 strategies, and their desire to leapfrog legacy (Western) business models and technologies. This was highlighted at the New Digital Economics & CSG APAC Executive Brainstorm in Singapore, as were increasing similarities between APAC region business model challenges with those in Europe and America. See furher analysis here.

telco2.net | 15-Dec-2011 18:35

President Bell Labs: what's after smartphones?

In this guest post, Jeong Kim, President Bell Labs, looks into the future and discusses the impact of video, sensors, the need for energy efficiency, and cloud services, and asks what form personal communications will take after smartphones. His answer may surprise you.

One hundred years ago, a telephone was a box on a wall. Now it's a wallet-sized device that captures video, surfs the web, and manages hundreds of applications. Tomorrow you may not always need your own device: the environment around you will offer those personalized capabilities - and more.

Peering into the unknown

At Bell Labs, we research the technologies that will drive the next great innovations. This involves a fair bit of trying to envision the future. Our expertise in key technical areas provides a good guide, but of course, there are still many categories of unknowns.

One such category is known unknowns: knowing, for example, that the current explosion in the use of video on the Internet is straining the capacity of networks, but perhaps not yet knowing which specific technology will provide the best solution. Then there are the unknown unknowns - unknown needs that will be met by unknown technologies. These are among the many reasons why we persistently interact with customers and nourish our research capacity across multiple disciplines of science.

Even so, predicting the future is by no means a sure bet. Five years ago, who would have thought that so many people around the globe would spend so much time on social networks like MySpace and Facebook? And it's certainly possible that in the next five years, other similarly unanticipated surprises will arise. Nevertheless, we can still identify several key trends likely to shape that future.

Video: a driving force for the networks

Video-based content - streamed to your desktop, your laptop, your smartphone, wherever - will be an even more fundamental component of how we communicate in 2015. I realized how important video had become last year when I asked my daughter which website she visited the most. Her response: "Youtube." It's where she does her learning - whether how to play the guitar or speak Spanish. I had always thought of Youtube as a substitute for TV; I never considered its other possible uses. It can be used to share ideas, to find out how to perform a task, or where students can watch lectures they might have missed.

The video boom is not just about Youtube - like sites. Video conferencing applications like Skype have become increasingly popular and part of our everyday interactions. I believe communications will migrate over the next five years to far more 'immersive' experiences that make it seem as if we are all sharing the same physical place even while being continents apart.

Many, many sensors - everywhere

Most of us connect over a network of networks - the most common being the Internet. Usually we go looking for information and these networks take us to it. But an alternative pattern is emerging, one in which a network of sensors continuously gathers information and, if relevant, pushes it out to us. What sort of sensors? Some will detect motion or sounds; others temperature or chemicals. They might employ radio-frequency ID (rFID) devices or video technologies. When certain conditions occur, these sensor networks will trigger an alert over the Internet to other machines or people.

We'll see these networks in our homes, along our roads, in our cars, and on our very person. Sometime after 2015, I can imagine sensors so small they reside in our bloodstream and form a self-organizing network that can detect abnormal events, sending messages to our doctor's office or to another device in our body authorized to take corrective action. This is the 'somatic network', a network that operates in the body. Sound far-fetched? There are already numerous implanted sensors in the market for detecting the movements of replacement joints, or measuring electrical pulses of the heart.

The value of the cloud

For some, 'cloud computing' is just the latest name for services in which you access a remote computer instead of processing on your own computer. that's not quite right. The cloud is like taking all of the parts of a super computer, scattering them to the wind and still using it as if it was a single asset right next to you. All of the complex synchronizations among those parts are retained in spite of being physically dispersed.

The beauty of this is that you're no longer confined to the capabilities of your one machine, or cluster of machines as is the case in a data center. So when you need more computing power, or more storage, instead of buying expensive hardware and plunking it in the corner, you just reach out to more pieces in the cloud for only as long as you need them. The capabilities of the cloud allow those pieces to be fully integrated and synchronized with your own resources.

Companies that provide communication services are beginning to use cloud architectures in their own networks. By 2015, many of those service providers will likely of fer highly reliable cloud resources to consumers.

Energy efficiency will be vital

Throughout the information technology landscape, there is a new menace stalking computers and data centers. I'm not referring to viruses or malware, but rather the costs of the power to run ever-faster and more powerful computers. Dollars or euros are only part of those costs. The larger concerns are the associated heat that can literally melt processors and the unsustainable level of carbon emissions from the generation of that power.

