Latest Blogs
Tougher market conditions are forcing operators in West and Central Africa to innovate
The telecoms market in West and Central Africa remains vibrant, but the message from last week’s West & Central Africa Com conference, organized in Abuja, Nigeria, by Informa Telecoms & Media, is that business is getting tougher for operators as a consequence of Read more »
Once Carter goes, whither Digital Britain?
Digital Britain: 245 pages of “outcomes, proposals, roadmaps and recommendations” on the UK’s digital future. On top of that, there’s the promise of a dozen further consultations and new non-governmental bodies.
Despite all this bureaucracy, communications minister Stephen Carter’s report has mapped out a clear vision of Britain’s digital future.
WiMAX volumes may finally be coming as major deployments get underway
The WiMAX industry continues to suffer from delays and a lack of scale, but can now point to signs that volumes may finally be on the way due a growing number of significant deployments by operators such as Packet One in Malaysia, Yota and Comstar in Russia, Cleawire and its MVNO Time Warner Cable in the US, and UQ Communications in Japan. Read more »
Could nationalism threaten telecoms globalization?
If globalization can be defined as the lowering of barriers to the exchange between countries of goods, services and investment, as well as ideas and behaviours, then telecoms is both a vehicle for advancing globalization as well as an example of it. Read more »
European Commission sees sense on mobile-TV ‘tax’
I have almost lost count of how many stories and comment pieces of the “mobile TV suffers yet another blow” variety I have written over the last months. So it is refreshing finally to be able to write about some good news amid all the DVB-H debris and reports of DMB launches without phones.
As we report in New Media Markets this week, the European Commission’s tax directorate has done the sensible thing and abandoned proposals to reclassify high-end mobile phones that enable reception of television signals – a move that would have triggered a very recession-unfriendly import duty of up to 14%.
Recent announcements reflect rising EU pressure on mobile termination rates
There has been a notable rise in announcements on mobile termination rates at an EU and local level in recent months, reflecting increased pressure for member states to reduce rates. Read more »
Could the next generation of Mobile Internet browsers adversely affect the market for Mobile Advertising?
On May 15th Mozilla announced the availability of the Alpha version of Fennec. Fennec is the mobile implementation of the Firefox desktop browser and is something that I have been looking forward to for some time. Read more »
Swisscom and EWZ battle for Zurich
Swisscom launched trials over its own FTTH network in Zurich in April. Its rivals have long-said that its decision to invest heavily in FTTH now is a reaction to activity from the utility companies and the incumbent has conceded as much. Without the competitive pressures from the utility companies and its main rival Cablecom, it would have tried to maximize the investment from its VDSL network before moving to FTTH. Read more »
Verizon Wireless netbook flags sky-high US mobile broadband prices
Verizon Wireless is the latest US mobile operator to move into mobile broadband netbooks, following AT&T Mobility, but its sky-high prices don’t match the penny-pinching ethos of the netbook segment. In fact the Verizon deal costs $583 more than a similar deal in the UK, and highlights that the US has some of the highest mobile broadband prices in the world. Read more »
BT results: broadband does well but any cause for optimism?
As ever, BT’s annual results gave rise to a swathe of coverage in the UK media today. This led mainly with the news of deeper job cuts and the woes at BT Global Services, but some reports flagged the modest success of BT Retail and of consumer broadband within that. The fact is that broadband overall (Retail + Wholesale + openreach) accounts for a shrinking percentage (10.42% vs 10.72% in 07/08) of a revenue base which grew overall by 3%. Read more »
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