Telco 2.0

US National Broadband Plan: good in theory...

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:59:55 +0000

The FCC has published its National Broadband Plan - you can get it here from the horse's mouth. We haven't finished reading the 376 closely printed pages of exhaustive detail quite yet (we're on page 62), but we do have some initial thoughts about the plan based on what we already knew, what's in the recommendations, and what we've read so far.

In brief, it looks good in theory, but the proof of the pudding will be what the complex US market structure turns it into in practice. In addition, in terms of global impact, we see the National Broadband Plan as another piece of evidence for the Telco 2.0 concept that telecoms is increasingly too important to be left to the telcos. The growing influence of Governments and Regulators on broadband is a major theme in the broaband business models strategy report we're about to publish, and will be examined in detail at the 9th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in London, 28th-29th April 2010.

Ducts, poles, and trenches

The Plan is strong on the holes-in-the-ground aspect of telecoms. It clearly recognises that open access to infrastructure is vital for the upgrade to fibre. Further, it should perhaps be considered a law that open access is appropriate at the level which is most expensive to replace - nobody thinks operators should provide open access to their core routers - and the plan is clear that the important bit is making it possible for new fibre to be attached to existing poles or blown through existing ducts at sensible rates. The FCC intends to review the regulatory settlement in so far as it applies to attachment (American for duct access), special access, the US equivalent of wholesale line rental, and national roaming in mobile.

Specifically, the original text states:

Recommendation 4.7: The FCC should comprehensively review its wholesale competition regulations to develop a coherent and effective framework and take expedited action based on that framework to ensure widespread availability of inputs for broadband services provided to small businesses, mobile providers and enterprise customers...and Recommendation 4.8: The FCC should ensure that special access rates, terms and conditions are just and reasonable.

Get the facts

Another significant element of the plan is data collection and public information. The FCC has initiated the procedure necessary to issue a new regulation forcing telcos/ISPs to provide a wider range of data, and crucially to provide data about actual performance rather than their advertised "up to..." speeds. NIST is mandated to prepare a common technical standard for broadband instrumentation and definitions. It also seems they're going to require more disclosure of who owns what infrastructure, where, which is a crucial pre-requisite for open access. All the FCC's data returns will be collated and published on the Web through a new Broadband Data Repository.

This is an important political step - in the run-up to the Plan, data has been a difficult subject, with projects like California's Broadband Map running into heavy opposition from the incumbent operators. After all, disclosure sheds light on how badly served some places are, leads to requests for attachment and special access from competitors, and also permits unwelcome comparisons of current service with the promises made by the RBOCs to state governments in the 1990s. This is a bitter political issue in many places - for example, Verizon committed to provide 45Mbit/s service to the bulk of New Jersey in exchange for generous tax breaks and regulatory reliefs, which didn't happen. Sara Wedeman's awful experience with this is instructive.

Incremental muni-fibre strikes again

As well as the headline goal of 100 million households with 50Mbits uplink and 100Mbits downlink in the next 10 years, Goal 4 is interesting. Goal 4 aims to get 1Gbps or higher connectivity to all "anchor institutions" - that is to say, schools, colleges, medical facilities, libraries, community centres, town halls and the like. This is important in a number of ways - not only does it obviously contribute to the public sector's own IT goals, but it's a measure against the digital divide, and it provides an opportunity for quick hits, as much of the land and rights-of-way involved are already in the public hand and the public sector institutions involved can act as a launch customer.

Of course, as the Plan points out, laying Gigabit Ethernet to the local school is a significant step towards laying 100Mbits Ethernet to the pupils' homes. It's all quite reminiscent of this talk from a past Telco 2.0 event.

Spectrum

The Plan is surprisingly heavy on the wireless side of the industry, which is in part a recognition that there are a lot of rural and exurban road frontages in the United States and running access loop fibre down all of them is a fairly awe-inspiring project even with access to the existing poles. Of course, as population density drops, although the cost of laying lines goes up, the number of users per MHz of radio spectrum is falling - therefore, there's a significant zone of opportunity for a combination of selective fibre roll-out (to those anchor institutions, perhaps) and advanced wireless in the access layer.

In order to deliver this, the Plan foresees a truly epic release of radio spectrum - they plan to part with 500MHz of the stuff. There are two rather special proposals here - the plan foresees a sizeable (20MHz contiguous) allocation of spectrum exclusively for unlicensed, open slather usage. This will be the primary usage of the band - rather than permitting the licensed bands to overlap into it, and restricting the unlicensed operators' transmitter power, the FCC wants to cordon off the unlicensed zone entirely and therefore offer the unlicensed higher power settings. The other is for a national public-service wireless broadband network for the emergency services, and perhaps for other public service goals in so far as there is spectrum over and above the blue light services' needs.

Paying for it

In order to fund the plan, the FCC leans heavily on spectrum sales as a revenue source. Expect a major string of auctions. Beyond that, it intends to divert the money that currently goes from the Universal Service Fund to subsidise rural voice operators into broadband deployment through a new mechanism (the Connect America Fund). It is also going to review the High Cost element of the USF - intended to give the hardest-to-reach places more subsidy - and to look at how the USF's revenues are raised, which might imply a Digital Britain-style levy on the urban subscribers.

Some final thoughts

The National Broadband Plan is a credible document. It embodies many of the key principles we've identified about the future of broadband - the importance of access to the civil works infrastructure, the importance of wholesale, and the expanded role of the public sector. As usual in the US industry, however, the key element will be how these principles get implemented at run-time, as it were, when the complex and frequently dysfunctional relationship between the various different types of operator, the FCC, the 50 state Public Utilities Commissions, NTIA, and the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service actually cut the rules, decisions and precedents that make up the plan's influence on the ground.

Free Demo, 23rd March - Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live!

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:40:14 +0000

We introduced last month a new service from Telco 2.0: Best Practice Live! the first carefully curated, online, video based, interactive knowledge bank of cutting-edge 'Telco 2.0' services, business models and solutions.

This a very powerful marketing tool for companies who want to read 000's of prospective customers worldwide in a very engaging way.

To help you understand the potential of this new service we have organised a free web-based demo on 23rd March 1.30pm GMT. If you'd like to take part please contact Tim Cook, tim.cook@stlpartners.com, to get your login details, or if you'd like a private demo.

Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! will run on the 28-30 June 2010 with live broadcasts of case studies to three geographic regions (Americas, EMEA, APAC), as well as being available for six months afterwards online. Sponsors can contribute case studies, testimonials, data sheets and more in multiple formats that (includes video, powerpoint, PDF, more). Every time a download is made of your materials you get a report back of who and when, as well as getting access to the entire attendee list. This is measurable, trackable marketing at its best.

The sponsorship prospectus of Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! is also now available upon request for interested parties - please contact Tim Cook, tim.cook@stlpartners.com.

Telco 2.0 News Review

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:00:05 +0000

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

Strategy & Finance: Vendors weather the crisis thanks to China, Safaricom & friends, VZW
Mobile Money: Telenor...buys a bank
Regulation: British intelligence: music wants to be free, maaan!
Broadband Connectivity: OFCOM moves on 800, 2600MHz bands at last
Advertising 2.0: How Apple missed out on Admob - and how Google spent $750 million to spite Steve Jobs

[Ed: There's a major session on 'Living with Google - Where to collaborate, where to compete?' at the 9th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm, 28-29th April, London]

ABI closes the books on 2009 and concludes that despite the global recession, mobile CAPEX held up well, if you count a 5% dip as "well"; key drivers of this included 243,000 base stations for China, Huawei's lavish vendor financing, and Verizon Wireless' LTE supercontract.

Telenor, in its role as Pakistan's second biggest operator, reckons that we're heading into the emerging-markets shakeout - they think Pakistan just has too many GSM networks, perhaps because of all that lovely vendor financing. Well, in a sense, they would say that, but it certainly fits with our experience at TelecomFinance. Also, when we included "Buy a bank - they're going cheap" as an option in the Mobile Money vote at the last Telco 2.0 event, it was meant to be a joke. Telenor Pakistan, though, has done just that, buying into a micro-finance bank and introducing mobile payments for utility bills.

Bizarre twist in the UK's Digital Economy Bill debate - are the secret services coming out against three strikes? It started with a leak of the BPI's weekly internal news digest, which contained an odd reference to a survey commissioned by TalkTalk and whether it was funded by MI-5. The Cambridge Computer Lab security blog has more, including the fact that the intelligence community is having talks with the prime minister's staff about this - it seems that the spies are worried that, if three-strikes provisions come in, essentially everyone will start encrypting all their traffic, and they won't be able to spy on it. Also, they won't be able to infer that the presence of encrypted traffic is in itself suspicious.

Who would have guessed that the intelligence services and the record industry would end up on opposite sides of an Internet-freedom debate? Of course, it is possible to see who else is supplying or downloading a file on a P2P network even if encryption is used - so an evil peer attack is possible - but it's also possible to push your P2P trafffic through something like Tor, or just use Rapidshare instead.

Meanwhile, the German supreme court struck down the EU data-retention directive after a long and bitter campaign.

Which is almost a pity, what with this new stealth product at IBM. Their M2 Insight Engine seems to be a platform for processing really huge data sets, based on the open-source Apache Hadoop system, and you'd think crunching telco subscriber data would be an ideal application. But IBM's suggested use-cases including something called Computational Journalism...

While the row about the Digital Economy Bill rages, the UK is making no progress at all on replacing the copper network. Computer Weekly joins the new Final Third First campaign for universal broadband, making the excellent point that it's not just the countryside that has problems - BT's urban residential network is gradually rotting (which is very obvious to at least one Telco 2.0 crew member, whose inner-London ADSL line achieves a spectacular 700kbps downlink). CW also makes the excellent point that no-one is really responsible for the quality of wholesale broadband lines and that it's quite possible that BT management is living in a fools' paradise because their metrics don't cover actual throughput rather than modem line rates.

