Gigatag

Last night Om more or less dared me to tag him, so that's what I'm doing.

Merry Winterval, Mr. Spitzer!

Given my steadfast belief that lawyers will inherit the earth, I share the following bit of festive fun which came my way this morning:

Christmas Card Disclaimer

I wish you, on the terms and conditions of the greeting below, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

From us ("the wishor") to you (hereinafter called "the wishee")

Please accept without obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, politically correct, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the northern winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all... and a financially successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2007 but with due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures or sects, and having regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform or dietary preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting you are bound by the terms that

* This greeting is subject to further clarification or withdrawal.

* This greeting is freely transferable provided that no alteration shall be made to the original greeting and that the proprietary rights of the wishor are acknowledged.

* This greeting implies no promise by the wishor to actually implement any of the wishes.

* This greeting may not be enforceable in certain jurisdictions and/or the restrictions herein may not be binding upon certain wishees in certain jurisdictions and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wishor.

* This greeting is warranted to perform as reasonably may be expected within the usual application of good tidings, for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first.

* The wishor warrants this greeting only for the limited replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wishor.

* Any references in this greeting to "the Lord", "Father Christmas", "Our Saviour", or any other festive figures, whether actual or fictitious, dead or alive, shall not imply any endorsement by or from them in respect of this greeting, and all proprietary rights in any referenced third party names and images are hereby acknowledged.

Net neutrality isn't just for Christmas

A Palladium Club mega-uber value reader points me to a presentation on Net Neutrality from Japanese regulator MIC some ten days ago. I note in particular: slide 15, which shows a 20% YoY increase in IP traffic; slide 16, which shows a big increase in bandwidth consumption by P2P applications on the downlink; and most interestingly, slide 17, which shows P2P consistently consuming over 50% of upstream bandwidth. Given that Japan is now ex-growth in DSL and firmly on the pathway to near-ubiquitous fiber, these stats will probably prove to be unsettling to EuroTelcos facing NGN deployments of varying flavors and intensities. This is one reason why in a recent "year ahead" piece for clients, I highlighted the dreaded Net Neutrality as an issue which may generate much more debate and activity in Europe in 2007 than in 2006. It is clear that a significant number of telcos are taking matters into their own hands, at least as it relates to BitTorrent (thanks Wired), but I wonder what the consequences will be with Big Media now firmly in the P2P game? With enough documentation of indiscriminate throttling in a given country, do we eventually see complaints to, say, the WTO?

Zurich votes for fiber

A Platinum Club mega-uber value reader alerts me to a Zurich city council vote on Wednesday night 95 - 22 in favor of a CHF200m investment in an open FTTH network. The plan, as I understand it, is for municipal power company EWZ to deploy fiber in its existing rights of way to 13,124 households and 4,020 businesses in the first phase, with a second phase yet to be determined. The plan is subject to a citizens' referendum to be held in March, and while one politician quoted in the Heise piece states that the plan is a "competition hostile solution," the Green Party's view (if my translation tool is correct) is "Let the single mistake of the model be that it was not brought in already five years earlier."

Don't you wish your coders were hot like mine?

One of the things which I found most interesting in the section of the Telco 2.0 survey built around my "Ten Things" presentation from the event back in October, was that the respondents tended to disagree most strongly with my statements on the dearth of innovation coming out of the industry. But let's put down the egg-nog for a minute here and get real. Check out this 13-minute video (pointed out by a Silver and Gold Club mega-uber value reader), in which we get a glimpse inside Adobe - where this particular team is working on some amazing applications to marry web services with the desktop. In particular I like the section where the developer is doing drag and drop of Vcard data from a Flash window straight into Google Maps. This is what I mean by innovation - open APIs, open minds, and apparently an open environment in which to explore and develop.

Let the spin begin

Just in time to ensure a Blue Christmas for economic self-determination in Amsterdam, the European Commission is opening a state aid investigation into the Amsterdam fiber project. Recall that the capital structure of the project is 1/3 municipality, 1/3 ING, and 1/3 housing corporations - which I have expected would provide a shield under the Market Economy Investor Principle. However, the investigation seems to focus on the period before this structure was agreed:

"In May 2005, the Dutch authorities informed the Commission about the project and then proceeded with the investment in 2006. If Amsterdam’s investment has been made under conditions which a private investor would have accepted, the city's investment would not constitute state aid. Although the Commission has repeatedly requested additional information from the Dutch authorities, they have until now not delivered all the information necessary to assess whether Amsterdam actually acted as a private investor would have."

