It’s a truism of the cutthroat world of human romance that there are few more effective turn-offs than desperation. It’s not absolutely the least appealing trait one can exhibit, of course. You could show yourself to be bigoted, selfish, arrogant or miserly, for example. They’re probably worse. Or you could just be butt-ugly. But on the list of characteristics that set the warning lights a-flashing, desperation is right up there.

Which is why it seems so strange that 3 Australia should not at least make an effort to conceal its neediness. This week the firm urged its own customers to sign a petition beseeching Apple to bestow upon it the distribution rights for the iPhone that it so pitifully craves. Optus, Telstra and Vodafone will all have the product on offer later this month; 3 alone is deemed unworthy.

So it posted a petition on its website, where its customers could signal their desire to Apple. What monkey thought this one up? A whole campaign dedicated to telling your customers that you don’t have the one thing that they all want, but your competitors do.? It’s either so far out of the box that it’s stone cold genius, or it’s just stupid. Which isn’t far behind desperate in the romancing no-nos department.

Still, it’s no fun being the one who’s left behind. It reminds the Informer of another story this week - nothing to do with wireless - about a Swedish eight year-old boy who had a birthday party and opted not to invite two of his classmates. The kid’s school complained to the Swedish Parliament, claiming that the uninvited pair’s rights had been violated. Eh? If that’s the case then the Informer’s rights were violated repeatedly during his childhood - a trend that’s shown no sign of slowing down as he’s matured. But then, the Informer’s not well liked.

While we’re talking about marketing exercises, France Telecom’s Orange has launched a new brand campaign with the following clumsy slogan: ‘Together we can do more’. It’s the France Telecom group’s first globally integrated campaign, which is perhaps why its central message sounds like a translation when read in English.

Sometimes the lofty ideals of marketing speak get right on the Informer’s tits. “Bringing people together is why Orange is here in the first place. Orange deals with and empowers relationships; they define who we are today and what we can become and achieve in the future,” gushed the press release. Really? The Informer always thought Orange was here in the first place to make money. Maybe he’s just tired and emotional today, and ill-disposed towards this kind of evangelism.

Once, just once, he’d like some plain speaking. “Cellco launches a new international brand campaign today with the slogan: ‘Confused and frustrated? You will be!’ Don’t understand your tariff? Nope, you’re not supposed to. Want to leave our network because your contract’s up? You can speak to a member of our team; a person of such colossally limited intelligence that they don’t even understand the concept of departure, making it impossible for you ever to escape.

“And if by some miracle you do find your way out of the Maze of the Incompetents, we’ll take FIVE DAYS to post your port authorisation code to you on the grounds that we’re not allowed to give it to you over the phone. Then, when it doesn’t arrive at your house - as we promised - we’ll begrudgingly give it to you over the phone, as you requested in the first place. We hope you feel empowered.”

It’s more likely you’ll end up feeling like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

In other Orange news, it emerged this week that the firm’s bid to gobble up TeliaSonera has failed, with the Nordic outfit clearly gratified by the outcome.

“As the terms and conditions [of the offer] have not been significantly improved, the Board of TeliaSonera maintains its view that the proposal substantially undervalues the company,” the firm said in a statement.

There was damning criticism of the bid from one Michael Kovacoy, European telecoms analyst at Daiwa SMBC, who said the deal “lacked compelling industrial logic from the outset,” before adding that: “France Telecom has a major task ahead of itself to regain credibility - which will be neither easy to do, nor will it come quickly.”

Recently Orange has also signalled an interest in Ghana Telecom, which has been moving towards a partial privatisation. This too was not to be, however, and on Thursday this week, Vodafone announced that it had secured 70 per cent of the business, with the Ghanaian Government retaining 30 per cent.

Telecom is the third-placed mobile player and the leading fixed operator in Ghana, where subscriber growth is running at 55 per cent annually. Penetration sits at just 35 per cent. The cost to Vodafone is $900m and Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin commented: “Our extensive operating experience together with our portfolio of products and services position us well to deliver a superior mobile experience to Ghanaian customers and significantly improve financial performance. I expect that our investment will generate substantial benefits for Vodafone and for the Ghanaian economy and we are delighted that we will be working in partnership with the Government of Ghana.”

Isn’t he supposed to be leaving? It seems to always be “just one more thing” with him, doesn’t it. He’s like Columbo.

Elsewhere, Vodafone’s been cosying up to social networking outfit Myspace, with the two firms collaborating on a new interactive music service called Vodafone Music Reporter. The service will allow music content to be shared internationally, including festivals with which the firm is involved this summer. It will also feature user generated material.

Talking of international sharing, the GSM Association has responded in familiar fashion to EU telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding’s latest plan to drive down data roaming charges in Europe. The Association argues that price caps already introduced by the EC are forcing operators to pull back on network investment. “Europe’s mobile industry is cutting back spending on new networks and services as a growing regulatory burden from the European Union puts profitability under pressure,” the group said this week.

It cites figures showing that the EU mobile industry’s capital spending has slipped from 13 per cent of revenue in 2005 to 12 per cent in 2006 and 11 per cent in 2007 and argues that the boom in roaming voice calls predicted by the EU as the logical outcome of its pricing regulation has not happened. Quoting AT Kearney, the GSMA says that voice roaming call volumes have swollen by just 11 per cent in the year to July 2008, while operators’ voice roaming revenues have decreased by 26 per cent.

The suggestion is that roaming tariff regulation is spanking operator revenues so much that they will not be able to build out sufficient network capacity and coverage to support the growth of a meaningful data roaming environment.

The problem with this is that the GSMA has always argued that competition will bring pricing down by as much if not more than regulation. In which case, revenues were bound for a drop anyway and the market economy would leave operators in much the same position. And, while a one per cent per year decrease in capital investment may well be a reality, it’s by no means a given that this is a direct result of falling roaming revenues. Simply, it may not be necessary as further upgrades to 3G technologies require less substantial investment than the build out of radio networks.

Anyway, in other regulator/industry clash news this week, Swedish vendor Ericsson has had a pop at UK telecoms watchdog Ofcom, over the body’s plans for 2.6MHz spectrum auctions. As part of its technology- and service-neutral approach, Ofcom will allow successful bidders to chose whether they use the TDD or FDD profiles in the spectrum they secure. Ericsson’s director of government and industry relations, Mikael Halen, warned this week that this could lead to interference between TDD and FDD solutions, resulting in “a poorer customer experience.”

Ericsson isn’t the only firm to have raised issues with the auction. O2 and T-Mobile have taken legal action against Ofcom to delay the auction, because they say the UK regulator has not yet made it clear how much of the spectrum they currently use for 2G can be used for 3G. By not knowing this, say the two operators, they cannot properly value the spectrum in the 2.6GHz band.

Ericsson’s handset JV, Sony Ericsson, was down in the doldrums this week, with the news that it will only break even for the second quarter of 2008. The company said that its net sales and net income before taxes would continue to be negatively affected by poor sales of its mid to high end handsets, in combination with a delay of new products.

This is the second profit warning this year, after the company took a knock that sent its net income down to Eur133m, from Eur254m in the same period last year during the first quarter.

T-Mobile claimed this week to be the first among UK operators to deploy HSUPA nationwide, offering upload speeds of up to 1.4Mbps. That’s nice, but over in T-Mobile’s German homeland, Nokia’s being well and truly hauled over the coals by the town of Bochum, where the Finnish vendor closed a factory earlier this year, relieving 2,300 locals of gainful employment. You can never discount the Germans, of course, and boy-oh-boy are they getting their pound of Finnish flesh.

Nokia agreed to a Eur200m package for the 2,300 workers it axed from its device manufacturing plant. But this has been deemed insufficient by the spurned Germans, who have hewn a “Growth for Bochum” cross for Nokia to bear.

Under the deal, Nokia will embark upon a proactive, international campaign to attract investors to Bochum in order to create long term employment opportunities; it will help establish an “Entrepreneur Centre” to develop and grow new companies; a Chair will be created at the Bochum University to ensure the commercialisation of scientific research; the firm must find a suitable buyer or investor for the Nokia facilities in Bochum; and will give financial support for the surrounding region of Bochum. As part of the deal, Nokia will also contribute Eur20m plus the net proceeds from the sale of the production facility and property in Bochum.

For the love of God! These people know how to turn the screws, don’t they? How easy do you think it’s going to be for Nokia to attract investors to Bochum? As soon as these potential investors get wind of what happened to Nokia when it decided to move on you won’t see them for dust. Cue a manic, bedraggled Nokia clutching at the sleeves of the newcomers:

“Where d’you think you’re going? Don’t you see? You’re in Bochum, now. This is your home. You mustn’t ever leave. You can’t leave. NOBODY LEAVES ha ha ha ha ha ha!!”

It’ll be like trying to sell a haunted house when the current inhabitants have been driven insane with fear.

“We said in January that, as a responsible company, we would work together with the employee representatives, unions, NRW Government and City of Bochum to find ways to support employees and Bochum’s future growth both during and after the difficult process of closing the factory,” said Nokia chief financial officer and executive vice president Rick Simonson, presumably after being forced to perform Michael Flatley’s Riverdance, naked but for a jester’s hat, for the amusement of the Town Fathers. “We are pleased to now announce this important milestone,” he added, through clenched teeth.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere, the Informer’s sure. You may think Nokia is getting a hard time of it but that’s nothing compared to what suspected terrorist detainees have to go through at the hands of the US intelligence services. Apparently, the Yanks have taken to blasting their prisoners with high volume recordings of David Gray’s hit single Babylon.

The Informer’s got no problem with torture. Water-boarding, fine. Pins down the fingernails, fine. Pliers, teeth, electrodes, bamboo, whatever you want - knock yourself out. But David Gray? If we turn a blind eye to this kind of thing, there’s no way of knowing what they’ll do next. God forbid they should get hold of a James Blunt album.

Happy Independence Day.

Take care

The Informer

 
 
 
 
There are lots of songs about the power of partnership: ‘It takes two’, ‘Let’s work together’, ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’ - there’s three off the top of the Informer’s head. And any one of them could easily have sound-tracked the creation of handset OS collective Symbian ten years ago. But this week time was called on the alliance. And handset front-runner Nokia was probably rather more inclined to drain its glass of vino collapso, sling down its handbag and warble the lines from that staple of the girls’ night out, ‘I will survive’, while tracing unsteady, stilettoed circles on the dance floor.

The Finn bought out its partners - Ericsson, Panasonic, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Siemens - on Tuesday, bagging the 52.1 per cent of Symbian that it didn’t already own. Simultaneously it announced the formation of the Symbian Foundation - which has the backing of Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo - which will make the OS available on an open source licensing model, along with Nokia’s S60 platform, Motorola and Sony Ericsson’s UIQ and DoCoMo’s MOAP solution.

