Just as dongles swept datacards before them, embedded chipsets for broadband connectivity are about to sweep dongles away. The Telco 2.0 team believe that eventually they will become as ubiquitous as WiFi connectivity is in today's generation of laptops. We can see the beginnings of a classic virtuous circle: for [...]

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 [...]

BT is at last moving on fibre. This is of interest because BT don't own a cellular network, and their current residential copper access network is functionally separated - a very 'Telco 2.0' horizontal model. Is it possible to make money on new network builds without complete vertical integration and [...]

Telco 2.0 is running a series of depth interviews with senior people in the Telco-Media-Tech sector. To start with, to support our summer research programme on new Content Distribution business models, we caught up with Tony Rallo, CTO of Televisa, the Mexico-based media giant which is also the world's biggest [...]

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 [...]

We were asked to present on a panel at the private marketing innovation conference of a UK mobile carrier last week. The subject was the "Need for Speed": what are the real drivers for network capacity and speed, and thus where should an operator focus its investments? Since our answers [...]

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 [...]

So, with two major US carriers rolling out fibre to the home, a string of European cities doing the municipal-fibre thing, Iliad fibreing-up their own network in France, and Japan and Korea having long started wiring up whole apartment buildings, how soon will the UK get cracking? Telco 2.0 went [...]

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, [...]

As there's a change in leadership occurring at Vodafone, it's a good time to reflect on the direction of the large convoy of opcos and investments being led by the good ship Newbury. Arun Sarin has stepped out of his asbestos business suit, albeit scorched by the flames of investors [...]

In Today's Issue: Motorola in the psychiatric ward; Verwaayen takes a bow;Bharti/MTN deal in the offing; Vodafone buys social network app, customers; Orascom: Iraq, Syria, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and now Cuba; C&W soon to be C and W; data from space cheaper than SMS; Qualcomm in the UK; more mobile-TV [...]

One occasionally controversial, but always lucrative, part of the telecoms business is the collection of termination fees. For example, the UK regulator Ofcom estimates that approx. 15% of UK mobile industry revenue is via termination (in other words £2bn of a £14bn industry in 2006). What might happen to this [...]

A TV show called Who Wants to Be A Millionaire is apparently now the most internationally popular television franchise of all time. Its popularity comes partly from the tension created by the huge amounts of money at stake and partly because of its interaction with the audience and with interested [...]

Telco 2.0 comes to you from the Mobile World Congress … sorry … 3GSM this week; not only were we covering the news but we were part of it, but that's another story. A big theme in the news this week was mobile Linux; Orange joined the LiMo Foundation, the [...]

We're usually very keen on the notion of vertical separation in the telco industry. The idea is to chop the underlying network assets out of the telco in order to permit others to use them. This stops the telco locking out the competition by owning the access bottleneck. But there [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As is traditional at this time of year, we've been reviewing everyone else's crystal ball visions, as well as giving the tea leaves at the bottom of our corporate mugs a gentle swilling. Here's what we think the future might have in store for us, with a bias towards European [...]

In Today's Issue: Asia goes crazy for network sharing, plastic fibre, fixed-line videocalls (yes, really), Opera Mini conquers all, make a widget and win a Nokia N95, UMA gadget with 2GB storage, data centre heists, iFlop, BlackBerry WiFi on a plane, Nokia threatens UGC boom, new torrent tracker tech terror, [...]

In Today's Issue: 3.3bn Mobiles, Open VZW, 3UK sues the world, Peter Erskine spends more time with his money, another WiMAX outbreak, Japanese data prices tumble, Dutch fibre prices untumble a tad, Saudi Mobily buys huge IP network, Vodafone and Telefonica and adverts, Lithuanian and Brazilian IPTV, rapid withdrawal from [...]

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 [...]