Telco 2.0

GMail voice - nice, but no Skype Connect

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:07:02 +0000

So you can now make telephone calls from within Google Mail. Well, among other things this is a fine example of something we said back in 2008 in the Consumer Voice & Messaging 2.0 strategy report. Jamie Zawinski said that every program tends to expand until it can read e-mail - we said that the same was now true of telephony. Everything expands until it can place phone calls. As a result, although total minutes of use keep rising, the market is deconcentrating, with the total spread across an increasing diversity of players - games, Voice 2.0 companies, enterprise VoIP networks, mobile apps, perhaps even the odd telco.

But we actually don't think Google's move is enormously significant. Consider this: if you're a telco, and you provide plain SS7 circuit-switched voice, everyone agrees you've got a problem. Telephony is now a software application and it's very often free, which doesn't leave you much scope. If you're one of the traditional alternative voice providers - calling cards, carrier VoIP like Vonage, discount MVNO, etc - you also have problems, because you're trying to undercut a price that's going to zero. We recall Boris Nemsic, when he was CEO of Mobilkom, saying that their answer to "fixed-mobile convergence" was a new tariff that offered unlimited national and on-network minutes for €10. There wasn't any point being cute, when they could just cut prices and squash the margin players like bugs.

So you need to find some way to differentiate - to offer better voice and messaging.

Now, we were trying to find out if the Google product was actually Google Voice, which does provide a range of better voice features - visual, integrated voicemail, presence/availability, transcription etc. Hence the reference to Google voice rather than Google Voice in yesterday's news post. Here's Andy Abramson, who discovers that the new service brings you that fine telecoms industry product, a traditional IVR voicemail inbox that doesn't work with either your e-mail or with Google Voice's unicomms features. Also, the technology leaves something to be desired - it looks like they've built a JavaScript JINGLE client that logs into the Google Talk XMPP servers, but some users are reporting that it drops the call if the browser tab or window it's running in goes out of focus.

If some other company had launched a basic cheap calls service, we wouldn't have thought that particularly interesting. So we shouldn't just because it's Google. Sure, it means even more pressure on voice margins, but that's hardly news.

So what's Skype doing? Alec Saunders points out that the big news over there is that they've rebranded and relaunched Skype for SIP, now known as Skype Connect. The point here is that devices other than Skype clients can log in to the Skype network - indeed, anything that uses SIP can send a REGISTER to sip.skype.com and get online. That means, for example, that your company's Asterisk PBX could get its bandwidth from Skype, or your fleet of Avaya call-centre turret phones could log into Skype. Because both SIP and the proprietary Skype protocol support passing a lot of other messages before, during, after, and outside calls, your Voice 2.0 applications should work with it. There's also a new Skype Manager application to keep track of it all, and of course you can still use SkypeIn numbers, SkypeOut PSTN interconnection, and Skype click-to-call.

It's $6.95 a channel a month for all the minutes you can eat, and Skype has gone to the trouble of getting Avaya and Cisco (as well as quite a few others) to certify interoperability with their enterprise voice kit, so the IT department can rest easy. So it's a lot more than just cheap calls - although the calls are pretty cheap as well. What's genuinely impressive, too, is that they've clearly thought through the implications of doing SMB and enterprise voice. The announcement on the official Skype blog says, first up, that this is about connecting unicomms and IP PBX systems to Skype, and goes on to press the issues of certification, channel marketing, deployment, and technical support.

So Skype is lining up a major challenge in enterprise voice. Who makes an awful lot of money selling IP PBXes, unicomms gear, and desk phones? Cisco! Hence this rumour, which would see Cisco Systems acquiring Skype for $5bn. It's more convincing than the idea that Google voice with a small "v" is part of a huge strategy to destroy Facebook by encouraging people to stay logged into Gmail (the two things are not mutually exclusive...) And Cisco has been expanding its interests in collaboration services for some time - think WebEx conferencing.

It's harder to see what would be worth $5bn in such a deal. Certainly not Skype's margins on international voice. Perhaps the idea would be to boost sales of Cisco's higher-margin hardware. But Skype Connect means that Cisco hardware can already interoperate with Skype. There's obvious cross-marketing potential, but that doesn't need the ritual sacrifice of shareholders' funds on such a scale. It is true that Skype is on the hunt for major partners - Samsung's coming Android tablet may ship with a Skype client as part of the understanding with Verizon. And there's evidence that they're interested in a two-sided business model around click-to-call.