The Foundation (which sounds a bit like a shadowy group of vigilantes) will be led by The Council of Ten (well, that’s what it would be called if they really were vigilantes). This comprises the top five handset vendors - Nokia, LG, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson - and five operators and silicon vendors; AT&T, DoCoMo, Vodafone, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments.

It made sense for Nokia to buy out the rest of Symbian, with analysts CCS Insight estimating that it laid out $250m in licence fees to its fellow stakeholders last year. But the strategy is more likely driven by increasing competition from the likes of LiMo, Google’s Android and Apple. The spread of backers in the Foundation does a fair old job of uniting the industry around a common platform - earlier this year, you may recall, Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin was calling for consolidation in the mobile OS space. And it prevents Symbian becoming a Nokia nom de plume, which might cause suspicion in the market.

CCS analyst Geoff Blaber had a few questions, though. Might management by committee prove more of a barrier than a bonus? And with the depth of Nokia’s vested interest, can the Foundation be truly vendor independent? As all journalists are taught to write on the first day of hack school: Only Time Will Tell.

In immediate response, there was consolidation within the mobile Linux arena. From the beginning of July, the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum will cleave itself unto the LiMo Foundation in a bid to unify and accelerate the development of Linux-based mobile platforms and specifications. A number of LiPS members have joined LiMo in recent times, leading the two organisations to conclude that they might be wasting resource by doubling their efforts.

In other Linux news, open source handset developer Openmoko has named the first five distributors for the consumer version of its touch screen Linux device, the Neo Freerunner. For the record, these firms are: Pulster, Golden Delicious Computers, TRIsoft, Bearstech and IDA Systems. The first three are German, the fourth is French and the last Indian.

The device uses a similar form factor to the Neo 1973, a popular hit earlier this year, with a 2.8″ VGA touch screen, A-GPS, 128MB of memory, a microSD card slot, Bluetooth and USB, as well as wifi and motion sensors and a faster 500MHz processor. It will come in two versions: a 850MHz tri-band and a 900Mhz tri-band and will ship with a basic developer platform. Subsequent software can be downloaded from the Openmoko developer site.

The Symbian buy-out not only saves Nokia a wedge of cash while defending its status as king of the smartphones, it will surely strengthen the Finn’s services strategy in the long term. A strategy that was bolstered this week with the announcement that the firm will acquire German ‘context-aware social activity service’ Plazes.

The service allows users to geo-tag a location with an invite or information, and then lets selected contacts know about it in a micro-blogging social networking Web 2.0 sort of way, further eradicating the need to actually talk to your friends. The Informer imagines a dystopian future where voice functionality on phones is considered as outmoded as the fax.

It seems likely the Finnish vendor will integrate the application with its own social networking offering, Mosh, as well as the Ovi platform. “This acquisition helps Nokia to accelerate its vision of bringing people and places closer together, in line with our broader services strategy,” blurted Niklas Savander, head of Nokia Services & Software in pristine business speak gobbledegook.

Another firm accelerating its vision this week was ISP AOL. The web giant’s UK business has announced a partnership with mobile content delivery firm WIN, which will see the ISP offer its wares wirelessly.

WIN will provide content aggregation, web and mobile portal design and ongoing service development and will also integrate mobile delivery of AOL’s instant messenger service (AIM).

Not to be outdone in the business speak gobbledegook stakes Chris Locke, director of mobile at AOL Europe, said: “AOL strives to offer our users a compelling mobile experience; we want to continue to enrich the web to mobile experience and attract new mobile users through attractive, made for mobile content.”

One firm resolutely staying out of the services space is Motorola which this week unveiled its latest device. The MotoZine ZN5 is Moto’s first camera-centric phone. The firm has teamed up with Kodak and the device supports the camera specialist’s web and PC services. Users will almost certainly resort to uploading their images at home though because the terminal is only EDGE.

Sony Ericsson must be bricking it.

Ovum’s Adam Leach and Martin Garner were upbeat though, saying: “If this is the shape of Motorola’s strategy for a refresh of its entire portfolio, then it could well be the start of its recovery.”

Why no 3G? Who knows? It is certainly bucking the trend. European 3G WCDMA subscriptions passed the 100 million mark at the end of May according to the Informer’s analyst chums. Still, there ’s a long way to go, five years after the region’s first commercial WCDMA network launch penetration only sits at 11.1 per cent.

Not surprisingly, Western Europe leads the way in terms of 3G subs. Informa Telecoms & Media reckons Central and Eastern Europe will break into double figures by early 2011.

As the makers of femtocells read this news they might want to consider packing their best Gucci and Armani power suits because Italy accounts for a quarter of Europe’s WCDMA subscriptions and has one of the highest 3G penetration rates at 28.7 per cent.

Why will they want to go to Italy? Well, because 3G in building coverage is rubbish apparently, and when it’s not rubbish outdoors so many people will want to use data hungry services that the networks will get over loaded. That’s the femto sales pitch see, the Informer knows because he went to see femto vendor Airvanna in the week.

He can confirm that watching YouTube on his phone via the femtocell yielded a first rate user experience. However, why he’d want to sit at home watching YouTube on his phone is beyond comprehension. Still, according to analysts at ABI Research, an estimated 40 per cent of European users might be making a femtocell purchase within the next year, this despite the fact that the majority of consumers would look blankly at you should you utter the word.

On Monday, femto vendor ip.access introduced a 3G Home Routing technology that connects 3G phones to a home network via a femtocell. ip.access claims the technology will make way for a new wave of applications such as streaming live video from a home media server to the handset, using the phone to browse the music on the home server and select tracks to play, or displaying a slideshow of phone photos on the TV.

All well and good for the digital home, but not all commentators think it will be that easy. Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis recently released a report which predicts that beyond the ‘femto 1.0′ business models, which work on the selling point that femtos work flawlessly with existing handsets, devices will need to be revised.

Bubley argued that if the phone will be used differently, it needs to be designed differently as well. “Standard phones can work with femtocells, but they are not optimised,” he notes. “The phone needs to be ‘aware’ of the femtocell, ideally both in the radio and the application platform.”

Meanwhile, back with our feet firmly on terra firma US MVNO Virgin Mobile is going toe to toe with the incumbent operators by introducing a flat rate calling plan for prepay subscribers.

The plan is called, like, Totally Unlimited. For $79.99 per month it, like, totally lets customers talk as much as they want to nationwide numbers, and for an extra ten bucks more per month, users can add Unlimited Text & Messaging. The Informer hopes for Virgin that the offer isn’t too unlimited.

Speaking of tariff-based malarkey Super-Viv’s been at it again. Commissioner Reding, the EU telecoms minister has proposed yet more measures to drive mobile phone charges “down, down, down”, as the man in black might have said. The EC has initiated a public consultation on the future regulation of mobile voice termination rates, which Viv reckons can come down by as much as 70 per cent.

Currently these charges are managed by national regulators and thus range enormously - from Euro0.02/minute in Cyprus to Euro0.18.minute in Bulgaria. Overall, mobile termination rates are nine times higher than fixed line charges. This distorts competition from country to country, Reding said, and makes for an uneven playing field for the fixed carriers. Not to mention unreasonably high costs for the blessed consumer, in whose name all of Reding’s crusades are carried out.

The Informer was due to cover a different story at this point but it was so boring that he fell asleep with his eyes open just reading it. So, instead we have the following news about The Waves!!! Dutch researchers have identified “potentially hazardous” effects on hospital equipment exposed to RFID technology. You can read the details about it here.

The thing about it that caught the Informer’s eye is that they apparently use RFID to track patients. Eh?

Surely there are only two types of patient that require RFID tracking: the elderly ones who’ve lost their conkers and think all the doctors and nurses are their children and the ones who have turned their toes up. I suppose you could use RFID to track the remains of all those people who cark it because RFID technology buggered up their life support. That would make for a neat case study.

Anyway, by way of a wrap-up, the Informer would like to apologise wholeheartedly to the Dutch nation. In this very newsletter last week he voiced his support for the Dutch football team and they promptly flopped out of Euro 2008, beaten by the Russians. This has been a theme of the Championships for the Informer. Every team to which he has pledged allegiance has been knocked out. So apologies to Croatia, Turkey and Russia as well.

So on this coming Sunday evening, having taken note of this alarming trend, the Informer will take a seat on his sofa, with a can of Becks and a bratwurst and throw his weight well and truly behind THE GERMANS!

Auf Wiedersehen

Das Informer

 
 
 
 
My God, it’s been so quiet this week you could have heard a Trappist monk complaining about a pin dropping onto a sponge. “Ripe was the drowsy hour,” as Cockney-John Keats wrote; the summer lull looks to have begun a little ahead of schedule this year, with only a few entities poking their heads above the news parapet.

Sony Ericsson was one, offering a hair of the dog to anybody nursing a hangover from last week’s iPhone knees-up. On Tuesday the JV vendor sent its summer collection tottering down the catwalk, with the 8.1 megapixel C905 Cybershot leading the way. In tow was the F305 - a games-centric piece with Nintendo Wii-esque motion sensors on board - as well as a couple of entry-level Plain-Janes trying to dodge the flash-gun glare.

Still, the firm’s been bulking out at the mid- and low-tier levels of its portfolio in an effort to grow volume - particularly in emerging markets - and make a bid to reclaim the fourth spot that it ceded to LG earlier this year. And it will have double the motivation to oust LG, now the latter has lured Sony Ericsson’s global director of brand away with its Korean siren song and, presumably, a fattened wallet.

Andrew Walker is now marketing director for LG UK and Ireland and had this to say about the move: “LG [has] the potential to become a leading brand in this market. The exciting challenge of building a marketing team capable of realising that potential was too attractive to turn down. In this role, I will be looking at making our brand approach coherent and consistent - shedding the cliches of technology communication to focus on being accessible, aspirational, distinctive and relevant to people across the UK and Ireland.”

On reading this the Informer was moved to scratch his head. Perhaps Mr Walker had drunk deep from the well of irony, he thought. For how can you shed cliches and still look to focus on being “accessible, aspirational, distinctive and relevant”? It’s a bit like Gordon Ramsey calling a press conference to announce that he’s taken the decision to stop f*!%ing-well swearing.

It was testament to how sleepy a week it has been that there was significant press hoo-ha over some throwaway comments made to the Financial Times by the EU telecoms commissioner, Viviane Reding. In her latest campaign, Big Viv’s going after the termination rates that operators charge one another to complete off-net calls. True to form, some operators have privately harrumphed that they will just have to hike their call charges to compensate. On being asked by the FT whether this might lead to the introduction of a called party pays element to European pricing, Reding said it was up to the operators but that she had no objections in principle.

So it was jumped upon, and headlines screamed that Europe would be getting called party pays - where consumers have to pony up a charge to receive incoming calls. If the Informer were a gambling man he’d have a nifty fifty on the sure thing that this will never happen. If mobile operators were suddenly to announce to their customers that they were going to have to pay to receive calls there’d be uproar. There’d be outrage. It would go down, as the Informer’s dear old Granddad used to say, like a cup of cold sick.