In tangentially related news, the UK Information Commissioner is trying to get the political parties to activate the legal provisions that could make it possible to send data thieves to prison...unfortunately, one of the parties' director of communications is a possible candidate for this punishment, so good luck with that!

And OFCOM has moved on the spectrum issue, officially approving the re-use of the GSM900 and PCS bands for 3G, and making a variety of detail changes (increasing the permissible transmitter power for underwater use so long as the transmitter is automatically suppressed when it surfaces...). It seems that a version of the Kip Meek plan will go before parliament before the general election - a tight timescale - with the auctions provisionally scheduled for the summer.

The plan foresees the release of the 800 and 2600MHz bands, with a 180MHz cap on individual holdings of spectrum and a 40MHz cap on individual holdings below 1GHz. 20MHz (in four 5MHz channels) of the 800 band will come with a universal service requirement of 99% population coverage. All the allocations are technology neutral. A key block of contiguous 2.6GHz spectrum - 50MHz worth - is allocated for TDD systems and is going to be fast-tracked, so it's "gentlemen, start your engines" for the WiMAX vendors. There's some good news for new entrants - if you can get to 70% population coverage, you have a right to a regulated national roaming agreement for the rest.

One operator that's interested in more spectrum would be Qualcomm's FLO wholesale mobile-TV network, which has signed up CNN as a new customer.

A little shot of whisky for sender-pays data: some operators (3UK is mentioned) are apparently thinking of linking priority data service with app stores, so you might (without noticing it) pay for priority access when you buy an app. 3UK is currently throttling down BitTorrent traffic from its dongle fleet on cells that are currently congested only.

Google's announcement of FTTH demonstration projects has unleashed a frenzy of interest from the broadband-starved. The latest move is that the U.S. Senator and comedian Al Franken (there are plenty of senators who are also clowns, but only Al is doing it on purpose) is going to lobby Google for fibre in two cities in his home state of Minnesota.

Meanwhile, the FCC has released an app that lets you test the quality of mobile data service.

It looks like Apple could have grabbed AdMob for $150 million less than Google eventually spent, had they moved quickly enough to close the deal during the 45-day lockup period. Apparently, Google's top motivation in buying the mobile-ad specialist was simply to stop Apple getting it.

Here's a story with an incredibly high buzzword density: a version of Google Reader optimised for the Apple iPad. It has a very clean and rather Apple-like user interface and is implemented entirely in HTML/Javascript (of course, you're not allowed to use Flash on the 'pad even if you wanted to for some perverted reason). There's a whole gallery of mockup newspaper applications on the iPad here.

There's also a fascinating piece about the thing's genesis and Fujitsu, the importance of voice control, and the possibilities of Google Android on the netbook/tablet/smartbook platform.

Perhaps the perfect representation of the zeitgeist - an iPhone app for unemployment. iPhone and Android users finding themselves out of work can now do a location-based search for jobs registered with the Jobcentre Plus system, and apply through the Jobcentre call centre.

Sprint is providing wholesale M2M service for pay-as-you-go car insurance. Basically, the idea is that you accept to be monitored whereever you go, and only pay for the miles you actually drive; it's also a possibility that your premiums might be dynamically adjusted. The only question that remains is why anyone would actually want that - Telco 2.0 was recently offered a quote by a PAYG car insurer that was literally double the best competing price, but we suppose you've got to pay for a really spectacular assault on your privacy.

Meanwhile, Californian electricity company PG&E wants to deploy smart meters; the EFF has privacy concerns, and it's off to the courthouse.

Mobile search usage data - Telemap has published statistics on what its users actually search for, and it turns out that they mainly search for pizza, Chinese takeaways, and coffee. Clearly, we're still not breaking out of the early-adopter geek market.

Has the app hype peaked? We ask only because someone's asking if they will "save the world". They probably do have a point about election monitoring. Meanwhile, Googlephone sales have been revised down yet again. And growth at Twitter appears to have run out of steam.

The management of MySpace are faced with a major challenge, as the network looks more and more like another Friends Reunited; they've changed CEO twice this year.

T-Mobile USA announced that it's joined a cloud platform that aggregates location data from multiple sources under a common API for applications developers, Veriplace, which also includes AT&T and Sprint.

There's a Nokia N900 up for grabs for the winner of a contest for the best Mozilla Fennec add-on. More here.

And the Electronic Frontier Foundation has the full text of the Apple iPhone developer license agreement - highlights include a clause that bans you from saying anything about the agreement and another one that denies liability for any damages greater than $50. As usual, the gap between Apple's image and the reality is impressive.

Interesting Voice 2.0 app - Twisted Pair lets you trunk push-to-talk systems over the Internet, so you can do your own PTT on networks that don't have it and extend your private-mobile-radio network's PTT service to all your mobile devices. They also deserve some kind of award for the company name...

We were a little nonplussed by the Orange-Barclaycard deal - was there really very much value in what was, after all, basically an Orange-branded Visa card? Here's something more like it - Barclays is promising to have an Orange-backed NFC product out this year. In other emerging finance news, Kickstarter is a crowdsourcing site for tech startups - rather than hoping to catch a VC player, you put up a project and try to get many users to contribute your funding.

Felix Salmon, however, sounds a note of warning - it's not usually good news when something that isn't a bank decides to dabble in a little banking, nor is it often good news when something that isn't an insurance company tries to write insurance, especially if they aren't covered by the same regulation that covers banks or insurers.

David Burgess is blogging his OpenBTS deployment on Niue further; there's a third post here, in which they climb the tower, set up the Asterisk box, and discover a radio environment stranger than they could possibly imagine.

It's been 25 years since the first .com domain name was registered; and ten years since World Online's botched flotation rang in the .com crash. The best mobile app ever? And the Internet has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Telco 2.0 News Review

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:52:41 +0000

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

Broadband Connectivity: FCC to switch USF over to fibre deployment, and back PSTN replacement?
Regulation: BSG - bring us your cost estimates and help build UK broadband
Emerging Markets: Megatender is off, Unitech Wireless relies entirely on tower sharing
Technology Disruptions: DARPA: the troops need an app store based on Google Android and they need it now!
2-Sided Business Models: The secrets of Amazon.com

We may be facing a major moment in industry history: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is looking at using the Universal Service Fund (USF) to fund broadband deployment. In the past, the use of the USF has been purely voice-oriented, and has hitherto transferred large sums of money from urban and suburban telecoms users to rural operators.

If this goes ahead, watch out for many operators deciding that it's time to set an out-of-service date for the PSTN itself - USF subsidies are assessed by PSTN line, and if they start flowing in other ways, there's not much reason to go entirely cellular or to VoIP.

It could also find very significant sums of money for fibre deployment, and it's likely to reinforce the paradoxical situation in which some of the tiny rural operators - RLECs - that the USF supports, can offer rather better service than the giant RBOCs that dominate urban and suburban America, and whose subscribers eventually pay for the USF. (That, however, does represent a transfer from the rich to the poor.)

Other regulatory decisions - for example, whether USF money can be used in the cities, and whether the common carrier provisions that apply to voice and wholesale T1/DSL at the moment will survive the end of the PSTN - are going to determine the future shape of the industry. But this one will certainly mean it won't stay the same.

It's probably worth remembering the sudden interest by various carriers at MWC in third-party VoIP. Brough Turner, meanwhile, points out that although LTE is designed to be all-IP, with well-known and awful consequences for voice, the first spectrum allocations have turned out to be the FDD ones optimised for...circuit-switched voice.

Some people are unwilling to wait; this US town is threatening to rename itself Google in a bid to get one of their FTTH demonstration projects. Meanwhile, a major round of grants were approved by NTIA, with 14 broadband middle-mile projects getting the green light. A major winner is Level(3)'s project to extend open access backhaul to 47 new POPs, which gets $14 million for six projects.

The UK's Broadband Stakeholder Group is gearing up for yet another round of consultations at OFCOM, which have a deadline of the 1st of April. (Insert your April Fool joke here.) The specific issue is the special business rates (for readers outside the UK - property taxes) that are applied to fibre runs in Britain - this is both a major added cost of fibre deployment and a barrier to duct-sharing, as the act of blowing fibre through the duct triggers a hike in the rates.

So far, the estimated costs for a national broadband network include taxes based on rough guesses of the cost of laying fibre. The BSG and Computer Weekly are appealing for anyone who can help to lighten their darkness with real data, hoping that the actuals may turn out to be significantly less onerous. OFCOM is also thinking about net neutrality.

And this week's merger rumour involves Vodafone and 3UK, which would reduce the number of competing radio networks in the UK to two.

In India, meanwhile, BSNL's famous 93 million line "megatender" is off again after months of on-off. The Central Vigilance Commission, a government anti-corruption taskforce, reckons that it's impossible for the process to reach a genuinely competitive conclusion - NSN, Alcatel, and ZTE have all been disqualified, which leaves only Ericsson and Huawei, and they're likely to split the job between them.

Telenor's chief in Asia has given some clues about their strategy in India (as Unitech Wireless) - he expects to cover about half the market by the summer, to price the service as a premium product, to mostly rely on tower-sharing, and to sit out at least the first rounds of 3G spectrum auctions.

Sprint, meanwhile, is planning another round of the price wars, with a monthly price of $70 for all the data, SMS, and voice you can inhale. 3UK is offering 750 minutes, and all the SMS and data you can use, and a Nokia X6 for £35 a month for two years. Similarly, NTT DoCoMo fights back against Softbank, with...lower prices and dongles.

In devices news, it looks like the first Android devices on AT&T will have Yahoo! configured as the default search engine. It is probably fair to say that Google didn't envisage this when they started cutting code on a mobile operating system. Tangentially, both Microsoft and Google are buyers of TV ads while being sellers of Web ones. However, as Connected Planet asks, does being the default search engine really count for anything? After all, Google is just a bookmark away, and so many carriers implement so bizarrely the fairly simple concept of "a link to google.com/yahoo.com on the front page" that being a default might even be a net negative.