Again, though, the only benefit from burning $5bn would be to the Skype founders - which is a reason for them but not for Cisco.

The really big news for Skype, though, is the developer API coming this autumn. It's going to be absolutely critical to their future - as this piece on the Fring row makes clear. Can they really have been keeping Phil Wolff waiting for details of SkypeKit for the last 125 days?

Meanwhile, the question of Google's motivation has been raised. Most of the media/analyst chatter about this has been obsessed by Facebook. We consider this to be purely buzzword-driven analysis. Google has huge software development resources and a culture that prizes innovative projects; it's both cheap to do a small development project, and highly incentivised. As a result, they do a lot of projects.

Another possibility is that this is an effort to gather social-graph information from GMail users. However, it's very likely that the call patterns will be dominated by the names in the user's existing chat roster - the very fact it's integrated with the roster guarantees this. This is information Google already has, although there is probably a significant degree to which a typical user's IM and voice networks don't overlap. (Similarly, my GTalk and Skype rosters are similar but aren't identical.)

Also, remember when they served links in different shades of blue to randomly selected users, to see which shade got clicked more often? Google likes experiments. It maintains coherence by using the experiments to kill off the dodgy projects. We believe this to be another experiment - perhaps there is some interesting data to be had? Or perhaps Google is just trying to learn a little more about this odd "voice" thing?

Either way, until and unless they develop the sort of understanding of voice & messaging that Skype Connect demonstrates, it's mostly another cheap calls offering with some extra features. Google could deepen the integration of GMail with Google Voice, and Alec Saunders' post referred to above offers some valuable pointers - it remains true that cheap calls are no longer enough, and there's a real market for better voice and messaging. Ask Skype.

We'll be discussing how to manage the co-opetition with Google, and the challenges of Voice 2.0, at our next Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorms, in LA on the 26th-27th of October and London on the 9th-10th of November.

Vodafone 360 on Android, iTunes: Now Getting it Right?

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:01 +0000

Vodafone 360 was meant to be a new, social-network centred approach to managing the customer interface. Unfortunately, it was also bug-ridden and dogged by a lack of clarity of purpose. Now, its availability on Android Market and iTunes may create a strategic opportunity for Vodafone to access more customers. More here.

[Ed - we will be discussing issues raised in this article at the Telco 2.0 AMERICAS (27-28 October, LA) and EMEA (9-10 Nov, London) events, as part of the 'Managing the Co-opetition/Facing up to Facebook' sessions.]

Telco 2.0 News Review

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:18:48 +0000

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

Voice & Messaging 2.0: Google voice (if not Google Voice) in your Google Mail is here!
Technology Disruptions: Let Google control your life with Priority Inbox
Online Video: BBC iPlayer Mobile - 230,000 viewers on iOS
Broadband Connectivity: DTAG LTE surrounds the cities from the countryside
Developer Communities: Apps that heal, kill, and govern

It's heeere...Google integrates voice into GMail. At the moment, they're offering cheap international calls to US customers (which may imply that this shares common infrastructure with Google Voice), although some UK users (including this one) saw a phone icon briefly appear in the GMail window. Wired's Ryan Singel points out that although Skype is now the biggest phone company by minutes of use, it's making very thin margins - of course, this goes just as much for Google.

Telephony, in itself, is a software application. Google Voice and Google Talk, importantly, are purely client-server architectures (SS7 and XMPP JINGLE respectively), unlike Skype's mostly peer-to-peer network, which will have consequences for infrastructure costs and therefore the sort of margins they can tolerate. Not that Google is short of a data centre or two, though. It's not clear if the new product provides any of the better-telephony features of Voice or whether it's just another cheap calls play.

But if you really want something innovative from Google, what about Priority Inbox, which uses a Bayesian classifier to learn what you find important and sort your e-mail by relevance? We've been using essentially the same logic for years to filter out spam, and if anyone understands the process Google does. This is essentially the opposite of a spam filter. Cool, although you might be a little chary about giving Google operational rather than just advisory responsibilities in your life - that Arthur C. Clarke story about the telephone exchange that becomes sentient and starts quietly adjusting people's lives by misrouting their calls comes to mind.

