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ECTA’s High Speed 2010 conference: Refreshing but still no resolution in sight
I’m no fan of conferences where everyone agrees and leaves with pretty much the same opinions they had when they arrived. In my opinion, such love-ins do the attendees a disservice and have played no small part in driving the telecoms industry down numerous dead-ends over the years. That’s why I found yesterday’s European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA) conference so refreshing. Read the rest of this entry »
BT and Verizon: Worlds apart in terms of IPTV
The keynote speeches by BT and Verizon at IPTV World Forum yesterday couldn’t have been more different. Terry Denson, vice-president of programming and marketing, for Verizon’s FiOS TV service gave a slick presentation featuring slides boasting impressive subscriber numbers and aims to maximise average revenue per user (ARPU). Richard Young, director of business development for BT’s Vision choose to preface his talk with a speculative video about the future of TV, but went PowerPoint-free otherwise. Now I welcome a break from PowerPoint as much as the next person, but there was a distinct sense of style winning over content about BT’s presentation, in more ways than one.
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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.
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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:
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Oxford University’s wake-up call to superfast-broadband fear-mongers
I was pleasantly awoken by my clock radio this morning to hear an Oxford University academic go “off-message”, as PR people and government spin doctors call it.
Alastair Nicholson of Said Business School was appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to answer questions about a Cisco-funded study which found that 24 countries had better-quality broadband than the UK. “Does it matter?” asked a characteristically combative John Humphrys.
Nicholson’s answer left the newsreader somewhat bemused, if not wrong-footed: “Ah, I don’t think so. Not at the moment.” A short pause followed. Read the rest of this entry »
TDC turns back the clock by withdrawing super-fast broadband offer
Are Europe’s former state-owned telecoms monopolies still so powerful that they can halt the march of technological progress? That’s the charge levelled at Danish incumbent TDC by one of the Denmark’s leading fibre-to-the-home operators, aggrieved at the low take-up of its super-fast broadband products. Certainly, TDC’s decision to take its 50Mbps fibre-to-the-cabinet/VDSL offer off the market is unusual, but perhaps understandable given the lukewarm reception other incumbents’ super-fast offers have received elsewhere in the world. Read the rest of this entry »
Orange lays ground work for Apple-style app store for IPTV
I had an interesting conversation yesterday afternoon with Steve Glagow, the leader of Orange Partner, the ambitious third-party developer programme of France Telecom. And he confirmed to me that Orange was planning to do something we suspected an operator might try sooner or later: build an Apple-style app store for IPTV. Read the rest of this entry »
3 UK and the broadband first-mover disadvantage
Some of you may scoff at the notion that the mobile group 3 could teach fixed-line ISPs a thing or two about the broadband business. After all, 3 spent the best part of a decade - and an estimated $20 billion – in order to become a “new kind of media company” before realising that the killer apps for its next-generation wireless network were cheap voice and unfettered Internet access. But in doing so, it has learnt an important lesson that operators rushing to bring ultra-fast cable and fibre broadband services to market could do well to consider. Read the rest of this entry »
Why taking on Google on search is no joke for BT
Earlier this month, influential blogger James Enck made a light-hearted observation about why telecoms operators shouldn’t build search engines. But once upon a time, BT was a dominant player in search, thanks to its phone book and directory enquiries businesses. Now the former state-owned monopoly is investing heavily to re-invent these services for a Web 2.0 world. Read the rest of this entry »
Analyst
Rob Gallagher
Rob is the prinicipal analyst for Informa Telecoms & Media's Broadband & Internet Intelligence Centre research portal.
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