Android, it turns out, is also the choice of DARPA, the storied boffin-tank funded by the US military that gave us much of the Internet protocols. DARPA is looking at setting up - what else? - an app store as a means of getting new applications into the field quickly. For the first round at least, participants have been told that Android is where it's at, and that the military is keen on getting lightweight UMTS kit of its own into theatre in order to provide the necessary bandwidth. (Readers may remember Private Mobile Networks.)

In the ultra-light, ultra-low cost networks world, David "OpenBTS" Burgess and Tim "PhoneFromHere" Panton have just been in Niue, where they've deployed the first national GSM network powered by OpenBTS and Asterisk. Of course, "national" is a relative term on a tiny Pacific island, but they did have some trouble with spectrum management - a local WLAN operator using the 900MHz band without telling anyone. PMN, you may recall, suggested that their customers wouldn't have this problem because they had bigger tanks, but that wasn't really an option.

Microsoft has announced a new gadget, cooperating with Verizon Wireless. Confusingly, "Pink" does not come with MS Windows Phone, but rather the older MS Windows Mobile 6.5.

Apple and Nokia are suing; Apple has also apparently just tried to patent life, the universe, and everything. Your roundup of iPad rumours is here.

A good patent row always tends to lead us towards the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has lately been celebrating 20 years since the case of FBI vs. Steve Jackson Games and its foundation. This week, they handed in a giant petition to the FCC demanding net neutrality.

Perhaps they - or their UK opposite number, could have a go at this? The BBC has just terminated a third-party client for iPlayer on the grounds it does too much caching, which could lead to ~~mixed dancing~~ a copyright violation. That's arguable, but they seem to be on much shakier ground with this piece of work, in which they barred users of the XBMC open-source Flash replacement.

A boost for MeeGo; Orange has signed up to support the Nokia/Intel mobile Linux platform as a "channel for consumer multimedia", whatever that may mean.

After the UAE's efforts to hack the whole national BlackBerry fleet, Saudi Arabia has taken a less flaky but no less authoritarian approach - they're planning to simply ban the BlackBerry Messenger instant-messaging service, presumably because they can't snoop on it easily.

The European Union is mad at Poland's incumbent telco, which is accused of deliberately delaying competing operators' access to infrastructure. Charter Communications is looking at mobile of some form, perhaps through being a major MVNO customer on Clearwire. A French hypermarket group wants to launch an MVNO in Brazil. Qualcomm's dual-mode chips find their way into a femtocell. Did the head of Google Europe really mean that the PC will be irrelevant in 3 years?

A report on the suicides at France Telecom is out.

And High Scalability has a must-read interview-cum-meta-feature on Amazon.com.

Register Now for 9th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm, 28-29 April, London

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:20:15 +0000

Detailed information for 9th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in London, complete with on-line registration is now live on the event website.

The Brainstorm will take place at the Grange St Pauls Hotel, London on April 28-29 and features dedicated one day summits on Digital Entertainment 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, as well as the very latest from Telco 2.0 on the 2-sided business model roadmap.

Check out our last blog on the event agenda and the website for more.

WAC, Meego, eStore: Three Big Moves in Mobile Platform Consolidation

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:00:52 +0000

Three major news items underline the centrality of applications development to the future of the telecoms industry.

The first is the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) - this essentially extends the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) proposal, originated by Vodafone, Softbank, and China Mobile, to a brief who's who of major world operators, 28 carriers in all. The aim is to establish a common environment for mobile apps development and deployment. By 'apps', however, they mostly mean JIL-style Web widgets.

The second is Meego, a merger of Nokia and Intel's mobile linux efforts, and the third is Ericsson's eStore.

In short, that's three major applications platforms who will line up against Google Android, Apple, and RIM at the top of the industry.

We'll be discussing these in detail with senior representatives from all of these initiatives at the 9th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in London on 28-29 April but, in the meantime, to whet your appetite, below is an analysis of what this all means and why it matters?

WAC - Telcos seek their own Appstore

The really good news about WAC is that the project looks set to clean up some of the standardisation proliferation that's beset the industry. Telco 2.0 spoke to people involved, who seem quite clear that the plan is to eventually filter the alphabet soup into a clear, single structure. JIL, despite being called the Joint Innovation Lab, you may recall, was actually a standard, similar to the Open Mobile Terminal Platform's BONDI standard, which was intended to provide a single API for access to device functionality across any OMTP-compliant gadgets. Unfortunately, being quite standard is the same thing as not being standard at all.

A bit of history...

At the same time as JIL and BONDI were emerging, the LiMo Foundation's flavour of mobile Linux was being marketed to operators concerned about the growing power and influence of Apple, RIM, and Google, as we discussed in this Analysts' Note. LiMo supports BONDI, and as we noted back in February 2009, the JIL operators wanted to support three platforms - Windows, Symbian, and Linux. It now seems that WAC will subsume JIL, and will be compliant with BONDI. And this week, the LiMo Foundation sent WAC a nice letter. Hopefully they won't need to go all the way to sending a cake.

... and the endgame

The ultimate outcome will see LiMo become the underlying operating system, with BONDI-compliant interfaces to the low level device functions, such as power management, audio/video, multitasking and access to the radio paging channel. On top of this will be a choice for developers between JIL-style widgetry or native Linux development. (For example, if you wanted to scrape the Transport for London Web site and provide a mobile-friendly list of the next buses from your nearest stops, you might do it as a widget; if you wanted to show the current locations of buses on a three-dimensional map, you'd need the full power of native code.) This permits the new community to tap the two biggest developer communities in the world - the Web/JavaScript one, and the Unix/Linux one. WAC is intended to provide a single interface for deploying, marketing, and maintaining applications that came out of this process.

If successful, it might provide the kind of scale that individual operators struggle to offer in comparison with the major global vendors (i.e. Apple, RIM, Nokia, and Samsung), all of whom can offer access to their entire device fleets. In that case, further help to redress the balance between the operators and the vendors, especially Apple and RIM.

Voda seeking unity?

It's also significant that the Vodafone 360 devices are both LiMo-powered and BONDI-compliant. Vodafone is represented on the board of LiMo Foundation, a founder of JIL, and a founder of WAC; it certainly looks like the world's biggest operator by revenues is trying to bring about a rapprochement between all three groups. (We noted that something like this might be afoot as long ago as April 2009.)

Meego - big vendor effort for consolidation

From the vendors' side, the big news was Nokia and Intel agreeing to merge their mobile Linux efforts. Intel has had a version of Linux (Moblin) around for a while without really getting any traction; Nokia has been supporting Maemo Linux for some time and has used it in tablets (N800/810) and in the new N900 flagship phone. These two will now be rolled together into Meego. Any reduction in the number of competing platforms is to be welcomed, of course, but more significantly, this signals a further move on Nokia's part to shift emphasis from Symbian S60 to Linux in their top-end devices, and to build up their developer community.

It may also mark a renewed effort by Intel to break into mobile, and by Nokia to diversify their sources of silicon. In 2009, Nokia buried the hatchet with Qualcomm, agreeing to develop devices for North America based on their MSM chips . Nokia also agreed to cooperate with Intel on a new mobile platform. Meego is a software project, but it is unlikely for a deal between the world's biggest manufacturer of semiconductors and the world's biggest buyer of semiconductors for mobile devices to have no influence on the market for semiconductors.

Qt - an attempt to bridge complexity and devices

Further, Nokia is putting a lot of emphasis on the Qt cross-platform graphical user interface framework. This is used in the KDE graphical desktop for Linux and in many other applications; Nokia acquired its parent company, Trolltech, some time ago. It will be the primary applications framework for Meego, and increasingly for Symbian as well.

The importance of Qt here is that it provides a common GUI and a common developer environment (Qt Creator) across multiple underlying platforms, that's sufficiently powerful to implement a whole desktop PC user interface and apps suite - it's available for Symbian as well as Maemo, and even for MS Windows. Meego and Nokia/Qt documentation frequently refers to Qt applications on the desktop and on embedded devices, which seems to suggest that Nokia is keen to see their technology used elsewhere than on mobile devices only. Nokia's developer activities have been repeatedly hindered by the sheer diversity of their device and software output - this is an effort to bridge over the complexity.

Ericsson joins the AppStore Value chain with eStore

Not to be outdone, Ericsson also made a play for a role in the apps world with the launch of its eStore, a cross channel, cross device app and content store that it is selling as a white label service to telcos as well as content owners. For operators, it provides the opportunity to get an app store up and running in weeks rather than months and is primarily targeted at tier 2 and 3 operators struggling to get into the app and content games. For Ericsson, it embeds the vendor in the app store value chain. Indeed, Ericsson confirmed to Telco 2.0 that developers would receive the standard 70% of revenue split, with Ericsson taking a 'small percentage' (it would not be more specific) drawn from operator's 30% share.

The eStore launched with 30,000 free and paid for apps, offering decent scale from day one. A partnership with Opera Software provides the client framework for web widgets and applications across multiple devices, so as with JIL, apps in this case primarily mean widgets, although the store offers native apps as well. However, the real differentiation for the eStore comes with the thinking Ericsson has put into ensuring a variety of business models could be supported, including pay per download, ad-funded and cross channel service bundles.

For the eStore, Ericsson has built on its SDP to offer payment for apps using the operator's bill, APIs to network functionality and an ad orchestrator that allows app developers to work with alternative ad-based business models tied in with device functionality. The billing capability is provided via Ericsson's existing IPX, while access to network functionality, such as location, identity, SMS etc, is delivered through APIs compliant with the GSMA's OneAPI initiative.

More than Apps, Media too...

A further differentiation is the cross channel proposition. It is not just a mobile app store but a content distribution platform offering IPTV and video content, which could lead to some more interesting cross-channel service bundles.