(Technical note: If you want similar functionality, but don't trust Google to turn it off, you might be able to rig it using John Graham-Cumming's POPFile, a generic e-mail classifier utility. You could create three POPFile buckets for High, Medium, and Low priority, manually sort a few days' worth of traffic into them, and then let it take over the sorting. If you started to suspect, you could always uninstall it. John's now working on something similar for huge volumes of enterprise helpdesk Web traffic.)

Would Priority Inbox think spurious patent lawsuits were high or low priority? Good question. It's probably fair to say that if the nastygram comes from hyper-rich Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen it's better to take it seriously, even if it is a patent on "Browser for use in navigating a body of information, with particular application to browsing information represented by audiovisual data". The first browser, NCSA Mosaic, was invented in 1992, before Allen's post-Microsoft project Interval Research....anyway, Google, Apple, Facebook, and some 8 other firms' lawyers will be chewing over this one this week.

BBC iPlayer users certainly are browsing information represented by audiovisual data, if anyone is. A Freedom of Information Act request reveals that about five times as many people are watching BBC content on Apple iProducts as on Androids, which isn't actually very surprising as only the very latest (version 2.2 "Froyo") 'droids are supported. Still, 230,016 weekly viewers on Apple iOS is a nontrivial user base. Apparently the BBC is worried about non-Flash streaming for "content protection" reasons, which is silly in the light of the free FFMpeg program which will happily record any Flash stream and re-rip it to the format of your choice.

More practically, the application is currently restricted to working over WLAN only. Something of a relief for the mobile packet-pushing department there. Fortunately, LTE is coming; it's still late and tempting but it's getting less elusive. Deutsche Telekom this week flipped the big switch on its first LTE site - in fact, Réne Obermann plugged in a pair of pink cables, although the interesting bit is that the spectrum licence requires DTAG to cover Germany's remaining notspots before they get to deploy it in the cities.

In the US, it looks like MetroPCS will be the first operator to deploy LTE, with the big switch getting thrown in Dallas and Las Vegas in September. Samsung promises that there will be a handset in time, too.

So what about that WiMAX stuff? Intel just bought Infineon's wireless baseband operation, which makes the current iPhone's cellular radio among others. It doesn't sound like they're full of confidence.

There's less relief for the packet pushers here; what about a Netflix app for the iPhone? (Their arch-rival, Blockbuster, is in deep trouble.)

We try, we try, but we always end up writing about iPhones. Here's a story about developing medical apps - for smartphones in general, not just iPhones, but the hook is the iPhone stethoscope app. It's just gone through the three million download mark. The big problem, though, is getting the thing approved by the medical world - its developer is keen to try a blood oxygen monitor (using the camera, we think) and a mobile ultrasound scanner.

So much for apps that heal. What about apps that KILL? Ones dedicated to war? A Hungarian software house has created an application based on the popular Layar augmented-reality system that implements something very like the US military's Blue Force Tracker, the system that lets you know where your friends are on the battlefield.

Creating mayhem is easy - it's order that's the difficult bit. Having conquered, you may wish to count your new subjects in order to impose your ideology on them more efficiently. Hence, a fascinating article on Brazil's census, an enormous administrative challenge which is being tackled with 150,000 LG 750GM smartphones and some custom software. The LG 750GM is a Windows Mobile 6.5 device, not perhaps what you might have expected in this context.

So perhaps it isn't quite as crazy as all that to spend $1bn on the launch of MS Windows Phone. That said, data logging could be achieved with a simple web form, so this may just mean someone had a lot of 750GMs going cheap.

Amazon Kindles, however, are selling like hot cakes, although the company is still being coy about the exact details.

In India, the government has given RIM more time to think about how it can make its service both secure against people the Indian government doesn't want to hack it and insecure against people the Indian government does want to hack it. The government has further demanded that Skype move its servers into India, which will be the easiest server move in industry history, as Skype is a peer-to-peer protocol.

RIM this week bought an app store to bulk up its App World operation and acquire various bits of back-office technology. Motorola, on the other hand, has bought a mobile apps development shop to add to its collection of Android devs.

Dell is investing in the cloud - specifically, they're keen on a multi-vendor approach rooted in the PC heritage, as opposed to Cisco's vision of deep integration between networking and processing hardware or HP's Matrix system, which consists of nothing but HP kit of every kind. And NEC wants to sell cloud services to China.

AT&T is hoping better self-care will encourage customers to upgrade their U-Verse fibre-to-the-node services. Actually, they're mostly interested in upgrading their TV bundles. In a tangentially related customer-care story, beware - data roaming may give you a heart attack.

