Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: Amazon & Google pour in CAPEX, buy more data centres
• Devices: Nokia: ex-exec says fire the fashionistas for radical change
• Technology Disruption: MeeGo picked for Linux-for-Lancias standard
• Broadband Connectivity: Why don't we charge for data usage in the busy hour?
• Regulation: Tech/telco lobbying - who spends the most, and where do these people come from?
• The Sixth Bullet: Taking the hype cycle hype out of the hype cycle

[Reminder from the Telco 2.0 Team: don't forget to check out the 40 leading-edge online video presentations on 'Best Practice' Telco 2.0 strategies, case studies and use cases now available on demand, including:

- CEO BT Wholesale, CEO Ericsson, and CTO Deutsche Telekom on Strategy;
- MIT, Invention Arts, World Economic Forum on the Data Economy;
- Telecom Italia on Augmented Reality and Entertainment Futures;
- AT&T and Oracle on Cloud Services;
- Telenor and Aricent on M2M;
- Nokia Siemens Networks and Buoungiorno on Customer Management;
- O2, Ericsson and Admob on Mobile Advertising;
- plus more on Mobile Money, Voice and Messaging 2.0, Amazon, and Shareholder Value.

NB To watch these videos you will need to register via the embedded links above.]

They call it the cloud, but it's a very physical, hardware-heavy business. Amazon.com and Google both announced great dollops of capital investment this week, in Amazon's case enough to spook the Street. The giant platform business is building infrastructure again, and a large fraction of that is in the form of buildings, 13 of them, both warehouses and data centres. They're also adding another 2,200 jobs. CFO Tom Szkutak specifically referred to their Filled by Amazon operation, which delivers packages on behalf of other e-commerce firms, and to Amazon Web Services as lines of business that were in need of more space. Google, for their part, spent $476m in the last quarter on capital goods, essentially all on data centres. As we pointed out in the Google executive briefing, not only does Google spend much more on capital investment than its closest rivals, it gets dramatically better returns.

No surprise, really, then that the market for servers is looking up. IBM says its sales of servers were up 30% this quarter, 36% the one before that, Intel's server products are up 42% q-o-q, and the Wall Street Journal notes a string of cloud/hosting companies (e.g Rackspace) expanding.

On the other hand, there were rumours all week of an effort to depose Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo as CEO of Nokia. The Q2 results weren't of a sort likely to help his case, with profits and average selling prices falling steeply. NAVTEQ is shipping a lot of product, but is a lossmaker, as is NSN. And they expect to sell 50 million N8s, although it will be the only Symbian ^3 device ever. OK...

Amid this sense of crisis, a former Nokia exec publishes a manifesto for change. Among other things, he says, Nokia shouldn't be so proud of having invented the world's best approval process, and he has hard words for the Soho-based design team.

"It's a trend office - they're sniffing trends. They look at what T-shirts people are wearing and design phones according to the trend. They've had their time....Since 2006, Nokia brand development has been a playground for marketing people and some fashion designers based in Soho, London. At the same time external marketing offices from London have been creating campaigns and Web visuals for Nokia basically without no relevant definition or guidance from Nokia's side. Nokia brand directors, under SVPs and VPs, are from Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney and Nike, from companies without any connection to technology, gadgets, functional products or 'rocket science' visions - without competence, visions and customer understanding."

He suggests the company should create a role for a co-CEO for innovations - which makes the whole thing sound rather like a manifesto for Anssi Vanjöki's next job application. He also makes the point that Nokia, if anything, does rather too much data capture, evaluation, and research. Given that two of the top five posts on Forum Nokia today are about just that, he may well have a point.

In better news, MeeGo got the nod from a car industry standardisation MLA, GENIVI, as their platform for "connected car" applications. NSN, meanwhile, landed the contract to supply 40,000 Node Bs for Harbinger Capital's proposed US wholesale-only LTE network, which has since been named LightSquared. (Because < a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic">Teledesic 2.0 wouldn't have sounded as good.)

Symbian^3 is still coming along Real Soon Now. Similarly, WebOS 2.0 is planned for "later this year", a target window closing at the rate of 24 hours per day.

Juicy gossip from within Microsoft after the failure of the Kin smartphone; allegedly they sold a total of 503 devices.

Qualcomm, meanwhile, had profits up 4% on shipments up 10%, although they confirmed that the FLO TV wholesale network is on the way out.

The Linux kernel developers and Google are working towards a solution that would let Android code get back into the main source tree of Linux. The current issue is whether it's acceptable for the shutdown process to be interrupted if a phone call comes in - fairly important for a phone, you might think. Google also has said that future contributions to Android will go into the main Linux codebase, rather than staying inside Google, although they won't appear until devices have shipped.

There's some, heavily caveated, data on different Android versions' share here.

Google has an update for Google Voice out. It looks like GVoice used to work as a callback service, a bit like Jajah, but now it uses a temporarily-assigned DID number and your carrier's SS7 network, and then presumably maps the DID to the real phone number you want to call. Seriously worse voice and messaging; AdMob (that's a Google division, remember) has been serving up an advert to iPhone users (and perhaps others) that contains a link that initiates a phone call to a premium rate number. Apparently the ad in question is "The Talking Cat".

Skype updated its iPhone client to make use of multitasking in iOS 4, thus making it a proper telephony application (as in: can receive calls without being permanently in foreground). They've also, quietly, reversed the decision to charge for Skype-Skype calls on the iPhone - this may reflect some ultra-profound, tectonic shift in the triangle of forces between mobile VoIP developers, Apple, and AT&T, or then again they may just have been trying it on.

Wired asks why AT&T doesn't do busy-hour pricing rather than data caps, a perfectly good question and one that reminds us that ISP people do actually know quite a lot about data pricing (busy hour, 95th percentile, burst, etc), contrary to the telco-establishment view that it's all free on the interwebs and will end in tears.

DTAG, it seems, is still pushing the Google tax. In that light, it's probably worth linking to the list of the top 10 tech spenders on lobbying; the top three are all telcos, and Verizon alone spends four times Google's bill for spin and schmooze and six times IBM's.

If you've ever wondered where telco lobbyists come from, meanwhile, wonder no more. The Sunlight Foundation has a useful chart. The short answer is "Congress", with 201 of 274 registered telco lobbyists having that on their CVs.

Except trouble tomorrow. The Ontario Teachers' pension fund, which speaks for 0.42% of Vodafone, is planning to vote for Sir John Bond's dismissal as chairman at the EGM. They apparently would like the sale of some of the minority shareholdings, like Verizon Wireless.

Vodafone's 360 product is increasingly looking like a way of using the Android Market to get access to the world Android user base. Verizon Wireless, meanwhile, is competing with RIM's BlackBerry App World, pushing its own app store as an app to the top RIM devices on its network.

A T-Mobile UK employee has confessed to being behind a massive theft of customer data. With an accomplice, whose trial is coming up soon, he sold the details of subscribers whose contracts were coming up for renewal to resellers who were paid commission for winning new business. It's a good reminder that the security of customer data is frequently threatened by fairly crude attacks.

TalkTalk is doing something unusual, in the name of fighting malware - it's following every link its subscribers click on, and searching the servers for dodgy code. Nice of them...had they asked first. Especially as the system involves "Huawei servers" - does that mean servers made by Huawei, or servers they own? (Meanwhile, Motorola alleges that some employees who left Moto took trade secrets with them - although, as Huawei's lawyers point out, the company they joined is nothing more than a reseller.)

Bizarre tale at Facebook: the man who paid Mark Zuckerberg to build "The Face Book" claims he has a contract that shows he should really own the company. Zuckerberg denounces it as a forgery. Popcorn?

Brough Turner's notes from the WISPA conference are here. Incidentally, he also found out what became of xG Technology.

Richard Branson to launch an iPad-only mag, while Barnes & Noble has an e-book reader for Android.

DEFCON attendees will be delighted to know that the EFF will be teaching them how to get their FBI files, and what commands to type into your lawyer if the Feds seize your laptop.

A novel view of the hype cycle. All Windows shortcuts are potential threats. A look back at the best of the Apple Newtons.

feedproxy.google.com | 7/26/10 1:17 PM

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Devices Strategy: concerns raised on Windows Mobile 7 Preview
• Technology Disruptions: The week Apple dropped the iBall
• More Devices: Mixed news for Android: Droid X panned, HTC Evos sell faster than Samsung can make touchscreens
• Security: Android accidentally hacks entire AT&T voicemail userbase
• Broadband Connectivity: Sprint, Intel, Alvarion look at LTE, Motorola wants out of networks

Reflecting the intensive competition in the mobile devices and OS world, as analysed by Telco 2.0 partners Arete Research in their Telco 2.0 'Best Practice Live!' presentation here (you'll need to register), a strong theme of this week's news is that many of the main players in the arena are experiencing their own 'worlds of pain'.

Starting with Microsoft, Infoworld got a preview of the latest Windows Phone 7 gadget, and reported a number of concerns, including a number of regressions from Windows Mobile 6.5 and a very strange user interface indeed. In the light of the idea of sudden extinction events, you might wonder whether Microsoft is going to stay in the mobile game.

On the software side of the company, they're striving for relevance by getting close to Facebook - as well as LinkedIn, you can now get your Facebook updates integrated in MS Outlook. It's a sign of the scale of the change in the order of the industry when MS are now the ones hoping to link up with the 'Big Platform'.

Perhaps fortuitously for Microsoft at least, it was the week when the leaders in the smartphone space seemed to be doing their best to let everyone else catch up. Apple addressed the iPhone 4 radio problems with a press conference at which Steve Jobs offered everyone a free plastic bumper, or perhaps a refund if they'd already bought a case. Apple also admitted that an elementary software bug had been discovered in iOS 4 that caused the signal strength indicator to display inaccurately - a bug fix has been rushed out.

This was arguably the least Apple could have done, but Jobs then pushed his luck by claiming that RIM, Samsung, and Nokia devices were as bad. This gave everyone a chance to mock the iPhone 4 all over again, and then Bloomberg got a scoop.

Apparently, Apple's chief RF engineer Ruben Caballero predicted that the external antenna wouldn't work early in the design process - as did engineers at an "unnamed" mobile operator customer. Although Jonathan Ive's industrial design team came up with several alternative options, Jobs insisted on the external strip antenna. Bloomberg also quotes various sources who suggest that the problem is interaction between the cellular and the WLAN/Bluetooth radios. An actual antenna designer comments here, where you can also read Mike Lazaridis' rather stinging reaction to Jobs' remarks.