Summary - More New Flavours competing for a share of the App Pie

So, to sum up, Ericsson's eStore is providing a white label platform for telcos which gives developers access to revenue-generating network functions, while on the device side we're seeing the emergence of a couple of large, Linux-based, mobile development environments.

One is carrier-driven, built on LiMo, using a Web/widgetry approach, and using the WAC as its route to market.

Another is vendor-driven, based on Maemo/Meego, using Qt as its apps framework, and primarily using Ovi as its route to market. (They've also signed up Orange.) They join Google Android, Apple, and RIM at the top table.

It's probably worth noting that Samsung is represented in LiMo and that its recently announced Badu apps ecosystem is BONDI-compliant - so that's the major smartphone vendors covered.

But what about Blackberry and Apple?

An interesting question will be what becomes of BlackBerry OS? There are those who think RIM needs to update it in order to fend off the fate of PalmOS. It will certainly be a difficult decision and one based on whether the OS itself contains significant value and differentiation, enough to warrant the costs of developing it further, or whether RIM's unique selling points are in the applications layer and in device design. If the latter, we could see RIM opting for one of the mobile Linuxes and concentrating on its own apps framework, competing at the level of JIL, Qt, and Apple's Cocoa.

As for Apple, it's a racing certainty that they will insist on keeping their own vertically integrated stack.

[Ed. - Come and contribute to the debate around appstore business models at the 9th Telco 2.0 Exec Brainstorm on 28-29 April in London.]

Telco 2.0 News Review

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:49:50 +0000

Developer Communities: Apps: 2nd factor in device sales

Strategy & Finance: Apple: What can we do with this mountain of cash?

Regulation: OFCOM: Yes, BT, you've got to pay the pensions. Yes, everyone else, so have you

Voice & Messaging 2.0: Skype is in your TV looking out

Broadband Connectivity: Indian 3G auction back on: tower deals surge

You really must show more application. According to a TNS poll, apps are now the joint second factor in subscribers' choice of device - neck-and-neck with brand loyalty, behind look-and-feel. This rises to the first factor for the 16-30 age group.

Unsurprisingly, the other kind of applications - the ones that happen when you aren't looking - are also burgeoning. Here's yet another warning about the threat from malware - especially from the possibilities of a fake femtocell.

In a world where T-Mobile UK is advertising that you can get "a smartphone with apps" for £20 a month, it may become hard to keep track of some of this stuff. You may recall Palm having a major announcement not so long ago. Now, it's turned rather sour, with sales of the WebOS devices disappointing - The Guardian's blog decodes the all-hands internal e-mail from Jon Rubinstein, Palm Chairman and CEO. Meanwhile, Sprint and VZW subscribers got a software update that gives the devices video capture (like most Nokias had since whenever).

In other device related news:

- Anssi Vanjöki apologises for the N97 being less than fantastic
- how Sony-Ericsson said no to producing the Google Nexus One
- and a criticism of the new MS Windows Phone - it's too phoney, and not enough of a computer.

Things are, of course, different at Apple. The AGM is coming up, and key questions are likely to be "what's the point of the iPad?" and "what are you planning to do with all that cash?". There's not that much else to ask, after Apple stretched out a lead of about $2bn in mobile net sales over Nokia's "converged mobile devices" since autumn 2009. Sales through the iTunes Store aren't bad either.

Of course, if all that cash doesn't tempt Apple to acquire something, and as DTAG and France Telecom have promised not to try anything silly in the line of mergers, it looks like it's up to the rest of Silicon Valley to keep the M&A bankers, lawyers, etc going.

Indeed, Google did their bit to keep the lawyers busy, as everything blew up when the Italian courts found most of the company guilty over a YouTube video. In fact, a YouTube video that had been taken down at the request of the police. Some context is here. It may be more serious that the European Commission wants to know if they're fiddling competitors' search results.

In other online player news, here's a Twitter monetisation effort; every Nth result in a search of Twitter could be an ad. But who searches Twitter feeds when they're trying to buy something? And, with a limit of 140 characters, wouldn't the ads-to-content ratio be a little high?

What about mobile audio ads? It sounds like the worst idea ever, but that's just the headline. The product seems to be essentially identical to Spotify - audio streaming over IP, with ads.

There's a lot of talk about making heavy users, or people who insist on using various classes of applications someone doesn't like, or whatever, pay more. The BBC announced record iPlayer usage, as if to knock the point home, while O2 is going the other way and offering a smaller data bucket at lower prices.

Neither, it seems, is trying to get the government to pick up an £8bn bill for pension liabilities. BT, we may recall, argued for a while that its own idiosyncratic understanding of the 1984 Telecommunications Act meant it could dump the bill on the UK Government. Nobody else did; least of all OFCOM, or its competitors, who blame BT for throwing the pensions money at the stock market. Unfortunately, it looks like the alternative solution is to hike the BT Wholesale and Openreach charges sharply.

Not that the Web 2.0 types are any better - Facebook just tried to patent the RSS feed, a sort of second-rate, history repeating as farce rather than tragedy, version of BT's attempt to patent the hyperlink.

Meanwhile, another wave of menace heads for traditional telephony: TV sets that run Skype. One barrier to Skype has always been that it doesn't really work on most mobiles, or on anything but a PC of some description, so if one party to a call wasn't permanently near a computer, you had to make a PSTN call or send SMS messages to arrange for them to be near a computer. Basically, a little like setting up an international phone call used to be. But a lot of people have TV sets, and a lot more have mobiles. And Skype users can now use their credit to pay for WLAN hotspots.

Clearwire announced subscriber numbers that appear to be improving though perhaps the most interesting question is how. Bill Morrow, the old Vodafone pioneer, said that they were expecting big things from "3rd party wholesale relationships". This chimes with things Telco 2.0 heard at Mobile World Congress.

There's been another big sale of Indian cell-sites, and another date has been set for an Indian 3G auction.

The FCC is after an additional 500MHz of spectrum for universal broadband which is meant to come from the TV world. They also issued a fascinating, dataful 168-slide presentation - we'll be commenting as soon as we've digested it all.

It looks like nobody wants to know about the Nortel name.

And finally, via Brough Turner, the the sheer joy of that TV spectrum.

Voice & Messaging 2.0: New API Use Cases

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:01:31 +0000

We've just published our latest report on New Voice and Messaging 2.0: API Use Cases on our sister research site, which contains details of three new real-life 'use cases':

* an in-store feedback service
* a mobile and remote decision support application
* a resource tracking opportunity

These use the principles of 'Communications-Enabled Business Processes' (CEBP) to add value to enterprise customers by reducing costs, increasing revenue, and improving services. The latest applications use automated and user-activated processes to deliver voice, SMS and IM messages.

The Maturity Path of Voice APIs

We've long said that Enterprises represent the key value opportunity for telcos. We also argue that this should primarily be through API-enabled applications and developer communities as a route to market, rather than direct retail engagement, because of the complexity of the market, and flexibility / low cost approach to implementation required.

From speaking to practicioners recently it looks as if this business model is increasingly taking root, and these New 'Use Cases' and others like them are needed to help both the developer and end-user enterprise communities grow the market. If you have examples you'd like to contribute, please comment on this article.

You can also bone-up on other innovative ideas through our Voice and Messaging 2.0 Innovators Directory.

(Ed: We'll also be exploring how new voice and messaging API based applications can be applied across the enterprise value chain at our EMEA Brainstorm in London, April 28-29, 2010.)

Telco 2.0 News Review

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:10:28 +0000

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

Technology Disruptions: Google steals Mobile World Congress!
Developer Communities: RIM - your new advertising threat
Voice & Messaging 2.0: Verizon Wireless meets Skype
Broadband Connectivity: Is the mobile data wave real?
Privacy: School FAIL

All the 'sparkle' at last week's Mobile World Congress seemed to be about software and developers. While Nokia chose this year to keep off the conference site itself, Google showed up for the first time. Eric Schmidt made a show-stealing keynote speech which we reviewed here after the stardust had fallen from our eyes. Alternative views are here.

In addition, anyone who had anything to do with Google Android had rockstar status, Google told the world that it was willing to invest in 1Gbit FTTH projects, and launched a virtual tour of the Trans-Siberian Railway. To which we can only quote the view of someone on Gordon Cook's listserv, to the effect that telcos spend money on lobbyists and lawyers, but when Google feels the need for influence, it carries out a small but spectacular tech project and everyone loves it.

Further, Telco 2.0 was able to speak to representatives of the LiMo Foundation at the conference.They argued that there was a major effort on to integrate the WAC, JIL, BONDI, and LiMo - so the carrier vision of the future is based on a common set of terms for app developers, an HTML/CSS/JavaScript widgetry layer next to native C development, and a common Linux distribution to drive it all. Samsung is also on board with the idea, only with a different name and a flock of very shiny gadgets. And Phillip Carter, Head of Integrated Terminal Products at Vodafone, is on the new LiMo board.

Even AT&T is selling their gadgets. However, that didn't mean that Google got what it wanted from Android; OHA vendors are very keen on the "free" element of Android, and they're willing to pay for third party technologies to extend this into cheaper devices. Developing better sub-elements of Android is becoming a little industry in itself - at least in part to outflank Google's IPR.

The GSMA and 28 global operators announced the launch of the Wholesale Apps Community, which aims to standardise app stores and technologies around those already chosen by the JIL and BONDI. It's worth noting that Vodafone seems to be a key actor in this effort. Also, everyone needs to watch out for RIM, who produced a fearsome showing of developers and third-party APIs - and a charming little robot. (Also, Mike Lazaridis seems to be worried about staff partying with models. We want to know what they were models of.)

We're especially concerned about RIM's plans for a two-sided in-application advertising platform. Telco 2.0 analysis is here.

Some Nokians were there in the guise of the open-source graphical user interface Qt, which has a book out.

