It looks like iPhone hysteria has reached a new high [or low], as mobile operator 3 Australia turns to begging Apple to let it have the 3G device.

The company has posted a petition on its web site, calling for subscribers to post messages about how much they want the iPhone. Apparently, 3 hopes it can convince Apple to let it carry the device if it drums up enough interest.

Perhaps jumping the gun a bit, interested parties can also register their interest in the iconic device.

Rival Australian carriers Vodafone, Optus and Telstra have already announced plans to launch the iPhone 3G on July 11, meaning it’s just 3 that’s left out in the cold.

“We’ve been talking the folks at Apple to bring the iPhone to 3. With the official launch of the iPhone just two weeks away, it won’t be available right away, but we’re hopeful it will happen really soon,” the petition says.

But Ovum analyst Nathan Burley questions why 3 would want to generate even more iPhone hype when the operator is not offering the device? “Perhaps the registrations and potential iPhone 3G sales can get 3 over the line with discussions at Apple. Perhaps the carrier thinks it can stop customers churning for the iPhone with the hope the device will come to 3 soon - at a potentially lower cost. Or perhaps by communicating its own iPhone frustrations 3 can make subscribers more loyal. Alternatively, for a conspiracy theory, perhaps 3 will be launching the device but needed a fresh media angle,” said Burley.

But the analyst adds, “Such developments are surely unprecedented for any other mobile, or for that matter any consumer product. And although the campaign is positioned as giving customers a voice, the exercise is embarrassing for 3 as it is an admission of its subscale and unimportance.”

 
 
 
 
Telecoms professionals are split down the middle on whether increasing bandwidth demands are likely to break the internet.

According to a survey of 372 industry professionals, carried out by research firm IDC at the NXTcomm08 conference in Las Vegas this week, of the 51 per cent who see trouble ahead, one in four think it could happen within two years.

Inline with recent media coverage, video is seen by the industry naysayers as the biggest bandwidth hog, with 43 per cent of respondents believing that up to 30 per cent of overall internet traffic is video today, while 40 per cent expect that to increase to up to 75 per cent in five years.

The survey respondents speculated a similar fate for mobile data, with 50 per cent saying that video puts the biggest bandwidth demand on mobile networks today, while 81 per cent believe that will still be true in five years.

“The findings of this survey make it very plain that bandwidth is not infinite,” said Lee Doyle, group VP and general manager for Network Infrastructure and Security Products and Services at IDC. “Unless there is sufficient investment into new infrastructure, the increased bandwidth demands of new advanced services could well outstrip capacity.”

Controversially, of the 80 per cent who identified a way to deal with internet congestion, 32 per cent think providers address spikes in traffic by prioritising via packet inspection, while 24 per cent believe that spikes are better handled by charging more for excess bandwidth.

The survey was commissioned by telecoms kit maker Tellabs.

Now we know. After weeks of speculation as to when Xohm, the WiMAX business unit of Sprint Nextel, would launch commercial services, Barry West, Sprint Nextel CTO and president of Xohm, finally named the month (if not the day).

Addressing conference delegates in his keynote presentation Tuesday at the WiMAX Forum Global Congress in Amsterdam, he said the first commercial Xohm service will start this September in Baltimore. “Mobile WiMAX services will follow in the Washington DC and Chicago markets during Q4 2008,” he said. “We’re already looking at other markets to launch after that.”

West says that over 575 Xohm WiMAX base station sites are on air, with a number of devices going through its own testing labs. “It’s the only [communications] technology I know where the chipset evolution for devices is going faster than the infrastructure,” he said. Talking to telecoms.com, West added. “The access devices available at launch will include a Samsung AirCard, a modem from ZyXEL, a ZTE USB dongle, the Nokia Internet tablet [N810]”, and Intel inside laptops. Others will follow.”

The original Xohm target for commercial launch was April 2008. One of the reasons publicly cited by Sprint Nextel for not making the April launch was lack of backhaul capacity. That problem has now been resolved, says West. “As we’ve sorted out the logistical issues with site deployment, we’re getting much better at securing backhaul capacity through fibre-optic and microwave links,” he says.