You'll also read the very good point that, perhaps, AT&T's network isn't helping either. Wired reports that last week's problems with their data network are still going on, if anything worse. Not only isn't the network providing the "HS" in HSPA, it's not really doing basic WCDMA speeds. There seems to have been some sort of inflection point in the first week of July - perhaps a dodgy update. All eyes are on Alcatel-Lucent, which is promising to fix the problem in software...

Even Apple's creepily-named Global Loyalty Team was having an off week. A judge in San Mateo threw out the warrant they'd applied for to seize the famous lost iPhone from the editors of Gizmodo.

While all the fuss was going on, Google quietly killed off the Nexus One.

TelecomTV wants to know what on earth Nokia is thinking in releasing a flagship device using an operating system they plan to end-of-life immediately after it launches.

It turns out that Apple, Google, and RIM all chucked in a bid for Palm. It also turns out that people expect the future of tablets/iPads/etc to be Linux-based.

So, surely, this would be the moment for a shuddering challenge from Android? Gizmodo reviews the Motorola Droid X, and finds it marred by annoying vendor and carrier impositions. They don't like the user interface much, and they find the idea of yet another single social network client to be annoying. (Infoworld has a less opinionated take.) Verizon will be shipping them and offering a $50 discount towards a 32GB microSD card, so you can stash a whole local copy of Wikipedia and still have 28GB left for cat pictures.

Android users, it turns out, can get access to any AT&T customer's voicemail using one of two caller-ID spoofing apps - worryingly, AT&T is relying on the CLI field to control access to voicemail, despite the fact that it often isn't verified in any way.

And Sprint and HTC are struggling to keep the Evo in stock. Apparently, the Samsung-made touchscreen is a significant bottleneck in the supply chain, and some might wonder if Samsung's own 'droids are getting first pick.

Rumours swirl that Sprint's renewed interest in LTE (it's not just them - Intel suddenly likes the TDD flavour of it too) is pointing towards another attempt to merge the operator with T-Mobile USA. Whatever radio air interface they use, though, it seems they're confident they have enough spectrum. Sprint is promising no data caps on the WiMAX network, at least unless the users get up to around 20GB/month. Which is rather like a 20GB/month cap...

Intel had their best quarter ever, as speculation swirled that they might buy Infineon. Sony Ericsson also had a good week. And Alvarion, of all vendors, announced that they were thinking about doing some LTE. Are the standards wars truly over?

Motorola is reportedly considering the sale of its networks division, all except the iDEN unit, to Nokia Siemens Networks.

In other connectivity news, AT&T improves its ideas about femtocells - it's been writing to selected customers offering free Cisco Microcells, apparently on the basis of loyalty or spending. So far it's just a trial, but it's a better idea than asking them to pay for the privilege of hosting critical telecoms infrastructure.

And the World Cup equated to a 24% spike in data traffic.

The FCC has announced its plans to change the rules of the so-called Mobile Satellite Service spectrum in order to release an additional 90MHz of the 2GHz band for generic wireless-broadband use. They're also trying to fix a problem - although $400m a year from the Universal Service Fund is allocated for rural telemedicine, so far very little of the money has been spent.

Telefonica announced a "global e-health initiative", to cover all its main markets. Not much in the way of specifics yet, but they seem to be keen on a major Telco 2.0 target vertical.

The UK government has put off its target date for universal broadband from 2012 to 2015 and confirmed that it wants to use money from the BBC licence fee. A company called Clear Mobitel announced that it was beginning trials of LTE in the 800MHz ex-TV band in Cornwall with a view to partaking of the lolly.

OFCOM wants to get mobile number porting down to hours 2, although they might perhaps do better addressing this rant from our new favourite ISP.

EU regulators have found that the implementation of the controversial data retention directive is usually illegal for a variety of reasons, mostly to do with privacy and that old friend, proportionality. The New York Times, meanwhile, wants Google regulating - Wired isn't so sure.

Cloudy! SFR is partnering with Hewlett-Packard to get into the private-cloud business, offering infrastructure-as-a-service and similar trendy abbreviations to its enterprise customers. Rackspace, NASA, and a huge cast of other partners, are preparing to launch an open-source cloud based on Python and Red Hat Linux, building on work they already did creating a cloud for the space agency and the US Federal government more broadly.

A good Voice 2.0 question; if hosted IVR is good, and hosted PBXs are good, why not integrate the two?

Telefonica does something with Jajah - discount international calls. Ho hum.

Half a successful South African MVNO up for grabs. More on new business models in the music industry. HOWTO use jQuery in Nokia Web Runtime. Working out how good the Apple Time Capsule really is, with basic stats.

feedproxy.google.com | 7/19/10 12:39 PM

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Technology Disruptions: HTC profits surge: these certainly are the droids you're looking for
• Google: Eric Schmidt: this isn't a zero-sum game
• Broadband Connectivity: Open ducts slash NBN costs, BBC = British Broadband Corporation?
• Customer Data: Apple plans to feed iAds the iTunes database
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: an innovative 4 million line VOIP project targeting voice spammers

[Reminder from the Telco 2.0 Team: don't forget to check out the 40 leading-edge online video presentations on 'Best Practice' Telco 2.0 strategies, case studies and use cases now available on demand, including:

- CEO BT Wholesale, CEO Ericsson, and CTO Deutsche Telekom on Strategy;
- MIT, Invention Arts, World Economic Forum on the Data Economy;
- Telecom Italia on Augmented Reality and Entertainment Futures;
- AT&T and Oracle on Cloud Services;
- Telenor and Aricent on M2M;
- Nokia Siemens Networks and Buoungiorno on Customer Management;
- O2, Ericsson and Admob on Mobile Advertising;
- plus more on Mobile Money, Voice and Messaging 2.0, Amazon, and Shareholder Value.

NB To watch these videos you will need to register via the embedded links above.]

News: HTC is prospering as never before from its commitment to Android, with net income up 33 per cent on outstanding sales of G1s, Magics, and Evos.

In other good news for Android, Ars Technica tested Android 2.2 against typical JavaScript rendering benchmarks and found it fast, considerably faster than iPhone OS 4 and its Safari browser. ComScore's quarterly numbers show Android gaining market share fast, up from 9% to 13%, and both Apple and RIM losing ground.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, meanwhile, attempted to cool down the tension between Google and other major tech companies. He said that Facebook users tended to make significantly more Google search requests, and denied that the relationship between Google and others was a zero sum game. However, he also picked a further row with Apple, accusing them of "rewriting history" about the development of the iPhone and Android. So the net impact of his comments is conflicted to say the least. One of the interviews, we note, confirmed the end of Google's adventure into phone-making - there will be no Nexus Two.

Google has also attained a compromise with the Chinese government. Rather than automatically redirecting searches to the Hong Kong version of Google, Google will now ask users to explicitly choose the Hong Kong version. This was apparently enough for the Chinese government to renew Google's license.

Google has launched a version of YouTube for your TV as a beta, as well as a new version of YouTube's mobile site using HTML-5 rather than Flash. (Yahoo! agrees.)

And Google is suggesting there will be more than one winner of its Fibre Cities contest.

On the subject of fibre, Australian Minister for Broadband Stephen Conroy says that the NBN project is going to come in significantly cheaper than expected - no surprise, in the light of the agreement with Telstra to swap duct access and PSTN decommissioning for wholesale service. He refused to put a number on it yet.

And Computer Weekly's Philip Virgo responds to a Government consultation, asking what if what we needed was the British Broadband Corporation?

Brough Turner points to a word-frequency analysis of the US National Broadband Plan. The take-home message appears to be that the Plan is surprisingly mobile- and wireless-centric - "spectrum" is the second most used word after "FCC", appearing 79 times more frequently than "dark fibre".

On the other hand, the Plan foresees an end to Universal Service Fund subsidies for cellular operators, with the money being channelled into broadband infrastructure projects. Tellingly, however, the bulk of the USF is currently going to Verizon and AT&T, two integrated fixed/mobile operators with little interest in the rural markets the USF is intended to help.

T-Mobile USA is sticking to its plans for incremental HSPA upgrades; the TMoBlog catches a presentation referring to "42Mbps HSPA in 2011". That implies the use of dual-carrier HSPA, which will obviously need some of that lovely spectrum the FCC is planning to dole out. In comments, it's pointed out that the rate-limiting factor for T-Mobile's current HSPA rollout is the time it takes to blow fibre to the Node Bs - once that's done, the next lot of upgrades will be much faster.

On the other hand, AT&T users might not think this is such a good idea, after a software bug in Alcatel-Lucent HSUPA gear knocked the "U" for Uplink out of the HSUPA. And, come to think of it, the "HS" for High Speed as well, as uplink speeds dropped well below 100Kbps. We feel a disturbance in the Force, as if a thousand ill-advised Flickr uploads cried out and were silenced.

West Africa gets a new submarine cable this week. And the Renesys blog reports that the number of Internet prefixes carried by Sprint is falling sharply.

Here comes Apple's customer-data play. The plan is that the new iAd service is going to match ads to customers based on their iTunes preferences and a bank of other indicators drawn from iPhone apps. They've also taken out a patent on a variety of location-based marketing applications. It looks a lot like a very vague, lawyer-driven exercise that would seem to cover a lot of things that have already been done in boring old Europe, but it does seem to suggest the next lot of iProducts will have NFC.

NFC and video calls? Perhaps Apple's Xserve server division will launch an IMS product next.

In the light of iAds, this excellent piece on fiddling social networks for advertising purposes is recommended. Also, the European Court of Justice considers it illegal to buy your competitors' trademarks as Google AdWords, unless it's obvious to the reader that you're behind them.

A survey shows that 52% of Brits with GPS-equipped handsets are "very or extremely concerned" about their devices oversharing their location. Veteran tech journalist Jack Schofield of The Guardian has joined the campaign to make cloud computing services let you take all your data with you.

Of course, you don't need to be Google to place millions of users' privacy at risk - you just need to omit to validate user input properly and always parameterise your SQL queries. Argentine hackers discovered an SQL injection exploit against The Pirate Bay that allowed them to download details of 4 million users.

A student who was fined $675,000 for sharing MP3 files has had the penalty reduced by 90%. There's an interesting interview with the founder of Tommy Boy Records on new business models for music here.

There's not been a mobile malware story in a while. Now there is - NetQin will try to recruit your Symbian S60 device into a mobile botnet.

One notable feature of the Nokia/Symbian world was always the sheer volume of stuff they published - Forum Nokia, Forum Nokia Blogs, S60.com, developer.symbian.com, etc, etc. This week sees the arrival of NokiaDevs.com, which adds yet another website to the fleet and seems to be aimed at publicising their platforms. The current lead story is about an independent app store.