Meanwhile, in other price fixing news, ahem, carriers in the Philippines have been fined a total of $8.3m for price fixing on text messages by the nation’s anti-monopoly agency. And those guys do love to text.

One thing the Informer has noticed as he scurries through London town is that UK operators have hit on a different way of cutting costs. It’s actually been around a while but there’s a big push on at the moment for SIM-only contract tariffs. And this week, MVNO Virgin Mobile released calculations it had made suggesting that UK consumers could save a collective total of £849m by opting for SIM-only tariffs.

The Informer spoke to Virgin and Vodafone this week after he saw this research and both operators trotted out the regulation blah about ‘choice’, ‘value’ and ‘flexibility’. But surely this is all about slashing subscriber acquisition costs by cutting out handset subsidies? Virgin reckons SIM-only is the fastest growing segment of the contract market over here in the UK but neither operator was willing to disclose the differential in acquisition costs between handset and SIM-only customers.

It could be, as Ovum’s Stephen Hartley suggested, that it also serves as a useful bridge between prepaid and full contract services, as SIM-only offerings tend to have a 30-day notice period. Hartley reckons that this could help woo commitment-shy pre-payers onto a contract from where they can be bombarded with enticements.

You’ve got to wonder what the handset vendors make of this - after all, Virgin found that 60 per cent of people surveyed would sooner keep their existing handset and bag a lower monthly tariff. If that translated into a commercial truth we could be looking at serious damage to handset shipments. Anyway, you’re going to have to keep wondering, as none of the handset vendors contacted by the Informer this week were willing to offer a comment on SIM-only and how they feel about a likely slow down in the upgrade cycle.

Nonetheless, the Informer will be looking into this a little bit more so he’d like to hear from anyone who has a view on the issue. SIM-only in emerging markets makes a lot more sense, so we’ll be focusing on the popularity of the strategy in saturated, developed markets. Is it going on anywhere near you? Let us know.

While we’re on the topic of research commissioned to prove a point, let’s have a look at a couple more items - it’s been a quiet week after all. First up, this old fluff from BT: The “latest figures” according to the press release sitting in front of the Informer show that office workers in the UK now see less sunlight each day than coal miners. This terrifying reality is being used by the carrier to urge corporate managers to let their drones work remotely through the magic of BT’s wireless hotspot network. Being outside and in the sun will make people happier and therefore more productive, says the frayed, hopelessly optimistic thread running through this release.

Let’s delve into this claim a little. First off, most British coal miners are now retired because the majority of mines were shut down by the Iron Lady. For all the Informer knows, these ex-miners now sit outside, basking all day long, so the comparison is meaningless. Second, this is the UK, people; there’s bugger-all sunshine anyway. Third, and most important of all, if you suddenly put a gaggle of UK desk-jockeys in the sun, they’ll blink in surprise for a couple of seconds and then they’ll go to a pub. Beer sales - not productivity - will go up.

Right, onto Mobyko, an online back-up facility for mobile data. The firm has created the ‘Mobilator’, an online calculator that enables anyone with too much time on their hands to generate a spurious ‘value’ for everything that is stored on their phone; contacts, text messages, pictures, audio, games and the rest. This calculator works on the following formula, devised, apparently, by a professor at University College London in conjunction with Mobyko:

X = St x T + Sv x V + Sc x C + Sp x P + Sm x M + Sg x G + Vm + W

At least Mobyko didn’t try and give any real weight to this frippery, joshing that “those of us not well versed in applied mathematics” should visit the site and try the application out for themselves. The thrust of the thing is that the firm is trying to persuade users to attach a monetary value to the content on their phone in an attempt to panic them into paying to keep it safe.

In the interests of thorough research - and because he had far too much time on his hands - the Informer tried it out, and found that there was £250 worth of content on his phone, including some unsolicited smut-spam.

(A quick aside here: The Informer’s mobile contract is up and he’s jumping ship from his current provider. On calling the operator to find out how long was left to run, and to inform a staff member of his impending departure and allow them the chance to talk him round, the Informer was made an offer. “I notice that you have a content bar on your account that stops you accessing adult material,” said the customer service monkey, before offering to remove it so that the Informer could spend the last month of his contract in bacchanalian consumption of barely discernible, low-grade bongo. How’s that for customer retention?)

Back to Mobyko, though. The funny thing about the service, if our content really is that important to us, is that even if you back it up, it’s not safe. Something could go wrong at the Mobyko end, or the firm could go out of business. Presumably, in this scenario, those users who have been persuaded that this insurance scheme is necessary would get the value of their content back? If it’s that valuable, eh? Let’s have a quick look at the Ts and Cs:

“It’s important to note that using the Internet has its dangers…We can’t be held responsible for any damage, loss or corruption of any data, information or material.

We are not responsible for any loss, claim or damage including but not limited to lost profits, lost savings or revenue, or loss or corruption of data or information or any indirect, incidental or consequential damages of any kind which arise out of or are in any way connected with your use or misuse of the Site even if we have been advised of the possibility of damage. Your use of the Site includes your use of information, products or services obtained through the Site.”

Righty-ho, then. If it matters that much, everybody, back it up yourself.

Perhaps Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo worked out a similar formula for its purchase of a 30 per cent stake in Bangladeshi mobile carrier TM International. DoCoMo paid $350m for the stake, part of a renewed drive towards international expansion. Such strategies haven’t exactly reaped splendid reward for DoCoMo in the past but, after a period of introspection, the firm’s ready for another pop. In an interview in Singapore this week, according to Bloomberg, Toshinari Kunieda, DoCoMo’s SVP for Global Business, expressed an interest in the MEA region and revealed that early stage talks are going with Qatar Telecom, Emirates Telecommunications and Saudi Telecom.

Out in the Netherlands there’s been a party spirit this week; celebrations all round and fervent expressions of optimism. Not just because we might be witnessing the beginning of a return to the glorious Total Football that is characterised by the Dutch national football team but because, for sure, the WiMAX Forum threw its first ever Global Congress in Amsterdam. And there was more WiMAX news than you could shake a wobbly business model at.

It’s not often a keynote presenter, speaking at a trade show conference, draws widespread laughter from his audience. But this is exactly what happened in Amsterdam this week, when Barry West, Sprint Nextel’s CTO, spoke at the WiMAX Forum’s first ever Global Congress event.

With admirable comic timing, he called the claims made on behalf of LTE (the would-be WiMAX nemesis) as - and prepare to guffaw loudly - “PowerPoint propaganda”.

Picked yourself up off the floor yet?

OK, so maybe it’s not Comedy Store material but anyone who can get a laugh from a telecoms conference audience has the Informer’s respect.

West was, of course, preaching to a crowd of converted WiMAX sympathisers. LTE is the enemy and they want to laugh at it. But West had a point. LTE is only experimental at this stage and talk of 100Mbps to individual users, outside lab conditions, does sound fanciful.

The good news for WiMAX supporters is that West announced in Amsterdam that Xohm, the mobile WiMAX business unit of Sprint Nextel and flagship mobile WiMAX player, would start commercial service in September in Baltimore. Commercial launches in Washington DC and Chicago are scheduled during Q4 2008.

Xohm was originally slated to launch in April this year - a date presumably flagged up in more than one PowerPoint presentation - so failure to meet this new deadline would be embarrassing in the extreme for the WiMAX crowd. If another delay did happen, though, perhaps it would give any comedy-minded LTE supporters the chance to turn the tables on Barry West and think up some jokes about WiMAX.

How about this: What is the favourite song among WiMAX supporters? I don’t know, what is the favourite song among WiMAX supporters? Go West. (I thought it was WiMAX Love? - Ed.)

The other significant announcement at the Global Congress was the declaration by the WiMAX Forum that the first batch of 2.5GHz mobile products had been certified (which should ensure interoperability). A total of ten products from eight suppliers have received the thumbs up from the WiMAX Forum in this frequency band (which is also used by Xohm).

And there was some good news for WiMAX operators using the 3.5GHz frequency band, some of whom had been getting a bit antsy. Testing for 3.5GHz mobile products is scheduled for 3Q 2008, the Forum promised, with certification planned for the following quarter. The 3.5GHz licence holders have often felt aggrieved that the WiMAX Forum, in their opinion, has prioritised 2.5GHz certification over 3.5GHz certification. If the WiMAX Forum can deliver on its 3.5GHz schedule, then it should make future meetings of WiMAX Forum members a little more amiable.

Anyway, come on the Dutch!

Take care

The Informer

 
 
 
 
This week we’re going to play a special version of the classic TV quiz show Going for Gold. Contestants must correctly identify what the show’s guest host, the Informer, is describing: Fingers on your buzzers.

“What am I?” asks our host, “In many cases, I contain elements of the original story, often with the same characters and settings. I can lead to a series, in which key elements appear in a number of stories. Although, the differences between more than one version and a series is often somewhat arbitrary.”

BZZZZZZZZZZZ! - Ed Zander, former head of Motorola. “Are you the RAZR?”

“No. I’m afraid not Ed, it’s back to the golf course for you, you’re out of the game.

“I’m attractive to my creators because there is less risk involved in returning to a story with known popularity rather than developing new and untested characters and settings. Audiences are sometimes eager for more stories about popular characters or settings, making my production financially appealing.”

BZZZZZZZZZZZ! - Steve Jobs, current head of Apple. “Are you the iPhone 2.0?”

“No, sorry Steve, I’m shamelessly cribbing the Wikipedia entry on sequels.”

They’re a tricky business, sequels. Great sequels are few and far between, the Empire Strikes Back, the Godfather Part 2, Seriously Dude Where’s My Car? - the list, frankly, doesn’t go on. It’s tempting to revisit the success of a debut offering when serving up round two. Everyone gets exactly what they’re expecting and thanks to the original’s success they don’t disappoint at the box-office. However, they can leave people feeling a little bit cheated and ultimately a little bit bored.

On Monday this week Apple unveiled the iPhone 2.0. In fairness to Jobs et al a majority of the concerns regarding the original have been addressed. The retail price point has come down, it’ll come with both HSDPA and GPS and it will be available in 22 countries on the launch date of July 22nd, consequently it will sell like proverbial hotcakes. Even though - and as the Informer writes these words he is shaking his head like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day - there are loads of technically superior handsets on the market. (Feel free to write in to tell the Informer why he’s wide of the mark, and how the iPhone’s UI sets it head and shoulders above its rivals).

OK, you’re reading this, so you’re probably interested in telecoms, so you will have already read umpteen iPhone stories this week. If you’ve just got back home from holidaying somewhere blissfully remote, like the Moon, or have a chronic memory loss condition, you can check out the finer details about the gadget and some of Apple’s other mobile news here and for further analysis of the OEMs’ reactions to the first iPhone try this for size.

