EuroTelcoblog

Baaad mutha

2008-07-23T11:12:00.003+02:00

It may be "fibre optic" service (disclaimer: I am actually very happy with my Virgin connectivity), but the billing system behind this broadband juggernaut canceled my direct debit payments for no good reason in June. According to the call center operator, this seems to have coincided with a billing system consolidation/migration exercise. The old jokes are always the best...

(UPDATE: I neglected to mention that my friends over at VoiceSage have some slick routines for dealing with these sorts of scenarios, keeping the customer informed and engaged, rather than shocked and annoyed.)

I am... already bored

2008-07-21T21:51:00.006+02:00

Unspeakably large billboard at the corner of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road/Tottenham Court Road. The future was once bright, now it's just baffling and silly...

My fortune cookie today

2008-07-21T16:23:00.005+02:00

Macabre sense of humor, these Chinese waiters...

The way we were

2008-07-19T11:56:00.002+02:00

If, like me, you find yourself with a bit of time on your hands, and, like me, you also spend some of that time pondering the erosion of American economic hegemony in the world, you might like to take a bittersweet journey through the outstanding Prelinger Archives, one of my favorite stops on this Interweb thingy. Thrill to swinging futuristic commercials, fascinating history lessons, cutting-edge technological innovation, and hard-hitting exposes of life in other cultures. Enjoy.

We interrupt this silence to bring you breaking news...

2008-07-16T00:56:00.003+02:00

Mega-uber value readers of the world (if there are any of you left out there), following 15 months of dormancy, EuroTelcoblog (and little brother Chaotica) will soon be making a comeback. There are some outstanding logistical issues which make a precise date impossible to define at this point, but please watch this space for more info as it becomes available. The best is yet to come, I hope...

While you're on hold, please enjoy these audio nuggets from a happier bygone era in telecom:

Nortel corporate musical, circa 1996 - 27 minutes and 46 seconds of pure torture - my favorite is "I Want an OC192 for Christmas"

Female employee chorus of KPN, late '60's - they really rock Hava Naguila!

James Enck 2.0

2007-04-10T22:45:00.000+02:00

Mega-uber value readers of the world, by now it is probably blindingly obvious to even the most forgiving among you that the volume of posts to this blog has dropped dramatically since early February. As you may have detected from some relatively unsubtle hints, there is a reason for this, which I have already shared with many of you with whom I have more direct contact. I am now ready to come clean, as all the t's are now finally crossed.

After six-and-a-half years, I left Daiwa eleven days ago, and will next week take up a new role within the principal investing team of a well-known Wall Street investment bank. One reason I find this a particularly gratifying turn of events is that, just as I may be no ordinary analyst, this is also no ordinary team. It has developed deep industry expertise and generally applies a greater level of focus in its investment process. It has been very successful in recent years investing in metropolitan fiber assets and portable/mobile broadband (two areas, you probably realize, which are near and dear to my heart). I think it's clear that my future colleagues do their homework and get involved early, well before the consensus has formed specific views on a space, and they take a broad thematic view across the full value chain (another nice area of fit) for investment opportunities, and search far and wide to find unique sources of information and market views. Perhaps most interestingly to me, the team has the mandate to invest in both public and private securities.

To say that I am very excited by this opportunity would be an understatement of epic proportions. However, one side effect of this move is that this humble bloglet, which ironically celebrated its third birthday on 30 March, the same day I said goodbye to my fellow Daiwans, must cease publication.

Judging from the reactions from those of you whom I have already briefed on this development, there may be a fair amount of dissatisfaction about this turn of events. I consider this to be a wonderful compliment. To think that (judging from the Bloglines subscription data I have, and my own tracking of site traffic) several hundred of you per day have given even a few precious minutes in your busy days to my ramblings over the past three years is more than enough – the thought that the blog might actually be missed is almost inconceivable to one who started with essentially no expectations. Recall that in my inaugural post I stated that the blog was essentially an experiment, an expression of frustration, a cry for help. That it has ended up being anything more significant to any of you is, if I'm honest, pretty damned surprising, and extremely gratifying.

