WCA news

We have a bumper 200 company entries for the World Communication Awards as of this morning; a record. If you haven't sent yours, do it right now; today's the day!

Gloves off

Telcos are cutting up rough with the regulators. KPN has started proceedings against the Dutch state for regulatory discrimination. Telstra is threatening to supend a 3.5 billion Aussie dollar network investment. Sol Trujillo wants the government to guarantee his profits. Nice business!

It seems the regulatory honeymoon post the 2001 crash is over. Regulators have been somewhat sympathetic to debt-burdened telcos getting back on their feet, but operators should not have thought it would last for ever. Regulators are back on the case. Well in Europe anyway; the FCC went into retirement a while back.

This is all the telcos' own fault of course - especially BT's. BT has been flexing and stretching its business in all directions, putting its network operations on a risk basis, and yet Ben Verwaayen keeps coming back with record profits.
Regulators can't see why telcos need more help. And in Europe, Viviane Reding has the perfect case for structural separation for everyone.

Wall St Jnl article - Day Three

"Normally we do go to the temple, but we can't find time all the time," says Pushkar Rege, a 25-year-old who lives in Vasai, a city 30 miles north of Mumbai. Mr. Rege sends two to three messages each month, recently praying for a smooth path for his brother who just graduated from college.

Hollywood lightens the telco burden maybe

We hang our heads in shame at missing Ovum's report on how Hollywood is rethinking its dealmaking with Internet service providers and telcos. If you did too - get it now. Josette Bonte. Ovum's new vp content and IPTV says the broadband content revolution began 3 April 2006, the day the film studios agreed to release big titles for Internet download the same day they are released on DVD.

"This is the year the studios are discovering broadband," Josette told us when she stopped by our offices on a visit from LA where she is based.

If like us you sat up at Disney's move to stream episodes of prime time shows on ABC.com, well you were right it is important, but probably not as important as the studios' agreement. That matters because it changes the way film-makers will deal with telcos, and lets the telcos in on a revenue management model that has underpinned international film distribution for ever. If you want to know more, go here

Wall St Jnl article - Day Two

But technology is making it easier for worshippers to pray to Ganesh these days. Every Wednesday, two attendants at the temple print out text messages sent to the god -- some 70,000 per week -- from cellphone users across India. Each message is then neatly folded and placed in a box by the temple's gold and vermilion idol.

Roundtable summer madness

Today must be National Roundtable Day. First up was Atos Origin to discuss procurement strategies with Boots and Vodafone. Next we're off top meet LogicaCMG to talk mobile data with Orange and how to fend off the evil Google ;0) ["You Brits and your sense of humor!"] Will we make it to BT's CTO strategy soiree later? Tune in tomorrow

report fest

The mother of all TMT market reports arrived last week in form of the this baby from PricewaterhouseCoopers.
You'll have guessed from previous posts this has been bumper season for analysts' and consultants' reports.
The PwC survey is a bit special, weighing in at multiple Mb if you get the e-version. Impressive sections on TV broadcast inc cable, Internet ad spend etc.
But don't miss the other goodies out there - including BackChannel's update on UK Business Internet servcies. That market could hot up if Cogent serves up the same price plans in Internet access it does for international IP services.

Wall St Journal article - Day One

For centuries, devotees of the Hindu god Ganesh have walked barefoot from their homes to pray at Mumbai's Siddhivinayak Temple. Depicted with an elephant head and a potbelly, Ganesh is believed to destroy obstacles that could keep people from, say, buying a house or launching a business. On Tuesdays, considered the god's day, visitors wait as long as five hours to enter the temple.

HSDPA for Macs!

Vodafone officially launches its HSDPA service for laptop users today. The good news for the Mac-lovers amongst us is that the operator plans to offer an HSDPA ExpressCard for the new MacBook models. The cards should be out by Christmas, members of Vodafone's business marketing team say. Could pre-integrated Macs be next?

The operator is also now selling a router that you can use to set up a mini-wireless network any time, any place with HSDPA used for backhaul. Certainly could be useful for those of us based in hotels at conferences with dodgy WiFi access! They'll need to sort out the 1-gigabyte-per-month data limit though.

-Anne Morris

BT Livebox, O2 Imagenio

Everybody's chasing Orange. BT is launching what looks like its answer to Orange Livebox - a home gateway package called Total Broadband including broadband, WiFi and VoIP, together with Fusion and apparently 370 GBP of goodies thrown in.
And O2 is acquiring broadband ISP Be for 50 million GBP, on behalf of Telefonica's international broadband strategy.
Nice heads up to our FMC briefing, going to press this week - read it in the July issue of TT mag. AD Little said back in February this would be the year of FMC and its been hard to keep up with operator announcements the last few days. On Friday Swisscom said it reorganised the whole group for FMC.

At Idate's soiree in Simpson's in the Strand last night.