In a PR move fooling no one South Korea’s Samsung officially launched another iPhone-a-like device, the Omnia, practically 24 hours ahead of the Apple terminal’s Californian unveiling. The Omnia is sleek and shiny, it’s got a big touchscreen and it’s got a 5 megapixel camera with, get this, ’smile detection’. It’s a Windows Mobile device and if you clicked on the link above you’ll have seen that it bears more than a passing resemblance to all the other iMetoo devices on the market. In Latin Omnia means ‘everything’, while in Arabic it means ‘wish’. In English it means bugger all, because everyone will still want an iPhone.

The ‘iPhone effect’ is being thanked by some for the rise in mobile data usage. Maybe the device has helped raise consumer awareness a smidgen, but the Informer reckons, in the main, that we have dongles to thank for the rise in mobile data consumption. Last week the fortune tellers at Gartner suggested laptops would soon be shipping with embedded 3G capability, and the Informer thought we might be witnessing the dongle death knell. Thankfully, it looks like the comically named peripheral has been granted a reprieve, for now at least. Price comparison site Top 10 Broadband has been tipped the wink that operators will soon been sweetening their mobile data packages by attaching dongles to the deals. Not only that, the website suggests mobile will displace fixed line internet in just two years.

Backing up the ‘mobile broadband everywhere’ theory are some new  statistics released by mangement consultant AT Kearney. The EU’s mobile data market, excluding text messaging, grew by 40 per cent to Euro7bn in 2007. A sour note for carriers comes in the shape of a 25 per cent reduction in the cost of data for roaming for consumers. Tom Philips chief government & regulatory affairs officer at industry lobby body the GSM Association reckons prices are coming down thanks to market forces.

The Informer thinks prices for consumers will continue to fall, or at least be forced to fall, if Viviane Reding and her army of meddlesome Eurocrats get  their collective way. Which, let’s face it, they will. Speaking at a press conference after a Telecom Council meeting in Luxembourg on Thursday Reding said she was “not impressed” with the reductions so far as they equate to a drop of only on Eurocent per roaming SMS sent.

Sticking with the regulators. In the UK, Ofcom has set out proposals for how it plans to release spectrum following the switchover to digital television. The Informer thinks it would be appropriate if Ofcom decided to award the spectrum as prizes in some sort of Dragons’ Den meets Big Brother meets the Apprentice meets I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! reality TV series. Potential bidders could be put through their paces shamelessly prostituting themselves under the credulous gaze of couch potatoes everywhere - think of the SMS voting revenues. Far more likely though is a boring old money spinning auction.

Speaking of money spinning auctions, in the US the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has decided to delay a decision regarding the fate of 25MHz of left over AWS spectrum. The Informer has an idea, should the Feds be reading this, rather than holding yet another auction they should perhaps have a beauty contest to find an appropriate owner(s). Though the Informer’s suggestion is likely to fall on deaf ears.

One of the more likely options under consideration by the FCC, is to auction the spectrum off with a requirement that some portion of the bandwidth is set aside to provide free wireless internet access to the US. Speculators suggest that the winner of the auction would be required to build out a network to provide free access to 50 per cent of the US population within four years and 95 per cent in ten years. The spectrum would likely be offered as a technology neutral investment and WiMAX is being bandied around as a likely platform.

If that happens we can expect to hear the sound of excitable splashing emanating from the direction of a recently erected WiMAX patent pool. This week six leading lights in the world of mobile WiMAX announced that they would be pooling their patent resources. Expect to see Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Intel, Samsung and mobile WiMAX pin ups of the operator community, Clearwire and Sprint lounging around the pool in Bermuda shorts, sipping Pina Coladas laughing and throwing a beach ball back and forth, but definitely not running, bombing or petting.

At an investor presentation on Thursday evening, Clearwire revealed its projections for business and revenue growth over the next ten years. The company reckons it can hit over million customers by 2009, rising to 4.6 million a year later. The target is 8.5 million by 2011 and 19.5 million by 2014.

Nortel looks like it will miss out on the possible poolside fun though. The infrastructure vending Canuck has decided to back LTE and therefore join fellow WiMAX basher Ericsson. This decision sent Nortel’s market valuation rocketing up by 13 per cent. Perhaps the Canadians and the Swedes can form a pool of their own, though come the winter it’d probably freeze over and they’d find themselves facing off over all the LTE deals coming their way.

In warmer climes East Africa’s biggest ever initial public offering (IPO) kicked off this week as Kenyan operator Safaricom began trading on the Nairobi stock exchange. The government’s sale of a 25 per cent stake in the carrier has proved popular, with the listing more than 400 per cent oversubscribed. Local reports suggest around 800,000 domestic and foreign investors had signed up to the offer. The government is raising about $833m from the sale, which values Safaricom at around $3.3bn. In the first hours of trading shares had already gained around 50 per cent.

Another organisation selling off, if not the family silver, then certainly some of the more valuable pots and pans was Nokia Siemens Networks. The monster vendor has reached an agreement to sell off its Open Transport Network (OTN) which specialises in fibre optic communications. The financial details of the deal have been kept under wraps, but the move is all part of NSN’s strategic refocus on its core businesses, as the vendor aims to realise Euro2bn annually in synergy savings by the end of 2008.

One year into its operation as a merged entity, NSN is still facing a challenging market. Competition is strong and the growth outlook is not good, as chief executive Simon Beresford-Wylie readily admits the carrier was caught on the back foot. “In 2006, at the time of the merger, the market looked like it was growing. But this wasn’t the case,” he said. He said plenty more too at a recent London press event and one of the Informer’s colleagues at telecoms.com heard it all.

Meanwhile, mobile operator O2 UK has, like a crestfallen West Ham Utd fan, been left blowing bubbles after losing a four year battle against rival 3 over the usage of bubbles in its advertising. The European Court of Justice ruled that “O2 cannot rely on its trade mark rights” to prevent the use of bubble imagery in a comparative advertisement for Hutchison-Whampoa’s UK 3G operator.

For many it’s hard to imagine anything more captivating that watching bubbles float about while listening to the dulcet tones of Sheffield’s Sean Bean. But spare a thought for the kids, for according to mobile ad firm JumpTap they’re ten times more susceptible when it comes to mobile adverts. Getting your hooks into impressionable children is not a strategy that marketers have traditionally shied away from. As the famously upstanding role model Whitney Houston opined in her epic ballad the Greatest Love of All, children are the future.

Finally, on this Friday the 13th, the Informer has been thinking about all the things that scare him: Wasps, Darleks and having to work for a living are all currently vying for the top spot. IT consulting firm Unisys though thinks one of the biggest fears out there is. mobile banking…

Unisys surveyed 13,296 consumers worldwide about their mobile-device habits and how secure they feel when conducting online transactions. The results indicate a widespread apprehension about the security of mobile devices and their ability to protect pertinent information relayed in a financial transaction.

It’s not exactly A Nightmare on Elm Street is it?

Be safe

The Informer

 
 
 
 
Earlier this year, US carrier Verizon Wireless (VZW) was suing its competitor Alltel over false advertising. Relations were decidedly frosty. Now, as if in the telecoms version of seminal rom-com When Harry Met Sally, they’ve gone and got it together, after Alltel faked a noisy orgasm in a restaurant. Vodafone - which holds a 45 per cent stake in VZW - confirmed the acquisition on Thursday, which will see VZW gobble up Alltel and its 13 million subscribers for $28.1bn.

Assuming no obstacles, the move will enable Verizon to reclaim its position as the largest US carrier, which it ceded to AT&T following that firm’s merger with Cingular in 2005. Arun Sarin, whose time at Vodafone is coming to a close at the end of next month, was chipper about the acquisition: “We expect the acquisition of Alltel to significantly increase the value of our 45 per cent interest in VZW through the realisation of substantial in-market synergies and to reinforce its leading position in the world’s largest mobile market by revenues. Whilst VZW’s free cash flows will initially be deployed in reducing net debt, the VZW Board has agreed to conduct an annual dividend review process and to the payment of enhanced tax distributions.”

More than once Sarin has faced calls to dispose of its VZW stake in light of Verizon’s unwillingness to yield to Vodafone’s MO of ownership rather than partnership. Perhaps he’ll feel that this latest manoeuvre is further proof of concept, even though an expected dividend from VZW will be unlikely to go Vodafone’s way any time soon, now that the acquisition has been announced.

There was less success for France Telecom in its bid to acquire Baltic specialist TeliaSonera this week. The Swedo-Finnish JV flipped FT the bird in umbrage at the French firm’s assessment of its value, with the offer pitched at EUR27bn and change.

“TeliaSonera is a strong business with excellent growth prospects in its own right,” said a bristling Tom von Weymarn, chairman of TeliaSonera. “The board and management are focused on developing the company to its full potential, driving strong and sustainable earnings growth and maximising value for all shareholders. The indicative price of SEK56.225 per share significantly undervalues this potential,” he concluded. Which suggests the firm may be open to an improved offer.

Meanwhile, it’s really annoying, isn’t it, when you get a song stuck in your head? Even a really good song gets tiresome in the end. So you can imagine how the Informer’s been feeling this week, he just can’t get rid of the Rockwell classic Somebody’s Watching Me: “I’m just an average guy with an average life. I work from nine to five, hey hell I pay the price.”

We’re not so much sleepwalking into a surveillance society, as being accompanied by a marching band. This week the news broke that 100,000 EU citizens have had their movements tracked in the name of research. The analysts logged the location of the nearest base station every time a call or text was sent or received by their guinea pigs and arrived at the earth-shattering conclusion that, guess what, people tend to go to the same places day after day. Most people don’t travel very far, although some people do. The research doesn’t prove that they ate some food at lunchtime and slept all night, but the Informer is willing to bet most people surveyed did.

If you missed out on all the surveillance fun, fear not, for those bastions of personal data collection, MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, are offering social networkers the opportunity to Sniff their friends. It’s the LBS equivalent of poking. Sniff stands for Social Network Integrated Friend Finder, and is not even remotely a new idea, but the social networks are getting behind it, so perhaps it stands a better chance of punters’ buy-in than previously launched friend finder services. Although, apparently each Sniff will cost 50p. Which is considerably more than a text or indeed a call, which is the mode of friend-finding the Informer generally prefers. It’s faster, cheaper and much more accurate.

The social networks will be hoping that the Informer’s assessment regarding the likely chances of success of Sniffing are wide of the mark. Particularly in light of the revelations of a recent eMarketer report UK Social Network Marketing: Ad Spending and Usage which reckons ad spend is not as high as anticipated. The report says £65m was spent on social network advertising in 2007 and this will have increased to £115m by the end of this year. It might sound like a fortune to the average Joe, but speaking to UK newspaper the Guardian Kirs Oser, director of strategic communications at eMarketer, described the amounts as “tiny”.