However, lest we get caught up in the potentially negative interpretations of the move to a non-blogging me, let me explain a little about why I think this development is actually a very positive outcome within the confines of the "Web 2.0" weltaunschaung.

About six months after EuroTelcoblog moved from being an email blast to an online point of presence, I got an email out of the blue from the fund manager who was ultimately responsible for bringing me onboard at my future employers. He had stumbled across the site and found it useful. At the time it was just one of many interesting contacts which were coming my way from the blog – bright, inspired people with whom I would have almost certainly never had any contact if not for the fact that I had, via the blog, become visible (and accessible) to the world outside the confines of the investment banking research walled garden.

However, as was thankfully the case with many of the contacts which came my way via the blog, this particular dialogue became a sustained exchange of information and opinions. This process eventually led to some face-to-face meetings and culminated in a formal recruitment process, which brings us to the current situation. I hope that the other ongoing dialogues which have also arisen from this adventure in the blogosphere will also continue in the days ahead. Indeed, for those individuals and companies intent on innovation and disruption, there is probably, now more than ever before, a rationale for us to connect and share ideas and opinions.

But back for a moment to my statement that my current situation constitutes a positive outcome within the confines of the "Web 2.0" weltaunschaung. My view is that none of this would have been possible in the absence of a parallel social dynamic, and the tools which have accompanied/enabled it, towards a decentralization of information flows. The effects of this ongoing trend are pretty much impossible to predict from a macro perspective, but from where I sit, very much at the micro end of the spectrum, the message seems to be all too clear. Whoever you are, whatever your situation, if you have ideas which you are passionate about, and if you can find a voice with which to adequately express them, then the tools are there in abundance to do so, and the results may end up being surprising and life-transforming, so you might as well have a go and see where it leads.

So, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. I want to extend my respect and eternal gratitude to each and every one of you who has ever been kind enough to drop in, even to those of you who have vehemently disagreed with what I have said. I genuinely, literally, could not have kept this up for the past three years without your suggestions and ideas. I also wish to thank those individuals at Daiwa (you know who you are/were) who were supportive of some fairly unconventional research approaches on my part over the past four years, once I awoke to the need to do things differently.

As a parting gesture, I will be upgrading all mega-uber value readers to full Palladium Club status at no additional charge, as a sign of my undying appreciation. :-) Ping me if you're interested, and I'll let you know my future coordinates and contact details. Hopefully, at some future date, I may return to the blogosphere, and if so, trust that I will find some way to make my presence known. Until then, many thanks to all of you for a most wonderful and enriching three years. I've never known anything like it. It's had a profound effect on my life, and that's the whole point.

UPDATE on 11 April: When I was a kid, my mother used to regularly lecture me about always wanting to have the last word, but this really is the last word. I am truly humbled by the huge number of emails coming in, many from people I have never communicated with before. Thank you, and stay in touch! JE

No peace in the valley

2007-03-20T09:16:00.000+02:00

My last remaining grandparent died last week, and I spent the week in the States for the funeral, entirely offline. So I know there was a lot I missed (my bet is on Deutsche Telekom), much of which is past its shelf-life for commentary. However, in catching up with my emails, the following items have caught my eye, FWIW:

A mega-uber value reader in Finland alerts me to a tender (Swedish) underway in the tiny island municipalities of Brando and Kumlinge for an open FTTH network. Apparently it's envisaged that customer premises will only be connected to the network if they agree to subscribe to at least one service on offer from one of the service providers who are hoped to materialize. Entry level pricing is said to be EUR16 per month. Yet another example of local activism looking to plug the holes in incumbent broadband rollouts.
I notice with interest that the Tor project has secured funding from Google for a handful of developer spots at Summer of Code. Interesting contrast in light of anxiety over a Net Neutrality about-face from the Big G. A good friend also points out that it's counterintuitive for Google to be investing time and money in something which could facilitate skamming AdSense - maybe this is about threat intelligence.
Jeremy Penston at IPDevNet has been on a bit of a hotstreak, producing a couple of interesting and informative pieces on online video. Well worth the read.
Adobe has gone live with a public alpha of Apollo, a video preview of which I linked to here. I agree with Dean that there is some very exciting stuff ahead.
UNESCO has published what looks to be an interesting report on the ethical implications of new technologies, now added to my pile of must read material.