As far as voice went, Skype announced the first clients for Symbian devices, and Telco 2.0 turned its friends into guinea pigs in order to establish a median opinion score of sorts. Verizon Wireless announced a deal to deploy the VoIP application to its customers, and the GSMA said that IMS will fix the LTE voice problem. VZW promised to test it, and also promised that their 2G voice net would run on for 10 years at least.

Rivals Fring, meanwhile, promised a wave of carrier deals, and also had a damn good party.

The world has lost one mobile operating system. Intel and Nokia announced a deal to cooperate on mobile Linux, under which Moblin bites the dust and their technology is rolled into Maemo. The new new thing will be called "Meego". In related news, a new version of Python for S60 is out, and it's the first that lets Python devs release software through the Ovi Store. There's also a library for augmented reality applications on Symbian.

Nokia has also pulled a planned NFC device, a decision we're totally on board with - we've never seen the purpose of these things, especially not for mobile money applications, as they suffer from a terrible first fax problem. We're also amused by the people who plastered QR codes (those things that look like a cubist chessboard and work like a barcode with much more data) as URIs all over the conference site - let us see. It's a URI that's entirely unreadable by human eyes, but that most devices will load automatically, with their entire browser context? What could possibly go wrong?

Comcast's famous and controversial usages caps are apparently being deployed at last. Brough Turner cites data to suggest that the panic is not as close as previously thought - mobile data is going through a step-change like that experienced by Internet traffic in general in 1995-1996 or Japanese Internet traffic when cable, fibre, and ADSL rolled out. Learn more with our new broadband report.

AT&T, it seems, is tracking VZW's plans for LTE steadily.

Cleanup efforts continued after Google Buzz committed a major privacy fail, while a US school district gave away laptops and monitored the kids' homes by keeping the cameras on all the time.

In remarkably mundane operator M&A news, Bharti Airtel wants to buy Zain. And finally, this year's guest of honour, after Lara Dutta and Isabella Rosselini, was Queen Rania of Jordan. They kept her far from the likes of us, but fortunately we had Andrew Bud's society.

How Google's Chief Magician Stole the Show

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:20:44 +0000

Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, bedazzled the 2010 GSMA Mobile Word Congress in Barcelona. In his keynote address he told the industry exactly which parts of their lunch that Google will eat, simultaneously appeared to offer peace, showcased mesmerising new technologies, effortlessly took 45 minutes of questions from the floor, and then disappeared to widespread applause.

Don't get us wrong - we were impressed too. It was a great speech and a great show. Dr. Schmidt is a very, very capable and inspiring person, and there is no doubt that Google is brimming with ideas, vision, and ability to make things happen.

We've recently published a Telco 2.0 perspective in our report 'Google: where to cooperate? Where to compete?' and are running a session specifically on 'Living with Google' at the April 2010 Telco 2.0 Brainstorm. In our view, some of the most important information was not just in what he said but what he said quietly or didn't say at all.

Like a great magician, Dr. Schmidt used the conjurer's gentle art of misdirection coupled with a mastery of performance to pull off his notification of Google's intended heist without appearing to alert or offend the hosts.

First, make them laugh to relax them...

Dr. Schmidt said he was 'shocked' to learn that the US might get LTE before or at least at the same time as Europe. The audience were amazed primarily by the sight of an American CEO appearing to grasp irony, and possibly also because none of them knew that anyone has signed up to a mass LTE deployment either.

LTE was a great thing he said, just build it and the money will follow, but he didn't say where from. Hang on, the still barely functioning conscious brain began to ask, wasn't the last time we remember that being the business case for a new investment when the 3G spectrum came up for auction? In fairness though, this isn't really Google's business problem. His point was that Google love anything that makes the internet stronger (of which more below).

... then charm them onto your side...

Moving smoothly on, Dr. Schmidt's big message was that Google is putting 'mobile first' in all development efforts from here on in. Sounds great, doesn't it?

But please note, he didn't actually say that Google are putting mobile operators and vendors first, but rather that they are putting an increasing emphasis on what they consider to be ultimately the mass market form of consumption of the internet - the mobile phone. He said, as did we, that Google wants to put a bit of Google between the user and the internet in every possible transaction.

Android, and Google's accelerating investment in developers, symbolised by the production of a magical shower of free Nexus One phones at the show's developer forum, are an important component of this part of the plan.

Before the audience had time to recognise or reflect on the prospect of disintermediation from their customers, he swiftly produced a series of stunning visual magic tricks.

...make them gasp with surprise...

Various effortlessly shining Google acolytes joined the stage to produce apparently live demonstrations of Goggles image search, voice translation both to text and to other languages, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on a phone across the internet.

Arthur C. Clarke said that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', and unlike the traditional 'rabbits from the hat' and 'flowers from the sleeve' tricks, these demos truly showed a little bit of magic in this sense.

So befuddled were the audience that Mr Schmidt had to prompt them to go 'wow' at first, though luckily there was at least one American in the audience who started whooping, so it didn't take long before the majority of the audience also fell under the spell.

And to be frank, it was pretty impressive.

Perhaps equally impressive as a lesson in business model innovation is the way Google has leveraged the assets of its web search processes and algorithms to the various searching, matching and translation tasks across voice, images and text.

Google is also showing real vision in terms of how the cloud network really should work as a resource - a place to perform complicated computing tasks (such as accurate speech recognition) on a relatively small bit of data really quickly and return a useful individual answer to the end-user.

...pick their pocket while they are distracted...

Dr. Schmidt has been rightly praised for taking 45 minutes worth of questions, even if some were of the simpering 'Google rocks!' and 'can I have a job please' variety. He dealt with a variety of challenges cleverly, never once retreating from his relaxed 'I have nothing to hide but my brilliance' stance beside the podium.

One infamous industry commentator tried to bluster through a 'you just want us to be dumb pipes' question. Like Zorro responding to the suicidal challenge from the latest brave but doomed local guard, Dr. Schmidt first confused his opponent by asking 'is that a question or an assertion?' The audience immediately on his side, he then mocked his opponent 'I like assertions, shall we deal with that first?' Then he appeared to deal with the question 'no, I don't think that at all' and finally seemed to show pity for his downed opponent 'it was not me that asked them to take the microphone away from you'.

More sophisticated challenges produced slightly more nuanced answers. He said that Google wanted telcos to deliver networks with the service quality and security needed to produce a great end-user experience (of Google). This is presumably his interpretation of the 'happy pipe' scenario for telcos.

On the issue of 'net neutrality' he sounded conciliatory saying that operators have every right to distinguish amongst categories of content (video from browsing etc.), and that Google supported that right so long as there was no discrimination between providers within any given category. This was greeted by many nods of approval from the audience, but what he didn't say was that he means that non discrimination within categories should apply to operator-run services too, and that's where Google comes head-to-head with operators on net neutrality.

On voice, he rebuffed suggestions that Google were 'stealing telco's minutes' through Google Voice. He asserted that equally, text messages stole telcos minutes, though omitted to recognise that text messages were at least in some cases revenue creating services provided by Telcos as opposed to a free service provided by Google.

...Customer Data: now you see it...

Perhaps most significantly, in a brief and almost off-hand comment, he said in five years Google and the telcos would both still be in the market 'together', but customers would have given Google more of their data. No pretence, no fuss, no fireworks - this was masterful sleight of hand, quietly telling the audience what would disappear before the show is over without them realising that this is the big trick, so that at the end they would say 'oh my goodness, he even told us what he was going to do and we still didn't work it out!'.

Source: The Telco 2.0 'Two-Sided' Telecoms Market Opportunity Report

That he remained unchallenged on this point seems proof yet again that many in telcoland just don't seem to understand the value of the asset they hold in their customer data (see here and here). This is what Google will gradually build up and use to its own ends, just like it did with location data - that originally unique asset of the mobile industry.

Perhaps this anticipation of value is also the great art and secret of Google's magic - they simply get there first. Before another industry even sniffs the value in a given area, before the newspapers are writing about the 'next big thing', like the great investors they've already hoovered up the assets for a snip. The logic is simple: it is possible to take a leading position in advance of the market, but much harder to when the whole market is after a given space.

This is the real challenge for the operators now - have they recognised the opportunity, and are they really doing enough to play for it? Google have recognised it, have told everyone about it, and will move forward rapidly.

...flatter them to keep them happy...

Effusing distracting and temporarily disarming modesty, Dr. Schmidt was at pains to say that Google is not perfect, and not strong as mobile operators in some key areas - a theme we've explored before, e.g. in Google Vs Telcos: The Tale of The Tape.

Neither does Google have unlimited resources, capabilities, or commercial ambitions. Dr. Schmidt said Google has no desire to compete in billing and payments, in which he said Telcos were 'far and away the most efficient processors'. He didn't mention that Google have just recruited eBay's US GM to be their VP Commerce, so perhaps we should add 'for now' at least, and not mention the financial services companies.

He also said that Google has no ambitions in fibre to the home where their activities are intended as a test to prove the concept that data rates over 100Mb/s are possible.

When questioned on growth ambitions, he said that it is simply a CEO's prerogative to always want more revenue, and that advertising is (for now at least) the biggest single pie that Google want a piece of. He said of the c.$1 trillion advertising market, less than 10% was online, and Google's priority is to accelerate the transition from offline to online and capture as big a piece of it as possible, particularly in mobile. Again, much as we said in our Google report.

... and leave them hungry for more

Dr. Schmidt's appearance and performance at the 2010 GSMA Mobile World Congress marks an inflexion point in the telecoms industry. It was significant just that he was there, and there was much in the content and the style of the presentation that signals some of the possible future paths that the industry may take.

Intelligent, visionary, and unapologetic that Google will pursue its own agenda, for those with any remaining doubt Dr. Schmidt announced that Google is in mobile seriously and to stay. He didn't say 'I don't care what you think, we are going to win all the bits we want' but he might as well have done.

And why not? Google isn't perfect or saintly, but it earns its place and its money by winning customer trust and usage by being a little bit magical - and to date at least by being smarter and better than everything else around it. Google does not owe the Telcos a living, though it would like them to provide it with useful services.