If Oser thinks that the spend in social network advertising is tiny, the Informer shudders to think what he’d make of mobile advertising. The analysts here at Informa Towers reckon the big brands are yet to transfer more than 0.5 per cent of their advertising budget onto mobile. It’s not all bad news though, Informa Telecoms & Media, forecasts that the global mobile advertising market will rocket from $1.72bn in 2008 to $12.09bn by 2013.

If the operators want to get their hands on the folding money they’re going to have to become service enablers according to research house Analysys Mason. The advice to operators has a familiar ring. They’ve long resisted becoming bit pipes, but there is clear trend towards open mobile internet access and all you can eat tariffs.

“Mobile operators are best placed to become service enablers in the content value chain by exploiting their unique assets, which focus on transmission, billing and consumer insight,” said Mike Grant, analyst with Analysys Mason. “These assets are essential to the success of content providers in the MME (mobile media and entertainment) market, and the ’service enabler’ revenue streams (including traffic, billing and advertising revenue) appear to be the most sustainable for mobile network operators in the long term.”

Along with opportunities, though, come threats. And the operator community has plenty of those in the shape of the vendors. This week Microsoft announced its intention to have another crack at the mobile services market. The Redmond Giant has unveiled something it’s calling the Connected Services Accelerator Program - a collaboration with independent software vendors, developers and operators.

“Our mission for the industry is to drive the transition to Telco 2.0, a new era of communications where service providers are delivering hundreds if not thousands of new services,” said Martha Bejar, corporate vice president for the Communications Sector at Microsoft.

A separate mission for the firm is to try and convince everybody that Windows Mobile devices are better than iPhones, ahead of the widely anticipated unveiling of the 3G version of Apple’s handset next week. One of the firm’s marketing folk emailed the Informer this week with a long list of reasons why Windows Mobile handsets are superior, including security, price, battery life, variety and developer access.

These may all be genuine benefits, but it just makes it sound as if Microsoft is running a bit scared of Apple in the mobile device space. Besides, Apple’s principal marketing hook is that the iPhone is cool - after all a rubbish camera and anachronistic access technology didn’t harm sales of the first model.

Meanwhile, industry analyst Strategy Analytics has said that Nokia, RIM 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.

Gartner, though, thinks otherwise. It’s changed its mind (a bit) regarding the potential for laptops embedded with 3G capability. The analyst maintains that, to date, embedded 3G capabilities for laptops has been difficult for enterprises to justify because of upfront purchase prices, monthly running costs and asset protection. But the firm concedes that with new pricing plans and technology evolution, the tide is turning. Sadly, built in 3G capability will kill the need for dongles, and the English language will lose one its more agreeable recent additions.

Gartner’s change of heart is fine though, the Informer recognises that sometimes the goalposts move. Then again, sometimes the goalposts are bricked up completely, and nowhere more so than in the UAE. The Informer isn’t sure whether he has many readers in Dubai, since he sometimes says things that the region’s rulers might not like. Censorship is far from unknown in the region. But if you are reading this in Dubai you can always call the Informer up, taking advantage of Du’s new cheap international calling tariffs. You’ll have to use those tariffs, because the pesky operator has followed in the footsteps of Etisalat by blocking Skype services.

Taking advantage of a filter that was put in place to protect residents from pornographic or offensive material, according to local reports, Du now prevents users from accessing cheaper mobile VoIP services.

The residents of Russia though will have no such problems. Open wifi champion Fon has signed a deal to expand into the country that seems to have turned its back on state-controlled Big Brother in favour of his more flamboyant, no more agreeable sibling Rampant Consumerism. (Dubai seems to manage both systems simultaneously). Comstar said it plans to establish 30,000 wifi access points in Moscow in 2008-2009 before expanding to other regions.

Fon’s business model is described by the firm as ’social routing’. Subscribers connect the Fon device to their own broadband connection and then choose whether to share and share alike their wifi with other Fon users or charge others for access (sharing the spoils with Fon). It would be fair to say that the idea has yet to really take off. The Informer was sent a Fon hotspot to try and he can confirm it makes an admirable door stop.

It’s shake-up time at Orange UK as new CEO Tom Alexander has announced plans for an overhaul. The firm will be divided into to principal segments - Consumer and Business - both of which will be supported by a new Sales & Loyalty layer. He’s also created a New Business, Wholesale and Strategy team.

The upshot is bad news for middle management, with 450 jobs up for the chop. But there’ll be a net increase in headcount (if not wage costs) as Orange plans to employ 500 new, customer facing staff by the end of the year. It’s vowed also to open 60 new high street stores and shift its off-shore customer service teams back to the UK, as well as deploy a further 450 GSM cell sites and accelerate its HSPA deployment strategy. Promises, promises.

Take care

The Informer

 
 
 
 
It’s the end of an era. The torch is being passed on. Let the trumpets sound out: The Emperor has abdicated. A great leader knows when his work is done; he understands that there comes a time when fresh hands must steer the course of his mighty ship. And so it was this week, that Lars-Johan Jarnheimer stepped down as president and CEO of Swedish carrier Tele2, to be replaced by Harri Koponen.

You’ve got to feel for Koponen. Becoming CEO of a cellular carrier is a massive achievement. But to have your moment of glory eclipsed by the news that the CEO of the world’s largest and most famous operator (by international footprint and revenue) is moving on is rotten luck. Which is why the Informer has given Koponen top billing this week, awarding second place to the news that Arun Sarin’s doing the off at Vodafone.

Sarin’s been in the chair at Vodafone for five years, having taken over from Chris Gent - the man who built the empire. A pin-striped British businessman of the old school, Gent bowed out with a string of impressive acquisitions to his name, leaving Sarin to make them all work nicely together.

He didn’t always have the easiest time of it. Two low points stand out: the first, in 2004 shortly after his tenure began, saw his first big acquisitive manoeuvre fall flat as he failed to gain control of US carrier AT&T. The second was in 2006 when, after recording the largest loss in British corporate history - £14.85bn - there was a shareholder revolt with 14 per cent of investors withholding their vote of confidence at the AGM. This was a bit harsh, as IDC analyst John Delaney pointed out this week, given that the loss was in part an after-affect of the Mannesmann takeover that many consider Chris Gent’s greatest individual accomplishment.

You could easily argue, though, that Sarin’s acquisition of Indian carrier Hutchison Essar was a bigger victory - India’s only the world’s fastest growing mobile market after all. Certainly it won Sarin an awful lot of admiration and - with Vodafone this week reporting a profit of £6.7bn for the year to March 31st (up from a loss of £4.8bn the previous year) - it probably makes sense for him to head for the door.

He must be a bit tired. A weary-looking investor relations chap at Vodafone HQ once told the Informer that Sarin liked his daily news briefing - face to face - at 7.30am. Whether his replacement, deputy CEO Vittorio Colao, will want the same service remains to be seen, although the early signs are that continuity will be the key theme of Colao’s premiership.

Sarin’s last day is July 29th, and the Informer imagines that an envelope containing a big “Sorry you’re leaving!” card and several kilos of jangling coins is making its way from desk to desk at Newbury as you read these words. In the card, no doubt, the standard messages will appear: “You lucky b£$%*!d. Another one escapes! Good luck on the outside! Viv x” and “Don’t forget about us! Stay in touch!!! Jon B.” He won’t stay in touch, Jon B. They never do.

One of Sarin’s most sensible decisions was to get the hell out of Japan where, this week, an initiative has been launched to limit mobile phone usage by children. The Japanese government has given its approval to the plan, which was drawn up by an education reform panel. The kids are mad for mobiles in Japan and there are concerns that it’s becoming worryingly close to an addiction, with added fears about cyber crime and bullying thrown into the mix. The nation’s cellcos will presumably have to bow and smile and agree with the whole thing in public, while cursing the meddling bureaucrats behind closed doors. In other news from Japan this week, a cat has been appointed to the role of station master in one town and a woman has been found living in a man’s cupboard without him knowing about it in another. And they think kids on phones is a problem…

Across the water in China, where commando-going actress Sharon Stone offended over a billion people with some mind numbing comments about karma this week, there are changes afoot in the telecoms market. The government has revealed plans to reduce the number of state-owned carriers to three with some nifty consolidation. China Mobile will merge with fixed carrier China Tietong Telecommunications, China Telecom will take over the CDMA network of China Unicom, while Unicom’s GSM network will be merged with China Netcom. Phew!

This fuelled more speculation this week about just what’s going on with 3G licensing in China, which some people still expect to happen before the Olympics in Beijing this summer.

Netcom holds a 20 per cent stake in Hong Kong quad-play outfit PCCW, which announced this week that it wants to consolidate its offerings into a new company called HKT Group and flog off a 45 per cent stake. Richard Li, the firm’s majority owner, has tried to sell the firm before - in 2006 - but was blocked by other shareholders. During the proposed sale two years ago, it emerged that Li’s father and Asia’s richest man, Li Ka-Shing, was involved in the consortium proposing to buy the carrier, exposing a family rift and preventing Li from voting on the sale.

Meanwhile, PCCW competitor 3 Hong Kong said this week that it will be launching the iPhone in Hong Kong and Macau later this year. 3 is a 3G only operation, right? So you know what that means.

The firm’s Irish arm struck a deal with BT this week that will see the fixed player build out an expansion of 3 Ireland’s backhaul network, supporting speeds up to 14.4Mbps by next year. It’s worth EUR44m to BT.

In other 3G news, Russian carrier MTS lit its WCDMA network in St Petersburg this week, joining MegaFon in the Russian 3G stakes. The firm has plans for ten more city networks during the course of this year and up to 40 further cities will be covered in 2009. MTS also holds 3G licences in Uzbekistan and Armenia, where it reckons launches will happen in 2009 too. All in all the firm’s earmarked $1.6bn for 3G development in Russia and the CIS over the next three years.

Russia’s no stranger to spy stories but it was in Germany this week that dodgy covert surveillance reared its ugly head. Well, it didn’t rear its ugly head, that wouldn’t be very covert would it? It sat in a van with a telephoto lens, shall we say?

Over last weekend, Deutsche Telekom said it was launching a full investigation in to allegations of “misuse of call records”. Chief executive Rene Obermann said that recent findings suggest call record data was abused between 2005 and 2006. It is understood that people within the company had hired an external firm to analyse call records of conversations between board members and the press in a bid to identify the source of numerous leaks.

Obermann said the company had already investigated an individual case in the summer of 2007, following a tip-off from within the company and was able to resolve the incident. As a result, Deutsche Telekom reorganised its security department and implemented new control mechanisms. Not very good ones, it turns out.

He revealed that last month the management board had received information concerning broader and even more serious allegations from a third party commissioned by Deutsche Telekom’s security unit.

“I I I am m m sh sh shaken to the the core by these allega a a tions,” said Obermann, shaking to his core. “We take the situation most seriously. We have called in the public prosecutor’s office and will support them in their full investigation of these allegations,” said a much steadier Obermann. “By taking this approach we want to ensure the greatest possible level of transparency and allow criminal prosecutors to bring those responsible to justice.”