Iliad's results are out, and they're good - profits have doubled over the last year from €72m to €171.4m, mostly driven by a successful turnaround of the Alice cable business they acquired in 2008. Operating margins were 38.6%, up from 31%, and the company says that 1,500 staff are working on its mobile network deployment, with Alcatel and NSN as the main contractors. Talks about the troubled national-roaming issue, however, are still not settled.

For its part, NSN is looking for a possible financial investor to buy a slice of vendor cake.

How do major operators fight municipal broadband projects? By having their lobbyists rewrite whole US state laws, that's how.

Bing for Android! Fraunhofer announces a new videoconferencing standard. The declining standards of spam. Moore's Law, reports of your death have been exaggerated again. HOWTO spot liars on conference calls. Don't do experiments on the Internet...please.

Entertainment 2.0: New Sources of Revenue for Telcos?

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:01:12 +0000

Telco assets and capabilities could be used much more to help Film, TV and Gaming companies optimize their beleaguered business model. There's an extract here from our new 38 page Executive Briefing report examining how.

These themes will also be examined and discussed at our Oct 2010 Americas and Nov 2010 EMEA Executive Brainstorms.

Report Extract - Figure 4: Entertainment-specific Business Model Strategy Choices

Source: Telco 2.0 Initiative

Speakers at Telco 2.0 Events, Autumn 2010

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:57:09 +0000

We're delighted to be signing up some excellent 'stimulus speakers' for the upcoming Telco 2.0 events in Los Angeles (27-28 October) and London (9-10 November). Here's a sample:

· Steve McGaw, SVP Corporate Strategy, AT&T
· Georges Penalver, SEVP, Strategy & Development, Orange Group
· Olivier Baujard, Group CTO, Deutsche Telekom
· Albert Hitchcock, Group CIO, Vodafone
· Sean Williams, Managing Director Retail Strategy, BT
· Stephanie Comfort, Chief Strategy Officer, Qwest Communications
· Frank Boulben, CMO, LightSquared
· Von Wright, VP Consumer Marketing, AT&T Mobility
· Joan Fitzgerald, VP TV, Comscore
· Jennifer Byrne, Director, Business Devt, Verizon Wireless
· Stacey Schulman, SVP Ad Sales Research, Turner Entertainment
· Thomas Fellger, CEO, Iconmobile
· Anthony Rose, CTO, Project Canvas

Watch this space for more announcements...

Telco 2.0 News Review

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 10:58:47 +0000

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

Strategy & Finance: Apps to pass voice by 2013? That's...brave
Broadband Connectivity: Fibre tax going up
Voice & Messaging 2.0: VZW launches mobile Skype for BREW gadgets
APIs: RIM launches App World 2.0, BlackBerry ID
Cloud Computing: Google's King of the Data Centres - don't go over the top on cloud

[Ed:Telco 2.0 is signing up a strong group of 'stimulus speakers' for its Autumn events in Los Angeles and London. Details here]

A survey of mobile operators for The Economist says that they expect revenues from apps to pass revenues from voice by 2013. Really? If valid, that's certainly the most radical prediction we've heard in a long time - you might almost consider it a marker of the existence of a bubble in apps. On the other hand, in the US, fixed-line substitution is running at 5% annually, so the prediction might not be so far off in as far as it involves voice revenues falling.

After last week's disappointing news that the UK's "fibre tax" is staying, there's worse - it's going up for everyone except Virgin Media.

Verizon Wireless is going further in their partnership with Skype - this week sees the arrival of a Skype app for featurephones based on Qualcomm's BREW platform, which takes mobile VoIP well outside the smartphone sector. Skype-to-Skype calls will be free, international SkypeOut cheap and paid for from Skype credit, and calls to US mobile or landline numbers will follow the existing VZW rate card.

Fring, meanwhile, announced its own clone of SkypeOut.

RIM launched the new version of BlackBerry App World this week - it's been in beta for a while, but this is rthe commercial kickoff. Key points include a wider range of pricing options (99 cents and $1.99 as well as free or $2.99), and interestingly, a new service called BlackBerry ID that lets you use your BlackBerry account information and authentication across other devices and services. There goes another operator asset.

It's also being rumoured that RIM is considering spending up to $400m to acquire a mobile ads company and give its (impressive) in-application ads platform a scale boost. Apple's iAds is said to be having difficulties with some advertisers.