For those hostile to the project, it's now time to make the lobbyists and spinmeisters get out and earn their Christmas bonuses.

UPDATE: Mega-uber value readers seem to be divided over this one. One writes in to say that it's precisely the effectiveness of the cable lobby's spin machine which has brought this outcome about in the first place. On the other hand, two others have written in to make their case for the glass being half full, noting that today's announcement is not accompanied by any obligation to halt buildout of the network during the investigation. Moreover, they note that the text of the announcement makes explicit that Ms. Kroes does not consider that a muni network funded under MEIP, in the absence of unacceptable state aid, has a distorting effect on the market. This is the positive and more significant message to take away.

UPDATE 2: Vincent Dekker from Trouw, EuroTelcoblog's telecom journalist of the year, has it on the record from Ms. Kroes' own spokesperson that a stop order on the project is not involved here.

What's inside Venice?

A Palladium Club mega-uber value reader did a very skillful screen-grab of Venice (click to enlarge) as it was launching, to capture the list of acknowledgements which appears very, very briefly. There's an interesting list of copyrights here, under the phrase, "parts of this product are": Joltid (okay, we knew that), the Regents of the University of California, OpenSSL Project, Sleepycat Software (I assume it's this), David Beckett (this David Beckett looks like a strong candidate, but I'm not sure), the University of Bristol (twice), Lev Walkin, and Dr. Brian Gladman of Worcester, UK (an encryption and security expert).

UPDATE: Om has a nice piece on Venice here, and I agree with a lot of the things he picks up on. Particularly the social aspects, which is something that the IPTV crowd has been talking about for a long time. Venice seems to have done less talking and more nailing. A couple of days ago, a friend also in the beta started IMing me in Gmail from the Venice client, and even after we finished the chat, I left the IM window open. Thereafter I got an update everytime he started watching a new piece of content. Very cool, and I am looking forward to playing around with Venice more intensively over the holidays.

Tag-a-delic, baby

The blog tag game which broke out last week seems to have spread farther and faster than I ever expected. Check out Michael Jensen's blog-tag tree. I look like a real killjoy here, but recall that I tagged any and all readers with their own blog (I know, that's cheating), so I guess my tree is more like kudzu, which is fitting.

Winds of change from the east

My inbox runneth over with interesting news of developments in Russia and its environs.

Firstly, and closest to my currently fiber-obsessed heart, I see that Golden Telecom has acquired FTTB specialist Corbina, which currently claims to cover 2.4m households in Moscow and is estimated to take 1/3 of net additions in the local broadband market.

Secondly, I discovered, via the fabulous alarm:clock euro, that Ambient Sound Investments, a heretofore unknown entity to me, but founded by the key engineers behind Skype, has hit the investment trail in earnest. Nice to see part of the proceeds of disruptive innovation being recycled to support even more of the same - and focusing on tapping the potential in Eastern Europe.

Lastly, but by no means leastly, the team at Quintura have launched a version for kids. I think this is really particularly interesting, because while children can obviously use Google, I find that its presentation of results is a bit cumbersome and monotonous, even for kids with good literacy levels (and patience/attention span). How much more interesting would search be for them if they were presented with a cloud of related terms/images? At the crass commercial end of the spectrum, I can see someone like Disney or Viacom wanting to jump all over this concept, but I think it is also an approach which the educational world should probably take a good long look at.

Future reading

If you're concerned about how you're going to use up all that spare time in the festive days ahead, why not log onto the newly launched sites for the Delta and Sigma scan projects, looking at issues of technology and social change over the next 50 years. Of relevance from a telco perspective, in my view, might be "Complexity Theory as a Tool in Social Relations," "New Technologies for Cooperation," this piece on ubiquitous broadband, the future of cybervanity, and context-aware computing. And if you manage to get through all that, I also highly recommend reading Alec Saunders' latest musings on "new presence," which coincidentally touch on some related themes.

Season's Geogreetings!

A Double Palladium Club mega-uber value reader sent me a greeting yesterday using the amazing GeoGreeting, and now I extend this to all of you out there in blogland. Happy Holidays!