Lost and found

2007-03-09T01:20:00.001+02:00

Sky ad 03 07
Originally uploaded by jimiinc.

I know I haven't posted anything in some time. I've had a lot of loose ends to tie up and have been otherwise distracted, so apologies. On the bus to a meeting today I passed a lot of very prominent Sky advertising like this, which highlights that Virgin Media customers in the UK are to lose content like "Lost" and "24" due to the public bust-up between Virgin and Sky. One other billboard I saw pulled no punches: "Get Jack Back," it screamed, followed by a succinct explanation about Virgin's apparent decision to drop Sky content and ending with the message "To subscribe to Sky, call..." What amazes me about all of this is the sheer speed with which Sky has been able to move. What was a public spat a week ago has been turned into a national ad campaign virtually overnight. At lunch today someone reminded me that this is exactly the sort of advertising at which Richard Branson excelled ten years ago during his bitter war with British Airways.

Test

2007-03-02T14:19:00.000+02:00

This is a test. Apparently some people are experiencing problems with Blogger.

Power server

2007-02-21T09:21:00.000+02:00

A Platinum Club mega-uber value reader points me to this interesting study published last week by Dr. Jonathan G. Koomey of Stanford University, which attempts to assess the power consumption of the servers which power our beloved internet. Power consumption by servers worldwide doubled between 2000 and 2005, and the total cost for the world in 2005 (including cooling and associated infrastructure costs) was $7.2bn. Not covered by the findings is the cost of energy consumed by delivering connectivity to end-users, which must certainly be even more staggering. The report notes that power consumption by servers and associated infrastructure in the US in 2005 accounted for 1.2% of the national total, an amount comparable to the total installed base of color television sets in the nation. Also of interest to me is the fact that the cut-off point for the data, 2005, really predates the net video/virtual world explosion we're seeing now, so I would love to know how the current situation differs from the growth trend observed here.

Four cool things

2007-02-21T00:21:00.000+02:00

Lately I've been a bad blogger, but with good reason. All will be revealed. Anyway, here are four things which came my way today, all of which caught my interest:

NeufCegetel ups the French FTTH stakes with the acquisition of fiber specialist Erenis. With aspirations of achieving 15k subs by March of this year, Erenis is clearly not the kind of acquisition which brings serious scale. But that's not the point - I think it's about tapping into the limited pool of people with true expertise in fiber deployments, as Iliad did with its October acquisition of Citefibre. No transaction value is stated, but I have to assume this deal makes a nice return for Iris Capital, et al, who funded Erenis just over a year ago.
My friend and Palladium Club mega-uber value reader, Lee Dryburgh, spent several days last week locked away in ITU meetings, which seem to have produced, somewhat remarkably, some hopeful-looking ideas on how telcos can position themselves as vital links in the chain of identity and reputation management. Check out the slides here. Will those of us who have spent the past four years (or more) chanting the mantra "telcos just don't get it" find reason for a re-examination in late 2007? As always, I'm skeptical, but nonetheless this is something to follow with interest.
A Pollonium Club mega-uber value reader points me to an apparently popular but still little-known corner of UK geekdom - the free cable TV via Linux phenomenon. Seems that a growing number of people are buying Nokia dbox2 set-top boxes from Germany with a Linux hack which allows them to do all sorts of cool things, including decrypting premium cable channels for free. Watch those RGUs, Virgin Media!
This interesting survey from japan.internet.com and goo Research covers awareness in Japan of Second Life. As usual, the research covers a sample group of 1,073 internet users ranging in age from 10 to 60, and discovers that nearly 19% of them have at least heard of Second Life. I agree with the authors' conclusion that, for a US-based virtual world with no Japanese language support at this point, this is quite an impressive number. Only 1.1% claim to have actually used it, however, but given the tendency for the Japanese to come up with homespun adaptations of ideas from abroad, I wonder whether this low uptake points to an opportunity for a domestic rival?