West also reports that Xohm’s back-office systems, responsible for billing and customer management, are nearly ready. “I’m probably two months behind where I thought I would be [on the back-office] but we are testing the software now [primarily from Amdocs] and we are very pleased with it. We can now activate a device over the air under five minutes and set up a billing relationship with the customer.”

The distribution of non-subsidised WiMAX-embedded devices through independent outlets is a key part of the Xohm business model, as is billing for customers rather than devices (the prevalent business model in the cellular world). West wouldn’t reveal any details of Xohm tariff packages in Amsterdam other than to say they would be simple to understand.

As anticipated, West poked fun at the high data-rate claims made by LTE supporters and those that branded WiMAX as a niche technology. “If its niche then it’s a global niche,” said West, referring to the fact there are now over 300 WiMAX deployments around the world.

One of the main weaknesses of LTE compared with WiMAX, argues West, is the lack of a developed chipset ecosystem. WiMAX has 23 chipset vendors while LTE chipsets are dominated by one or two companies. “LTE could wither without multiple chipset vendors,” says West.

West believes LTE will not be rolled out in any significant volumes until the 2012-13 period as operators, who have already invested a lot in HSPA, hold back on 4G investment.

Research from security specialist Unisys suggests that consumers remain wary of using their mobile phones as payment mechanisms, driven by concerns over security. Of more than 13,000 mobile subscribers from 14 countries surveyed in March, 71 per cent said that they would not consider using a mobile device to bank or shop online.

Scepticism was highest in France, where 86 per cent expressed their reluctance, while residents of the UK (79 per cent), Australia (78 per cent), Belgium and Italy (both at 77 per cent), and the US (71 per cent), revealed themselves to be extremely cautious towards the concept of mobile payments.

The research also revealed that 59 per cent of the sample did not trust in the security of mobile device for financial services, while only nine per cent of the total base had ever made mobile transactions of this nature. This figure was lowest in the UK, where only one per cent of respondents had used these services.

The survey of German users revealed yielded a more positive outlook. Twenty-one per cent of German respondents currently use a mobile phone or personal organiser to conduct financial transactions, representing the highest percentage of any country or region included in the survey.

Survey results suggested that users are far more willing to trust banks for secure financial transactions than they are to rely on network operators and online retailers, although there were variations region to region. Italians, for example were almost twice as likely as Malaysians (72 per cent to 38 per cent) to trust a bank to secure a mobile transaction.

“Despite unprecedented growth in the number of cell phone users and the advancement of mobile technologies, telecom providers, online retailers, and financial institutions seem unable to convince consumers worldwide that a secure platform exists for conducting online mobile transactions,” said Tim Kelleher, vice president of enterprise security at Unisys. “There is a great deal of money to be made in mobile payments, but only when consumers believe that the security of the transaction meets or exceeds the freedom of using mobile devices.”

Unisys argued that these responses indicated a need for further collaboration between the financial and telecom communities. “The fact that consumers trust banks more than others to secure mobile transactions bodes well for the financial-services industry,” Kelleher said. “But banks must still find ways to work alongside telecom providers and retailers to leverage their innovation while educating consumers on the realities of mobile banking and payment security. Collectively, they must prove that conducting a financial transaction via a mobile device is as secure as doing so on a desktop computer or in front of a bank teller at a local branch.”

Mobile advertising is almost ten times more effective on young consumers than other forms of advertising, according to research released by mobile ad firm JumpTap.

On Thursday the firm announced the results of a study which it commissioned from Research and Analysis of Media (RAM), carried out over a sample group of 300 Swedish TeliaSonera mobile users.

RAM discovered that the impact of mobile advertising on the 16-24 age group was significant, with 9 per cent responding that they would likely make a purchase. This compares to a likelihood of 0 per cent on other forms of advertising. Female users also proved susceptible to the mobile medium, and are apparently twice as likely, at 15 per cent, to make a purchase following a mobile ad than any other kind.

The research also revealed a greater recall rate for brands advertising on mobile platforms. Although approximately one third of respondents had no familiarity with the advertisers beforehand, around 10 per cent of 16-24 year olds and 28 per cent of 45-79 year-olds stated they would seek out more information on a brand following a mobile ad. This compares to 0 per cent of the 16-24 age group and only 13 per cent of the 45-79 age group who would look for more information after seeing other advertisements.