Nokia, meanwhile, got out of the wireless-modem business and promised a "laser focus" on smartphones.

Here's an innovative Voice 2.0 application if ever there was one: a honeypot for telemarketers, using 4 million DID numbers delivered over VoIP to British business-focused ISP Andrews & Arnold. Spammers' auto-dialler programs call them, and stay there for ages, chasing a succession of automated messages and IVR prompts and hopefully running up enormous bills. At the very least, while they're talking to the honeypot, they can't call anyone else.

Their CEO's blog has recordings of spammers arguing with the automated messages, and an outbreak of spontaneous creativity in the comments. The latest idea is to have their Asterisk PBX server sense when there is more than one spammer online, and bridge them into a conference call with each other....and post the recordings on the Web for general amusement.

You could have done this with e-mail 5 years ago, and people have been mocking unsolicited callers for years, but automating it and making the callers talk to each other? That needs the full power of Voice 2.0.

(The same operator has hard words about capacity issues with BT's 21CN upgrade.)

In more serious Voice 2.0 news, Asterisk developer Nir Simionovich sets out to bring you "Google Analytics for telephony". Pre-registration for the beta is open now.

India is the latest country to complain that they can't decrypt Skype calls, and demand that not only Skype, but also RIM and Google Mail, should give them a backdoor. Hackers, meanwhile, reverse-engineer one of the crypto algorithms they use.

Huawei and the Feds are making nice, apparently with a view to Sprint buying Huawei gear. Connected Planet points out that actually, quite a lot of US operators use their stuff, and suggests that the real story might be growing interest at Sprint in LTE.

France Telecom announces a five-year expansion plan. Fring piggybacks on the FaceTime hype to offer SIP-based video calls to devices other than iPhones.

And Microsoft reorganises in an effort to make something of the Azure cloud.

feedproxy.google.com | 7/12/10 12:06 PM

Telco 2.0 News Review

• Voice & Messaging 2.0: 20% more revenue from 3UK's Skype users
• Technology Disruptions: Cisco's Cius - like an iPad for business
• Online Video: HOWTO serve video to 60 million Brits
• 2-sided Business Models: Softbank pays subscribers to deploy femtocells
• Developer Communities: ALU buys ProgrammableWeb!

[Note from the Telco 2.0 Team: 40 new leading-edge online video presentations on 'Best Practice' Telco 2.0 strategies, case studies and use cases are now available on demand, including:

- CEO BT Wholesale, CEO Ericsson, and CTO Deutsche Telekom on Strategy;
- MIT, Invention Arts, World Economic Forum on the Data Economy;
- Telecom Italia on Augmented Reality and Entertainment Futures;
- AT&T and Oracle on Cloud Services;
- Telenor and Aricent on M2M;
- Nokia Siemens Networks and Buoungiorno on Customer Management;
- O2, Ericsson and Admob on Mobile Advertising;
- plus more on Mobile Money, Voice and Messaging 2.0, Amazon, and Shareholder Value.

NB To watch these videos you will need to register via the embedded links above.]

News: Via Rich Karpinski, some numbers are filtering through about 3UK's peace treaty with Skype. 80% of Skypephone users are new customers, and they show ARPU 20% higher and churn 14% lower than 3's typical subscriber. Karpinski points out that it's quite possible that the user base for Skype and like services are "hyper-communicators" who are likely to be heavy users of all your products. There you have it - a strategy to deal with the VoIP wave.

Juniper Research predicts that mobile VoIP traffic will double every year from here to 2015. They point out that some operators are beginning to re-assess their strategy and adjust to this, and that the real threat is shifting voice traffic to WLAN. On the other hand, a minute carried over a £40 Wi-Fi box, the open Internet, and your GAN interface is one that doesn't need carrying over your transmission network, radio network controllers, and the like.

Apple's unexpected embrace of video calls has given other vendors a spur to look again at video for communications rather than content. Cisco has announced an interesting new Android-based device - the Cius is a vaguely iPad-like tablet optimised for high-quality videoteleconferences. It should provide 8 hours of battery life, connecting over the full range of WLAN specifications, with cellular capability coming later. If you can sit through 8 hours of video conferencing, you probably deserve a shiny that will be priced "below $1,000", but presumably the great majority of them will be sold to enterprise IT departments. The device comes with the full set of Cisco's telepresence/conferencing/collaboration/unicomms applications built in, so no video calls for you, Mr. Telco.

Telepresence has always suffered from the need for fancy hardware to achieve a reasonable user experience - multiple, large, high definition screens, hi-fi surround speakers, high end microphones and multiple, high resolution cameras. This makes it expensive and very, very fixed. Cisco may be onto something by wrapping those capabilities into an integrated high-end mobile device.

At the same time, they're pushing out more consumer products, notably home-automation devices, and it is rumoured that having acquired the Flip line of video cameras they're going to add some sort of network capability. Conferencing/video calling? Instant streaming to the Web? Connected Planet speculates that there might even be some sort of Amazon Kindle-like embedded cellular element on the cards - so perhaps an opportunity for a lucky operator there.

How do you go about serving video to the BBC's user base? Simon Frost, the iPlayer's technical architect, explains how in an excellent post at the BBC Internet blog. It's well worth reading, if nothing else, for the point that adding social, recommendation, and other features can be a big increase in complexity and a major challenge for your infrastructure quite apart from the job of pushing out the video streams.

Hulu has announced three more networks' content in its Hulu Plus service, and Google won its case against Viacom.

In other online video news, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs says the company wants to get out of the business of operating their MediaFLO TV network. Qualcomm originally positioned MediaFLO as a wholesale-only operator, whose roll-out would be part financed by its partners in the content business. More recently, it's started offering a direct-to-consumer mobile TV service. It now looks like Qualcomm would rather just be selling FLO equipment to operators than being one itself. This shouldn't be surprising - revenues from the operation are falling and the costs of building it out have been stubbornly high. They are also looking at using the infrastructure as a supplementary data network for heavy Internet content, but so far, there are no takers.

Speaking of home automation and energy, here's a piece on work at Intel Research into the user anthropology involved. Interestingly, one strategy they are looking at is integrating energy monitoring into communications devices (answering machines), because people use them.

Ars Technica notes that according to the FCC, 13% of US fixed telephone lines are now carrier-VoIP services like Vonage or similar. We note that by definition that takes no account of Skype, Fring, Gizmo, Google Voice and friends...although you might think Cisco have an opportunity there.

Microsoft has terminated its Kin "social phone" two months after launch. New industry hyperblog Voyces (regulars will probably recognise some of the names) says they think there's an opening for a low-cost social networking device, but surely 3 already did that with INQ?

Engadget has inside-Microsoft gossip about the Kin story - apparently the original plan was to do a low-cost, super-featurephone independent of Windows, using the old Sidekick OS they acquired some time ago, but MS top management insisted on porting it over to Windows CE (which is in any case on the way out).

So far, many operators who have deployed femtocells have asked their subscribers to pay for the privilege of hosting a piece of telco infrastructure. This is not perhaps the most attractive proposition ever dangled afore the public - it's reminiscent of BT's Fusion FMC product, which offered the user cheaper outbound calls on Wi-Fi, but charged all incoming calls at mobile rates, so that your friends essentially subsidised your cheaper calls. Softbank is taking a drastically different approach - put a femto in your house, and Softbank will pay for the DSL line. As they're paying for the connectivity, there won't be any effort to restrict which Softbank subscribers use your femtocell, so it's a cunning way of thickening up their coverage.

The Advertising Standards Authority has told off Orange for claiming to have more coverage than they do have, by fiddling with the definitions. As is pointed out here, the real problem is that for some strange reason, there are no publicly accessible maps of UK mobile coverage at useful scale.

As pre-announced, the White House has announced the beginning of National Broadband Plan implementation with the release of 500MHz of new spectrum. There's also money. Another $800 million for 66 projects has been announced as part of the economic recovery plan.

Having cranked prices on its heaviest data users up, 3UK is now balancing that by slashing prices for lower users. A new tariff offers 1GB of data, plus a truly huge quantity of voice traffic (2,000 minutes), for £25 SIM-only. CEO Kevin Russell has some thoughts about "unlimited"; as he was also in this weekend's Guardian bashing the other operators over termination rates, we presume there's some sort of PR drive on. Check out the comments for the tale of the acceptable-use policy that forbade subscribers to make more than 24 hours of calls in any 24 hour period.

Everyone's having fun with the Apple iPhone 4 radio problems. Nokia explains how to hold one of their phones for best results (i.e. any way you like), Motorola takes out full-page ads. Apple is advertising for antenna designers. Lenovo taunts the beast.

Anssi Vanjöki declares the beginning of Nokia's fightback on the company blog. Points of note include that it's official that the N8 will be the last N-series to use Symbian^3 (presumably the only one), but there might well be at least one N-series device on Symbian^4, and there won't be a Nokia Android. And he's determined to persuade Symbian Guru back into the fold.

As if to provide ironic contrast, there's an urgent bug fix out for the Qt SDK. And some N900 users are annoyed about default opt-in to MyNokia, although to be fair they could just turn it off.

Verizon Wireless is refreshing its App Catalog for Qualcomm BREW-based feature phones. AT&T, meanwhile, is also pushing BREW as an apps platform for non-smartphones. There's going to be an open app store, a suite of network APIs, and a developer sandbox.

Google can remotely install applications to your Android as well as remove them. Eric Schmidt offers a different view of the Nexus One.

Like Android? Like Python? You'll like this. Google is preparing a new feature that will let you distribute Python apps for Android as the standard .apk package for one-click install.

Least expected acquisition of the year: Alcatel-Lucent buys mashup hub ProgrammableWeb. Check out the interview with PW founders about telco APIs.

Telefonica integrates its Latin America developer communities into O2 Litmus.

Undesirable mobile innovation; 50 people are arrested in Romania for distributing stalkerware applications that let you spy on other people's phones. The F-Secure blog points out that you still need physical access to the gadget to install it.

After Spotify: MSpot lets you upload your music collection into the cloud and pull it down to a mobile device, shared PC, whatever. It's basically a streamer application using a cloud storage service as the back-end. You pay a small fee, and they don't worry about licensing fees as it's assumed it's your music.