The important question is: what will the telecoms industry do about it? Will it continue to appear beguiled and flattered, rolling over to be tickled like the enchanted Congress audience? Will it get insular and defensive and threaten regulation as Vittorio Colao, Vodafone CEO appeared to suggest in his keynote? Or will it get on and take the opportunities that it has within its own grasp - including the opportunities to both work with and compete against the big innovators like Google?

No doubt a bit of 'all of the above' will apply. In our view though, it is critical for the telecoms industry to recognise the fundamental reshaping of the commercial and technical infrastructure that is happening right now, collaborate on initiatives to create the business models required in the new information economy, and continue to compete like hell on the existing business.

Encore?

So overall then it was an honest and skilful performance by Google's Chief Magician, even if some of the most important pieces of information were in what was quietly spoken or not said at all. It could only have been improved if the intelligence of the presentation were matched by the skill of the facilitation and interaction with the other brains in the building. To this end we'd love Dr. Schmidt to join us at the 'Living with Google' session at the April 2010 Telco 2.0 Brainstorm where we will offer just that.

(Image Source of Dr. Schmidt: EON News)

MWC Watch: Developers, Developers, Developers

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:31:47 +0000

Telco 2.0 is, of course, at Mobile World Congress this week. Something that's very obvious this year is the come-back of the North American industry, and specifically anything that involves Android or developers. All the device vendors who ship substantial volumes of Android devices are heavily present. Samsung is practically rolling in Androids. Despite the announcement of the new version of Microsoft Windows Mobile, HTC is big on Android as well. Android software developers are everywhere.

However, an interesting phenomenon is making itself felt. Rather than - or as well as - being a top-end product for the latest smartphones and early adopters, Android has been heavily adopted by vendors looking for an economical platform to get into the smartphone market. This places some strains on the technology itself and may have significant long-term consequences for the Android ecosystem.

It's something of a tradition for Google to throw hardware at its problems; we live in an era where hardware is cheap in terms of engineering man-hours, and Google has relied for years on huge numbers of PC servers crafted to its specifications. It came as a shock to the industry when we learned that there were 100,000 Google servers back in 2004 - how many must there be now? The limiting factor for this approach turned out to be power and its twin, cooling. Google has since invested heavily in improving the power performance of its hardware and its buildings.

As a result, it is perhaps not very surprising that Android has a reputation for being a resource hog. Specifically, the heart of Android, Google's home-grown Java virtual machine Dalvik, is significantly more processor intensive for comparable performance than the Sun-made original, or code running in native C. If the device in question uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 1GHz chip, this won't be a problem. If it's a much cheaper ARM9, it can be a significant constraint on the user experience and what exactly will work. Now, if Android was only being used for the top-of-the-range, this wouldn't be a problem. But vendors are keen to broaden the smartphone sector and make use of what is the cheapest mobile operating system going.

Dalvik is one of the keys to the whole Android project; as well as wanting to avoid relying on Sun Microsystems or paying them royalties, Google created it in order to give the Android phones a primary development environment based on Java and arguably also in order to have a control point in the intellectual property rights. Whereas much of Android is pure GPL code - like the Linux kernel, the core libraries, the WebKit browser, the user interface, the Python virtual machine - Dalvik pointedly isn't.

This is why the appearance of alternative Dalviks is interesting. Myriad, for example, offers its own version of Dalvik, which it has subjected to extensive code refactoring. They claim that it performs dramatically better on the Android common benchmarks and on some standard IT measures (Grinder, quicksort); Telco 2.0 saw a jBenchmark test carried out. The performance boost seems to be concentrated in graphics rendering and in loop constructs - as the latter are very common in procedural code and most code is procedural, this is significant. They claim it is interface-identical with the original and that it passes the Android unit tests.

So it's possible to squeeze Android further down the range of devices - and to remove an intellectual property dependency on Google. This, of course, puts greater importance on the Google account, its related G-services, and Google Ads to deliver value for Google from Android.

Google has Android. RIM actually had an android on one of their two stands - skittering about among the legs, under the control of a developer skulking in the crowd with a BlackBerry. It would be churlish to complain that controlling a basic robot with Bluetooth is one of the examples in Scheibe and Tuulos' s Mobile Python; everyone we mentioned it too instantly went all shiny. "Robot!" Like some people do around cats. Developers are like that.

Showing off your developers is a big theme this year - the GSMA started the show with their announcement that 24 more carriers have, in essence, joined the JIL operators in standardising their app stores and widget APIs. The big question is whether the Wholesale Apps Community/JIL/BONDI strategy - HTML/Javascript widgets and operator app stores - is going to get traction or whether the vendors will clean up before it takes off.

Take RIM. RIM has practically nothing else in the show but dozens and dozens of start-ups with their applications, spread across two enormous stands and a developer day. The immediate reaction from a Telco 2.0 perspective is that so many are rather sensible and enterprise-related - field-service ticketing systems and BlackBerry clients for industrial SCADA. Not the sort of thing that gets you on the front page of Reddit and Slashdot, or on the keynote at MacWorld, but certainly the sort of thing that makes real money.

Speaking of making money with RIM and developers, we also took in one of RIM's developer sessions about their new advertising and payments services, now in closed beta. These make it possible to embed rich, targeted adverts in an application's user interface context, to manage them through a central Web interface, and to link the adverts with a programmatic callback. Rather than just going to another advert on a Web site, the advert's call-to-action can be a literal callback that initiates a voice call, places a contact in the user's address book, places an event in their calendar, or sends the user to BlackBerry App World to make the sale. RIM is acting as an aggregator, acquiring ad inventory from multiple ad networks and placing it with developers; out of the advertising revenue, RIM intends to take a small revenue share - covering costs only - and to pass some of the rest to the ad networks, with the balance going to the application owner.

Yes; it's a two-sided advertising market, intended to sell devices through helping application developers monetise, and it's all the work of a device vendor. Not good for carriers, although they will be pleased that the related payments SDK will provide carrier billing as an option next to PayPal and credit cards.

[Ed. - we'll be exploring these issues in more depth at the 9th Telco 2.0 Exec Braintorm on 28-29 April, London].

Security Breach at M-PESA: Telco 2.0 Crash Investigation

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:58:57 +0000

Fraudsters have relieved a Safaricom M-PESA agent of 35,000 Kenyan shillings. This may not sound like a lot (about €340), in a business where figures in the tens of billions are routine, but it's a business-killing loss for a Kenyan reseller agent. In fact, it's equivalent to 26.8% of per capita GDP. With a savings ratio of 17%, it would take a typical Kenyan a little over 18 months to replace the capital loss. (Actually it's worse - there's no reason to think the savings ratio is evenly distributed. Usually, the rich save more, because they have money to spare.)

And if your business depends on thousands of reseller agents, anything that can wipe out their capital in 20 minutes is a serious threat. Therefore, security is a major challenge in delivering the promise of mobile money.

How it's meant to work

The cash-out process in M-PESA (in Kenya - some other deployments are different) works as follows; the customer approaches an agent and asks for cash. Then, the customer opens the M-PESA application on their device and initiates the USSD session with the network. The application running on the phone authenticates the customer's PIN and authenticates the device with the back-end. The OSS back-end processes the transaction. The agent's device initiates a session with the back-end and receives a message including a transaction authorisation code and the agent's current M-PESA balance.

This should rule out a number of attacks - as the devices involved are independently authenticated with the network, this should prevent one device pretending to be another to get access to someone else's account, and as the user and agent are authenticated with the devices, this should prevent someone pretending to be another user. Further, as the transaction process flow goes via the operator, you shouldn't be able to pose as an agent and accept deposits, or pose as a user and draw cash.

However, the security of the process depends critically on the agent being certain that the authorisation message comes from Safaricom. If an attacker could somehow deliver them a spoof authorisation message, they might be able to carry out a fraudulent withdrawal. Similarly, if an evil agent could somehow deliver a spoof authorisation message, they might be able to accept deposits fraudulently. A crucial element, therefore, is the distinction between the M-PESA application's user-interface context and that of the device's own messaging function.

Case History

At about 2 pm local time, on February 1st, 2010, two persons approached a reseller agent on the fringes of the city of Nairobi, about 24 kilometres from the city centre. They claimed to be Safaricom employees conducting an audit of the reseller and presented what seemed to be M-PESA publicity material and Safaricom identity documents. Such audits are carried out on a regular basis. They asked to see accounts, and left. It is not clear if they interfered with the device physically.

Some 20 minutes later, another man approached the agent and requested 35,000KSh in cash. He appeared to start the M-PESA transaction on a mobile device. Shortly afterwards, the agent received a message purporting to be an M-PESA transaction authorisation, which contained their current credit balance. They verified the man's name on his national identity card, and paid out 30,000KSh. Before the agent could hand over the rest, he signed the transaction slip and said he would return for the remaining 5,000. He left.

Some time later, another customer arrived. A valid M-PESA transaction was carried out, and the agent noted that the withdrawal of 35,000Ksh had not been recorded. They called 234 - the M-PESA agent support line - and reported a suspicious transaction. The call centre confirmed that no transaction had been recorded.

Discussion

Previous frauds have occurred in which the fraudsters gained physical access to the agent's mobile device, and inserted a contact with the name "M-PESA" and a GSM number under their control into the address book. Therefore, a message or call from that number would appear as "M-PESA", although it would not appear in the user interface context of the M-PESA application. This permitted, up to a point, a spoofing attack. Of course, the necessity of physical access to the device - a so-called Evil Maid attack - restricts the possible scope of the threat.

In this case, it is reported that there may have been no such physical security breach. If this is the case, this renders the attack considerably more dangerous, as many agents could be simultaneously compromised at a distance. The most likely vector for such an attack would be that an "M-PESA" contact was inserted into the device address book remotely, as a vCard payload in an SMS message (most devices, including all Nokias, will open them automatically, although the Nokias at least will show a dialog asking the user if they want to add the contact to the address book). A large scale attack could use a GSM device or modem controlled by a PC, or more complicatedly, a software client sending SMS messages encapsulated in SIP. A really basic option would be to simply keep texting.