The claims tally with those of ad funded MVNO Blyk, which has announced average advertising response rates of 29 per cent. Compared to other forms of mass market advertising, this figure is phenomenal, against a 0.5 per cent response rate for online advertising and 4.5 per cent from unprofiled SMS.

However, industry analyst and telecoms.com parent, Informa Telecoms & Media, recently warned that mobile advertising has yet to convince the big hitters. The analyst revealed that the majority of early adopter big brands are yet to transfer more than 0.5 per cent of their advertising budget onto mobile.

But while this is in part down to the much maligned issues of non-existent measurement and premium pricing associated with early formats of mobile advertising, the analyst argues that these are short term hurdles and forecasts that the global mobile advertising market will rocket from $1.72bn in 2008 to $12.09bn by 2013.

 
 
 
 
As expected, California’s king of cool gadgetry, Steve Jobs, delivered the goods on Tuesday.

It’s got tri-band HSDPA; it’s got GPS; it costs just $199 or free and it’ll be here next month. Yep, it’s the next generation iPhone.

During the opening keynote for the Apple World Wide Developers Conference, held in the Moscone Centre in San Fransisco this week, Apple frontman Jobs unveiled the latest incarnation of the iconic device.

The iPhone 3G will be available in more than 70 countries later this year, with rollout beginning on July 11 with 22 countries - Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the US.

The gadget will come in two sizes and will be subsidised by carriers, so the 8GB model is priced at $199, while the 16GB unit costs $299.

The previously announced iPhone 2.0 software includes support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and runs the hundreds of third party applications already built with the recently released iPhone SDK. An enterprise focus means contact and calendar syncing as well as remote wipe and Cisco IPsec VPN for encrypted access to corporate networks.

Jobs assured the industry the 3G unit also supports easier multitasking with simultaneous voice and data communications, as well as intelligent switching between wifi, EDGE and 3G to provide the optimal connection at all times.

A new battery means ten hours of talk time on 2G networks and five hours using 3G, with up to five to six hours of web browsing, up to seven hours for video playback and up to 24 hours for audio playback.

A plethora of mini updates include mass move and delete multiple email messages, search for contacts, a new scientific calculator, parental control restrictions for specified content, and taking a leaf out of Nokia’s book - MobileMe. This is an internet service that pushes email, contacts, and calendars from an online “cloud” to native applications on iPhone, removing the need to manually check email and wait for downloads, whilst contacts and calendars on any Apple device are synced and continuously kept up to date. Users can also take photos and post it directly to a MobileMe Gallery online.

The new gadget also includes the App Store, which allows users to purchase and download applications wirelessly and instantly. The App Store will be available in 62 countries at launch.

Click here for a list of countries in which the iPhone will be available

 
 
 
 
The world’s biggest handset vendor, Nokia, and two outsiders, RIM (BlackBerry) and Apple, stand to gain most by pioneering fresh revenue streams for the mobile handset industry with their emerging push into value added services such as navigation, email and music.

Industry analyst Strategy Analytics said Wednesday that Nokia, BlackBerry and Apple are the first handset vendors to realise that global handset revenues are approaching a peak and fresh growth streams must be found in mobile services.

It’s been well documented that a cocktail of promising applications for wireless consumers is already emerging, such as GPS navigation from Nokia, push email from BlackBerry and music from Apple.

Current revenues from the respective strategies of all three vendors are modest, but growing. Chris Ambrosio, executive director of wireless at Strategy Analytics, said: “We estimate Nokia generated less than one percent of global revenue from its Ovi services sub-brand during 2007. Sales may be tiny, but they are growing.”

Strategy Analytics estimates that Nokia’s VAS proportion can realistically achieve 5 per cent of turnover by 2012. “The real impact of Ovi, and other content offered by handset vendors however, will be in increased shipments of profitable, rich-media smartphones that will be necessary for accessing these advanced services,” said Ambrosio.

The news comes just as Nokia is reported to have struck a revenue sharing deal with Buongiorno, the world’s largest mobile content provider.

Having added previously resistant pan-European carriers Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone to its growing list of Ovi services customers, Nokia is now seeking to boost its blossoming content and services strategy further. In October, Nokia made its largest ever acquisition, buying Navteq, a US mapping and navigation company, for $8.1bn, effectively sewing up that corner of the market.