Nokia, meanwhile, acquired a mobile analytics firm, Motally. As if they needed to do any more incredibly careful evaluation... At the same time, they're scrubbing the Nokia brand off Comes With Music and pulling it into Ovi, because everyone knows what an Ovi is....

More obviously, the price of listing an app on Ovi Store has been cut permanently - it's now the cheapest of the major app stores.

We mentioned that VZW's fleet of BREW featurephones are getting Skype. On the same them, here's a new Nokia - it's a Series 40 gadget, but it claims to be the only one around to combine a traditional 12-button pad and a touchscreen, and more importantly it brings Nokia Messaging, Ovi Mail, 16GB of removable storage, 3G and WLAN connectivity, and API compatibility with (some) apps written for S60 5th Edition. It's an example of the progressive up-grading of what used to be considered basic phones towards smartphone standards. (There's a retrospective of smartphones here, although Nokia people might well object that not everything on the market in 2005 looked like a Palm Pilot.)

Developers will be pleased to know that jQuery, the popular JavaScript application framework, is available for mobile devices, and the user interface screenshots have a pleasantly clean look. If you have a recent web browser, you can do JavaScript, and if you can require jQuery, there's a lot of things you can do on a featurephone.

Speaking of jQuery, a neat trick (beware - technical!) - need to pack your software libraries in a resource-constrained environment? Why not encode them as a highly compressed PNG graphic file? You can see what jQuery looks like as a picture here, and learn that sadly, cool as the idea may be, it's not as good as GZip compression.

Relatedly, we're approaching the 5 billionth end point connected to the Internet. Connect something to the Internet, of course, and you've immediately got some interesting problems - when DTAG talks about "Connected Car", they probably didn't mean letting random monkeys on the web track the movements of your car or make the warning lights on the dashboard flash in pretty patterns.

Facebook has launched its Yahoo! FireEagle/Google Latitude/Foursquare/whatever clone, Facebook Places, which lets you share your current location with them (and slurps your location from Latitude, Foursquare, Gowalla, or whatever stalkerware service you're using besides). Actually, it also lets other people share your location with the world at large, Facebook's advertising data-miners, etc - so you might want to read this EFF guide to how to control disclosure of location data through Facebook.

The EFF has written to Verizon in its capacity as owner of CyberTrust, asking what they make of Etisalat's drive to get rid of encrypted BlackBerry service - after all, Etisalat is using an SSL certificate authority signed by the Verizon division.

Google TV has run into certain problems, as talks with the major US TV networks didn't go well. It seems that they don't like the idea of subscribers being able to see both their subscription/TV offering and the stuff they serve out on the Internet and through firms like Hulu in one place.

Here's an interesting post mortem on Google Wave from the CEO of Canonical (the firm behind Ubuntu Linux).

In further Google news, what if the cloud wasn't all it's cracked up to be? So says Vijay Gill, the Google exec responsible for its vast data-centre infrastructure. More specifically, he argues that once you get past a certain level of capacity-utilisation, owning your own equipment becomes cheaper than buying in cloud services. This is the flip side of Joe Weinman's argument about cloud computing - it's still the peak/mean ratio that makes the difference, but in this case, we're looking at it from the other side of the curve. Interestingly, he also says that after a certain scale is reached, managing the relationship with the cloud provider and administering the system take up as much time as traditional systems administration does....

There's a fantastic list of Google's failures here - who remembers Google Web Accelerator, the Opera Mini-like compression proxy that incidentally stopped you from watching Google's YouTube videos? Not so sure about the conclusion, though. Here's an interview with Yahoo!'s chief scientist.

Android 2.2 has voice control, which probably sounds more impressive if you don't remember repeating your girlfriend's name at a late 90s Samsung device trying to get it to trigger a voice call. Some people are concerned about a drift towards closedness in the Android world.

Foxconn, assembler of iProducts, has launched a campaign of rallies to "raise morale" among the workers after the well-known wave of suicides. (Check out the photo from the rally - it's the most depressing thing you'll see all week.) More to the point, after the wave of strikes that followed the wave of suicides, Foxconn has accepted another pay rise.

Here's a list of 119 iPad apps for IT productivity. Vodafone's latest mobile-WLAN hotspot has a slot for micro-SD cards - how soon will it come with a little Asterisk server that talks to their GAN interface, automatic VPN encryption, and some collaboration tools, thus making it an instant office?

Orange UK's data network was down this week. PlayStation 3 hacked.