As everyone knows, however, there’s no justice in the world. If there were, brattish Chelsea footballer Ashley Cole wouldn’t be a millionaire. You can bet he’d be the type to go for one of the phones that a firm called Gresso has launched. You’d have to be stupid to drop $52,000 on a handset, even if it is covered in diamonds and built from ancient African Blackwood and 18 carat gold. After all, in 12 months it would be out of date and you’d be left with the ugliest brooch in the world.

In less frivolous handset news, Gartner revealed this week that, for the first time since it began tracking the handset market in 2001, sales for the first quarter of this year actually fell in Europe - by 16.4 per cent. That’s the cost of pushing contracts up to 18 months, which the vendors probably don’t like much. There was more bad news as Gartner suggested that sales in high-end handsets in particular were affected. As we get progressively more skint, it seems we are shying away from the top-notch phones. So up yours, Gresso. Gartner warned vendors to strengthen their mid-range workhorse portfolios in response to these straitened times.

Presumably we’ll all be cutting back on far-flung holidays as well. Especially now that European operators have reacted to the EU roaming cap by hiking prices for calls made from further afield. By as much as 163 per cent, according to Informa Telecoms & Media.

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.”

And that’s about it this week, although during one of the five ‘leisure minutes’ that the Informer is permitted each day, he found his way onto the website of comedian Emo Philips. There on the homepage was the following snippet of Emo wisdom:

“Cellphones are like dogs’ nipples. You don’t have to SHOUT INTO THEM!”

Take care

The Informer

 
 
 
 
This week, the Informer received a missive from his Big Boss reminding him that inappropriate use of the company’s IT infrastructure was a sack-worthy offence. With this in mind he begrudgingly removed his teacup from the aging G4’s CD tray and took down his Ethernet cable washing line, placing his damp socks on the radiator instead. Then he took out his Big Book of Jokes and put a thick red tick next to the chapter regarding inappropriate use gags.

His Big Boss wasn’t talking about that sort of inappropriate use, silly. He was talking, primarily, about the downloading of $mut. It’s not a laughing matter, so you can take that grin off your face right now. The Informer will have to be careful with his phraseology here, for up and down the land and all around the world spam filters will happily block emails with words like f1lthy’and ‘p0rn’ - and it’s a good thing too.

The Informer’s IT department has put in place just such a spam filter, which raises the following question: Who at Informa Towers can circumvent things like spam filters? Who is not surrounded at all times by colleagues in a large open plan office, but sits alone in the gloomy basement of the building? Whose first (and sometimes only) suggestion when faced with a problem is to “turn it off, and turn it on again?” The Informer thinks he knows, but firewalls have ears, so he’d best not name names.

The corporates’ primary concern here is not protecting their employees’ innocence. For innocence - as everyone knows - is the first casualty of work. No, the corporates are simply trying to avoid any potential bad PR and, more importantly, they’re trying to avoid being sued by litigious rivals or business partners who might - mistakenly or not - receive material that they deem inappropriate.

But corporations aren’t the only organisations keen to keep a watchful eye on their flock. It has emerged this week that the UK government is mulling plans to build a monster database capable of holding the details of all mobile and landline phone calls, emails and internet sessions initiated by UK citizens. This isn’t Big Boss, it’s Big Brother.

The proposals appear to be an extension of 2006’s EU Data Retention Directive (DRD), which requires all ‘access providers’ to store call records and ‘event logs’ for a period of not less than six months and not longer than two years.

The original implementation of the DRD suffered from a number of problems - not just the massive financial burden placed upon companies required to comply with the storing of, and access to, the data in question, but also with the definition of those companies. MNVOs ran into trouble, because they are required to produce comparable data records to traditional MNOs, but do not have the same access to the complete network and IT systems that are required.

Maybe the Informer is overreacting here; he has nothing to hide, so why should he care? Well, it would be a different case if this sort of thing were to happen in a country currently being led by a wildly unpopular premier who is failing to step down in the face of overwhelming evidence that he should. Somewhere like, say, Zimbabwe where - quite coincidentally - the local regulator has just announced that it’s going to scan all text messages to make sure subscribers are not “abusing the service”. By abusing the service, we can read sharing political thoughts and ideas that run contrary to those of one Robert Mugabe.

But since the Informer lives in a nice place where all the people at the top are looking out for his best interests, he has nothing to worry about, right? Mind, if you are a fan of totalitarian police states, you’ll be glad to hear that Orascom Telecom has revealed that it has successfully trialled WCMDA 3G services inside the Democratic [sic] People’s Republic of Korea.

The Informer is pretty sure that those lucky enough to get hold a 3G phone in North Korea will be free to talk to anyone they like, about whatever they like, without fear. Because the government will be poring over every single bit of data to make sure that they’re safe. Because that’s what governments do, right?

The Informer realises that comparing Gordon Brown with Mugabe and Kim il-Sung (yes, he’s still the president, despite dying in 1994) would be unfair. The latter two were actually fairly popular in their homeland when they came to power. BOOM, BOOM.

Brown, of course, would argue that his cyber-snooping is being put in place to crack down on serious crime. Maybe he needs to have a word with the guys and gals over at the Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP). They’ve written a 200 page recommendation that looks at the best ways to protect mobile devices as they begin to support more advanced features.

Back in February (remember February? It’s that short month with the really loooooong week in the middle) McAfee Mobile Security presented the results of its annual Mobile Security Report. The report, carried out in conjunction with analyst house Datamonitor, stated that 86 per cent of the 2,000 mobile consumers it surveyed across the UK, US and Japan are worried about security risks posed to their mobile handset, with 79 per cent knowingly using unprotected devices. Consumers feel threatened, it seems, but not enough to do anything about it.

Fortunately, for the carriers and subscribers alike, problems with handset security are rarely encountered. “We first saw malware for mobile phones appear at the beginning of this century,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant, Sophos told the Informer. “But they have always been largely proof of concept. So written by kids mostly to show off.”

Cluley estimates that there are about 200 known mobile phone viruses currently running ‘wild’. This compares to over 300,000 for Windows. “I think the criminals simply thought ‘well yes we could write viruses for mobile phones, but they’re unlikely to give us as good a return as the viruses for Windows at the moment’. Because with mobile phones you have to think about the different operating systems and the different devices. Many of the phones out there simply aren’t compatible with each other, so you are instantly narrowing your market of how many people you can infect.”

Still, just because something’s alright now doesn’t mean it won’t run into trouble down the line, which could quite easily have been what the 17th century sailors landing on Mauritius said when they first clapped eyes on the dodo. In all honesty, the Informer will probably give the OMTP’s 200 pages of wisdom a miss for now.

We’ve had the crime, now let’s have the punishment. Motorola has just been slapped with a …oh hang on, the Informer is so used to writing about bad things happening to the embattled kit maker he’s forgotten that sometimes good things can happen too. A judge in the US has ruled that the outcome of the nine year old Iridium bankruptcy fight will not cost the company a penny. Moto was looking down the barrels of a possible $4bn payout, which given the current situation would probably have just about finished it off.

Poor old 3UK wasn’t so lucky; it’s just been clobbered with a court order to cut its call termination rates by 45 per cent. Ouch. Termination rates are 3 CEO Kevin Russell’s worst nightmare (apart from the one where he’s being chased round his desk by a man with the head of a cockerel). When the Informer spoke with Russell late last year he explained: “There is a fundamental problem in the UK market on mobile to mobile termination rates. You cannot have a new entrant subsidising profitable incumbents. It has no place in a level playing field.” Seems Ofcom disagrees, and credits 3 with “significant market power”. Which, under any other circumstances, would be music to Russell’s ears.

Speaking of music, France Telecom-owned UK mobile operator Orange lifted the curtain on a wireless internet radio device this week. The Liveradio is a wifi radio device which gives broadband customers access to over 4,000 local, national and international internet radio stations. It costs £99.99 and sounds about as unexciting as the iPhone sounds exciting.

Thankfully, for Orange, it also had some iPhone-related news to trumpet this week. Quite possibly dancing round HQ to Daft Punk’s Around The World, executives at the French carrier have agreed a deal with Apple to sell the ‘must have’ gadget in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and Orange’s African markets - so Guinea Konakri, Guinea Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Niger, Mali, Kenya, Cameroon, Madagascar, Botswana and the Central African Republic. Phew.

Sales may have slowed in the iPhone’s existing markets, as punters await the arrival of the 3G version, but the new territories will help Steve Jobs to his stated aim of flogging ten million units before the end of this year. Global handset sales did their traditional post Christmas dip in the first quarter of this year according to analysts down at IDC. A total of 291.6 million units were shipped during the Q108, down 11.6 per cent from the previous quarter. The good news is sales were up 14.3 per cent on Q107.

And there was some even better news for smartphone mobile operating system developer Symbian this week. It said 18.5 million devices using the OS were sold in the first quarter, that’s a 16.5 per cent year on year increase in unit shipments. As one would expect revenues were up too, from $41.3m in the first quarter to 2007 to $43.5m in 2008. That’s a little over five per cent.

Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis is unimpressed and reckons that sales are down not just seasonally since Christmas, but are even below the level of mid-2007. “Against continued shipment growth of the overall market to above 1.1 billion phones a year, that’s not looking too promising for some observers’ expectations of 30 per cent penetration of smartphones in a few years’ time,” he said.

The handset market can be a dangerous place for the uninitiated. While the balance of power that exists between operators and OEMs generally swings towards the former, one carrier rumoured to be looking at making things even more one-sided is Newbury’s finest, Vodafone.

Word has it that Huawei has decided to put up to 50 per cent of its handset business on the market, in a bid to raise around $2bn and overcome US concerns about security issues related to Chinese companies. And there has been speculation that the big V might be up for a slice.

Vodafone, of course, built its position as a telecoms super power by snapping up operators. And that’s not a strategy it looks like ditching. This week it agreed to acquire the remaining 26.4 per cent stake that it didn’t own in German fixed line operator Arcor for Eur474m in cash.

Vodafone bought the remaining shares from Deutsche Bahn and Deutsche Bank and, with full ownership of Arcor, can lay claim to some 2.6 million DSL lines, representing 14 per cent of the German market.

Staying with acquisitions, giant US chip shop Qualcomm as made a strategic investment in femto and picocell manufacturer, ip.access. The Big Q joins existing investors Cisco, Intel Capital, ADC, Motorola Ventures, Scottish Equity Partners, Rothschild Gestion and Amadeus Capital Partners, with funding for ip.access’ latest bit of kit, the Oyster 3G femtocell.

In more news from Femto Corner, industry association the Femto Forum has made some headway towards harmonising the integration of femtocells into mobile networks. Speaking with the Informer’s colleagues at telecoms.com, Forum chairman, Simon Saunders, said the operator community had agreed on a single definition for the so-called Fa interface, allowing a multi-vendor approach to femtocell infrastructure deployments.