Rebirth in Venice

An awful lot is going on in the P2P TV space at the moment, and a Palladium Club mega-uber value reader pointed me towards this blog post from Venice Project team member Sylvain Wallez, who runs through a nice description of some of the features. I find it intriguing that he mentions using Jabber to communicate with friends - why not Skype? Can't wait to try it out, but alas, my application to join the beta a couple of months back has yet to be approved - nobody loves me. If you have an invite and are feeling the Christmas spirit, send it along and I will be eternally grateful!

UPDATE: Within an hour of posting this, I received my long-expected invitation to the beta. Coincidence, or is somewhat out there reading?

Send in the clowns, don't bother they're here

Yes sir, this UK broadband market is a regular barrel of laughs, as illustrated by the good-natured bonhomie on display at the OFCOM event a couple of weeks back - in which Stephen Burch of NTL and Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse seemed to be battling it out for the title of most whimsical and charming in their panel. The problem is that not a lot of other people seem to be laughing. The editorial team of UK Sunday paper The Observer seems to have taken a decision to devote a dedicated slot to the TalkTalk rollout every week, this week going so far as to feature the splendid TalkTalkHell blog, as well as running through the usual list of "customer care" atrocities.

Should NTL be feeling a smug sense of schadenfreude? Based on my recent experience as a customer, I have to say no. On 21st November I cancelled my TV subscription with NTL, in favor of Freeview. Because our broadband service runs off a modem embedded in the set-top box, I would need to have the box taken away and replaced with a modem. The very sensible-sounding customer service person I spoke to offered me an upgrade in speed at half price for three months, and booked the switchover for the earliest possible date under NTL's cancellation policy. This was the Saturday just passed, 16th December, and I was told that the technician would be coming around between 8 AM and 1PM, to swap out the box and set up the modem.

Fastforward to this past Saturday, and (as my UK readers have probably by now anticipated, using their acutely tuned "poor customer service ESP") 1PM came and went without any NTL truck parked outside my house. I then grudgingly called the premium rate "customer care" line, and held on for 20 minutes, listening to a recorded message touting various other NTL services which I would not be receiving. Finally came my turn in the queue, and the beleaguered-sounding customer service person explained that between making the order and the scheduled installation date, NTL had migrated to a new IT system, and our work order had somehow not made the migration. Then he confirmed that all the audit trail leading up to the work order - TV service cancellation, set-top box swap-over, etc, was still on the notes to the account. So, all the necessary data was there, but something failed in the data migration to trigger the truckroll.

Perhaps I should count myself lucky that we have suffered no interruption of service, but I still find it entirely unacceptable that a company can book an appointment three weeks in advance and just not turn up on the day - not only not turn up, but not even be aware that it hadn't turned up - in the process wasting five hours of its customers' time. If I were doing consultancy work, five hours of my time would cost NTL considerably more than one full year of service - yet I end up paying to make a call registering a complaint. And telcos wonder why people are ambivalent towards them...

Fiber, fiber, burning bright

Christmas lights twinkle away in the early evening across Europe, and the rumor on the streets is that this year's must-have present is - fiber.

France Telecom's presentation today contained an early Christmas present for the FTTH enthusiast, not that we should have been surprised, given the pressure coming from Iliad. However, the initial response was perhaps somewhat more subdued than some had expected. I noted at least one "trading sell" recommendation ahead of today's announcement, clearly in expectation of something more radical. With the share price having languished so badly for so long, however, I think it was to be expected that the company would slow-peddle, at least initially, and it seems to have worked (FT closed up 1.7%).

However, the private equity-owned Essent Kabelcom has today received a sizeable lump of coal in its already holey Christmas stocking, as the city of Deventer, right in the heart of Essent country, finds itself the new focus of Dik Wessels' fiber attentions. Mr. Wessels' company Reggefiber has acquired FTTH specialist Y-3Net and plans to spend around EUR50m to connect all 40,000 households in the city. Unlike the Hillegom deployment, this Wessels project is apparently going to be an open network, in accordance with last week's Breedned declaration, which brought together key players in the Dutch market in a rare bit of public consensus. Vincent Dekker at Trouw quotes KPN as saying it might seek to offer services on the Deventer open net, while Essent claims it will take advantage of the open streets to upgrade its network (given its historical ties to Teleste and Ethernet-over-coax, I presume it will pursue something like this). And in the streets of Deventer this evening, the music rings out, "Cable bucks, roasting on an open fire..."