Brough Turner's notes from the Community Wireless Networks summit - beware technical! but well worth reading. He also recommends Ben West's conference blog.

OFCOM Communications Review: The Customer of the Future is Here

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:29:49 +0000

OFCOM's annual Communications Market Review is out (pdf, charts and spreadsheets here), and it is of course packed with chewy data. Taking a first look into the 379 page behemoth, we've noticed a couple of interesting points about the industry and the customers of the future, the people who took centre stage in our Serving the Digital Generation strategy report.

Before we get to that, though, here's a very important chart indeed.

First point - spending on communications is falling as a share of household income, dropping from a peak in 2005. Further, as you may have noticed if you aren't leading an extraordinarily sheltered life, this isn't because household incomes are surging upwards faster than we can devise products to absorb them. Monthly household ARPU in cash terms has fallen 10% since 2005.

The breakdown of this fall is interesting in itself. Spending on fixed Internet service hasn't changed significantly. Spending on TV has fallen very slightly. Rather more than half of the change has come from the decline of fixed voice, and the rest is accounted for by falling prices in mobile. These trends are not the impact of the Great Recession, either - the second fastest drop in fixed voice was 2005-2006.

This classical Bass diffusion model suggests that, if you thought the last couple of years had seen dramatic growth in mobile data traffic and in smartphones, you ain't seen nothing yet. OFCOM reckons both mobile broadband and smartphones were about to transition from the "early adopters" to the majority adoption phase - aka the rapid growth inflection in the curve - as of Q1 2010. The Bass model typically predicts that the Early and Late Majority groups both account for 34% of total adoption, so 78% of total adopters are excepted to arrive in a period of time only half as long again as it took the 15% or so of early adopters to rock up. Watch out!

Notably, Ofcom still expect a long hard slog before significant fibre deployment - that's still in the earliest fraction of the innovator segment.

The economic crisis is unlikely to hold up this development very much. Consider this chart...

As the recession bit, the public valued mobility more. On the other hand, they targeted pay-TV subscriptions and good old steam telephony for their very own emergency cuts package. This, by the way, fits with what we heard from Eircom at Telecom Finance in February.

But what will the customer of the future pipe over our networks? Everyone knows that - an unstoppable tsunami of pirate video, delivered in an unholy alliance with Google and Amazon. Right?

As this chart shows, the 16-24 year olds may watch more video on their computers than other groups, but it remains a relatively small percentage of user time. In fact, totting up e-mail, social networking, and "other Internet use", which seems to include the WWW, usenet, etc, you can't avoid the conclusion that the PC is still a fundamentally textual medium.

In fact, the 16-24 and 25-44 groups consume the least video, as this table shows.

Actually, being young reduces your video consumption below the national average more than being at work does - "working" as a group averages 35% of their total media time watching video, 16-24s 32%, the lowest single group.

Again, the customer of the future is heavily textual - the 16-24s spend much more time on "text communication". Interestingly, though, this doesn't represent a cannibalisation of voice. On average, 5% of all adults' media time consists of telephony, and the intergroup variance is next to nothing.

Typically, this group is doing something else at the same time; 71% of 16-24s' media usage is concurrent, while only 12% of 55-and overs is.

This chart offers a nicer visualisation of those data - note, again, that there is hardly any distinction between groups with regard to voice, which can be read both as an index of its enduring value and also as a consequence of its commodity status. Further, the bars make it very clear that the biggest difference between the customer of the future and the customer of the past is that they don't watch TV, and even counting in "other video", they still don't watch enough YouTube or iPlayer to make up the difference. This importance/attention matrix makes the point clearly. Again, note the enduring importance of voice.

It's been a cliché since the 1960s that we live in a TV society - at the very least, the fact everyone thinks it's hugely influential must have had important consequences for political and business strategies. To a significant and growing extent, we won't any more. In that light, it's no surprise that advertising revenues are stagnant to falling - although it might be a surprise that well over half the OFCOM review is dedicated to TV.

On the other hand, the stereotype of the bandwidth hog we alluded to above is right about something.

50% of the 16-24s are already mobile data users. The data-centric, smartphone environment is the new normal. We will need the extra capacity after all - even if it's more likely to be signalling capacity, to handle all those instant messaging sessions and the like, rather than raw bandwidth for video-hauling. And by the way, the typical Customer of the Future is a girl - OFCOM's numbers for the "active online universe" show that the 16-24 and 25-44 cohorts are slightly, but significantly, more likely to be female.