However, the attack fails if the M-PESA user interface is easily distinguishable from a normal SMS event, and it is actually distinguished by the user (not the same thing). Similarly, it fails if the message itself can be verified as being genuine or not. Various approaches are possible, but essentially all of them rely on a shared secret between M-PESA and the authenticating party. In this case, it seems that the authenticating party's balance is used as such a shared secret - the authorisation message should contain the correct balance after the transaction, which serves both to help the agent monitor their finances and to verify the transaction's genuineness.

This explains the role of the fake Safaricom employees. Without the need for physical access to the phone, you might wonder why they were needed, except perhaps as psychological reassurance or misdirection. In fact, it seems that they probably served to discover the shared secret and therefore to get the information required to create a convincing forged authorisation. As they asked to examine the agent's accounts, they presumably simply read off or calculated the current balance. (Perhaps they also sent the spoof contact to the device at the same time - under the guise of an "update" or a "test"?)

It's also worth noting that the attackers ingeniously made use of M-PESA's own security system - namely, auditing - to get the information they needed and to gain the target's trust.

The evil client, it can safely be assumed, didn't start an M-PESA transaction and instead sent his accomplices an SMS message telling them to send the forged authorisation.

Critical Points of Failure

The critical point of failure is undoubtedly in the user interface. The technical architecture of M-PESA provides a secure channel for transaction authentication and authorisation from device to device, using encryption, the SIM, and USSD. Attackers therefore targeted the section of the communication channel that runs from the device screen to the user's eye. The UI may need to be redesigned to make the distinction between the M-PESA user context and the phone's normal context more obvious, if at all possible implementing a poka-yoke function to force the correct process path.

For example, inbound SMS could be suppressed while the application is active - SMS is a store-and-forward technology and therefore no messages would be lost - or the notification of incoming messages could be turned off temporarily. This would require the authenticating party to start the application at the beginning of the transaction, which would itself require thought as to how to make this unavoidable. However, there are barriers to this example - a major criterion of acceptance by the Symbian test houses is that your application must not interfere with voice or messaging functionality. Another design issue is that users are likely to be unfamiliar with computers and at least some possibly illiterate.

Of course, the pretty UI in the screenshot above is all well and good, but not many Kenyans have iPhones.

A secondary point of failure is the use of the balance as an authentication secret. Is it sufficiently secret? Further, it may not be optimal to use a number that the agent has to record in writing as a shared secret. On the other hand, it's necessary for the agent to remember the secret, and the balance is obviously a number they are likely to know. Further, there is a useful feature here in that using the balance provides an automatic red flag - if it isn't what you expected, something is suspicious. On balance, this shouldn't be a problem if the user interface is fixed.

Impact and risks

A serious problem that this attack exposes is that the agents - critical to the entire system - bear a disproportionate fraud risk. Essentially, they're out of pocket. This has a number of downsides - for a start, the system depends on their confidence and on users' confidence in agents. If existing and prospective agents fear their capital might be wiped out, it will be harder to recruit and retain agents, especially as raising the capital to become an agent is a nontrivial challenge in itself.

Further, the agents' coping strategies against fraud risk are likely to harm M-PESA. The obvious countermeasure is to minimise the credit balance you hold with M-PESA and the cash float you keep on hand. This diminishes the liquidity and value of the entire system, the potential for collateral sales of airtime, and its value to the banking partner as a source of deposits. There is a worse one - if you have no protection against fraud risk, you also have an incentive to cooperate with the fraudster.

A limiting factor to the risks is that this attack is still only partly capable of being industrialised. It's possible to push spoof contacts out in large numbers, but discovering the credit balances of agents requires either a class break of M-PESA's Web or core-network security precautions, or else a fairly laborious social-engineering attack like this one. It's possible, however, that such a social-engineering attack might be carried out at a distance by voice or SMS, which would indeed be a major threat.

Conclusions and recommendations for action

M-PESA security is critically dependent on the device graphical user interface and process flow to prevent attackers spoofing transaction authorisations. A successful attack using spoofing and social engineering has been demonstrated which requires physical access to the target device. An attack which does not, and which is capable of at least some scaling-up, may have been demonstrated. Such an attack is certainly technically possible. Attention to the user experience is required to defeat spoofing.

However, second-line security measures constrain the attacker to use an expensive and risky social engineering exploit that requires their physical presence. Further, the attacker demonstrated that it was possible to defeat Safaricom's physical security by faking or acquiring stolen ID cards, uniforms, and publications.

Further, the management of fraud risk against agents requires attention to prevent it becoming a major threat to user and agent confidence in what is, after all, a quasi-bank. A refund process for end-users does exist, as discussed in this excellent blog post.

In general, MMT operators should be aware that it is certain they will encounter mischief and unauthorised innovation of some sort. It may be difficult to distinguish between user innovation and actual abuse - for example, how do we classify the Ugandans who are providing an unofficial M-PESA service where the real thing doesn't exist yet?

Blurred Vision...

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:05:25 +0000

Informa Telecoms & Media has a series of pre-Mobile World Congress (MWC) interviews up with a roundup of industry luminaries including Virgin Mobile founder Tom Alexander, O2 vice president Mike Short, Bell Labs UK director Louis Samuel, Ericsson CTO for Northwest Europe John Cunliffe, and T-Mobile UK head of technology strategy Tony Weiner, on the theme of "2020 Vision" (heh). The (rather weak) editorial is here.

We won't dwell on the fact that one of the panel predicted that the hit technologies of the future would be 3G video calls and NFC (!), and instead cut to this:

By way of illustration, Bengt Nordstrom [one of the interviewees] takes a punt on the 2020 Mobile World Congress awards. The event, he suggests, will be happening in Beijing. "'Facebook Free Talk & Chat', already the world's most popular voice and messaging service, also wins a GSMA award," he predicts (although it will be surprising if the GSMA hasn't had a rebrand of its own by this stage).

We'd instead go for the following winners at MWC 2020:

Network Operator

And the winner is....IBM Global Services' Multitenant Service Provider Network Outsourcing division. I thank you! An honourable mention goes to BT Openreach.

Why? If you think there's pressure on margins and capacity now, think what it'll be like in 2020. If you think investors are getting snippy about CAPEX now, and pressing you to sign network-sharing agreements, think what it'll be like in 2020. The core-network equivalent of sharing towers, ducts, dark fibre, power, etc, is to move your core network into a massive multi-tenant hosting infrastructure - exactly the sort of thing that IBM, BT Global Services, Amazon, Salesforce, Akamai, Google, the Internet Archive, etc, have built up a core speciality in.

Also, the value of the core network itself is changing. According to Brough Turner, between 96% and 99% of the data traffic on North American mobile networks is heading straight out to the Internet - so if it touches the core network at all, it's got no business being there. Not only will more and more voice and messaging bypass it in future, the price of voice and messaging is in any case marching steadily downwards, and the value of the softswitch must go with it.

Managing really big high-availability data centres and cloud technology is their speciality, just as reliability used to be AT&T Long Lines' profession. If there's no point having four sets of ducts and cell sites, there's not much point having four sets of data centres and four sets of redundant backups.

Best device

No doubt there'll be a sexy and overrated Apple product launch at that year's Macworld a couple of weeks earlier, but our pick is the QQ-Skype phone, courtesy of QQ, Skype, and Zhang's Shanzhai & Chips Ltd. It's running Linux, of course, and supports OpenARML-over-XMPP for its augmented reality functions. There is a scramble to get IPv6 deployed in mobile networks after it is realised that its voice capability depends on them all having their own globally routable IPv6 addresses.

Why?

We've given our reasons for being keen on QQ before; and despite the general loss of buzz about Skype since about 2006, it's still steadily eating into the international voice market. However, as it's probably unwise to have voice and video traffic do multiple hops over the cellular air interface, the client is probably very much Skype in name only. But perhaps the call control will be in the cloud - Skype's cloud of clients running on millions of fixed machines.

AR is currently waiting only for a widely deployed client and a standard protocol to explode - OpenARML does, in fact, exist, but the clients currently talk proprietary protocols.

And the Shanzhai stuff? Whether it's actually from that community or not, we suspect that the outcome of the great smartphone smashup is going to be very PC-like - a broadly standard architecture that can accept many different vendors' components and many different form factors. The shanzhai devices are currently the closest to that we've got; although there will be some very un-shanzhai materials science stuff in the devices of 2020...not just in screens and batteries, but in things like nanomechanical radio.

Infrastructure

Astringent Systems' 59867 Optical Wavelength Router was the undisputed hit of the conference. Kite wind turbines were selling well on the Avenida. Unfortunately, there's no stand for "really huge numbers of bog-standard PC servers".

Why?

Down in the packet-pushing world, even now, a lot of people are beginning to find IP and MPLS rather constraining for high-performance applications. National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), as usual, are going first, building backbone networks that consist entirely of private wavelengths directly on the fibre. As we move from virtualising software across racks of servers, to virtualising it across whole data centres, to virtualising it across whole globally-distributed data centre infrastructures, it's increasingly useful to be able to treat the whole system as a single network fabric.

A key barrier to utilising direct lightwave communications is that unless you have diverse fibre routes to all your DCs, you're essentially back in the pre-internetworking world where all your routes are predetermined. The major technical challenge is to switch lightwaves with the same kind of flexibility we have with IP packets - some equipment can now do this, but it has to take the packets through an electronic stage. Just as really high performance IP routers are defined by how much traffic they can route in hardware TCAMs rather than using the CPU and software routines, really high performance optical networking will need to do as much as possible in light rather than having to hit the grey silicon (as opposed to the glassy kind).