The Informer is still not entirely convinced of the need for home-installed 3G base stations, but then his granddad said The Beatles would be a flash in the pan when he first heard Love Me Do, so writing things off early is in his genes.

Besides, with all that money and all those high-flying ‘Plugged In’ firms backing a technology it’s bound to succeed, right? Just look at Twitter bagging $15m in a second round of funding (that’s $20m so far!). The firm is currently valued at $80m. We’re not quite sure what it’s turning over at the moment, but it’s got “bags of potential”. The mind boggles. Then, of course, there’s Location Based Services.

If ever there were a case for the expression, the perennial underachiever, LBS would win hands down. This week, one the Informer’s telecoms.com colleagues attended an LBS roundtable. “We all know what the BS in LBS stands for,” he quipped upon his return. You can read more of his comments here. In case you’re rushed for time, the take-home message is that the industry has yet to locate a workable business model.

Cell-ID is not accurate enough, GPS avoids cellular networks. So how can the mobile operators make money? Well, like all good VAS the value added for the operators could come from advertising. Analyst Arthur D. Little predicts about 60 per cent annual growth in mobile advertising spend over the next four years.

Ah, advertising that never-ending pot of money that will pay for everything. It’s like having a wealthy uncle who you know will one day kick the bucket and bequeath you a fortune. Except it turns out that he’s been telling all his other relatives the same thing, and that fortune will need to be spread out very thinly.

Surely it would be smarter to find something for which punters are willing to part with cash before developing that something, rather than the other way around. Still, taking risks is what it’s all about. And with that the Informer would like to bid you all a fond farewell.

Although, as Lieutenant Columbo used to say, there is just one last thing. Last week he (the Informer, not Columbo) asked what was so special about Entel PCS, promising an answer at the bottom of the page. Trouble is, the IT crowd that sends out the email managed to delete the p.s. Maybe they were too busy monitoring inappropriate material. Here’s the answer: Ay Carumba! You guessed it! Entel PCS was the first GSM carrier to launch on South American soil, earning it a GSMA Gratitude Award in 1998.

Hasta la vista, baby

(I’ll be back)

The Informer

 
 
 
 
If corporate raider Carl Icahn lived in the classic 1954 MGM musical Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, he’d probably step out onto the veranda of his ranch each day to admire the fine, hand-painted Technicolor morning. Then, in response to his wife’s enquiry as to what he planned to do, he’d launch into song:

“Well, my dear…

I’m a goin’ ousting, ousting, ousting, that’s what I’ll do.Corporate jousting, jousting, jousting ’til the day’s through.Gonna buy me a few more million shares, gonna oust that board right outta their chairs,I’ll oust today and oust tomorrow, too.”

Then, as he galloped off to work (on a horse) his wife would cock her head and laugh to herself, saying:

“Dear lord, but my Carl sure does love to oust!”

And doesn’t he just? Not content with securing his strategic objectives at Motorola, Icahn has turned his attentions to web giant Yahoo, where he feels the board has made a significant booboo by spurning the moustache-twirling advances of Microsoft. The software firm turned on its heel earlier this month after the Yahoo board waved away its offer of $34/share, opting to hold out for $37.

Microsoft, bristling from the rejection, has stated its intention to push on unaided in the online search space and Icahn, who bought 50 million shares in Yahoo following the collapse of negotiations, believes the portal has overestimated its appeal. He is not alone in his assessment - other Yahoo shareholders are known to be unhappy with the board’s decision - and this week Icahn announced his intention to nominate a board of his own choosing to replace the incumbents at the firm’s shareholder meeting in early July. His primary objective looks to be persuading Microsoft to resume discussions.

It could be done. Hopeful WiMAX pairing Sprint Nextel and Clearwire were able to sort out their differences, after all. And with both firms putting out results this week, it looks like they have a thing or two in common, challenging Paula Abdul’s assertion that opposites attract. Both firms had a bit of a shocker, to be blunt. Clearwire’s Q1 revenues were up 76 per cent year on year at $51m, on the back of a 72 per cent growth in the customer base, which now sits at 443,000. But losses grew by 90 per cent to reach $176.4m.

Sprint, meanwhile lost $505m for Q1, considerably more than double its Q107 deficit of $211m. Revenues were down eight per cent year on year to $9.3bn, as 1.09 million customers (net) fled the carrier’s network. The Informer wonders what the two firms’ coterie of WiMAX investors - Google, Intel, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Brighthouse - made of these results, what with them having just stuffed $3.2bn up Sprint and Clearwire’s collective chute.

Speaking of questionable collaborations, US MVNOs Virgin Mobile and Helio are making noises about banding together. On the back of a few days’ worth of rumours this week, Dicky Branson’s US outfit confirmed that it is in talks with South Korea’s SK Telekom which, along with EarthLink, owns Helio.

Opinion out in the industry appears to be divided as to whether this duet will be comparable to The Girl is Mine by Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney (a very bad idea) or Walk This Way by Run DMC and Aerosmith (a very good idea).

MVNOs don’t have the easiest time of it in the US and there have been some high profile disasters involving the likes of ESPN, Amp’d and Disney. Virgin Mobile is the most successful MVNO the world has ever seen but, although its US arm turned a profit for 2007, it had a poor Q4 - traditionally strong for prepaid, youth-focused players as Christmas shopping gets underway. Net adds for the quarter were only 209,669, down from 613,752 for Q406. And the firm itself predicted that churn in Q2 will lead to a net loss in customers for the second three months of the year.

Helio’s no great shakes, either. It’s got a nasty case of the financial trots and has a subscriber base of only around 200,000 people. Why should the amalgamation of two struggling firms create one strong one?

Still, the optimists argue that the target markets are complementary - Virgin goes after the low-spend prepaid youths, while Helio targets the idle rich with its fancy handsets and contracts. And both operations are on the Sprint network, which could possibly lead to a slight reduction in wholesale rates if they start joint negotiations with their host. Either way, it will be a while before we find out - if we ever do - as Virgin is stressing that it’s very early days at the moment.

It’s been all about the get-togethers this week. Alcatel-Lucent has formed a new joint venture company with Indian operator Reliance to provide managed services. AL currently sits third in the managed services vendor rankings, with around seven per cent of the market, according to the industry watchers at Informa Telecoms & Media. It’s a long way off the pace, though, with Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks commanding more than 20 per cent apiece.

The growth in managed services is significant for vendors whose kit sales are drying up and it’s a big focus for the Franco-US outfit. But partnering with an operator to build on your existing portfolio is an unusual manoeuvre for a vendor to make. The first contract the new firm is announcing will see it manage the networks of none other than Reliance itself, which is a little odd. Is an ownership stake going to be a prerequisite for all customers?

It’s a novel way for an operator to spread its international reach, though, which is high on the agenda for Indian carriers. The Informer understands that Alcatel-Lucent will shoulder the greater part of the operational burden.

It was party time and the cava was flowing at Spanish carrier Telefonica this week, which reported a 22.4 per cent year on year increase in Q1 profit, up to EUR1.54bn. The firm’s European properties dropped off a little, with revenue sinking 1.7 per cent to Eur3.5bn. It was Latin America - where Telefonica operates in ten markets - that did the business, with revenue growing just over ten per cent to EUR5.16bn.

It’s a region effectively dominated by Telefonica and America Movil, a carrier which - through a series of partnerships - gives Vodafone its presence in the market. The big V extended its tendrils further into Latin America this week, striking a partnership deal with Chilean player Entel PCS. Here’s one for the cellular history buff(s) out there: What is special about Entel PCS? (Answer at the bottom of the page).

Vodafone will introduce a range of push email devices, branded handsets and HSDPA USB modems into the market. Entel places second in Chile, behind Telefonica, which will no doubt be delighted to welcome Vodafone to the market, and will probably pop round with some empanadas on the first night, so Vodafone doesn’t have to cook anything while it’s unpacking. Unattached as it is to a big international group, the deal will probably help Entel as much as it does Vodafone.

In New Zealand, Vodafone is the one laying on the welcome. Hitherto a duopoly, with Telecom New Zealand offering the only competition to Mr Sarin’s people, NZ is set to become a triumvirate market with the news that a third player is entering the fray.

Well, it’s not really a fray, is it? The population of the country is only a little over four million; and half of them seem to be in London, where they’re attempting to watch cricket in the rain. The two incumbents had to release a bunch of spectrum as part of their licence extension deals with the Kiwi G. So now it’s business time for NZ Communications.

Right then, what else? A bit of handset malarkey, perhaps. Research in Motion unleashed its new model on the world this week, which it has named after a laundry detergent. The ‘Bold’ is the first of RIM’s BlackBerry family to support tri-band HSDPA, wifi and GPS.

Like all new, high-end handsets that get launched, it’s been hailed as a response to Apple’s iPhone, partly because of the industrial design that’s all black chrome and leatherette (sounds more like a mid 80s bachelor pad to the Informer). The Bold was apparently delayed somewhat by RIM’s attempts to get the battery life up to scratch, and the firm says five hours of talk time and 13 standby can be expected when the phone hits global markets later this year.

Also, following in the footsteps of Google and Apple, RIM has announced a partnership with Canadian bank RBC and business information group Thomson Reuters to launch the BlackBerry Partners Fund. The initiative is a $150m venture capital fund designed to promote investment in mobile applications and services for mobile platforms.

Meanwhile, those brainstorming sessions at Motorola are finally beginning to pay off, with the news that the firm is launching a new ’silver-pink’ version of the RAZR for the ladies of South Korea. Mind-blowing stuff.

On the OS side, open mobile Linux initiative the LiMo Foundation opened its doors to a handful of new players on Wednesday, including US carrier Verizon.

New additions to the forum also include browser platform Mozilla, as well as Infineon, Kvaleberg, Red Bend Software, Sagem Mobiles, SFR, and SK Telecom, expanding LiMo’s membership to 40 since the foundation’s launch in January 2007.

A not for profit organisation, the LiMo Foundation aims to blend the community-based development benefits of Linux with development practices from the mobile community in a bid to minimise fragmentation - an ambition shared by Android backers the Open Handset Alliance and as well as the LiPS Forum among other Linux collectives.

The collective was launched in January 2007 by six mobile players - Vodafone, Motorola, NEC, Panasonic Mobile, Samsung and NTT DoCoMo.

The last of these - Japan’s leading mobile operator - is apparently interested in kicking its faltering international investment strategy into drive again. Historically DoCoMo has attempted to spread its solutions through minority stakes in operators in Europe and the States, a policy marked by failure. But now the carrier has expressed an interest in Bangladeshi player Aktel, according to local reports.

And that’s about the size of it this week.

Take care

The Informer

Entel PCS quiz answer:

Ay Carumba! You guessed it! Entel PCS was the first GSM carrier to launch on South American soil, earning it a GSMA Gratitude Award in 1998.