The Finnish vendor is understood to be adding Buongiorno’s BlinkoGold mobile site, which carries video, music, graphics and games, to ten device models, including the N95, N70 and N82.

Italy-based Buongiorno, which is listed with a market capitalisation of Eur200m, appears to be betting on this latest deal to help it achieve its 2008 revenue target of Eur330-350m, almost double its 2007 figure of Eur175m. The firm has redesigned its software in preparation for the next level of mobile content services, including social networking and targeted mobile marketing.

Last month, telecoms.com parent and industry analyst Informa noted that the focus is moving away from a limited number of services provided by the operator to internet access and operators’ non-SMS data revenue base is in the process of shifting from services to basic access. The services users are beginning to use on their mobiles are provided by internet players rather than mobile operators.

As such, the analyst expects that mobile operators can look forward to a period of growth in mobile broadband connectivity. But to capitalise on this opportunity, operators need to invest heavily in new high-capacity networks, effectively marking a transition to becoming ISPs. To avoid the fate of fixed-network ISPs, mobile operators will then either need to partner with internet firms and share revenues and/or develop a smart-pipe strategy. This involves ‘exposing’ different parts of their networks to third party service providers and monetising access to them.

 
 
 
 
European mobile operators have raised the price of roaming calls into the European Union by as much as 163 per cent as they seek to offset losses from reduced charges within Europe.

The introduction of the Eurotariff in June, and its enforcement in September, capped European roaming charges at 49 eurocents per minute for calls made abroad and 24 eurocents for calls received abroad, excluding VAT, hitting operator revenues hard.

As a result, analysts at telecoms.com parent, Informa Telecoms & Media, reveal that operators have jacked up their roaming charges outside Europe to make up the shortfall.

European regulators have no legislative powers to regulate the cost of roaming outside their own territories, but they say they are well aware of the situation and are considering ways of remedying it.

Informa said its analysis was based on the percentage change in aggregated roaming prices on a country by country basis between 2006 and 2008.

For example, the average price of a call home to Italy made by a subscriber roaming in Russia was Eur3.67 (excluding VAT) per minute in 2006 but had risen 25 per cent to Eur4.58 since the Eurotariff came into play.

A German mobile user outside the EU has seen a massive 163.7 per cent price increase since 2006 for a call home from Africa.

Informa analyst Angela Stainthorpe said that since the EU roaming regulation came into force, operators have reported roaming revenue declines into the hundreds of millions of Euros. “As roaming traffic growth hasn’t kept up with falling tariffs, operators are looking elsewhere to recoup their losses.

“Although only 15 per cent of EU roamers are travelling outside the EU, the high per minute rates they pay for the privilege have had a significant impact on roaming strategy. In some cases, countries that were once relatively unimportant to EU operators have now been elevated to prime position purely as a result of their contribution to roaming revenues.”

The EC said it is concerned about the price hikes but is powerless to legislate outside its domain. Meanwhile, UK regulator Ofcom is working with the European Regulator Group (ERG), which represents regulators both within and without the EU, to “monitor the situation”.

 
 
 
 
For the past few years, telecoms.com’s sister publication MCI has run an annual feature on mobile navigation and Location Based Services (LBS). And despite all the hype, in 2008 we’re still waiting for them to find their way to market.

Developments in navigation services have failed to produce any more meaningful application beyond the obvious; getting from A to B. And the operators still haven’t found a way to monetise the service.

This week, I attended a roundtable on the ‘Future of Mobile Navigation’. But the talk wasn’t so much about the future as it was about what had happened to navigation on the way to the party and when, indeed, would it actually be arriving?

Among those present: Peter Heath, director of alliances, EMEA, at BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM), Oren Nissim, chief executive officer of mapping and navigation firm Telmap, Nick Langton, product manager for the Enterprise Application Partner Programme at Vodafone UK, and a handful of analysts from Yankee, IDC and Ovum, the general consensus was that to date, navigation and LBS has been an enterprise endeavour, but in order to turn it into a money maker for everyone, it needs to tap into the mass market.