So how's that Brazilian Phorm deployment coming on? Not so well. The company lost another $29.7 million this year, and although it charged its sole customer Oi 1.6 million Brazilian reals, none of that was earned by the much-loved DPI system. And the Brazilian Ministry of Justice is after them

The Spanish-Portuguese tussle over Brazilian operator Vivo took another twist. Although a majority of shareholders voted to sell the stake to Telefonica, the Portuguese government invoked its golden share in PT to block the deal. With that, everyone's off to the European Court of Justice.

Qualcomm says it bought BWA spectrum in India to keep it all from going WiMAX, and to reserve a spot for LTE. Time was, Qualcomm might have done that for one of its own radio technologies, but the standards wars are over. There's also an interesting chat about augmented reality and Qualcomm here.

Brough Turner is starting up a startup, and it looks like it's an operator of some sort.

A fine example of Worse Enterprise Voice & Messaging. A ton of data on Spanish mobile Web users and Vodafone. A neat mobile banking app - deposit a cheque in your mobile phone by photographing it. US Government CIO Vivek Kundra on the cloud.

Everyone needs a robot squid.

feedproxy.google.com | 7/5/10 11:12 AM

A survey on SDP, developer communities, and app stores: What do you expect and need from your SDP suppliers? What do developers need from an SDP?

From the earliest days of Telco 2.0 we've been concerned by the importance of the Service Delivery Platform layer in the network - in the future, it might be where the economic activity is. Without our concern that the industry was drifting towards a monolithic, control-minded, IMS-based solution without a clear business model, we might not have started the company. Now, Moriana, in co-operation with Telco 2.0, is conducting an industry wide survey.

It is aimed at operators, service providers and communication service providers (CSPs). The objective is to gather information from CSPs about their wants, needs and intentions in relation to Service Delivery Platforms, app stores, developers, and their SDP suppliers.

Your input is important. The results of the survey will have an impact on the industry and help determine the strategic direction of SDP, applications and services in the telecom industry.

If you're a developer, there's a special version of the survey here.

What you get in return

• Your input and influence on the future of SDP in the telecom industry
• A free summary of the results
• Plus the chance to win a netbook

All results will be presented TOTALLY ANONYMOUSLY.

The survey is here and closes July 7th, 2010. The special developer version is here and also closes on the 7th.

feedproxy.google.com | 6/29/10 5:27 PM

One of the questions we are most commonly asked by strategists is how Telco 2.0 business models can be deployed in the face of opposition from IT and other management divisions which claim the technology involved in servicing upstream customers will be too expensive, too disruptive and will take too long to implement. At the 9th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm held in London at the end of April, Infonova's Andrew Thomson offered up one possible solution in a specially arranged session entitled, 'Yes we can! Rapid implementation of Telco 2.0 Business Models.'

The session was created to look at moving from Telco 1.0 to 2.0 with minimum disruption to existing services and Andrew Thomson began by saying that upstream customers genuinely wanted to consume, bundle, and re-use telco services and assets. However, typically, telco IT departments struggled to deal with this, and even worse, telco management was loath to invest in changes to the billing platform. His

The Vital Importance of Multi-Tenancy
He introduced details of Infonova's billing platform, specifically its ability to operate as a multi-tenant platform. Multi-tenancy, he explained, enables telco systems to accept upstream customers as operator-like entities, which could inject their own business rules into the system, use its development APIs, and run their product management independently. The whole system therefore adds up to a modular 'order-to-cash' platform that permits the operator to sell to many upstream customers, while the upstream customers themselves get a wide degree of control of their own order to cash cycle.

Telco 1.5 in 10 weeks
He cited cloud computing, logistics services, and a KPN-like multi-MVNO strategy as early use cases and also identified smart grid, e-health, and other utility services as major markets of the future. He argued that the Infonova system could deliver "Telco 1.5 in 10 weeks", and had the advantage that the deployment of new tenant businesses could be repeated again and again without further software development on the side of the operator. This, he claimed, made the move to Telco 2.0 much more possible in the real world.

A video of Andrew's presentation at Telco 2.0 is here.

feedproxy.google.com | 6/28/10 2:15 PM

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Broadband Connectivity: 500MHz US spectrum dump coming
• Technology & Devices: Nokia N8 to be the last of the Symbian line
• Developer Communities: Google activating 160,000 'droids/day
• Online Video: World Cup tests UK ISPs, BBC wins on delivery
• Advertising 2.0: Windows Phone 7 to be "ad-serving machine"
• Telco 2.0 Event Telco 2.0 virtual event begins today

It's been widely trailed, the FCC has spoken, and now it may be about to happen. The big US spectrum dump may happen as soon as today, when President Obama signs an executive order to start releasing the 500MHz of additional spectrum required for the National Broadband Plan (our response is here). NTIA is mandated to pick out spectrum allocations that the Feds currently aren't using and prepare for auctions, although some elements of the plan, notably the type of auction and the idea of reusing the proceeds for public-safety radio networks, will need approval from Congress.

It's official; the photo-optimised N8 will be the last of the main line of Symbian smartphones, as Nokia moves its flagship range to MeeGo Linux. It's not yet clear if the E-series enterprise gadgets, which are in many ways comparable with the N-series and sit in Anssi Vanjöki's division, are going the same way, but you wouldn't bet against it. Relatedly, Charles Davies, Psion's first employee and long-time pioneer of the industry as (among other things) CTO of Symbian and head of architecture at Nokia Research, is leaving Nokia to join several other ex-Psion figures at TomTom.

Since Vanjöki took control of Nokia's smartphones, software, and services, there's been a string of dramatic changes. Another is here; following the release of the Qt-based cross-platform SDK, Nokia is finally getting to grips with its developer infrastructure. The requirement to spend $210 in all and be a company in order to get the all-crucial Publisher ID is going; there's now a $50 signup, and a target of getting approval times down to less than 2 weeks. And there's an installer tool that automatically fetches whatever bits of Qt are missing in order to simplify deployment.

Now, if they could just integrate Python for S60 (and just ordinary Python for the Linux devices) in the SDK, they'd have a truly excellent product...

On the other hand, it may all be irrelevant. Google is activating 160,000 Androids a day, growing at 60% monthly. Sony Ericsson, the other major user of Symbian, seems to be concentrating on Android after having a relative success with the X10. Motorola launches another supergadget based on the platform. A survey shows, not surprisingly, that developers are fascinated by iPhone and Android (although MeeGo is beginning to gather buzz).

It's suggested that very little has been paid out for Android Market apps so far, but this may be an artefact of rapid growth from zero, and also the fact that Android developers are disproportionately drawn from the Linux community and a lot of material on the Android Market is free. Relatedly, this analysis of iPhone app economics would be interesting if it wasn't for the quite odd assumption that it costs on average $35,000 to develop an iPhone app - perhaps it does if you let a telco billing department try.

Samsung is warming up Bada, its developer platform that wraps LiMo and BONDI in a brand someone's actually heard of. Sensibly enough, the BONDI standard is being transferred to WAC, with the low-level standards work at OMTP being moved to the Open Mobile Alliance. OMTP boss Tim Raby is moving over to head the WAC.

RIM, meanwhile, shipments up 42 per cent. As they said at MWC, carrier billing is coming to the next version of RIM App World.

Last week, Microsoft announced quite a lot of different mobile platforms. The core product, Windows Phone 7, is their rival to MeeGo, RIM, iPhone OS, Android, etc. Apparently it's going to be "an ad-serving machine", with ads in the browser, inside apps, and also outside both the browser and any application context. That is to say, ads everywhere all the time. Microsoft calls the home-screen ads "Toast", and the jokes are already multiplying. Another cogent criticism of mobile ads is here, compressed into 140 characters.

Apple, however, has apparently decided to give its competitors a chance; hardly had the iPhone 4 (now with gyroscope) appeared, than people were complaining about it dropping calls if you held it the wrong way. Steve Jobs's remark that they shouldn't hold it like that is now inscribed in Internet folklore. If you still want one, UK pricing is rounded up here.

Also, Jobs has been summoned to make explanations to Congress about the new iPhone Ts & Cs, which they sneaked out under cover of the iHype, and which allow them to collect and resell location information without any further consent.

Here we go for another privacy row. Juniper Networks, the world no.2 in IP routers, is pitching a new product that adds a geocode to the HTTP headers passing through ISP networks, so that advertisers' Web servers can alter their responses based on location.

If you're desperate for video calls, Apple has an app for that - you can talk to a nice person from Apple, who might even answer your prayers for rain. Or something. Nokia Beta Labs, meanwhile, is looking for people to test an application for reading your kids a story remotely using video calling and screen sharing.

Cheap calls; there's an app for that. Rebtel is offering an Android app that takes over the dialler and sends your international calls via their VoIP service's PSTN dial-in number. Sweet, but on the other hand, most of the potential of better voice and messaging beyond cheap calls comes when you take over control of incoming calls, which has to happen in the network. Another cheap-calls mobile VoIP service, Vopium, announced a major fundraising and plans to "target Skype".

England's brief and disastrous World Cup campaign drove surges of traffic through the Internet. Eyeball networks reported 50-55% greater than normal streaming activity, while business-focused operator EasyNet Connect was up 225%. Interestingly, the BBC's service appears to have been much more robust than ITV's - showing the enduring truth that peering is the fundamental architecture of the Internet.

The UK government says Britain will have the best broadband infrastructure in Europe by 2015, with the expenditure of a maximum of £300m in public funds. They may have a different definition of the words "best" or "broadband" from the rest of us.

Meanwhile, it gets dramatic between Telefonica and Portugal Telecom. First, the two of them bought a fixed and a mobile operator in Brazil. They worked out a sort of Treaty of Tordesillas 2.0 under which the Spaniards would run the fixed operation and the Portuguese the mobile. Vivo, the mobile operator, has done very well, Telefonica is jealous, and wants to buy it out. The Portuguese refused. Now Telefonica is threatening to make an offer for the whole of PT. The Portuguese government says it will have a state bank and three major Portuguese institutions vote their stock against, and perhaps even make use of a golden share that gives it reserve powers over the operator.

It's rumoured that Verizon is pushing back against a new effort by Vodafone to extract a dividend from VZW.

They're also preparing to launch a variety of smart-grid and home automation services in their FiOS fibre triple-play bundles. And they aren't holding back on pure connectivity - they recently demonstrated gigabit service over the network, in a test campaign that looked very much like a response to Google's FTTH initiative.

Last week, the Australian government and Telstra came to an agreement about the National Broadband Network plan. As a result, things are falling into place. NBN Co has issued a shortlist of 21 contractors for the civil works. They've also tapped Alcatel-Lucent as the main supplier of GPON optical network gear, which is likely to be a monster of a contract, as much as $1.5bn. The fact that former Alcatel COO Mike Quigley, once considered Serge Tchuruk's likely successor as CEO, is the boss of NBN Co has given rise to certain suspicions, especially as the CFO is also ex-Alcatel.