Best guesses

2007-02-15T15:25:00.000+02:00

Hello, mega-uber value readers. Apologies for my recent silence. I have been busy and very distracted with some major news, which I will share with you in coming days. Meanwhile, my cyberfreund Keith has been doing such a wonderfully irreverent job of covering the quarter's results, M&A foibles, and other oddities, that I am nearly speechless.

Nearly, that is. I am inspired by Telenor's results today to break my recent silence. How extraordinary it is that the best performing company in the European sector over the past two years finds itself in the position of having to publish estimates of the results of its own largest source of EBITDA, due to a court injunction over releasing financial information resulting from legal action by a partner (Storm LLC, which holds 43.5% of Kyivstar and is controlled by Altimo). Up to now the ongoing disagreements have been an area of concern, but without any visible impact on the share price. Altimo seems to have demonstrated powerfully today that throwing stumbling blocks in Telenor's way to cause uncertainty and a lack of visibility is enough to do serious damage after all - in this case a 9% decline in market cap.

Hot off the presses

2007-02-08T07:12:00.000+02:00

The good and clever people over at Stratix Consulting in the Netherlands have put together an exhaustive survey of the current state of FTTH in the Dutch market, which you should download and read now. I will too, once I finish breakfast.

FTTx in suburban London

2007-02-07T19:02:00.000+02:00

At last, a Pollonium Class mega-uber value reader pings me with news which we have been anxiously awaiting/expecting: an apparently open network FTTH deployment to a nearly 10k unit new-build development in Kent. If anyone out there has any additional info, please get in touch.

How many zeros are in a Googlewatt?

2007-02-07T18:42:00.000+02:00

How fitting that, being here at the FTTH Council Europe event in Barcelona, where all 1,200 delegates are debating how much bandwidth is enough and how fast, while simultaneously jockying for position near scarce power sockets for a quick recharge of depleted laptops, today my friend and Palladium Club mega-uber value reader Vincent Dekker of Trouw in the Netherlands, breaks the story of a massive new data center being built in the northern Dutch backwater of Eemshaven. Though no official confirmation is forthcoming, the word is that this new data center's primary tenant will be Google, with space for 100k servers, and conveniently located near a 2.4Gigawatt power plant, a windfarm, a "green" power cable making landfall from Norway, and a harbor which will in future house an LNG terminal. Do we see a pattern here? What's also interesting is that Google is reportedly the largest occupant of the current largest server farm in the Netherlands, Zernike, just up the road in Groningen. Looks like when planning for its future bandwidth and power demands, Google is a believer in the immortal words of Jerry Lee Lewis, "Enough is good, more is better, and too much is just about right." Except that "too much" continues to prove very difficult to gauge.

EuroTelcoblog Exclusive Offer of the Day!

2007-02-06T16:48:00.000+02:00

Step right up! The kind people at Fon have offered EuroTelcoblog readers in the UK (sorry, only UK readers need apply) an exclusive claim to a free Fonera while supplies last. Head here to claim yours. Be quick and good luck. (Disclaimer - I have no connection, financial or otherwise, with Fon. I simply like what they are doing, and they are keen to engage with bloggers. I am honored to be chosen.)

UPDATE on 7 February: The folks at Fon inform me that the initial response to their offer is over four times what they expected. I always knew my mega-uber value readers were value-conscious!

Big Fon

2007-02-05T22:52:00.000+02:00

I'm jetting off to Barcelona early tomorrow to hang out with the fiber geeks for a couple of days, at the FTTH Council Europe's annual trench-dig. Fun though that may sound, I hear that the real Fun will be taking place to the southwest, in Madrid, where Fon will be celebrating its first birthday. Remember that this feisty contender requires from the end user a hardware, not just a software, commitment, so don't expect anything like Skype user numbers after year one. But then consider that we're talking about viral access here, and an opportunity for some mainstream carriers to assert themselves virtually in the wireless domain. We've already seen it with NeufCegetel in France and a host of other, smaller players. What might lie ahead in 2007? Ignore at your peril...