Sanjiv Ahuja said Orange expects to get 5-10% of all its revenues from user-generated content within 3 years.
"We will generate our own content from our own users," he insists. "We have to."

One questioner from the floor asked why users would want Orange to look after their content.
Because there are 65k blogs in France and 1.2 million visitors to them and 140 million views online, and:
"Users are looking at these on mobile as much as in fixed," says Ahuja.

Another questioner asked Ahuja if he thought there would be more consolidation of networks and operators.
Ahuja immediately asked her who she was, and it turned out she was from Ofcom.
"He doesn't know me," she said later. "But he seemed to know instinctively he was dealing with a regulator!"
Ahuja took the opportunity to register his dismay at the European Commission's intervention on roaming charges.
"We signed national licence agreements," he said. "When did the Commission start regulating national markets?" Then he remembered that Orange spent 4 billion on 3G spectrum, and looked quite pained.

What did you say?

Returning home tired and emotional from watching the England-Trinis match and hearing Sanjiv Ahuja's speech at the Idate reception (more of that later) I mistakenly texted the following to our home phone number "Hi hon I'm on the train and hungry. xxx" My wife was impressed to get her first SMS-fixed message, but pointed out that the synthesised voice version she heard sounded like an invitation to a porn chat line. A lesson to us all...

Triple Quad Whammy

"Even with fantasy assumptions, the [triple play] business case remains bad"

(see Operators told to expect big losses on IPTV networks

"Quadruple play is a fallacy"

and what's more

"Big Barriers to the Adoption of
Mobile Value-Added Services"

had enough yet?

Telcology 2

Stephen Young, consultant at Ovum, has spotted a report by independent consultancy CarbonSense featured on BT's society website.
Young says BT is one of the few telecoms companies taking environmental issues seriously. When he wrote a report on Climate Change and the Telco in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina last year, only BT responded.
About the time Stephen was writing his report, and BT's chairman Sir Christopher Bland was making a speech to the Carbon Disclosure Project, we were launching our Telcology newsletter.
We got one response too. Honourable mention to Ericsson, then.
If you would like to see a copy of the launch issue of Telcology email me:
david.molony@totaltele.com

Planning a network?

Heads up on two new reports. Vodafone may not have set the world alight with its last strategy outline, but it has more up its sleeve, according to Emma Mohr-McClune at Current Analysis. In fact, it has quietly assembled a portfolio of mobile VPN/intranet services for SMEs which its now rolling out. Why Voda has been keeping quiet is not clear; possibly because it has mixed feelings about segmentation offers - something we had heard separately.

Lars Godell at Forrester has produced the first of a series of reports on broadband/triple play service strategies. Telcos trying to pick their way through infrastructure investment options will find some useful guidance. In fact the numbers in the report help explain why telcos have been reluctant to go for full fibre access networks.

(Registrations required)

World Cup of woe

The 2006 World Cup will be the first to get featured live on the Internet but it has come one year too early for most telecoms operators.

The BBC is going to be showing its matches live on the web as well as on TV. But it's not making a huge fuss about advertising the fact. Presumably the Corporation is treading carefully around possible broadcast licence issues.

Among the telcos, BT is not battle-ready yet, despite the new deal for Premier League rights. Deutsche Telekom, host nation operator, is the most glaring no-show for IPTV.

KPN and Belgacom would have been the obvious best candidates as host-nation incumbent telcos. They just finished their first seasons of football IPTV and KPN has just celebrated signing three top Dutch clubs for next season's coverage. But who knows if they would have been happy to have got a Fifa deal? Belgacom needed 410 people to wrap up for the Belgian league. What would be the economics of a global tournament? Maybe they are relieved the last Benelux-hosted (Euro) championships were held back in 2000.

Queue jumping

Another day under email bombardment leaves my current backlog of unread press releases at 1,399 - despite wading heavily into them this morning.
PRs who call to ask if I have read the email they sent earlier go to the back of the queue....
What have I missed? No sign of an IPO for NTT Com yet, despite our story that a Japanese government panel has recommended breaking up NTT.... in 2011.
One very interesting report says two-thirds of laptop owning rail passengers are making use of in-train WiFi. There are new markets out there.

Asia-Pac cables

The spinout of Asia Netcom is an indication that things are reviving in the Asia-Pac longhaul business. It's also another reminder that a new generation of emerging international carriers in China and India is going to give western operators a run for their money. As it happens, we have a series of articles on just this topic in the latest issue of TT magazine, online now. One important thing: those western carriers are getting cleverer about how manage their operations and services, and more efficient.

WCA fever

just back from a week in the Mallorcan mountains, where there are no signs of World Cup fever among the black vultures and booted eagles.

But there's World Communication Awards fever here! The deadline for entries is being extended till 16th June! This hasn't been announced yet - you read it here first...