As they serve growing numbers of mobile users, video consumers and data centers, these costs have risen to levels where many service providers are now considering radical changes in their network infrastructures. This is one of the reasons for the strong interest in Alcatel -Lucent 's recently announced lightradio™, which doubles network capacity while halving energy consumption. Programs such as the Greentouch ™ initiative, whose goal is to improve networks' energy efficiency by a factor of 1,000 will also play a major role in achieving a sustainable future.

After 2015: communicating without a personal device?

Let me conclude with a slightly controversial opinion. I can envision a scenario where people no longer fully depend on their own smartphones or other personal computing devices. Rather, as they make themselves known via sensor networks, they interact with connected information displays and other appliances located throughout their environment - no matter where they find themselves. Individuals have access to all of the same capabilities (or "apps") and personal settings they would at home or in the office.

Sessions are transferred from device to device, so that the last page of an e-book you were reading at home is the first page that appears on a device at the hotel you're visiting the next day. It's a compelling vision in which we can enjoy all of these capabilities without being limited by one's personal device.

telco2.net | 14-Dec-2011 13:44

Personal Data 2.0: Industry fails Carrier IQ test

Personal Data 2.0: Industry fails Carrier IQ test is our new analyis on the debacle involving Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile US over Carrier IQ's phone monitoring software. It highlights the pitfalls and opportunities of recording user behaviour, controlling mobile broadband networks and working with personal data - a key enabler of the new digital economy and new telco business models, and is on our research portal now.

telco2.net | 08-Dec-2011 12:52

LTE: Less Transforming than Expected

LTE: Less Transforming than Expected - an analysis of the status of LTE, the next generation of wireless network technology, including a round-up of early operator trials, and views on prospects for key vendors by Telco 2.0 partners Arete Research, is on our research site now.

telco2.net | 08-Dec-2011 12:40

Telecoms and the Eurozone Economic Crisis: a perfect storm?

New analysis: what are the possible impacts on telecoms of further economic troubles in the Eurozone? Will it be recessionary business as usual or something much nastier? And how will it impact 'Telco 2.0' Strategies? See 'Telecoms and the Eurozone Economic Crisis: a perfect storm?' on our research portal.

telco2.net | 01-Dec-2011 09:48

Your Text is on Fire: OTT's to burn 40% SMS revenue by 2015

New analysis on our research portal 'Your Text is on Fire: OTT's to burn 40% SMS revenue by 2015' says that in four years' time, Telco SMS revenue will decline on average by around 40% across Europe and the Middle East according to the senior execs at this month's Telco 2.0 brainstorm in London. The main cause is competitive pressure from 'OTT' alternatives (Facebook, Skype, Google, BBM, etc). Mobile voice isn't that far behind, with a 20% decline foreseen. What can be done and what is the role of RCS-e? More here.

telco2.net | 25-Nov-2011 18:09

STL Partners / Telco 2.0 is recruiting an Experienced Research Associate / Junior Consultant

Jobtitle: Experienced Research Associate / Junior Consultant
Location: Primarily office based in London EC2, some travel and off-site work.
Package: £36-40k basic + bonus

STL Partners has been at the forefront of the field of business model innovation and analysis in telecoms, media and technology (TMT) since 2006. In particular, the Telco 2.0 Initiative has focused on the opportunities for growth through new telecoms business models.

STL Partners offers TMT companies research, consulting and brainstorming strategy events to help them identify and realise growth opportunities.

We are growing fast and undertaking a growing volume of research and consulting assignments where we need to expand our skills base and capabilities. These include:

1. Bespoke research projects. e.g. (www.tellabs.com/info/smart/stl_value-of-smart-pipes.pdf)
2. Strategy projects. e.g. identifying the threats and opportunities posed by over-the-top services to telecoms operators
3. Marketing and proposition projects. e.g. identifying and developing major breakthrough propositions for operators seeking to achieve future sustainable growth.

As a result, we are seeking an experienced consultant / research analyst to work with us. As a minimum we are seeking:

• a very strong academic background from a leading university
• 1-3 years in strategy consulting or research firm working for a blue-chip player (not necessarily in telecoms but this would preferable)
• highly analytical - comfortable thinking through problems and good at structuring answers

To apply by email to this position, please send your CV and covering letter to the following link: jobs@stlpartners.com , quoting reference number: TCRA1
telco2.net | 21-Nov-2011 15:25

Skype-Facebook integration, Mobile data surge challenged, and UK fibre furore - Telco 2.0 News Review

• Strategy & Finance: UK indie fibre investors "certifiable" - Rothschilds
• Broadband Connectivity: Mobile data overcapacity or 20x traffic surge?
• Voice 2.0: Full Skype-Facebook integration launches
• Cloud Computing: Microsoft ditches Dryad, embraces open-source Hadoop
• Regulation: Police raids send Indian MNO shares plummeting

[Ed. Two bits of news from us - we're off to the fully booked APAC Executive Brainstorm in Singapore next week, and our strategy report on the Disruptors went down well at the EMEA Brainstorm, about which there will be more published in coming weeks.]