Will steal for AdSense revenue

2007-02-02T16:36:00.000+02:00

A friend pointed out a blog called voipniche, which has some interesting posts in it. Like this one, this one, and even this one. If they look familiar to you, it's because they have lifted them from this blog, verbatim, with no attribution.

Let's see if this is an automated process, or if there is a real live thief behind this AdSense scam.

VOIPNICHE.COM REPOSTS ITEMS FROM EUROTELCOBLOG WITH NO ATTRIBUTION AND WITHOUT PERMISSION

I'll be curious to see if this post turns up there later today.

UPDATE: Less than two minutes later, the post indeed appeared on the site. Looks like voipniche is a direct RSS-reader-to-splog bot of some sort. What a wickedly ingenious development! I used Centralops to look up the domain. Seems to be registered to someone in Mumbai, but the traceroute ends in Brazil. Who knows, who cares? Enjoy that AdSense money, whoever you are!

Friday fun

2007-02-02T15:22:00.000+02:00

A mega-uber value friend alerts me to this very clever viral marketing tool based on Carphone Warehouse's TV ad campaign. Here's my first effort, entitled "Come back, Arun." I don't know how much this will do to change people's perceptions of the broadband product after the beating it has taken in the UK press, but at least perhaps it will give people a way to amuse themselves while they wait on the customer help lines.

Baltic tigers

2007-02-02T12:50:00.000+02:00

A Palladium Club mega-uber value reader points me to the latest broadband scorecard from ECTA. I used to get ECTA press releases, but it seems that they don't love me anymore... Anyway, my friend out there in cyberspace points out that the most fibered country in Europe is Estonia (17% of total connections in Q3 2006). After second place Sweden (14%) comes, that's right, Lithuania (6.2%), and Latvia is giving Italy a run for its money at 2.2%. In this Eurovision bandwidth contest, there's an awful lot of big countries scoring nul points.

Friday catch-up

2007-02-02T09:19:00.000+02:00

This week seems to have gone in a flash, what with the Vodafone/Sky double-header on Wednesday and France Telecom yesterday. Still playing catch-up today, but here are a few things which caught my eye.

Keith has a nice write-up of the Vodafone results, which he refers to accurately as the quarterly game. I can't think of many other companies where the management consistently start the presentation by repeating that they think the KPIs they are about to report are of diminishing relevance in gauging performance. In that case, why not report quarterly results with a full set of financial statements? Surely that's preferable to the current system.

As for Sky and FT, there were a lot of interesting facets to their respective results, but the thing that really struck me most was the sharp contrast between the two broadband deployments. Sky has clearly ramped up the rate at which it is connecting new customers quite dramatically (from c.11k per week in the December quarter, to over 16k per week in January), 87% of its subs are unbundled, and 70% of that group has opted for a product carrying an additional charge (i.e., a higher bandwidth package). Orange UK, on the other hand, added only 34k broadband subs in Q4 (a connection per week rate of less than one quarter that of Sky's), and only 16% of its subscriber base is unbundled. On top of that, the company only added 50k net contract mobile subs, so clearly whatever the appeal of free broadband for contract spend of over GBP30 per month, it is not really having any visible impact. Keep in mind that Sky is concentrating on its existing base for the most part (only 18% of new broadband customers were completely new to Sky), while Orange's addressable market is arguably the entire contract mobile subscriber base of the UK, yet it seems to be making very feeble headway.

One other thing about the Sky presentation which I found impressive was James Murdoch's comments on positioning the brand in terms of social and environmental responsibility. I'm sure a lot of people would have some reservations about accepting this at face value given the source, but leaving Murdochophobia aside and taking a neutral view, it's a brilliant line to take. Committing to this is not only the right thing to do ethically, but it's the right thing for consumers to see you doing. Brands which don't position themselves adequately here may indeed risk creating a gulf between themselves and the consumers they aim to engage. As with so many other things, I think Sky is ahead of the curve here, and many others will follow in its wake.

Now back to my bandwidth obsessions.