Of course, by 2020, power will be everyone's number one issue, whether the climate forces it on us or supply constraints save us from the climate. Available wind power, and the percentage of the time it's available, goes up exponentially with tower height; the well-dressed emerging market base station will probably wear a kite-turbine, and your recovery crews (probably working harder than ever before - the future's going to get weird) will have them as part of their standard load-out. Don't think we're joking- the renewables industry has a surprising number of aerial turbine startups.

All those data centres, of course, will be full of cheap PC-based linux boxes - that's how Google does it now, and we can't expect telcos to catch on in a mere decade.

We reckon, however, that the conference will still be in Barcelona. Nice place, and not too many Mass Group Incidents.

[If you'd like to meet a Telco 2.0 analyst at MWC next week, just contact us]

Apple iPad - Business Model Analysis

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:03:09 +0000

We've just published our analysis of the business model impact of the Apple iPad. See here for a free preview at the Telco 2.0 Subscription Service portal.

Introducing Telco 2.0 'Best Practice Live!'

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:31:00 +0000

We are delighted to give our readers a preview here of Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live!

This is a new service from the Telco 2.0 Initiative (and partners), created in response to requests from our community. Telco 2.0 'Best Practice Live!' provides what will be the first carefully curated, online, video-based, interactive knowledge bank of cutting-edge 'Telco 2.0' services, business models and solutions from around the world.

It opens on 28-30 June 2010 with live online broadcasts of case studies to three geographic regions, each incorporating interactive discussions and panels, and supported by a major online exhibition. All materials are available afterwards 'on-demand' and then updated every six months via a new live broadcast and exhibition.

Below are details of the objectives, rationale, participants and agenda. If you would like more details of how to get involved, please email us. A website will be available next week too.

Event Objective
To identify and showcase best practice and next practice case studies from around the world which demonstrate the value of developing Telco 2.0 businesses. The case studies will come from both developed and emerging markets, be replicable and identify practical steps for moving towards Telco 2.0. The exhibition will complement this with a showcase of the technologies and solutions that underpin the development of the 2-sided business models that sit at the heart of the Telco 2.0 concept.

Why We've Created Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live!
Telcos around the world are embracing Telco 2.0 and the 2-sided business model concepts. As a result there is an ever-growing pool of inspiring and very real examples of telco 2.0 services or how to move towards them. The problem is that while these exist, they are not seen or understood by the broader telco industry. We have therefore designed this virtual environment to bring the very best examples to the attention of a global audience in a single place, accessible by all.

In June we will be looking at:

*Keynote Sessions: These concentrate on four areas that are central to the development of Telco 2.0 business models. Each session lasts for an hour and includes case study presentations and interactive Q&A sessions with the presenters. Each will also be accompanied by a moderated chat session.
The case study presentation will follow a template designed by us to demonstrate the Telco 2.0 principles used, the value these create, the level of control the telco has over the business model and therefore the sustainability of that model.

The keynote sessions will cover: Corporate Growth Strategies; Machine-2-Machine; Consumer Data and Behavioural Advertising; Mobile Broadband cost structures.

*Streamed Sessions: Each session focuses on an area of telecoms industry development that is both hot and has potential for growth. Again, each session lasts for an hour and includes case study presentations and will be accompanied by a moderated chat session with the speakers.
The topics covered are: Entertainment and Content Distribution; Mobile Money; Mobile Marketing; AppStores and Developer Communities; Cloud Computing; Carrier Services; Devices; IT/OSS/BSS; Network Technology.

Participants
We expect up to 4000 people to participate (2000 in June and another 2000 following): senior executives and decision makers from telcos, media and technology companies who are involved in strategy, new business development and product development and procurement. CTOs and technical teams involved in the development of the structures and solutions that support two-sided business models. Plus those involved in strategy, operations, new business and IT from 'upstream' industries in Advertising and Media, Entertainment and Broadcasting, Financial Services, Applications and Software Development and Enterprise Solution Providers, along with M2M sectors such as automotive, logistics, health and energy.

What Differentiates Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! from Webinars and Webcasts?
In short - video and interactivity. It is a complete virtual event that includes everything you would get a physical one and more. It combines the latest technology in webcasting, online chats and video streaming, to offer the elements of trade shows: exhibitor booths, speeches, seminars, distribution of marketing literature and social gatherings. It combines the video interface of a webcast with greater interactivity and social engagement tools. Business collaboration, the exchange of opinions and information is not just supported but actively encouraged and it all takes place in real time. Live group, moderated and one-to-one chats are supported as well as forums, blogs and even Twitter for the Tweeters amongst the visitors.

Agenda:

Event Structure
The event combines a fully interactive virtual exhibition with a video-based, interactive conference. The conference is split into two parts - plenary or keynote sessions for the first half and streamed sessions for the second.

Keynote Sessions
Session 1: Corporate Strategies
This session will feature presentations from telcos that have already developed a cohesive strategy that encompasses multiple examples of telco 2.0 and telco 2.0-like services and business models including carrier services, machine-2-machine and monetisation of telco assets to third parties.

Session 2: Machine-2-Machine
Featuring best practice and next practice examples of Machine-2-Machine deployments that are streamlining enterprise business processes and building new comms-enabled functionality on top of these. These could include but are not limited to:
 Smart Grids - meter reading, facilities management and energy conservation
 E-Health 2.0 - examples could include a wellness monitoring, asset tracking, appointment setting, etc
 Telematics and logistics 2.0 - including deliveries, field service, asset tracking
 Automotive - maintenance, repair, insurance

Session 3: Consumer Data and Behavioural Advertising
Advertising revenue is an important source of revenue for Telco 2.0-type business models and this session will feature new examples of how telcos are looking to expose and monetise their assets to advertisers and focus on their role as the custodians of consumer data. These could include but are not limited to:
 Personalisation
 Identity Management/Multiple IDs
 Creating valuable aggregated data for marketing purposes
 Consumer data protection and security

Session 4: Mobile Broadband
This session will focus on the best and next practices for deploying mobile broadband based on their ability to support both the data traffic and business models associated with Telco 2.0. These could include but are not limited to:
 Using broadband as a market entry/re-launch mechanism - developed and developing markets
 Creating broadband services beyond consumer buckets
 New business models for Internet access only e.g pre-paid access with dongles, Wifi-like pay as you go access
 The economics of traffic management and offload strategies including femtocells, backhaul and DPI, QoS as a service.

Streamed Sessions
Each session focuses on an area of telecoms industry development that is both hot and has potential for growth. Again, each session lasts for an hour and includes case study presentations and will be accompanied by a moderated chat session with the speakers.

Entertainment and Content Distribution
This session will concentrate on the areas in which the telco, media and entertainment worlds are converging and could include but is not limited to:
 Hybrid broadcast/IPTV
 Building telco onto gaming
 Integrated home hubs for telephony, broadband, IPTV/Pay TV, gaming
 Time and place shifting
 Social Networking
 Recommendation and retail

Mobile Money
This session will cover the fast-growing mobile money sector and will concentrate on the role of operators as value-added facilitators of money services not just a distribution network. It could include but is not limited to:
 Money Transfer - building services on top of P2P transfer - bill payments, wages,
 Mobile Payments for physical goods in real and virtual environments
 Mobile payments for virtual goods - in game, social networking etc

Mobile Marketing
This session will focus on the services telcos can offer to media and advertising companies beyond access to their customer base. It could include but is not limited to:
 Media exchange amongst operators
 Ad booking
 Campaign management
 Measurement and metrics

Developer Communities
One of the hottest topics in telecoms, the developers, developers, developers mantra has hit the mobile telecoms world with a band. This session will examine the value created by different developer-engagement strategies. It could include but is not limited to:
 App Store Partnerships
 Device and platform partnerships
 Telco created communities or app stores
 API exposure and monetisation

Carrier Services
Carrier service divisions are almost entirely based on the interconnection or exposure of a telco's assets to a third party. Up until now this has been almost exclusively telco services to other telcos. However, there is the opportunity to build on these businesses, selling telco services to other businesses and other services to telcos. It could include but is not limited to:
 IP Exchange
 Content delivery platforms
 Hub services
 Financial service interconnect and clearing
 Managed service mobile backhaul - carrier ethernet etc

Cloud Computing
Another of the industry buzz terms, almost every application imaginable it is claimed can be put in the cloud. This session will look at the business models associated with telcos playing in the cloud. It could include but is not limited to:
 Public, private or hybrid clouds
 Cloud services for SMEs
 Mobile Cloud Computing
 VAS to Cloud service providers - QoS, security, SLAs

Mobile Devices
The once ubiquitous definition of a mobile communications device is changing beyond recognition. In addition to communication device developments such as smartphones and dongles, there is an emerging genre of devices developing around app-specific services. This session will concentrate on the new business models that are developing around devices. It could include but is not limited to:
 Dongles and pre-loaded data
 E-readers
 Smartphones
 Embedded consumer electronics for M2P or P2M applications

Business and Operational Support Systems
Often overlooked because it is both complicated and far less 'sexy' than many of the other business areas, BSS/OSS does, however, lie at the heart of Telco 2.0. It is where the majority of the assets that could be monetised sit and are enabled from. . It could include but is not limited to:
 Billing
 CRM
 APIs
 Network Management
 Traffic Management

Network Technology (other than Mobile Broadband)
Network technology has always been central to the development of the telecoms industry and while it is no longer the total solution, technology remains a key growth enabler. This session will concentrate on the business models developing around different technologies and could include but is not limited to:
 FTTx
 Carrier Ethernet
 National Broadband Networks
 Optical technologies - RODMS

Exhibition
In the exhibition halls, as attendees you can browse through virtual booths just as you would at a physical conference. And, just like a physical event, you can chat directly with booth reps and other visitors but in addition, you can download content directly to your own Virtual Event Bag. On exiting the event, all contents of the bag are automatically zipped and downloaded to the your desktop.

If you would like to learn more, please email us.