At the same time, the Aussies are planning to auction 126MHz of new spectrum for some A$1bn. There's something odd about Australian attitudes to the Internet - on one hand, they're planning to fibre up every dunny from Birdsville to Thursday Island, on the other hand, they've been trying for years to impose a censorship firewall on the whole country. It's the classic Australian conflict between larrikins and wowserism, being played out in a new sphere. It looks, however, like the latest effort will fall when parliament dissolves for the coming general election.

O2, Orange, and Vodafone are planning a further trial of UMTS-TDD as a mobile-TV technology (they did this back in 2006 and it worked), which would fit in the unused TDD spectrum they got with their 3G licences and use the 3GPP's Mobile Broadcast-Multicast Subsystem standard in the back-end. Apparently you can now buy part of the system from Amdocs.

Aftershocks from the Indian 3G auction. State-owned MTNL, which got its spectrum earlier, is now offering national roaming agreements to the privately owned operators, who are desperate to save on deployment costs after paying through the nose for spectrum. On the other hand, BSNL, equally nationalised, is asking for time to pay over its BWA licence.

Another study shows no reason to worry about THE RAYS!, but it won't stop them.

Having got its way with OFCOM, BT is reselling Sky Sports 1 and 2 on BT Vision at low low prices. At the same time, Sky Italia announced price cuts - are we seeing the beginning of a content price war?

The BBC Trust gives Project Canvas the go. Spotify signs up more content. Share and archive your whiteboard. The Afghan Ministry of Communications orders AWCC to block "alcohol, dating, social networking, and pornography". Apparently there's alcohol in GMail - who knew? They blocked it anyway. And Twitter, but then, it certainly gives me a headache.

feedproxy.google.com | 6/28/10 11:32 AM

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Strategy & Finance: VZW may resume paying dividends, boost VF cashflow 30%
• Online Video: VZW smartphone users get through 600-800MB/month - official
• Developer Communities: Vodafone 360 turns to Android
• Broadband Connectivity: Telstra & NBN - it's an A$11bn deal at last
• Regulation: FCC - Title II reclassification may be coming

Verizon Wireless is signalling that it may resume paying a dividend to Vodafone next year. At VZW's current monthly free cash flow, the company's debts should reach zero some time in 2011; Verizon itself is as keen as Vodafone to get its hands on VZW's profits, although they have been insistent on paying down the mobile operator's debts first. A resumption would increase Vodafone's free cash flow by 30%.

Meanwhile, VZW's CFO said that they would soon introduce a mobile data cap. Apparently, Verizon's smartphone users are consuming between 600-800MB of data a month. Connected Planet also notes that AT&T femtocell users will see their data usage on the femtocell counted against the cap - which is cheeky, seeing as the point of a femtocell is to radically reduce the costs of delivering mobile data. (Operators are always tempted by this. Recall the early version of BT Fusion, which worked at a business level by making your friends subsidise your cheap calls.)

They point out that such users are very likely to use Wi-Fi anyway, which renders the whole issue moot. Now they can do so at Starbucks, where the Wi-Fi is now free, as long as you sign in with a single identifier for advertisers' convenience.

On the other hand, AT&T has cancelled a trial of capped fixed-line DSL service, on the grounds that it costs too much.

Vodafone Portugal has launched a triple-play FTTH service, offering up to 300Mbps Internet service, HDTV to an unlimited number of TVs, and of course, voice. The service rolls out first in the Lisbon area and then expands to 200,000 homes in the first wave of deployments. Vodafone will, no doubt, be making use of open access to PT's ducts.

There's also news from Vodafone 360, the app store/social network platform they launched on two Samsung LiMO handsets earlier this year. Vodafone is now looking at integrating Android apps on 360, in order to get more developers involved (currently there are 8,500 apps on 360, compared to 50,000 on Android Market) and push the platform to a broader base of devices.

Vodafone UK has invited its customers to join the network engineering department. If you twitter which device you have, where you are, and how many bars are showing to #vodafonesignal, you'll appear on a Google Map on their website. Why you'd want to do that is another matter, as there's nothing obviously in it for the subscribers. It's telling, though, that it was easier to come up with this than pulling in the data from Vodafone's radio network. (Another data point: Foursquare, the LBS hit that doesn't bother with GPS or network location, and just asks users to say where they are.) The map is here and it's not particularly impressive.

In Australia, meanwhile, the NBN project took a step forward, as Telstra agreed to provide its layer-zero infrastructure and to undertake further universal service projects in return for A$11bn in payments from NBN Co over several years.

Reliance is preparing to sell off its towers and other civil works infrastructure, in a new business unit called Reliance Infratel, which will be the biggest non-operator owner of telecoms infrastructure in the world. They are hoping the deal will pay for their expensive spectrum commitments and permit them to pay off a substantial debt, while the new company looks likely to be a multi-tenant provider. In other network sharing news, Maxis is planning to share infrastructure, and may join the existing joint venture between the other two main operators in Malaysia.

BT, meanwhile, claims it's going to deploy fibre to 87 per cent of London by next year's Olympics, which will require some 114 local exchanges to be upgraded and another 2 million customer premises to be passed.

Brough Turner has been conducting automated tests on his Verizon FiOS link, and he's not happy about the quality of service. Download speeds vary between 1 and 21Mbps.

The FCC is looking at cracking open 90MHz of Mobile Satellite Service spectrum, possibly on the basis of a "hybrid" system like the one Harbinger/SkyTerra are proposing. It still doesn't look sensible to launch satellites so you can also deploy thousands of base stations. The Feds are also going to start taking comments on whether or not to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service in the meaning of the Communications Act, moving it under their Title II authority and giving them the ability to impose common-carrier status. This would functionally replicate most of the Net Neutrality concept, and possibly render ISPs less liable for alleged copyright violations, as well as having an impact on wholesale markets ("special access").

Unsurprisingly, the RBOCs are not happy. Connected Planet doubts if their threats are credible.

Spain is preparing to break out the 800MHz band and have a spectrum party sometime next year. Submissions to the Ministry must be in by the 15th of July.

Bad news for WiMAX: Infotel, a big winner in the Indian BWA auction, is planning to deploy the TDD flavour of LTE rather than WiMAX. On the other hand, the technology is now available in two more frequency bands. In the UK, Daisy, the current owner of what was the Pipex wireless broadband network is selling up to concentrate on its unified comms business. Its rival, Freedom4, acquires the assets and spectrum.

IBM is making a pitch to outsource entire operators' back-end activities.

Microsoft has announced another mobile operating system: ZDNet reckons that makes seven. As well as the old Windows Mobile, there's also the new Windows Phone 7, and then a whole range of different takes on Windows for various kinds of embedded, netbook, smartbook, TV, ruggedised, M2M, and other uses, which descend from the old Windows CE platform. There's a little more here.

While all that's going on, they're trying to work up buzz about Windows Phone 7 among the developers. One way is to offer them cold cash, which is precisely what MS is doing with some iPhone games developers. On the other hand, Windows Phone requires a compass in the hardware, but doesn't provide an API to it.

Twilio has launched a virtual PBX product that extends their VoiceXML-like API and acts as a sort of hybrid cloud/local application, running on your Web server but getting its telephony functions from Twilio's infrastructure. The upshot is that it provides a graphical tool for designing Voice 2.0 applications in your business. At the link, Thomas Howe is impressed.

Google is endeavouring to make Android OEMs stick to a common user interface, although surely part of the point of Android is that it allows for a maximum of customisation. Google has been described in the past as the world's favourite command line, but now they've gone the whole way, and released a software package that implements exactly that.

Apple has released some improvements to MobileMe, including an application for finding that iPhone 4 you left in a bar. Nokia has promised to integrate NFC in all its smartphones. Toshiba has a neat ARM-based netbook, sorry, smartbook.

Project Failures's Michael Krigsman experiences the iPad data breach, and confirms that the attackers did indeed carry out a dictionary attack by generating lots of possible ICC-ID numbers.

Facebook may be making $800 million this year. Everything is a platform. Should you give up on voice? F-Secure Labs give away Nokias.

feedproxy.google.com | 6/21/10 12:08 PM

Developing strategies to optimize mobile broadband profitability is a major theme of Telco 2.0's research and event agendas for the next 6 months. Competing with Facebook, collaborating with Hollywood, and better M2M strategies are also part of clarifying the roadmap to sustainable telecoms business models.
Below are previews of the agendas for our next two physical events, which complement our virtual event programme:

• 10th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm AMERICAS, 27-28 October, Los Angeles (PDF);
• 11th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm EMEA, 9-10 November, London (PDF).

(Regular readers will know that both events use our 'Mindshare' interactive format, and involve 200 invited senior execs from the Telecoms, Media and Technology sector. More information, please contact the Event Director: tom.davies@stlpartners.com or call +44 207 247 5003.)

The EMEA event agenda is here:

Fuller details on objectives and outputs will be available next week. In the meantime, here are a few more details on the topics we'll be covering:

Telco 2.0 Growth Strategies: Key business model opportunities to enhance growth, profitability and shareholder value

• Disruptive Strategies and business models, new frameworks for business model innovation, and global best practice from telco and adjacent markets


• Mobile Broadband Economics covering new strategies to optimise mobile broadband profitability.


• M2M & Embedded Mobility: Horizontal vs vertical Telecoms industry platform strategies. Best global case studies.


• Cloud computing: as an enabler of dramatic cost savings and potential new service revenues


• Managing the 'Co-opetition': Facing up to Facebook, and defending the core product (voice and messaging).


• Sweating the asset base: Case studies and use cases showing network, IT and device assets used for new sources of growth (mobile money, voice & messaging, ICT platforms).

2nd Hollywood-Telco International Summit/Digital Entertainment 2.0: New Telecoms-enabled Business Models for Film, TV and Gaming in a multi-screen, 3D/HD, mobile world.

• Online Video: Disruptive strategies and business models, latest global market developments in five key 'digital entertainment' business models.


• Defining the next TV experience: creating a differentiated online experience, fully exploiting 3-screen capabilities, and 'content anywhere' (digital locker).


• Optimising International Online Distribution: new methods for content delivery, asset management, and workflow efficiency.

New 'Direct-to-Consumer' Entertainment Services: leveraging telco consumer data and reach to create new commerce and advertising platforms, and exploring the practicalities of new 'use cases'.