西方紅

I've been quietly wondering over the past year or so how long it might be before Chinese carriers, with their remarkably strong balance sheets, began to look West in search of acquisitions. I had mainly believed that their eyes would be firmly on emerging markets, as seemingly confirmed by China Mobile's reported interest in Millicom, but I never ruled out the idea that they might have a pop at a target in a developed market - if only as a signal of their growing economic importance. If mega-uber value cyberfreund Guy Kewney is right, we may see this as soon as tomorrow. Beyond whatever political machinations may be involved here, I'm genuinely curious to see how dynamics in the UK market change with an ambitious and financially strong fifth player in the market, looking to show just what it can do.

2007 - the year of living separately

A couple of weeks back, I published my "year ahead" piece for clients, and in it I gave prominent space to the idea that structural separation will figure prominently on the agenda, and even went so far as to predict that we may actually see it happen in practice in 2007. Today, Reuters is reporting that OPTA's 2007 year plan includes an examination of issues around structural separation at KPN. At this writing, the relevant page of the OPTA site, which is slow as Christmas anyway, appears to have no live links to the actual document, but I'll keep checking. KPN is currently up just a bit more than 1%, making it the second best performer on the day so far. Is there a message there?

Double-tagged

It's the silly season, so why resist a bit of frivolity? Jeff Pulver has started an entertaining game of blog tag, and I have been tagged twice - once by Irwin Lazar and again in Dave Gale's blog. The challenge here is to bring out the human beneath the blogbot by revealing five things about yourself that not many readers may know. I don't want to name and shame anyone publicly, but if you are a reader of this blog and have your own blog, then consider yourself tagged. Anyway, enough about you, back to me and here we go:

1) The funniest/strangest moment in my career as an analyst: There are a number of strong candidates for this, including the fund manager who kept falling asleep during a presentation which a colleague and I were giving back in 1998 - we ended up taking turns coughing to subtly wake him up, while the other droned on. Or the other client who stared quite blatantly at the legs and cleavage of the saleswoman accompanying us, throughout the duration of the 60-minute presentation. But the winner comes from early 2004. From a historical perspective, it is important to remember that, while we all take Skype for granted as common currency here in late 2006, in early 2004 this was far from the case, despite the level of excitement already being felt among geeks and geek wannabes (including me). With that in mind I would like to stress that, in relating this anecdote, I am not denigrating the response of the investor in question - it was simply a wonderfully surreal sort of moment which deserves to be related. So, early 2004, I'm in Stockholm for a day of meetings with fund managers. The topic is, unsurprisingly, industry disruption, and my presentation has a long section on Skype. I arrived the night before and somehow came down with the flu, so I look and feel like absolute shit. In the first meeting, I work through the first part and move on to Skype. The fund manager says, "Sorry, I'm not familiar with this, what is it?" Being in Sweden, I figure I'll use shorthand. I answer, "Have you ever heard of a Swede named Niklas Zennstrom?" The fund manager perks up. "Yes, I played basketball with him in high school. What's he doing now?"

2) Back in Memphis I was an active musician, involved in a vast number of bands and projects. I started off playing electric guitar and bass, but after my younger brother got a drumkit I became an enthusiastic, if not entirely proficient, drummer. Late in my career I took on the tenor saxophone, playing in a manner most closely resembling a one-lipped Pharoah Sanders. My last sort-of official band, The Grundies, had a habit of rotating instruments, so in the course of a single show (or, as some in the audience referred to it, "an incident") I would play guitar, bass, drums and tenor sax - thankfully not at once. The bands I played/recorded with, in roughly chronological order were: Pseudobop, Kings of the Western Bop, Four Neat Guys, Panther Burns, Shock Opera, Possible Fossils, Harris and the Hepsters, Satan's Bedpan, Linda Heck and the Train Wreck, Hans Faulhaber, Big Mouth Bass, The Brewers, Slaw, Hot Joe, Compulsive Gamblers, Snakehips, Linda Heck and Her Yes Men, Skronkadelic, The Grifters, Bob's Lead Hyena, The Grundies, An All-Gourd Band (yes, all the instruments were made of gourds), and The Bum Notes. I once composed a sort-of three-minute thrash rock opera based on "The Elephant Man," of which I was very proud, though not many have heard it. I had/have a passable singing voice, though I didn't do it publicly very often - usually at paid gigs (weddings/corporate do's) with a jazz combo. I also taught myself to throat sing in a style known as Sygyt, though I don't do that very often these days. My final musical involvement before leaving Memphis was with a group of percussionists, just for fun. One of them was an amazing man named Jack Adcock, who made many of his instruments, including some which were totally original. As it happens, Jack is having surgery today because he is gravely ill with cancer, so even if you don't know him, spare a thought. Godspeed Jack, I love you.