Telco 2.0 News Review

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:13:24 +0000

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

Regulation: Google and Verizon - net neutrality plot, giant CDN deal, or just more spin?
Broadband Connectivity: The heaviest data users are on VZW
Devices: Android will catch up with and outstrip iPhone
End-User Services: Vodafone grasses a catch - 360 for 'Droid goes wrong
Tech Disruptions: The week they hacked the iPhones

No prizes for guessing the lead this week; the deal-that-wasn't between Google and Verizon, and the follow-up "seven principles". The EFF's opinion is here; Robert Cringely's take on the original proposal is here. It seems reasonable to think that the original deal was something along the lines of a mammoth CDN contract, taking advantage of the operator's physical footprint to deploy Google servers close to users.

We'll be discussing this never-more-important issue at the 10th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in Los Angeles on the 27th and 28th of October, and at the 11th in London on the 8th-10th of November. Key points will include:

What are the new business models enabled by prioritisation, traffic shaping and policy management?
How important are these business models to the development of Telco 2.0 businesses?
What are acceptable use cases for techniques such as DPI and policy management?
Are there alternative technology solutions that comply with regulations but offer telcos flexibility?
Which models do these support?

The "seven principles" document, however, may be more interesting than the original deal. TelecomTV discusses it here. The most difficult elements for many people to accept will be the notion of services that are "distinguishable in scope and purpose" from yer ordinary Internet access and that are exempt from its regulatory requirements. It's also telling that the principles exclude mobile (although it is hard to see how, technically, you can prioritise packets over the air interface, which is usually the gating factor).

TTV has further discussion here, making the excellent point that for a document which supposedly encompasses months of negotiation, it's a tad thin, and also very unlikely to be accepted by the FCC. They argue that the seven principles paper was rushed out in order to spin the original New York Times story and perhaps to set an initial negotiating position with the regulator.

Meanwhile, the beat goes on. Ericsson estimates that mobile data traffic almost tripled over the last 12 months. Interestingly, new data shows that Verizon Wireless smartphone users (i.e. mostly Android) are significantly heavier consumers of data than AT&T (i.e. mostly iPhone). The difference is concentrated among the very heaviest users - VZW has twice as many users over 500MB/month and four times as many over 2GB.

This may be connected with the latest US market share figures. Nielsen's data for the first half of 2010 is out, and is interesting indeed. New iPhone customers have peaked, in the last quarter of 2010, and are now falling at a remarkably similar rate to both Microsoft Windows Mobile and RIM. The inflection point for iPhone market share is very close indeed to that for Android, which took off dramatically in Q4 2010 and is now in second place. It seems certain that it will overtake RIM early in the third quarter. Everyone else is essentially flat-lining.

Vodafone, meanwhile, pushed out a software update to its HTC Desire fleet, whose users were eagerly awaiting Android 2.2. But it wasn't Android 2.2 - it was an update to the Vodafone 360 app, which came with a variety of unremovable Vodafone-branded graphics, apps, and bookmarks. User rage followed, and an embarrassing climbdown. Other Vodafone opcos have since delayed the update in order to sort it out.

In related news, the 360-specific LiMo handsets have been cancelled in favour of a pure software experience. At least in part as a result, it seems that LiMo's responsibilities will be merged into the Linux Foundation, with the higher level issues taken care of within WAC. Speaking of WAC, details and names are here, as well as a promise to have the first beta release of the SDK out in November and a production release by February.

There's an interesting comparison of Apple vs. Android vs. RIM, and the Apple vs. Microsoft wars here. They conclude that the recent Android surge has a lot to do with telcos - specifically, their vendor relationships, supply chains, and retail footprints. Android's licensing model has got its devices into the right channels. Unfortunately, it's also being sued by Oracle over some Java patents.

Meanwhile, Mark Papermaster, the man responsible for the iPhone 4, has taken his coat. After all, it was also the week they hacked the iPhone. To recap; someone discovered a way to "jailbreak" the device from a Web page. It had never been easier to get root access to your iPhone! Then everyone realised just what a bad idea this was - if any Web page could get access to a stock iPhone, with its root password set to "alpine" by default, hackers could do literally anything they liked with them. Only a bug in iOS's handling of MMS messages prevented the attack spreading over-the-air, as F-Secure Labs pointed out here. F-Secure also has some details of the exploit, which used a deliberately broken font in a PDF file to crash Safari and execute attack code.