Any investors in UK fibre would be "certifiable", says the head of NM Rothschild's telecoms investment desk, and calls for OFCOM to insist on wholesale access to Virgin Media's cable network. Meanwhile, Computer Weekly compares Andorra Telecom's FTTH to BT's DSL service, which has to be the most apples-to-oranges comparison in a while. Benoit Felten is still pressing for muni-fibre. Marco Forzati, via the 3G & 4G Wireless Blog, has attempted to quantify the economic benefits of FTTH in Sweden. As usual, the key variable is take-up in the MDUs the fibre passes. That also gives us an undisputed winner for this week's Chart of the Week:

She's a beauty!

Dean Bubley argues that O2 UK's results mean that the surge in mobile data usage has passed. In comments, alternative explanations such as changes in O2's data allowances and metrics are suggested and his maths is challenged. The 3G & 4G Wireless Blog puts the official line with presentations from Qualcomm and UMTS Forum showing the traditional traffic/revenue "scissors chart". And even if the UK might see mobile data overcapacity, it doesn't mean everywhere will.

O2, meanwhile, is firing up a 1,000 user LTE trial in London, the first LTE with live users in the UK. OFCOM, for its part, is angry about "unlimited" data plans that are actually limited and come with painful overage charges.

It looks like Steve Jobs had a dose of the metro-WiFi enthusiasm so common in the early 2000s, and discussed the idea of building a huge Apple WLAN and perhaps not even giving the iPhone a cellular radio with John Stanton, veteran mobile industry exec and pal of Craig McCaw. Fortunately for Apple, he seems to have cooled Jobs off on the deal.

However, here's a cunning play with WLAN - we've occasionally mentioned that some of the technology changes in VoLTE make it easier to rig up a hybrid MVNO/WLAN operator, using WLAN where available and the wholesale provider's cellular network where it can't be avoided. Republic Wireless claims it can give you unlimited mobile service for $19/month, thanks to Devicespace's fancy WLAN manager app that seeks out hotspots and automatically navigates the splash pages. They estimate 60% of the traffic will get offloaded.

And Renesys reports on Lebanese ISPs' escape from satellite connectivity after a new Telecom Italia Seabone fibre landed in town.

It's here - you can now make Skype video calls between Facebook profiles from within Facebook. If that doesn't quite make sense, put it like this - Skype is providing a whitelabel version of itself to Facebook, so they can have video calls between Facebook users. You do have to import your Facebook contacts into Skype in order to make calls, though. But you don't as far as we know need to install Skype to receive them, so some version of Skype is running in the browser, although whether it's a Skype node or a thin client using SIP or something else talking to an otherwise unannounced Skype API isn't clear. All clear so far?

Dan York is delighted to see that the new features have arrived simultaneously on Windows and Mac OS X. Another new Voice 2.0 startup. Tropo forks OpenVBX for additional openosity. Bidding for calls, like clicks on Google AdWords, with Freespee. Push notifications for HTML5, in the cloud.

Up in the cloud, Microsoft announced this week that it was going to halt development of LINQ to Dryad, their big-data cloud product, in favour of the open-source Hadoop platform, itself a community clone of Google's MapReduce that eventually outgrew the original. MS plans to port Hadoop to the Windows Azure cloud and also integrate it with their SQL Server database.

Here's an interview with the founder of VMWare's CloudFoundry. Via High Scalability, is cloud portability really a good thing? How Google+ works and why there isn't a public API yet (hint: complicated). Using gossip protocols to monitor the cloud.

Elsewhere in the enterprise, Warren Buffett starts tech investing, by buying a boatload of IBM shares.

China Mobile passed 638 million subscribers, with 3G penetration rising fast (45 million, up by 2.1 million, compared to total net-adds of 5 million). Rival China Telecom, however, reached 120 million subscribers but has a much bigger share of 3G users - 30 million.

There was a dramatic sell-off in Bharti Airtel shares today after Indian police raided the company, investigating alleged corruption around the award of GSM licences back in 2002. The police also visited Vodafone India and the former top civil servant at the Department of Telecoms.