New Devices: Impact on Consumer Entertainment; the role of the iPad, tablets, MIDs, 3D and Internet TV's, Set Top Boxes and Media Servers on consumer engagement; how new operating systems and hardware will enable richer consumer interaction; and market scenarios, opportunities and threats in the digital entertainment market.

The Consumer '2.0' (incorporating the Privacy 2.0 International Summit); Leveraging consumers' 'personal data and information' to invigorate the digital economy.

• Consumer Data: understanding its true economic/social value, latest output from the World Economic Forum's 'Re-thinking Personal Information' project, including a draft policy and commercial framework for telcos and key stakeholders.


• Enriching Consumer Experiences: the practicalities of leveraging consumer data to improve the quality of everyday services (Customer Management, Customer Loyalty, the impact of technologies like Augmented Reality). Realising the opportunity for telcos to take a role as 'custodians' of personal data and information.


• Augmented Reality & Mobile Apps: disruptive business model opportunities at the intersection of technology, devices and consumer data; and market scenarios, opportunities and threats in B2B and B2C.

M2M & Embedded Mobility 2.0; defining the most profitable strategic role(s) for telcos in this developing market.

• Strategies and business models: horizontal vs vertical Telecoms industry platform strategies. Best case studies from around the world.


• Beyond Connectivity: adding value through additional Telecoms enabling capabilities


• Overcoming Practical Issues: device numbering limitations, SIM inventory costs, network congestion, network service differentiation for devices/apps.

(For more information, please email our Events Director - tom.davies@stlpartners.com - or call +44 207 247 5003.)


feedproxy.google.com | 6/16/10 6:11 PM

Both fixed and mobile broadband markets will continue growing in revenues, up to $416bn in 2020, but operators face some hard decisions about future business models, according to a new study published by the Telco 2.0 Initiative.

The report, "Mobile, Fixed & Wholesale Broadband Business Models: Best Practice Innovation, 'Telco 2.0' Opportunities, Forecasts and Future Scenarios", finds that telecom operators will benefit from both new types of broadband wholesale and more sophisticated direct-to-consumer retail propositions and tariffs. Recent introductions of new tiered and capped wireless Internet data plans are early evidence of this trend.

Key findings from the report include:

• Global broadband access is forecast to increase from $274bn in 2010, to $416bn in 2020, an increase of 52% in revenue terms;


• More than half the revenue growth will come from wholesale and "two-sided" fees for improved access capacity and quality;


• By 2020, mobile broadband will be worth $138bn, or 32% of the total broadband industry revenues;


• Three new revenue streams are identified: "Bulk Wholesale", "Comes with data", "Slice and Dice";


• New 'upstream' customers are forecast to generate over $90 billion in broadband revenues globally by 2020.

Today, many operators fear the supposed risks of becoming "dumb pipes", but the study suggests the forecast market value means the term "happy pipe" is more appropriate for some. Certain telecom carriers will be able to add further value through enhanced "Telco 2.0" services and platforms, but it is important to note that the basic carriage of data can itself be profitable and a source of substantial growth.

On the conventional retail broadband side, the big winners are fibre-based fixed services and mobile data for smartphones. ADSL and cable revenues will peak in mid-decade, and then decline with substitution from the progressive deployment of fibre. PC-based mobile broadband retail revenues will grow strongly in the short term, before being impacted by price competition and a shift from user-paid retail subscriptions to new wholesale-enabled models.

The study predicts that the wholesale market for broadband will evolve in three separate directions:

• "Bulk wholesale" is an evolution of today's approach to MVNOs and data roaming in mobile, or loop-unbundling and open fibre access in fixed markets. The report predicts an acceleration of this type of wholesale provision, as governments force greater openness on telecoms licencees, and operators look to alternative partnerships to supply new market niches with capacity. There is also a possibility for parties other than the end-user to pick up the bill for subscriptions - for example, some local authorities are now providing free broadband to disadvantaged communities.


• "Comes with data" business models have started to emerge recently, with devices such as the Amazon Kindle. Here, a product vendor or service provider contracts for data capacity with the broadband provider, and bundles it in a combined offer - the user does not have a subscription or direct relationship with the telco. The report expects this approach to be important for laptops, netbooks, tablets and various other new device categories.


• "Slice and dice" wholesale is more complex, and more controversial. This involves operators selling data capacity in fine-grained "parcels" to parties other than the user, who is typically also paying for some level of access. This type of "two-sided" business model could involve deals with device vendors for inclusion of data in bundled M2M offers, or to content/application providers where they pick up the bill for data transmission rather than the end-user.

The incremental revenue opportunity for new "slice and dice" wholesale business models in mobile broadband alone is forecast to be $21bn worldwide by 2020.

According to Chris Barraclough, co-author of the report and Managing Director of Telco 2.0, "Telco 2.0 is not about throwing away existing operator business models, but about evolving them to generate additional value. In new Telco 2.0 style 'two-sided' business models, there are 'upstream' and 'downstream' customers - upstream customers are typically enterprises or merchants seeking to reach their markets - the so-called 'downstream' customers."

"As we show in this report, there are many creative ways that operators can add more value for existing downstream customers. However, it is also clear that those companies providing services over the internet will increasingly seek to mash-up connectivity more tightly with their own offerings, for example by including connectivity as a part of their products. These new 'upstream' customers are alone forecast to generate over $90 billion in broadband revenues globally by 2020."

The report's co-author and founder of Disruptive Analysis, Dean Bubley, said "Both fixed and mobile operators need to look beyond the traditional 'end user subscription mindset', and examine new and innovative wholesale opportunities. At the same time, they need to embrace radical evolution of their retail portfolios - for example, supporting prepaid fixed broadband, or offering innovative tiering and policy structures for mobile Internet access from smartphones and tablets. Whoever coined the term 'dumb pipe' has cost the industry billions in shareholder value".

The report, "Mobile, Fixed and Wholesale Broadband Business Models: Best Practice Innovation, 'Telco 2.0' Opportunities, Forecasts and Future Scenarios" is available to buy from Telco 2.0. For more information, please see here, email contact@telco2.net, or call +44 207 247 5003.

feedproxy.google.com | 6/16/10 11:47 AM

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• End-User Services: O2 UK latest to re-price data
• Broadband Connectivity: Containing the iPhone signalling flood
• Online Video: iPhone 4 tries to revive video calls
• Technology Disruptions: HTC Evo, the 'Droid that streams HD video to your TV
• Customer Data: When Facebook data mining just isn't worth it
• The Sixth Bullet...: Take me back to prison - ex-Qwest CEO Nacchio

Don't forget to register for our FREE virtual (online) event - Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! Over 30 presentations from senior execs from around the world addressing important aspects of business model innovation. Strategies, case studies and use cases covering: Mobile broadband; Digital Entertainment; IT & Cloud Computing; Mobile Advertising; M2M; Voice & Messaging 2.0; Consumer Data/Privacy; Living with Google; Mobile Payments, and more...Register FREE here.

Data repricing watch; O2 UK is the latest operator to (re)introduce tiered pricing, with monthly buckets ranging from 500MB on contracts between £25 and £35 to 1GB for £60. Another 500 costs a fiver. Oddly enough, existing unlimited contracts (and anyone who signs up before the 24th) get to keep their unlimited status, so the famous USB dongle torrent freaks and radio network controller-mangling iPhone fans aren't affected yet.

As well as putting prices up, the operator has called in Nokia Siemens Networks to boost supply. The investment is targeted as a quick-hit project, concentrating on data service in central London and using Nokia Flexi multisector base stations to double the number of sectors available. (Also, Wind Telecom signed a major upgrade contract with Huawei for both HSPA+ and LTE.) There is much more on this issue in our Broadband Business Models report, extensively revised for 2010.

There's a rather good piece by Mike Hibberd of Mobile Comms International on the iPhone signalling load problem. NSN's latest products implement a paging channel, which is standardised by 3GPP but isn't mandatory, that could be used to limit the number of signalling messages generated by "chatty" smartphone applications. We've mentioned before that the radio paging channel is a hidden telco asset.

The poster child for this problem is, unhappily, the industry's flagship product. This week saw the launch of the latest Apple iPhone, of which Computer Weekly has a comprehensive review. A new feature is that it finally gets a user-facing camera for video calls - if your network engineers were surprised by the iPhone's signalling demands, wait 'til the circuit-switched video channel fills up. You might find the leftovers from your Millenium Eve party in there.

Actually, we're going in too hard there. At the moment, it only works over WLAN. This is probably less of a restriction than it seems - it's even harder to make a convincing case for video as something analogous to mobile voice, ubiquitous and instant, than it is to make one for video as something like fixed voice, where you have to be sitting down near a telephone at the moment you want to communicate. The great bulk of actual video telephony is of course on Skype, or on enterprise webcast or telepresence systems - all of these require that you're sitting comfortably, having negotiated the video element in advance.

It may be more of an issue that you can only call other iPhone users.

Rumours are circulating that there may soon be an announcement from Google on voice, specifically, integrating it into the GMail chat function. This should be technically simple - Google Chat/Talk (the terminology depends on whether it's integrated in GMail or in a standalone application) is an implementation of the much loved XMPP messaging protocol, whose VoIP extension (Jingle) Google created. So it's a question of binding the Jingle signalling messages to HTTP requests (XMPP developers call this BOSH and do it quite a lot) and talking to the user's speakers and microphone from inside the browser, which Flash has done for years.

(There's a good piece on why people, Steve Jobs chief among them, don't like Flash here.)

Oddly, though, there doesn't seem to be much going on around integrating Google Voice, which is mostly a Web interface for traditional SS7 telephony, with the GTalk/GChat platform.

After 14 hours, meanwhile, Google turned off a brief experiment with putting a picture on their front page.

Apple also amended the iPhone developer agreement to ban in-application adverts from networks other than iAd (read: Google). In fact, it goes further. You can't gather stats that might be useful to advertisers without getting their permission in writing. More here.

Someone who certainly did gather useful information on iPad users is now on the lam from the FBI, as last week it was discovered that hackers had acquired 114,000 e-mail addresses of iPad users, including numerous VIPs, by spoofing an AT&T Web site with the devices' ICC-IDs, an information field from the SIM card. (How they acquired these isn't clear - they could have been somehow extracted from the network, or they might have discovered a way to generate all the possible IDs and carry out a dictionary attack.)