3) Living in Memphis, because of its tremendous musical legacy, it seemed pretty normal to me back then that you should always be only one or two degrees away from greatness. It's only living in Europe that the full wondrousness of that sort of environment really strikes me, as I occasionally am able to tell music fans about the people I met/saw in the course of normal life in Memphis. My first experience with this was as a 12 year-old, not long after my family had moved to Memphis from New Haven, where my dad had done his doctorate. My sixth grade English teacher was named Barbara Jackson, a flamboyant and somewhat scary woman with an amazing collection of mid-1970's pimpette-wear (it was the mid-70's afterall). Her husband occasionally used to come to the school to visit her during breaks, and it was only several years later that I realized the significance of the fact that his first name was Al. I was similarly unaware at the time of the full identity of the person named Alex whom I first met watching TV in my high school girlfriend's living room in 1981, but we crossed paths and played on gigs together many times over the subsequent years. Our family house was about half a mile from the houses of both Sam Phillips, whom I occasionally saw out mowing his front lawn, and Willie Mitchell, and a bit further to the West was the heavily wooded home of the brilliant Charlie Rich, who used to come to the restaurant where I waited tables in college, steadfastly refusing to sign autographs, and politely, but firmly, sending fans away because they were disturbing quality time with his wife. Much later, in my late 20's I regularly used to see Isaac Hayes in a local health food restaurant (this was long before South Park and the Chef renaissance), and for some reason I also seemed to frequently find myself in the same drug store as Rufus Thomas. I also met both Paul Burlison and Roland Janes, perhaps two of the most incendiary guitarists of their era, but when I met them both were languishing in obscurity before once again getting some recognition. I met, and played with on a couple of occasions, the inimitable Cordell Jackson (now there's some Chaotica for you), and she was kind enough to invite me and some friends to her home for the Moon Records 30th anniversary party, where I also met Estelle Axton. One of the bands which I played with included as an occasional member the amazing Robert Palmer, who was incredibly charming. Even in London, I don't seem to be able to avoid the Memphis Mojo. Late last year, my friend Jim Spake came to London with a Stax review, and managed to get me backstage at the Barbican, where I found myself unexpectedly having dinner with Eddie Floyd, William Bell, Skip Pitts (who played the universally recognized wah-wah figure on Theme from Shaft) and Ben Cauley (the only survivor of the Otis Redding plane crash) later meeting Mabel John, and showing a somewhat bemused Booker T. and his wife to the courtesy room.

4) My father went to the same high school as Lee Harvey Oswald, though Oswald was a couple of years behind my dad and they didn't know each other. We have always suspected that Oswald didn't stick around for long (confirmed in this Wikipedia entry), and he apparently missed photo day, because my dad's annual doesn't have his individual photo in it. However, there is one candid group photo taken in a school corridor where he is identified by name, and it is unmistakeably him.

5) My paternal family history is largely a mystery, but it is quite conceivable that I may be related to Johann Franz Encke, which may explain a childhood obsession with astronomy. One connection we are sure of is that I am distantly related (by marriage) to Tex Ritter, which makes me an even more distant relative of John Ritter.

Symptomatology

Yesterday I gave a presentation in the final session of the Cambridge-MIT Institute's symposium on Net Neutrality. I would love to write a detailed piece on the event, but for two complicating factors: 1) due to logistical problems, I only attended the final two sessions; and 2) the event occurred under the Chatham House Rule. General messages which I picked up from the two sessions I saw, and from talking to those who had been there throughout, were:

• There is a startling dearth of information with which to assess in any comprehensive way what is actually happening on the internet as it is today, let alone how that changes in a non-NN world. Presenters cited some good work by Caida, CoCombine, and IIJ, but there seemed to be a consensus that we need much more - particularly for regulators to get greater insight into what they are trying, or perhaps not trying, to resolve.
• Definition continues to be the most troublesome aspect, and some questioned if we could actually identify whether there is a problem, or just the prospects of a problem. Conversely, by the time a problem is generally acknowledged, it's often too late to resolve satisfactorily. Others questioned whether the issue will be amplified to serve individual political ambitions in Brussels, resulting in a pre-emptive over-reaction. I'd love to be more specific about all this, but rules are rules.
• It seemed that there was a consensus that the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive is fraught with potential problems.