There are only so many ways this can happen. One of them, the most obvious, is by making GPS available in more handsets. Heath said that RIM is actively pushing GPS into more of its BlackBerries, but the fact remains that the BlackBerry is still largely an enterprise device. To be fair, the last few BlackBerries have been curvier and more consumer targeted, but with the vast majority of mobile users on prepay tariffs, such a high end device isn’t going to break the mass market.

Vodafone’s Langton admits that LBS “are very much postpay services at present and we need a new, keenly priced model to target the prepay segment. Obviously the device will be key,” he says.

With their ever increasing screen size and the ‘always with you’ relationship we have with mobile phones, GPS-enabled devices have managed to kick the stuffing out of the PND (Portable Navigation Device) unit, fast replacing units like the TomTom. In this case the fact that phones cater better to pedestrians and offer more availability of real time info than a PND, are the winning features.

Yet translating that success to myriad other applications could prove tricky. Telmap’s Nissim said that the next generation of LBS would be context aware, such as finding your nearest cash machine. But he admitted that such services face stiff competition from the old fashioned - and far cheaper - ask-someone-in-the-street tactic. In fact, the only time I could see such a service being useful is when abroad in a foreign speaking country, but in that situation the roaming data charges would make the application prohibitively expensive.

When talking about monetisation, Vodafone’s Langton insisted that the company is generating revenue from navigation services, although I can’t imagine how, unless it’s from a cut of the subscription service to Telmap or similar. Telmap’s mapping application is sold as a white label product, and although it can be bought separately after market and installed, Nissim confirmed that the cast majority of activations are from preinstalled installations of the software. It’s well known that consumers don’t install applications on their phones, so again, the only revenues in this space come from preinstallations on a small number if higher end handsets.

Going forward Langton admitted that Vodafone didn’t really know what type of LBS content would be a revenue generator, although he said “m-commerce and advertising are elements we need to take a look at.” At this point the hackneyed example of a coupon that gets sent to your phone as you walk past a shop was wheeled out. A word of advice: just stick a sign in the window if you’ve got a special offer - it’s more effective and less annoying.

Langton drove the point home: “We see a high activation rate of GPS applications in the handsets we sell, people see it as a good value add.” And that’s it exactly - it’s a good value add. In terms of premium services, Telmap’s Nissim reckons a consumer would be prepared to spend £60 per year on an application that warns them of upcoming speed cameras, but this is hardly a killer app. It’s more of an extension to the existing killer app for GPS - finding your way from A to B.

By this same logic Nissim also believes that consumers would be willing to pay for services such as local restaurant reviews. Again, this seems to be a non starter. If I’m going to a restaurant and I’m going to care that much about the experience, then it probably won’t be a spur of the minute decision. I’ll have booked ahead and got the recommendation for free off the real internet, or even more shockingly, by word of mouth.

It’s almost time again for that annual LBS feature, and I’d wager that not much has changed in this space since last year. Except maybe that Nokia too has realised that navigation is a good value add. It’s acquisition of Navteq and the roll out of Ovi puts it in a perfect position to stomp all over the operators and the mapping firms by getting Nokia Maps on as many of its devices as it can as a basic feature.

It’s not that navigation has lost its way, as a service it knows exactly where it’s going. It’s just that rest of the industry has been wondering around in circles looking for killer services and applications that might not exist. As the joke goes, a really useful LBS application would be one that could point you to a really useful LBS application.

Here’s an update on the latest iPhone 3G distribution announcements:

Announced next generation iPhone carriers:

Softbank - Japan

Telefonica - Spain, Czech Republic, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela

3 - Hong Kong and Macau

TeliaSonera - Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia

Swisscom - Switzerland

Optus - Australia

SingTel - Singapore

Bharti Airtel - India

Globe - Philippines

Vodafone - Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey

Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) - Italy

America Movil - Markets unconfirmed but potentially Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Chile

Rogers - Canada

Orange - Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and Orange’s African markets - which presumably means Guinea Konakri, Guinea Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Niger, Mali, Kenya, Cameroon, Madagascar, Botswana and the Central African Republic.

Existing iPhone carrier partners:

AT&T - US

Telefonica O2 - UK and Ireland

T-Mobile - Germany and Austria

Orange - France