Apple has since released an emergency patch. iUsers are strongly advised to get it as soon as possible (the link points to both the official and jailbreak versions). They might also follow these instructions to set a strong root password as a goalkeeper against any attack that gets around Apple's precautions.

Voyces has an interesting piece on the differences between iOS's claimed multitasking and RIM's.

While all this was going on, the Indian government has succeeded in demanding that RIM let it decrypt e-mail and BlackBerry Messenger traffic. Apparently, they now want to go after Google Mail and Skype. RIM could tell the UAE where to get off, but India was a much bigger proposition. The Indian Department of Telecommunications has also announced that operators must support number portability if they want to launch anything new.

Virus warning for Android users. If someone sends you a text message inviting you to install a Russian media player, don't...

In other security news, the year of GSM hacking goes on, with the demonstration of a new low-cost evil base station attack.

Speaking of Skype, the SEC filing for their float is out, with lots of lovely data. They reckon that 28% of the total Internet user base has a Skype account and the run-rate is $812m a year.

The UK population is to be guaranteed 768Kbps mobile data, or rather 90% of them will be. It's something, but it's not the 2Mbps the Digital Economy Bill originally targeted. The good news is that the government looks like pressing on with Kip Meek's proposals to sort out the 800MHz band, GSM refarming, and the other spectrum issues. Even the issue of those special-events wireless mikes has been tackled (they're going to be replaced).

Much more significantly, the government has decided not to review business rates on fibre. BT gets to pay business rates (a property tax) on network assets after they go into commercial service; everyone else has to pay them as soon as they're lit, even if they're leased from BT. Also, the rates are higher on local-loop than on long distance. Both coalition partners promised to review the so-called "fibre tax" in their manifestos.

AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile USA have agreed to start a joint venture to launch a mobile-based payments service using NFC, in partnership with the Discover credit card network. Wired has a sceptical take here, pointing to the powerful network effects Visa and Mastercard enjoy from their base of merchants, and also their existing infrastructure. (Recently, Telco 2.0 was in a restaurant in the Italian Alps where the credit card terminal was GPRS-only. According to Katrina the waitress, it "never worked when it's raining", so they may well have a point there.)

In the UK, NatWest Bank has pulled out of its joint venture with O2, O2 Money.

KPN has been rummaging in the industry's dusty toolbox, and has found something that might come in handy - CDMA450! Specifically, they want to use it for M2M applications, which makes sense in that they don't tend to be heavy on the media, but they do need good building penetration, and this way KPN can save on infrastructure and keep its UMTS spectrum for the smartphones.

Remember Google Wave? You'd better, because they're shutting it down. It's not clear if they are going to release the codebase as promised, although they have promised to provide means of "liberating" your content from the system before the plug is pulled. The key problem appears to be that, rather as we thought back in the autumn of 2009, nobody had a clear use case for it.

Nokia, however, has something new and useful out - it's an improved browser for Series 40 devices that (rather like Opera Mini) runs your data through a compression proxy somewhere within Nokia Ovi in order to speed things up and save on data transfer over-the-air. There's also a nice account of HOWTO publish apps on Ovi as an individual developer, although it still doesn't sound great fun.

Telefonica eventually got the deal for Vivo; Free.fr and France Telecom have settled their long-standing disputes. Carphone Warehouse has good Q1 numbers.

A platform for querying the web of Linked Data with SPARQL. Is it a myth that big IT projects fail? Controlling a satellite with your Android phone. The app that wins arguments about climate change. The power of Big Data: the correlates of a good dating profile picture, based on objective criteria. An interview with Martin Geddes. Why you shouldn't deny you're a technology company.

Telco 2.0 News Review

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:17:02 +0000

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Telco 2.0 News Review

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:39:43 +0000

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Telco 2.0 News Review

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 11:06:43 +0000

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Telco 2.0 News Review

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:12:29 +0000

Telco 2.0 News Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Telefonica integrates its Latin America developer communities into O2 Litmus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone needs a robot squid.

Survey: What do you need from your SDP?

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:27:23 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

What you get in return

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

All results will be presented TOTALLY ANONYMOUSLY.

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

Rapid Telco 2.0 Implementation - "Yes, we can!"

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:15:05 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Telco 2.0 News Review

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:32:09 +0000

Telco 2.0 Top Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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