Clearwire is threatening to miss a $237 million debt repayment on the 1st of December. The troubled WiMAX operator has total cash on hand of $698 million, so they could strictly speaking pay the bill, but this would force them to stall further deployments. Part-owner Sprint recently raised $4bn from the money market, but they're blowing hot and cold about investing any of it in Clearwire. Presumably, Clearwire management is threatening to go bust in the hope of forcing Sprint to fork out or lose their equity in the operation.

Telkom South Africa's net profits are down 36%, but Telecom Italia expects to outperform the market.

Occupy Flash is trying to get people to uninstall Adobe Flash from their PCs. Apparently there's also an Occupy HTML trying to resist this, but when did you last have to kill the "HTML plugin" because it went ape and tied up 120% CPU?

Ars Technica has a typically chewy report on the landscape of Web video post-Flash. Interesting fact: Netflix is very keen indeed to move to HTML5 and is contributing to the standards group for adaptive streaming in HTTP video.

Google, meanwhile, wants you to share music into Google +.

Hackers succeeded in reverse-engineering Siri's network protocol and connecting to the server with a homebrew client, although it's dependent on spoofing an iPhone's unique identifier and you bet Apple will notice multiple simultaneous connections from the same device ID. Full details are here, at the horse's mouth. Ars Technica reviews the iPhone 4S as a camera, compared to other cameras. Smartphones are dancing on portable gaming devices' graves.

Is it good news for Microsoft and Nokia that app developers' interest in Windows Phone 7 is unrepresentatively high, compared to Android which after all has 52% of app sales? See the Nokia Lumia 800 being built. Samsung and Android move the smartphone market, and Apple is scoring off RIM in the enterprise.

NFC SIMs, perhaps. Barnes & Noble gets their tablet out one day ahead of Kindle Fire. KDDI sues Mobage. HOWTO get a DVD out of an Apple DVD drive if it won't eject. An idea that's too long for Twitter, too short for Google +, and too smart for Facebook. Chinese censors do something weird to SSL. 30 years of CB radio!

telco2.net | 21-Nov-2011 12:02

Vodafone, Telenor, BT and Colt - whipping up a storm on Cloud 2.0...

Here's a detailed outline of what top execs from Vodafone, BT, Telenor and Colt will be sharing about their strategic approaches to Cloud services at the Cloud 2.0 session at next week's EMEA Brainstorm in London. If telcos' cloud strategies matter to you, you really should join us there - register here, or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003.

From Vodafone, Bob Brace, Head of Unified Communications and Cloud Services, will talk about live customer experiences of One Net, Vodafone's cloud based telephony service that provides fixed-mobile convergence and integration with Microsoft Office 365. He's also got some interesting things to say about telcos' opportunities with Platform as a Service (Paas) and will touch on the issues of user privacy.

From BT, Stuart Hill, VP London Olympics 2012 Programme, will talk about how a cloud-based IP Telephony service is a key component in BT's delivery of the communications infrastructure for the 2012 Olympic games in London.

Also from BT, Peter Roe, Global Banking and Financial Markets, will be talking about the cloud needs of the global Financial Services sector, and the niche that exists for some telcos to serve these needs. Peter will describe how BT's strategy is to combine available high quality infrastructure assets with partnerships with ISVs, customers and other innovators to deliver a hybrid of end-to-end cloud services and a 3rd party platform.

From Telenor, Dr Frank Elter, Director of Product & Business Development, will give a top-line insight into Telenor's approach to enterprise cloud services and will give concrete examples on new services and role in the eco system. Further, based on an ongoing research project with University of Oslo and the LSE, Dr. Elter will share some research findings that gives a new view on where to look for Cloud services and Telcos role in Cloud services.

From Colt Technology Services, Mirko Voltolini, Director Network Design and Architecture, will describe Colt's overall re-positioning as a technology service provider and its approach to cloud services.

Plus Telco 2.0's Research Director Andrew Collinson will give an introduction and overview of findings from our recent research report 'Cloud 2.0: don't blow it telcos', and there will be our usual high-octane mix of 'Mindshare' interactivity and voting and debate with the panel of speakers.

You can find more on the Cloud 2.0 event agenda here, register here, or call +44 (0) 207 247 5003.

telco2.net | 02-Nov-2011 15:00

Customer Experience 2.0: learn from Apple - simplify

One of Apple's great strengths is the simplicity and elegance of its product design, delivering an outstanding customer experience born from on an extraordinarily effective and single-minded product management ethos. We'll be discussing optimising the customer experience at the EMEA brainstorm in London next week, and also previewing findings on Apple from our 'Dealing with the Disruptors' report.