 
 
 
 
Mobile WiMAX – it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Or, as developments this week would suggest, it’s not a Sprint, it’s a Clearwire. Sprint Nextel’s plans for a nationwide mobile WiMAX network in the US have stalled more than once, not least because of the carrier’s failure to sustain its relationship with wireless broadband provider Clearwire.

But the firm is clearly of the belief that there is safety in numbers, not to mention an awful lot of money. Sprint has persuaded a bunch of other firms – Intel and Google among them, as well as cable providers Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks – to buy into the dream, like some multi-billion dollar version of Dragon’s Den. The new company will carry the Clearwire name and also use the Xohm brand that Sprint developed for its WiMAX operation.

Whether this is letting friends in on a score or simply evidence of the old adage that misery loves company we’ll have to wait and see. Either way, Sprint has turned over 49 per cent of the operation to other investors, retaining 51 per cent for itself. Existing Clearwire shareholders will get 27 per cent, while the newcomers are getting the remaining 22 per cent for a collective investment of $3.2bn.

Individual investments are as follows: Comcast is topping out the fund with $1.05bn, hotly pursued by Intel Capital with $1bn. Time Warner Cable is carving itself a $550m slice, just ahead of Google with £500m, while Bright House is bringing up the rear with $100m.

But the money’s not just buying a share in the business. For its half a billion, Google’s got its feet well under the table, as preferred provider of internet applications to both Clearwire and Sprint, while also finding a guaranteed home for its Android handset platform. The cable guys have sorted themselves 3G and 4G wholesale agreements – a clear defensive play as cellular carriers look to position their services as the only kind of broadband you need – and Intel will be pushing Clearwire’s services in association with its notebooks. Everyone’s a winner…

Well, if the technology works. And assuming, of course, that juggling such a diverse gaggle of stakeholders – each with specific demands that they will seek to prioritise within the operation – will be easy. The Informer rather suspects that it won’t. And if it turns out not to be, the additional funding that this coalition has provided may simply turn out to be a stick with which Sprint gets soundly beaten.

This is all happening against a backdrop of speculation and difficulty for the carrier. Earlier this week, one of Sprint’s largest wholesale customers, Qwest, took its business – and its 816,000 subscribers – over to Verizon and there have been suggestions in the US press that Sprint should and may be looking to offload Nextel, for which it paid $35bn in 2005.

As if this all wasn’t enough, German magazine Der Spiegel this week reported that Deutsche Telekom is looking at buying Sprint Nextel as a means to improve its own position in the US market as it plugs away against Verizon and AT&T. DT’s T-Mobile is some way behind the other leading US players – only this week switching on very limited 3G coverage – and such an acquisition would make it the largest mobile player in the States by some distance. But think about it: A US GSM/WCDMA carrier buying a CDMA player with a half stake in a complicated, multi-sector-owned mobile WiMAX operation and an iDEN gig on the side? It’s going to be tricky to wring much synergy out of that lot.

There was another transatlantic M&A development this week, with UK-headquartered retailer and service provider Carphone Warehouse announcing the sale of 50 per cent of its European and US interests to stateside consumer electronics retailer Best Buy for £1.1bn. Part of the deal will see Best Buy use its share of CPW’s European retail presence to establish a consumer electronics foothold. So Carphone Warehouse could soon be selling TVs and the like.

The UK retailer will contribute its 2,400 European stores as well as its share of its existing relationships with Best Buy. Under the agreement, Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy will each own 50 per cent of the retail business, comprising all the 2,400 stores, the web and direct businesses, the insurance operations, and airtime reselling businesses. Carphone will maintain 100 per cent control of its fixed line telecoms business in the UK, comprising TalkTalk, AOL Broadband and Opal; and its share of the Virgin Mobile France joint venture.

Charles Dunstone, Carphone’s CEO, said, “Best Buy brings demonstrable expertise in merchandising, sourcing and customer service: that should help us accelerate the evolution of our business towards the broader connectivity market. We bring local knowledge, infrastructure and the expertise in linking services to product: that should help them push into larger format consumer electronics retailing in Europe.”

Dunstone said his company plans to use the proceeds of the deal to pay down debt, invest in broadband customer growth and infrastructure, and invest in new areas of growth.

In other international investment news, Indian carrier Bharti has long harboured a desire to take its highly regarded operational expertise on a long holiday overseas. This week the firm confirmed that it is in discussions with South African-headquartered MTN over an acquisition that could be worth $17bn and would create a powerful international player. It stressed that the talks remain at an early stage.

As the largest operator spanning the Middle East and Africa, MTN is something of an obvious target for major investors looking to increase their presence in high growth emerging markets. MTN had a total subscription base of 68.2 million at the end of the first quarter, with operations in 21 countries. The carrier is 76.9 per cent publicly traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, so Bharti would have to make an offer to institutional and private investors to acquire a majority stake in the company.

MTN’s $5.5bn acquisition of Investcom in 2006 expanded its footprint outside South Africa, but many of the markets in which it operates have relatively low penetration rates, making it a prime candidate for an acquisition approach.

There is a major shift underway, the Informer reckons, in the global operator community’s balance of power. Carriers in high growth markets are building impressive scale and looking to export their expertise. You can read all about this in the May edition of Mobile Communications International.

Back in the UK, BT this week unveiled its Broadband Anywhere package, which adds an HTC s620 – branded as the BT ToGo – to the fixed line broadband/wireless router connection. Punters can get 50 minutes of mobile talktime and 50 texts (courtesy of BT’s MVNO relationship with Vodafone) for £5 extra or 600 minutes and 700 texts for £35 extra.

The bundles include unlimited wifi browsing, but there’s a 10MB per month data download on the cellular use. Given that the fastest network technology available on the mobile side is GPRS, this should be ok. Because on a GPRS connection, it will probably take users a month to download 10MB anyway. The Informer can’t understand why there’s no 3G option on this, because not even the GSMA would try and pass off GPRS as broadband.

BT should have a peek at what Mobilkom Austria’s been up to. This week the carrier claimed – in conjunction with Nokia Siemens Networks – to have undertaken the world’s fastest HSPA data call. During the trial, the firms said, the downlink peaked at 10.1Mbps. Which is pretty nippy.

Meanwhile, Nordic/Baltic carrier TeliaSonera – recently the focus of acquisitive attentions from Orange – Norwegian competitor Telenor and Hutchison’s 3 have all won 4G licences in Sweden, where the beauty contest award concluded this week. Never mind your 10Mbps – these guys are talking about 100Mbps. That’s broadband, BT. Capiche?

Still, to be fair on BT, Apple didn’t deem it necessary to launch its iPhone with 3G (although it did have EDGE at least). This week Vodafone – conspicuous by its absence from the first wave of Apple’s distribution partners, announced that it has secured supply rights for the handset in 14 of its markets. Details on timings are yet to appear, but Voda will be flogging the iPhone in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey. The UK and Germany won’t see Vodafone offering the handset, presumably because of exclusivity deals that Apple has with O2 and T-Mobile respectively.

It strikes the Informer as likely that Vodafone won’t be offering the current iteration of the device, given that the carrier has always had issues with the absence of 3G connectivity. Last September, the Informer spoke to Jens Schulte Bockum, Vodafone Group’s global director of terminals. While he heaped praise on the handset in terms of its interface and design, here’s what he had to say on its connectivity:

“We think the fact that the current iPhone is not supporting HSDPA or 3G broadband is a serious omission. Whether you use an EDGE network of GPRS, the 2G internet experience from the iPhone doesn’t really leverage the intrinsic device capabilities from a browser perspective. It is not as compelling as one would have thought it could be. Especially if you benchmark it against the wifi experience.”

The iPhone is popular with the youth, of course. And it seems these days that if you want to connect with the youth, you have to meet them on their own territory. So it emerged this week that His Holiness the Pope will be using text messages to contact young Catholics when he attends World Youth Day in Australia later this year. Perhaps something along the lines of: ‘U W8 til ur married :o(’

Benedict XVI will be marshalling a range of youth-oriented technologies to spread the word to the youngsters, including digital prayer walls and a special social networking site, a bit like a Catholic Facebook. The latter, presumably, will see users being ‘poped’.

It is a fact that his namesake, the actor Dirk Benedict, who didn’t do so badly communicating with the kids himself, through his roles as Face in the A-Team and Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica, lit on his stage name while he and his agent were in a restaurant trying to decide what to have for breakfast. On seeing Eggs Benedict, the decision was made.

The Informer can’t help but wonder if the Pope, likewise, chose his own handle by scanning the Vatican brunch menu. It must have been a tough call but, in the end, Pope Pancakes probably wouldn’t have worked. (With Papal syrup? Ed.)

Take care,

The Informer

 
 
 
 
Apparently this week sees the 30th birthday of spam. Not the tinned meat product (which is 71 years’ old, if you’re interested), but the endless, unsolicited electronic messages with which we are each bombarded daily. The Informer wouldn’t have known about this anniversary were it not for a press release he was sent using the news as a hook to plug some anti-spam products.

There are layers of meaty irony here upon which we could feast, like a rich literary lasagne. But the Informer will simply observe that he can imagine no more appropriate way to be told about the birthday of spam than a press release such as this one. He should also point out that there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this newsletter.

Birthdays are usually celebrated of course, but to bake a cake for this would be a bit like throwing a party to mark the anniversary of the day you first learned you had herpes.

In equally un-celebratory mood this week was Alcatel-Lucent, which sat out the clamour of last week’s results-fest in order to have the stage all to itself on Wednesday for the mournful announcement of its fifth straight quarterly loss. Q1 this year saw a shortfall of EUR181m, compared to EUR8m for the same period in 2007. Sometimes things get worse before they improve. But sometimes, things just get worse. Nokia Siemens Networks is faring no better and proof of concept for the mergers that created the two companies is hard to find at the moment.

Revenues at AL were down a sliver at EUR3.86bn, and the firm projected more misery to come. Half of its sales are in US dollars, and customers are cutting back on their spending anyway.

Another problem is that the CDMA market in which Alcatel Lucent is the leader, is showing little sign of growth, according to CEO Pat Russo. There was speculation last October that Russo had been given a month to turn the Franco-US JV around, which clearly came to nought. But French press reports this week suggested that the firm was scouting around for a replacement again.

Nomura analyst, Richard Windsor, said: “There is still no sign of a consistent return to spending growth from operators, which leads us to believe that recovery to a sensible valuation is some way off.” Windsor also notes that the company offloaded what is believed to be its UMTS IPR portfolio during the quarter, and that this went to Research In Motion (RIM) for a profit of Eur31m.

Perhaps the firm will be hoping that the French Government goes ahead and issues a fourth 3G licence, as Alcatel historically didn’t do too badly in its home market (ahem). There were four licences originally in France, but there were only three takers prepared to stump up. The fourth licence was shelved because the only interested party, Iliad Telecoms, sheepishly admitted it couldn’t afford i