My talk (slides here, and Torrent version) centered around two themes. The first was that, one year on from the infamous "My Pipes" interview, the world is a lot more complicated. Whereas the MPAA probably once (mistakenly) wanted Bram Cohen's head on a pike, its members are now signing up for BitTorrent distribution, and there are other platforms which seek to use the protocol to empower independent content creators and established names alike. World of Warcraft uses BT for client updates, and woe betide any carrier which stands between a guild member and his virtual world. As I've discussed before, the BBC also employs Kontiki in services like this one, which it makes clear is funded by the TV license fee - I don't know how many people would feel strongly enough about it to kick up a fuss, but it seems to me that throttling such a service could be seen as depriving license payers of the full use and value of their license. Okay, that's probably a stretch, but it illustrates the point that protocols previously classified as "alien," "pernicious," or downright "evil" may now be supporting perfectly legal services which consumers and authors have paid for/invested in. Ham-fisted attempts at "traffic shaping" now risk angering not only consumers, but also media companies with big legal departments, so choose your enemies wisely. I attempted to make the same point around the mash-up culture, citing examples like AIM Pages, which is now up to 239 application modules, some of which are from "mortal enemies" in the web space, as well as Second Life, which I think could end up being a minefield for a "My Pipes" implementation.

My second point was that I think the entire debate has only come about as a result of the yawning gap between the pace of innovation in applications and the pace of deployment of true broadband. In other words, the disease is our approach to infrastructure, and the Net Neutrality debate is a symptom - I seemed to be the only person to delve into this aspect, though it's possible that someone did in an earlier session. While I stopped short of proposing any specific solutions, I did try to convey the idea that we need to seriously question whether the current model is capable of delivering true broadband, because there are some serious structural issues which seem to be inconsistent with the goal, which I listed as follows:

Incumbent telcos
–Vertically integrated business models
–Addicted to scarcity
–Risk averse
–Primary focus on capital markets/investors
–Poor track record in innovation
–Maximum investment horizon 3 – 5 years

This last issue, investment horizon and the audience likely to be interested, is a crucial one. I closed by predicting/proposing that there will soon be a re-examination of the infrastructure funding model, involving all or some of the following in some no doubt interesting combinations:

–Entrepreneurial capital, thinking outside the box (cf., Iliad)
–Utilities
–Property companies/REITs
–Specialist infrastructure funds
–Public/private partnerships
–Municipal/regional governments/development agencies (Amsterdam, Cataluña, Loma Linda CA, Seattle, Singapore, UTOPIA)
–Incumbent telcos, pending a change in DNA

Opening the packet

Today I had my second meeting with the nice folks from Packetmobile, the first being about three weeks ago, when the company was still in quasi-stealth mode. Now the wraps are off, and I have been given a handset which I am looking forward to playing around with.

As a bit of background, I can't help thinking back to the OFCOM meeting last week, where Arun Sarin was asked about the threat from mobile VoIP, and responded by saying that the cellular world is going to flat rate pricing, which limits the appeal of VoIP - end of story. That sort of thinking is rooted in the "VoIP as price arbitrage" mindset, and frankly I think a lot of people have moved on from that now. Packetmobile seems to be another validation of this shift.

The proposition here includes VoIP, of course, but I think the value to the end user is really built around group context and presence. There is some very clever stuff going on here around user location, motion and velocity, handset status, network connection, and signal strength - all of which remove a lot of the frustrating lack of transparency inherent in mobile services currently.

From the operator's perspective, these same features also open up a lot of possibilities for revenue streams which have very little to do with voice itself. The client has the added advantage of being very small and bearer-agnostic, and that goes down as far as GPRS - so let's not sneeze at the voice angle either. There is also an intriguing social stealth marketing potential here, wherein a user on a Packetmobile-powered service can invite an off-net user to download a Java midlet, so they can share presence information and IM, the operator opportunity being, "Like what you see? Churn to us and enjoy the full service." What I expect operators might like most is that Packetmobile has positioned itself as an enabler/managed services partner, with no aspirations of creating a presence in the consumer space - i.e., the spec and branding are controlled by the carrier.

