Euro telco deals

Well, Deutsche Telekom this is getting very wild! But if they have 32 billion to spare, frankly it is a
snip. You get 20 bil revenue from year one. You get an NGN, great
skills etc and interconnect with the whole UK telecoms sector and access to UK-based multinational
companies.
Its only 8x what ebay paid for Skype with 0.05 revenue day one.
Remember when DTAG was going to pay 100 billion for Tel Italia!

Digiworld

Total Telecom will be helping present Idate's report Digiworld 2006 at a special reception with guest Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO of Orange, at Simpson’s in the Strand on 15th June
Idate's brand new UK representatives Colin Forster c.forster@idate.org and Jean-Michel Chapon jm.chapon@idate.org
have invites for very special people if you are one...

Age War

Not everyone is persuaded the youth market is the future for telecoms services or any other business. Allan Tumolillo wrote for us about the effect of an aging population on US telcos back in December. National newspapers are catching up.

Congrats, Ken

Congratulations to Ken Cukier, chair of the judges' panel in this year's WCA, on his appointment as Technology & Telecoms Correspondent at The Economist. Before, he was a mere Technology Correspondent...

Wireless mysteries

BT's results were a welcome boost for a beleaguered telecoms sector this week. Looking forward to working through BT's KPIs this weekend! (http://www.btplc.com/Sharesandperformance/Quarterlyresults/Financialpresentations/q406KPIs.pdf)

We had a nice article about BT's Spanish WiFi hit, which the company is being quite coy about

but so is every operator with hotspots...

I asked T-Mobile what usage they were getting on wireless LANs. They said "We can't give you numbers but traffic increased 300% last year."

I asked BT the same question and they said "We can't give you numbers but traffic increased 400% last year."

Mobile TV

Wireless access eh? - not at TeleManagement World anyway...

Mike Short at O2 at least made TMW worthwhile. Interesting comment that while mobile TV trials are encouraging, more "made for mobile" content is needed. Sounds good for filmnight and other content ASPs

New Contenders

Just back from a briefing at Ovum. The analysts there have possibly coined an acronym for the new Internet competiton. It is GAMEYs and it stands for "Google, AOL, Microsoft, eBay and Yahoo'

Technology Foresight

I always enjoy the provocative Intellectual Capitalist column by Bruce Feirstein in strategy+business from Booz Allen Hamilton. Here's an extract from his latest:

"Take heart in my suspicion that blogging is the new CB radio: for most people, a passing fad. It’s a maw that has to be fed. If sites aren’t continually updated, traffic drops off. You can only repeat the same thing so many times; sooner or later blogging fatigue sets in — for both the blogger and the reader."

read the whole column

Customer care

Fascinating release today (Friday 5 May) of a report from Phil Sayer and associates at Forrester describing how service providers should be managing development of converged IT and IP communications for businesses. It's especially interesting on how important self-service portals are becoming to operators. Also, how important it is for service providers to widen their assessment of what a good/bad job they are doing for business customers, to include KPIs, customer satisfaction ratings, TCO reduction and other factors in a "balanced scorecard".

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,37545,00.html

(registration required)