In this guest post, Ernest Margitta, VP Marketing of Telco 2.0 partners Tribold argues that simplifying and explicitly managing products in a single enterprise product catalogue, telcos/CSPs can deliver enormous benefits including lower costs, greater commercial and operational agility, and increased customer satisfaction.

Introduction

Investments aimed at improving the customer experience will be undermined if CSPs do not also invest in better product management, since the product experience is such an integral part of the customer experience. Likewise enhancing product management also complements investments made in business intelligence and analytics, as it supports a 360° view of products, enabling CSPs to monitor and optimise their performance.

The importance of the product to a successful commercial strategy, and to the customer experience, means that CSPs now urgently need to consider how they manage their products so as not to risk undermining both their strategic goals and investments... (contd.)

The need to deliver a good customer experience

The Communication Service Provider (CSP) industry is currently awash with talk about the importance of optimising the customer experience. The customer experience is considered to be a key area of differentiation, and delivering a good customer experience as essential for those CSPs who wish to retain existing customers and attract new ones from rivals.

However, in order to truly optimise the customer experience, there is a vital dependency on optimising the product experience. The product experience is what underpins a satisfying customer experience: the products are what drive a customer to engage with a service provider; the diversity and attractiveness of offers and services are what generate additional revenue; and the quality and consistency of the use of those products is what keeps the customer loyal.

Ultimately, the customer experience is substantially defined by the customer's interaction with the CSP's products, from purchase, to delivery, to use, to payment. At the same time, communications products and services are no longer static, long-lived or few in number. CSPs are increasingly defined by the products they offer, and to stay competitive and deliver against customer expectations they must manage and refresh a complex and dynamic product portfolio. And to add further pressure, the increasingly competitive CSP market requires that service providers closely monitor how their products are performing, so that they can make better commercial and strategic decisions, and continually evolve their product strategy.

The business challenge behind the experience comes down to a basic premise: what should I be selling to my customers and what do I need to do to effectively deliver and manage that? So the successful retailers who deliver on customer experience are the ones adept at product management and at understanding the relationship between customers' wants and needs and the products designed to fulfil them. However, delivering on this targeted style of customer management on a large scale is only possible through an "industrial" (ie automated and scalable) approach to designing and managing products; not through the "artisan" (ie labour-intensive) approach we commonly see throughout the industry.

The central role of 'product' in the customer experience

When we consider what the customer experience actually involves we quickly discover this is a rather more complex question than it first appears. It encompasses far more than just customer service or customer service channels, as important as these are to the customer experience. Rather it is defined by the sum of all the touch-points a customer has with a CSP.

There are in fact a wide variety of touch-points that together create the customer experience. The common element throughout an end-to-end experience, as Figure 1 shows, is the product: the product is being offered, sold, provisioned, used, billed for, or enquired about at a given touch-point. The lure of a particular product offer is often what attracts a customer to a CSP in the first place. How these products perform in terms of delivering against the customer's evolving wants, needs or desires contributes substantially to customer satisfaction, retention, lifetime spending and support costs.

Why the product experience needs to be explicitly managed

The central role of product in the customer experience makes it essential that CSPs have explicit control over the entire end-to-end lifecycle of products, as well as having accurate and timely insight into how these are performing operationally, commercially and from the customer's point-of-view.

However, delivering this level of insight is often far from trivial, since the concept of "product" is fragmented throughout the order-to-install-to-cash-to-care process. Moreover, the proliferation of CSP products, the increasing velocity of product rollout, the speed of change and decreasing product lifespans mean that CSPs need to centrally and explicitly manage products.

It is now broadly recognized that using a common reference of product information throughout the selecting, buying, using, paying and customer care phases holds the key to centralized control and effective management. And with the product portfolio central to running the business itself, the requirements are obvious: a product management strategy that delivers simplification and accuracy; standardization with flexibility; reliability and low cost.

Delivering this type of centralised product management not only optimises the product experience, but also increases operational efficiency in a wide range of processes and supports greater commercial agility.

The benefits of delivering a better product experience

Understanding, and ultimately managing, the key role that the product plays in the customer experience delivers a wide range of commercial, operational and customer benefits, as shown in Figure 2.

Making the case for such an approach can be challenging, however, if trying to quantify the total losses as a result of a sub-optimal product experience: direct losses (such as higher operational costs and billing errors) are spread over a number of operational areas, while indirect costs (such as opportunity costs or sub-optimal competitive positioning) are notoriously difficult to quantify.

Alternatively, the upside of such an approach can be more easily quantified and even proven.

telco2.net | 01-Nov-2011 17:51