We are currently doing consulting work on the future of telephony and what future business models might look like. A recurring theme is understanding what the underlying sources of value are in the voice and SMS products that we take for granted. The excerpt below from our report on the [...]

Continuing our series of interviews with major industry thinkers, Steve Zimba is Microsoft's Managing Director, Global Telecoms Business. We interviewed Steve about their 'Telco 2.0' strategy. This integrates their PC, IPTV and mobile offerings with a combined software and services offering, supported by telecoms-specific capabilities and a third party ecosystem. [...]

In Today's Issue: Vodafone calls serpents out the vasty deep over termination fees; AT&T's cheaper data roaming - not very cheap; Google nixes XMPP on Android; Nokia kills native SIP on N-series; Mobilkom's new SIP softphone; Comcast's huge bandwidth cap; TiVo turns to telcos; new navigation-focused Garmin GPS gadget; what [...]

It's August; not much going on in the telcosphere. But the summer calm was shattered this week by some news - and, despite what you'd read elsewhere, it wasn't the Ericsson/STMicro merger. We documented, with a little help from Plusnet and their happy wurlitzer Ellacoyas, just how heavily the BBC's [...]

In Today's Issue: 3G iPhones don't work; developers think Google is being evil; Sun open-sources more stuff; China Unicom inflates the Chinese 3G bubble; UK MNOs not so good at ISPing; public doesn't want Be CCTV after all; Orange UK gives away Asus EEEs, makes money; UK 2.5GHz is with [...]

The Telco 2.0 research team is undertaking some detailed business modelling around 'Rich Media Distribution' over the summer. We'll also be debating this with industry leaders on 4-5 November at our next event in London. More on both of these anon. In the meantime, here's some analysis of Verizon's P4P [...]

The big news in mobile this week is that Nokia has bought Symbian, the mobile operating system provider, so that it can give it away. In the first article on this news we looked at the deal from the view of the shareholders and competitive threats. In this second article [...]

Following the popular article last week on FTTH prospects for the UK, Benoit Felton of Fibrevolution sent us some excellent material looking at the issues from a more international perspective. He says: In April this year I attended a very interesting conference in Stavänger, Norway, organised by the OECD on [...]

Last month, Qualcomm purchased at auction 40MHz of spectrum (1452-1492 MHz, known as 'The L-Band') for £8.3m ($16m). Since then there has much speculation about Qualcomm's motives and the services that they will deploy, focussing upon Mobile TV. The answer tells us a lot about how new platforms and intermediaries [...]

"exaflood" of data with bad consequences for the telecoms industry. We've got a different point of view to most observers on the matter: video doesn't 'kill the Internet', but it does kill the traditional stand-alone ISP business model. To see what's happening, though, you don't need probes in Internet backbones, [...]

We'd strongly recommend to all telco-media-tech strategists worldwide the GSMA's Mobile Innovation Marketplace event on 3-4 June in Atlanta, USA. The GSMA has unquestionably the best pulling power on senior mobile execs (see list below), and their new events team has really shown that it can do a lot more [...]

In Today's Issue: Online businesses crave telco capabilities (potentially…). Motorola rearranges the deckchairs. Nokia profits up 25%, but you wouldn't want to see what went into that. Is Comes With Music a lossmaker? Nobody pays for the stuff anyway. Silverlight everywhere. And Moonlight. Is Microsoft IBM in 1993? 1,788 entries [...]

As you may have read in our news post this week, as well as elsewhere, Sprint-Nextel is in deep trouble. Since this is a story that has been well-covered in the industry press, we'll just briefly recap the main points, but dig deeper into the business model aspects. The basic [...]

The Apple Digital Media Platform has been one of the runaway hits of this decade and driven a 400% gain in Apple's share price over the last three years. Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced the entry into the movie rental business and a new version of the Apple TV Set Top [...]

We've been putting together a directory of all "2.0"-type players for our forthcoming Consumer Voice & Messaging 2.0 Report. One newcomer, Ribbit, is offering an early foretaste of what the future environment for developing voice and messaging services might look like. Ribbit reckons it's "Silicon Valley's First Phone Company". Silly [...]

Profit in telecoms has often been as result of pleasing regulators as much as paying customers. Our many non-European readers may be unfamiliar with the interesting shifting dynamic of the European regulatory scene. Traditionally, national regulators have retained most of the regulatory levers; there is no real European equivalent of [...]

BT strikes in the set-top box market; they're the first to ship Xbox360 consoles as IPTV endpoints. And there's more; BT Vision gets an "on-screen magazine" based on the same single platform. We've often said that the fixed-line world doesn't get user equipment, and that this creates interesting opportunities; BT [...]

Telco 2.0 Strategy Structural separation? We don't need no stinkin' separation! So says Belgacom… Telco 2.0 Comment: They built a VDSL network, and now their competitors want to play. Belgacom of course claims they took the risk and therefore should reap the rewards; but the biggest competitor is the company [...]

An instructive summary of a recent presentation by one of AT&T's Group Presidents, Ralph de la Vega, covering IPTV and the broader transformation of his company here. De la Vega's track record is near perfect. The way he re-built Cingular and merged it with the old AT&T Wireless is a [...]

This is an edited version of the keynote presentation of Martin Geddes, Chief Analyst at STL Partners, at the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in London last month. It provides some initial findings from our research into future business models for broadband service providers (BSPs), including our recent online survey. (The [...]

It's one thing to exhort business model change and write about platforms and better telephony and Telco 2.0 all day; but what about the financial results? So, here's a chart we made earlier. It shows the change in the share prices of 6 major telcos over the last 24 months; [...]

Telco2.0 Strategy Telecom NZ profits down 18 per cent. Telco2.0 Comment: Barbara Castle once advised someone to "Think, think, think - it'll hurt at first but you'll get used to it". You could say the same thing about structural separation - just ask BT.O2 reckons 200,000 iPhones will go this [...]