It's meanwhile being rumoured that Foxconn is planning to move production capacity out of China, relocating to India, Vietnam, or back home to Taiwan. However, we're a little suspicious that the number of employees given is roughly double what everyone else thinks it is, and so high that Foxconn would be a similar size to the NHS in terms of full-time equivalent staff, or half the size of Indian Railways or the Chinese State Electricity Grid.

On the other side of the smartphone business, HTC's Evo, a WiMAX/EVDO Android device launched on Sprint this week, setting the highest first day sales in the operator's history. Unfortunately, the previous record holder is the Palm Pre, so you have to make allowances. The gadget is getting good reviews, focusing on its monster, 4.3-inch touchscreen. However, it's going to make your network beg for mercy - an unusual feature is an HDMI socket, so you can hook a hi-def TV set to it, presumably to watch high definition video streaming. It also comes with the Qik personal video creation app pre-installed - Qik said that the launch weekend saw 20 times the average level of traffic through their servers.

However, Sprint later had to revise down the sales numbers, and a lot of people appear to be disappointed by battery life - although that would be no different to any other 'droid in our experience. On the network side, Clearwire put its head on the block and promised to stick with unlimited data plans, presumably betting on not having the signalling issues AT&T has experienced. (In the light of last week's Phone Scoop drive test, though, they may be mistaken.)

The Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin writes in Business Week that the mobile market is separating into Apple, and the rest, who all run on Linux, and that open-source products have a duty to be "fabulous".

Apple Insider runs a piece on the emergence of Microsoft Windows Mobile malware, specifically diallers, and demonstrates that their name is indeed accurate. If you're distributing applications through the Android Market (so, the great majority of cases), users have to review which capabilities they will use before installing; hardly "security free".

Nokia's strategy to leverage its huge emerging market user base took a step forward, as the C3, a low-cost smartphone based on Symbian Series 40, had a big launch week in Indonesia. It may have helped that Telkomsel was giving away data for the first month.

The release-candidate version of Nokia's Qt SDK is out.

How do you know you're a telco? When you buy an Amdocs billing system. Time was when Vonage was a scary new VoIP player. It's like moving to the suburbs and buying an estate car. What they're actually getting is the BSS Pack product, which is the cut-down, quick install version that provides the core billing/CRM/OSS features.

Iliad closed on a $1.7bn line of credit from a syndicate of eight European banks to finance the first steps of its mobile network. After the Indian 3G auction, the Wireless Broadband auction closed, with Infotel getting a nationwide licence for a fairly chunky $2.74bn.

The Apple video-calling announcement gave this week's news a heady flavour of the year 2000. As if on cue, messaging vendor Syniverse Technologies reported that it's seeing year-on-year growth of 235% in MMS traffic, of all things. The interesting bit is the reason why - rather than sending photos to each other at 50p a shot, or subscribing to "content" delivered in MMS messages, it's quietly become a significant route for uploading photos, video, text, and sound into social networking applications. Rather than a peer-to-peer, unicast, retail, standalone application, MMS has eventually turned out to be a one-to-many, multicast, wholesale, enabling technology. So all we got wrong was the use case, the business model, the customer, and the pricing.

More retro: a row between BT and OFCOM about premium rate numbers. BT reckons it can set termination fees as a percentage of whatever the originating operator charged the caller; OFCOM says no.

The European Court of Justice upheld the roaming caps, thus ending a three-year lawsuit with several operators. And the EU's Article 29 working party has told Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft that they're still breaking the law on data protection - they need to anonymise harder.

Meanwhile, the Guardian fact-checks the UK Government's revised broadband plans. Key detail - the Tories are opposed to paying out public money for reachability, but the great majority of the people who can't get broadband are in the broad acres of safe Tory constituencies. Work that out. Perhaps they're worried about keeping them down on the farm once they've seen Paris?

Vimpelcom wants to help you keep your robots in line - it's announced what it claims is the first M2M platform in Russia, as a partnership with Jasper Wireless. Thinking of Telenor Objects, perhaps operators in places with lots of space, relatively few people, and oil pipelines have a strategic advantage here?

Security guru Ross Anderson liveblogged an international conference on economics and information security.

How a search company decided that mining Facebook data wasn't worth it.

Installing HTML5 applications. A world without PowerPoint. Engineering for kids. HP pays $460 million damages over project failure. 30 essential Android applications. And disgraced Qwest CEO petitions court to be taken back to jail.

feedproxy.google.com | 6/14/10 1:11 PM

At a time when telcos are being re-rated as quasi utilities by investors, the importance of creating sophisticated and effective strategies for new growth is becoming ever more pressing. But the recent Telco 2.0 'Executive Brainstorm' demonstrated that the clock is ticking fast and the opportunity could slip away from Telcos as nimbler competitors from adjacent industries take the value.

There's a write up of the top level take-outs and votes from the Brainstorm here.

Below are two useful videos from the event below showing Telco 2.0's CEO, Simon Torrance, interviewed by Telecom TV on the overall messages, and our Director of Consulting, Phil Laidler, outlining the opportunity in enterprise services.

Simon Torrance, CEO Telco 2.0, on the overall messages.

Phil Laidler, Director of Consulting, Telco 2.0, outlines the enterprise services opportunity.

feedproxy.google.com | 6/10/10 7:54 AM

This is an open invitation to our readers to join strategy leaders from around the world for Telco 2.0's first 'Best Practice Live!' virtual (online) event being broadcast to 3 timezones on 28-30 June 2010. We've collected some of the best Telco 2.0 strategies, case studies and use cases from around the globe. You can register for FREE here.

As well as the Telco 2.0 analysts, leading industry speakers include:

• Hans Vestberg, President and CEO, Ericsson
• Olivier Baujard, Group CTO, Deutsche Telekom
• Dr Hans Wijayasuriya, CEO, Dialog Group
• Sally Davis, CEO, BT Wholesale
• Prof. Sandy Pentland, Human Dynamics Lab, MIT
• JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist, BT Group
• William Hoffman, Associate Director, World Economic Forum
• Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO, Telus
• Joe Weinman, VP Strategy, AT&T Business Solutions
• Cenk Serdar, VP International Payments, Vodafone Group
• Roberto Saracco, Director Future Centre, Telecom Italia
• Marie Austenna, VP Strategy, Telenor Objects
• Chris Hitchens, VP Business Transformation, Oracle
• Armin Hessler, Head of Enterprise IT Strategy, Vodafone Group
• Rolf Assev, Chief Strategy Officer, Opera Software
• Marc Davis, Co-Founder, Invention Arts

Telco 2.0 'Best Practice Live!' is part of a programme to curate and communicate a knowledge bank of the best case studies, use cases and strategies from across the globe, in key 'Telco 2.0' areas: Corporate Growth Strategy; Mobile Broadband Economics; Customer Experience & Service Innovation; Machine-to-Machine; Consumer Data/Identity Services; Voice & Messaging; Apps & AppStores; Mobile Advertising & Marketing; Online Video Distribution & Entertainment Services; Mobile Money; Cloud Computing.

It will be repeated quarterly with new content and the virtual exhibition will be udpated with the leading 'Telco 2.0' vendors. More information below:

The aim is to give players across the Telecoms, Media and Technology sector tangible examples of what they can do to enhance their business models, using rich, interactive virtual event technology to disseminate and discuss these practical ideas.

The Telco 2.0 analyst team will also be presenting updated analysis on 'Living with Google', 'M2M 2.0' and other key topics, and there will be other case study presentations and examples from those leading the way in business model innovation from around the world, including AT&T, World Economic Forum, BT, Vodafone, AdMob, Ericsson, Opera, Telecom Italia, DoCoMo, 3UK, Telefonica Argentina, Telus, MIT, O2 Media, Amazon and Safaricom.

How does it work? Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! is made up of short (15 minute) pre-recorded video presentations (to our template), which are then broadcast online at set times as part of the event. Online Q&A between speakers (and their representatives) and delegates follows afterwards. There are multiple tracks, based on Telco 2.0 themes, and an online exhibition. The event is broadcast to 3 timezones, as per below and is then available 'on-demand' afterwards for 3 months:

• 28th June (Americas - 0900-1700 Mountain Time)
• 29th June (EMEA - 0900-1700 British Summer Time)
• 30th June (APAC - 0900-1700 Hong Kong Time)

Register for FREE here.

What next? Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! will be refreshed with new cutting edge 'Telco 2.0' case studies, use cases and strategies for new events on 28-30 September and 7-9 December 2010.

Get involved If your company has cutting-edge case studies, use cases or strategies that you feel could grow the entire market if they were more widely adopted, or you would like to exhibit and/or sponsor, please contact us.

In the meantime, registration for 28-30 June is now open here.

Website here.

feedproxy.google.com | 6/9/10 4:50 PM

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

• Broadband Connectivity: BT fibre unbundling terms revealed, and how to blow fibre on poles
• End-User Services: AT&T intros tiered data prices
• Technology Disruptions: Tested: HSPA+ vs. WiMAX. HSPA wins
• Voice 2.0: Mobile Skype - free to VZW users, not to AT&T users
• Bonus Broadband Bullet: Top 10 cities for Internet service - it's either big infrastructure or layer zero anarchy
• Event: Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live, 28-30 June: CxOs from BT, DTAG, Ericsson, Telus, etc join in

We are delighted by the response to the inaugural Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! virtual event, broadcast online to 3 geographies worldwide on 28-30 June. Senior execs from around the world are preparing special presentations for this FREE event - including Olivier Baujard, new Group CTO, Deutsche Telekom and Sally Davies, CEO, BT Wholesale. Support also from MIT, the World Economic Forum, Vodafone, Telecom Italia, Telenor and others. You can register for FREE here.

More information on the accelerated BT fibre roll-out: the European Union has spoken, and it has decided that the carrier will have to offer so-called "virtual unbundled line access" to its wholesale customers in the first instance. This seems to be an odd hybrid of a wholesale generic Ethernet product and unbundling, which will still use BT's electronic kit. However, although OFCOM thinks that will be enough, the EU insists that eventually they will have to transition to full LLU with physical third-party control of the fibre and colocation of third party equipment.

We were ploughing through the BT Investors' Day transcripts for unrelated reasons, and one thing that stands out is that they seem to have come up with some handy new tricks about fibre deployment - for example, they've been trying out laying plastic conduits on the pole infrastructure, so that the fibre can later be blown to the premises in a one-shot manoeuvre. The people who are going to carry out that manoeuvre, meanwhile, are going on strike for the first time since privatisation in 1985.

