Broadband & Internet
TM jumps into IPTV market, but the odds of success are long
Telekom Malaysia ™ has finally decided to make the jump into IPTV, after several years of deliberating, but the operator looks almost certain to be fighting a losing battle to establish itself as a significant player in the country’s pay TV market. Read more »
The time is ripe for China to focus on a unified broadband plan
The completion of China Mobile’s long-running merger deal with fixed-line player China Tietong in December was the last piece of the jigsaw in the Chinese government’s restructuring of the country’s telecoms market. Now the government needs to figure out an orderly path for China Mobile to fully enter the broadband market. Read more »
KDDI makes move for J-Com, but the hard work is only just beginning
Japanese operator KDDI’s purchase of a 37.8% stake in Jupiter Telecommunications (J-Com) from US media giant Liberty Global came as no surprise to most watchers of Japan’s market, though the US$4 billion price tag – equating to a 65% premium on J-Com’s share price – certainly caused a few raised eyebrows. Read more »
Kosovo: Investment and growth already occurring
As part of the broadband team at Informa’s drive to cover all growth markets I have taken a careful look at some countries in the Balkan region. For the cineastes amongst you, it has been a voyage of discovery redolent of Harvey Keitel in Angelopoulos’ masterful Ulysees’ Gaze. Kosovo is one such market I have looked into and the evidence shows there is much potential.
Read more »
Online music services: made by geeks, for geeks?
I’ve just returned from Midem, the music industry’s annual knees up held in (usually sunny, but not really in January) Cannes. The general mood was the mixture of optimism (Spotify, new business models) and pessimism (piracy, stalling digital sales) that has long been par-for-the-course at music industry events. Read more »
Over-the-top TV needs fine-tuning to truly court couch potatoes
Early adopters put up with a lot. They risked crippling back injuries to tote the first portable laptop computers. They paid over the odds for broadband for the pleasure of being “always on,” albeit at 512Kbps. They overlooked the many failings of numerous generations of smartphones to access the Internet on the move. So it should come as no surprise that the latest trend to sweep the telecoms and media markets should prove to be a bit of a disappointment. Read more »
The Middle East and Africa offer some of the best regional prospects for WiMAX
The prospects for WiMAX seemed to have dimmed somewhat in the past couple of years as a result of the strong growth of HSPA, which is often seen as a rival to WiMAX, and a recession that has reduced the appetite for the spending necessary to build networks. Read more »
AT&T may face down Net neutrality with per-megabyte pricing
AT&T Mobility’s consideration of usage-based pricing for its mobile broadband network lays the groundwork for billing changes that could be induced if regulators force it to comply with any Net-neutrality rules. Read more »
BT results: ploddingly unspectacular is no bad thing
Gone are the days when the tabloid press could proclaim with not a little veiled snarling, that BT was announcing super-profits equating to x million pounds a second. Today results showed that it amounted to about 70 quid a second over the first six months of BT’s financial year. I did a brief slot on BBC Breakfast this morning before the results were announced and I was asked if I thought BT’s problems are now behind them. I said that I thought they were and on the whole, and on the evidence of these results, they are.
Read more »
Meet me next week at the CDN Strategies Summit
I’m particularly pleased to write that I will be charing day one of the CDN Strategies Summit. Why? Because the conference will address one of the most fundamental problems facing telecoms operators today: How they can work with Internet and media firms to support the growing burden of video and other bandwidth-hungry services travelling over their networks.
We at Informa first covered the concept of operator content delivery networks (CDNs) in 2004, when I wrote about a startup called CacheLogic that suggested that operators could put technology for restricting burgeoning peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing traffic to more positive uses (subscription required).
Much has changed, as this excerpt shows: Read more »
Quick Links
© 2009 Informa Telecoms & Media. All rights reserved.
