In December 2005 the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) launched an inquiry into the future regulation of wholesale access on fixed networks. It has now announced a final decision, following a public inquiry, under section 152AL of the Trade Practices Act 1974 on six fixed-line services that had been due to expire at the end of this month. The following will remain declared services until July 2014... more
The story of the growth of pre-paid mobile voice and SMS in Africa and the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council is well known. The challenge is to move to mobile broadband, which is seen as having potentially explosive growth. Operators will need to create new value propositions, they face significant internal challenges and risk being displaced by rivals moving faster or better able to understand and meet the needs of customers... more
The recent launch of Google Wave generated a lot of attention, and for good reason. It's recently crossed my path in a few different settings, and while the news is still fresh, there is a lot here for service providers to be thinking about. At a high level, Wave is Google's entry into the real time collaboration space, and being Web-based, is poised to disrupt the status quo, not just for vendors, but service providers as well. more
One of the great challenges has been to conceive a business model for next generation telephone companies. This is constrained by their limited core competences which do not match well with many of the opportunities that lie in entertainment and complex/customised bundles for consumers. Frost & Sullivan, a leading firm of industry analysts, notes the enthusiasm of service providers to offer connectivity, entertainment and information services, within a digitally connected world... more
The OECD has published a detailed report, Broadband over Powerlines: Developments and Policy Issues, on what was once considered a potentially interesting and disruptive technology that might have rivaled DSL. It notes that having largely failed in that, it is instead being applied to "smart grid" applications. more
Our world finds itself at a critical juncture. Both trillions of dollars and the future of human communications including fundamental access to it are at stake. For telecom operators and media outlets there is not a migratory way from where we are to the future. There is a clear consumer shift underway that runs in the opposite direction to that of telecom and media incumbents; emergent social practice is increasingly clashing with the very structure and desires of incumbent players... It was for these reasons that one of the six keynote speakers invited to Spring 2009 Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco was Richard Whitt, Google's Washington Telecom and Media Counsel. His keynote was entitled, Tinkering without Tampering: Wrestling with Convergence and Communications Policy... more
With countries like Australia and New Zealand implementing infrastructure that can deliver 100Mb/s for their next generation broadband -- and with most Europeans not too far behind this -- it is quite shocking to see that the $7.2 billion economic stimulus package in the USA (under the RUS Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and the NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP)) requires nothing more than 768 kilobits per second (kb/s) downstream and 200 kb/s upstream. more
Who would dare to predict the year the Internet will reach 50 billion addressable devices? Thomas Noren, head of LTE product development at Ericsson sees one day 50 billion devices shouldered by LTE. He sees LTE as the truly global standard putting to rest the long and acrimonious rivalry between CDMA and GSM protagonists and even sees the Chinese third way with their TD-SCDMA aligned on LTE. Mobile WiMax is, in his mind, already relegated to the dustbin of history... more
It was interesting to see that in New Zealand Vodafone had second thoughts and decided to come up with its own proposal of forming a consortium of network operators, rather than simply supporting the government's announcement of its FttH plans. Our analysis of this change of mind is that mobile operators increasingly need fibre networks to sustain the enormous growth in mobile broadband. Most mobile stations around the world are not connected to a fibre network. more
The Wall Street Journal's dubious story about Iran's use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) for spying, censorship and disinformation appears in a highly charged atmosphere. The US Republican right wing wants the US to talk tougher to Iran, to bomb-bomb-bomb, invade, or commit "regime change." More questions than mine have surfaced about the WSJ's story... more
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