In other infrastructure news, this was the week AT&T brought in tiered pricing for mobile data. Crack financial blogger Felix Salmon has some questions for them, notably about why you can't just be switched automatically to the heavy user plan for the rest of the month if you burst the cap. He also wants to know why low users can't roll over unused capacity from month to month. The answer is probably because the costs are driven by peak busy hour usage on the heaviest cells, so letting people save up their megabytes and then drink the lot doesn't help AT&T manage its outgoings. It is, however, true that operators who want to put up prices for heavy users ought to look at cutting them for low users - otherwise, there's a structural incentive for the BlackBerry users to buy more capacity than they need, which is both uneconomic for them and an encouragement to guzzle the lot rather than let it go to waste.

Wired points out that this means doom for mobile streaming-music services, as the $15/month data plan would be consumed with 7 hours of music. But this was never a good idea anyway. The typical commuter use case involves trains, railway tunnels, and such, and the availability of multi-gigabyte storage and iTunes on the device undercut the whole rationale.

Undeterred, the founders of Skype have launched a streaming music service with social features (a bit like Last.fm, really, or rather, quite a lot like it).

The New York Times interviews some app developers who are concerned about the move. They also mention that the development of the iPhone itself is tending to increase data demand. Notably, the arrival of a front-facing camera for video telephony looks likely to increase uplink traffic - as will improvements in the camera in general (and just wait for the Nokia N8 users...). Qik, for example, is offering VGA-quality video free and high definition video for $5.

Hewlett Packard is planning to give all its printers their own e-mail address, in order to let smartphone users print to them more easily - which is another uplink heavy application ("Let me print you this 10MB PDF file..."). Notoriously, many HP printers are accessible from the Web by default, by dint of a well-known Google search, so this is something of an improvement (although the spam filter better be good).

TelecomTV has a series of discussions - not so much a webinar as a whole web symposium - on the subject of net neutrality and mobile.

In the light of all this traffic, which is best - HSPA, LTE, or WiMAX? We've been arguing about this, but PhoneScoop went out and drivetested various devices and applications against T-Mobile USA's upgraded HSPA and Sprint's WiMAX networks. The results are interesting - both of them are acceptable, but HSPA+ can sometimes beat WiMAX for downlink, usually beats it for uplink, and also beats it for latency. The latency issue may tell us something about their comparative network architectures, specifically that T-Mobile is probably using a product like NSN's iHSPA 2.0 base station that breaks out Internet traffic at the lowest possible level.

WiMAX is meant to be a flat architecture technology, of course, which only makes the point more telling. They may also be doing something interesting with regard to their peering, colocation, and CDN strategy. Anyway, it's a fine example of the enduring truth of kaizen.

It's been a grim couple of weeks for WiMAX - as Wireless Watch points out, a major force in this has been the arrival of a TDD (Time Division Duplex) version of LTE, which opens up a lot of unpaired spectrum for LTE use. The WiMAX Forum headquarters in Beaverton, meanwhile, shuts down.

And Clearwire has discovered one way of monetising WiMAX spectrum: wait until AT&T is gagging for data capacity, and sell it.

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs is disappointed with take-up of FLO TV - it is still very much the case that people who want to watch TV - broadcast, big content, long format, non-interactive video - usually watch TV. It works, a lot of it is free-to-air, there is a nice big screen, and a comfy chair. Web video isn't the same stuff. It's worth noting that Jacobs is worried that his operator customers may decide to use the FLO spectrum for their generic mobile data service.

So, last week, we learned that AT&T (and by extension, Apple) were now cool with a Skype app for the iPhone, as long as iPhone-to-iPhone calls were charged for. This week, it emerged that Verizon Wireless users will still get the full benefit of Skype - and their Android devices will let it run as a service (Android's term for what other Linux/Unix systems call a daemon) in the background, as well. Connected Planet speculates that the difference may be that VZW is getting a share of SkypeOut revenues.

There's a fascinating thread at Skype Journal, which confirms that the Skype for iPhone (Skyphone?) app is a proper Skype node, rather than either a special SS7 dialler or a SIP client - which means that Skype is proposing to charge AT&T subscribers for calls that don't pass through the Skype infrastructure, something of a first. Unsurprisingly, users are not pleased, and Phil Wolff points out that they can no longer say "Skype to Skype calls are free", rather "Skype to Skype calls are free except when they're not". This isn't the best sales pitch ever.

Verizon, meanwhile, added its own carrier-VoIP service to more FiOS bundles, thus demonstrating still further the approach of a post-PSTN world. After all, VZ line technicians are in the habit of cutting the copper wires when they install a fibre connection.

VZW has formed a new partnership to promote itself as a smart grid enabler - specifically, it's keen on extending corporate networks out on mobile, something we've often cited as a role for telcos in the future.

RLECs oppose the National Broadband Plan...because the nation is planning for insufficient breadth in their view.

Brough Turner has a list of the top 10 cities for average broadband speeds, based on Speedtest.net's aggregate statistics. Seoul is top, unsurprisingly, followed by Riga and Hamburg, giving the list an odd Hanseatic flavour (herrings, probably). Stockholm is up there, but it's interesting that places 7-10 go to Sofia, Bucharest, and Kharkov - Brough theorises that this is the result of extreme open access, aka "just hang your damn fibre on the lampposts!" That's borne out by Lisbon being no.9 - Portugal is one of the earliest markets to get open access to ducts. This post applies.

So, India's mobile operators are waking up from the 3G spectrum auction to the hangover, the buyers' remorse, and all that good stuff. Reliance Communications has an instant fix for their huge bill - flog a 26% stake of the company. Apparently, Etisalat and AT&T are in the running.

Samsung's LiMo-powered, WAC-standardised Wave launched in the UK this week...and delivered assorted malware to German users' Windows PCs. Rather than shipping an install CD for the various utilities that the gadget comes with, Samsung decided to ship the gadget with a big microSD card, and to load the installer on that - when the user connects it to a Windows PC, the AutoPlay function executes the installer, and in this case, the virus.

Microsoft promised Windows tablets, while Intel demonstrated some MeeGo ones, and a range of Linux distributions lined up their flavours of the new mobile Linux standard, including Novell, makers of the enterprise SUSE Linux. Netbooks are coming next year.

MS also cancelled a slightly odd scheme under which it paid random users to search the Web with Bing, and before that, Live Search. The idea was that advertisers would kick back a percentage of the purchase price to anyone who bought from them having searched with MS. Hilariously, someone worked out that they might be able to sell money for more than its face value, and share the reward with the buyer in such a way as to make them both come out ahead at Redmond's expense.

Microsoft's mobile strategy is apparently to let you get at all your stuff from your phone, by putting it in the cloud. This seems to be a lot like Nokia Ovi, or for that matter, Google services on Android.

Apple is going to announce the next iPhone, which looks likely to be a lot like the last one, with some incremental improvements. Kaizen again. Daring Fireball advises Apple to beat the charge that the iPhone OS is too closed by offering a configuration option to turn off all the security features.

Felix Salmon, meanwhile, learns that Apple iAds are much more expensive than the usual Web rates - as we predicted - and that they're dependent on an active Internet connection.

In ironic news, Apple has deployed a demonstration of HTML5, boasting that it was "designed with Web standards", and made it detect the browser user-agent and only run on Safari. In fact, Firefox, Chrome, and IE8 support HTML5, although there are differences between them and the Apple browser - one wonders if it works with other WebKit browsers like the Nokia browser and Konqueror. Actually, we don't wonder - we checked, and it doesn't, although the demos do work on the developer site.

At Foxconn, meanwhile, a second round of pay rises adds up to 96% for some workers by the end of 2010.

Nokia's developer contest is out. It's also added more gadgets to its Remote Device Access testing service.

A cautionary tale: Digg learns that even super-high traffic Web platforms can lose customers as fast as they gain them. Zuckerberg speaks, doesn't say much. Yahoo! tries to opt-in all its e-mail addresses to a social network product. And Twitter increases its intellectual level, with Twitter for cats.

feedproxy.google.com | 6/7/10 11:42 AM

Many mobile operators have to deal with short-term problems around capacity utilisation and improved management of their existing networks, as well as evolution to 3.5G/4G networks and new business models (as featured in our latest strategy report New Mobile, Fixed and Wholesale Broadband Business Models).

Last week we published the articles Optimising Mobile Broadband Economics: Key Issues and Next Steps, analysing the output of the mobile broadband session at the latest Telco 2.0 Brainstorm, and 'LTE - Long Term Enthusiasm?', an analysis of the recent LTE Summit by our long-term associate Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis.

This week we're highlighting the publication of a new Disruptive Analysis research paper: The Top 10 Technology-Led Approaches to Traffic Management for Mobile Broadband which focuses on solutions possible in the near term with existing technologies.

Dealing with Now while Planning for Next

While future deployments of LTE or HSPA+ will add more capacity for mobile operators, it is still critical to examine ways to reduce congestion on a shorter-term basis. Even with future 3G / 4G capacity additions, the hunger from new applications - especially those based around video or other rich media - will demand strong discipline for optimisation.

The Factors are Complex

There are many ways to control traffic, or minimise its impact on the most expensive parts of the cellular network. There are arguments for offload to WiFi or femtocells, traffic-shaping compression in the core network, or numerous forms of innovation for policy management and charging. [NB Telco 2.0 covers the concept of "managed" offload extensively as a Use Case in the new Broadband Business Models report here.]

Operators are facing a bewildering set of choices here, as almost every vendor evolves and repositions its product range to assist in the traffic management challenge. Disruptive Analysis' new research paper gives an independent perspective on these approaches, and is the first we've seen that highlights the range of traffic management options available - and the operational and organisational challenges involved in moving from "fire-fighting" isolated problems to a more holistic medium term view, and on towards the 4G deployment horizon.

And the Answer is...

Dean says that there is no single, easy answer, and that the best approach will depend on a given operator's existing customer base and its behaviour, the mix of smartphones and laptops on its network, the operator's spectrum and cell site holdings...and its forecasts and beliefs about the future.

In many operators, there is also an organisational and management problem: there is often no single individual who "owns" the issue of data traffic, who can develop a holistic solution. Instead, there are often diverse individuals who pursue narrow goals, which can have unintended consequences elsewhere in the network - or impacts customer experience.

In almost no operator is there an individual with the job title of "Policy Manager".

To Buy the Disruptive Analysis Report

More details on the new Disruptive Analysis paper on Top 10 Technologies for Mobile Broadband Traffic Management are here. The paper is based on dozens of meetings and interviews conducted over the past few months, and a total of 100+ conversations with operators and vendors since the beginning of 2009, and Dean has asked us to tell you that prices start at $350.

feedproxy.google.com | 6/2/10 8:21 PM