The fact that 70% of Sky's unbundled customers take a higher bandwidth product, for which they have to pay an additional charge, seems to underline again that demand is indeed on the rise. I think James Murdoch must have used the word "bandwidth" at least 50 times in the course of the presentation. I wonder if he had seen the news that, only a couple of weeks after the HD DVD bombshell, Blu-Ray has also fallen victim to the tireless efforts of cryptogeeks, the first file weighing in at a healthy 22GB. What a bruiser.

A friend and Prix D'Or mega-uber value reader also drew my attention for the first time to some stats tracked by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which show bandwidth consumption among business and residential internet users. Notice that between March 2005 and June 2006, the number of broadband households nearly doubled, but data consumed nearly trebled. The next update is due on 16 February, and should be interesting.

There's news, and then there's not news

2007-01-30T17:03:00.000+02:00

This item doesn't seem to have found its way on to KPN's corporate website yet. KPN's German fiber assets (presumably dating back to the good old Bubble 1.0 days of KPNQwest) are to be jointly marketed with those of Wingas, which happens to be 50% owned by Gazprom and apparently has aspirations of being a pan-European long-haul fiber player.

Dart in the PAN

2007-01-30T15:31:00.000+02:00

Just got an intriguing press release from Motorola, which states that its venture unit has made an investment in Dart Devices, heretofore unknown company (to me anyway), which describes itself as being in stealth mode. The release states that Dart will be making a demo at Demo 2007, so if anyone there has anything to share, I'm all ears. I stumbled into the customer area of the Dart site and found an interesting list of companies (including Vodafone, misspelled) there, along with more description, which sounds very much like a piece of the vision I heard from Motorola's own John Waclawsky back at Telco 2.0:

"DART combines a group of connected devices into one virtual device with all the collective software, hardware and content of the devices available to all the devices. Any device running the DartPlayer middleware can run Dart software applications, called "dapps," which can securely spread their execution across heterogeneous devices, operating systems and communications protocols.

The net effect is truly seamless interoperability between devices without any need for prior knowledge about the other devices or what software they contain. DART makes it easy to build new types of self-distributing software 'Social Applications' which can synchronize content and operations across any number of devices. This adds an important new dimension to existing interoperability technologies and standards."

A bit of reading material

2007-01-30T08:36:00.000+02:00

If I ever get a break from the day-to-day grind, I'm going to get caught up on my reading. Add to the already long list this 203-page feasibility study on FTTP in San Francisco kindly sent in by a Palladium Club mega-uber value reader. Interestingly, one conclusion is that the initial FTTP deployment in the enterprise district be extended city-wide, as an open network, which would be "competition-enhancing." This last bit seems to pretty well capture the mood both Stateside and increasingly in Europe.

Should you manage to make it through the document and still have energy for a bit more, these are the slides (torrent) I presented at the Telecom Finance conference late last Friday afternoon, as Deutsche Telekom was no doubt discussing the most awkward timing for this year's first profit warning (yes, Sunday mid-day was a lovely choice). Due to a late start and an increase in panel size from three to five, I basically had to try to get my message across in seven minutes or so. The best moment for me was when I said that telcos should expect that everyone is in competition with them. As an example, I asked for a show of hands from those who thought that Adobe should be counted among the field of telco competitors. Not a single hand rose, but later, when I touched on the deal with Verisign, I could see some wincing going on, and when I closed with the Acrobat 8 news (which no one seemed to have clocked), I was rewarded with the smiling and head-shaking disbelief that I usually aim to see at least once in a presentation.

Chapter and U-Verse

2007-01-26T09:06:00.000+02:00

If you're either a bull or bear on FTTN, take some time and read this exceedingly detailed and interesting first-hand review of AT&T's U-Verse service, including tons of screengrabs. No matter what your view, you'll probably find something that confirms it here - there are plenty of positives, but also some glaring negatives (single HD stream only, highly compressed VOD signal) which I, as a bear, focus on. Despite the pretty balanced views of the reviewer, the final assessment is a damning one:

"This is still a beta service and for some reason they decided to roll it out unfinished. They should not be charging for the service as it is now... U-Verse is just a band aid for what AT&T really needs to do, and that would be fiber to the home."

(Thanks to the Mother of All Palladium Club mega-uber value readers for drawing my attention to this.)