It's going to be very interesting to see what sort of interest this combination of elements generates from carriers desperately in need of differentiation, particularly in the wake of 3's wake-up call to the mobile world.

Skoogle

Well, there probably aren't many people out there who have any lingering doubts about the Murdoch brigade's grasp of "this internet thing," but if so, here's the final nail in the coffin - Sky and Google in a wide-ranging alliance covering advertising revenue share, a Sky-branded version of Gmail, UGC video, and an intention to

"explore opportunities to provide further services such as Google's VoIP (voice over internet protocol) telephony services, enhanced storage and future product developments,"

and to

"explore future forms of web, TV and mobile advertising."

If you expect, as I do, that Sky is eventually poised to do something disruptive in wireless, then this last little piece is even more intriguing. Stay tuned.

Breaking Tru da Cloud

The Truphone team are on a bit of a roll, now authenticating on 7,500 Cloud locations in the UK. Besides adding a new level of convenience for the indigenous UK user base, I guess this will be pretty damned sexy for business users roaming into the UK.

On an entirely separate, but I think related note, the Consume list points me towards a nice Google map mash-up of hotspots, many of them community initiatives, in the UK, and also to the Boundless mesh network in Greenwich.

It's your document calling

Everytime I talk to clients about the wild and wonderful world of VoIP, I urge them to keep their eyes on Adobe. Most times, they seem confused until I explain, but those of us interested in these things have known why for some time. Today we get a much clearer, and very exciting, indication of things to come. Again, it probably shouldn't come as any surprise that Adobe has found a way to marry Flash with the humble pdf, but think about how significant this could be, not only for collaboration within companies, but also between publishers and clients.

As one example near and dear to my heart, I keep thinking about the brokers' research community and its enduring addiction to scattergun pdf distribution and voicemail bombardment of clients - how different might things be if the reader/readers were able to opt in to just this sort of virtual meeting room to discuss and debate? Pull, not push, share, not thrust.

All I want for Christmas is my 200Mbps

Or should I say 100Mbps each way? That's precisely what subscribers of OnsNet Nuenen (which a Palladium Club mega-uber value reader told me last week is now at something like 93% market share within its footprint) are getting from Santa Claus, at no extra charge. Hopefully this is the Ghost of Christmas Future, though I'd urge UK residents not to hold their breath.

The meek shall inherit?

Unless you're either Puff Daddy or an employee of a City firm other than the one which employs me, you'll probably agree with me that this may be the most vulgar and distasteful output of the holiday press release season so far. Maybe Amazon UK's PR team would like to raise the tone by donating to the Farepak Relief Fund? (Some background for non-UK residents)

P.S. - that's right, not a single telco on the list, despite margins and cash flows most industries would kill for. And to make matters worse, the beleaguered savers have to call a premium rate phone number to find out just how badly they're going to get screwed.

The kindness of strangers

Telenor shares hit a new record high today, but Mr. Yunus is on the way to Oslo, humming the old Hi Records classic, "I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down." I guess it's safe to assume he won't be putting in a special guest appearance at this Thursday's "what-a-great-year-it's-been" webcast. Ever seen a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a telco CEO mud-wrestle?

Tubular Orange

Orange UK has jumped aboard the user-generated train, with an intriguing contest for amateur filmmakers, including some helpful DIY hints. Speaking of the intersection of mobile and UGC, as it happens I will be moderating a TEN panel on exactly this issue tomorrow night at the Waldorf Hilton in London. Perhaps I will film 60 seconds of it for the Orange contest...

Christmas in EuroTelcoland

Well, it's that time of year again, when EuroTelcos line up to say, "Thank you God for another year of existence, and please smile upon our IPTV deployments." If you've finished your shopping and are worried about how to spend the next 19 days, try out this infinite Flash loop from Swisscom.

Tru pioneers

Congratulations to the team at Truphone for being selected by the WEF as one of 47 technology pioneers for 2007, along with SlingMedia, Bridgeport Networks and Mozilla Foundation, among others. Not bad for a bunch of farm boys from Kent!

Squeeze those pipes

I'm trying to get dug out after a busy few days, and wanted to highlight a couple of interesting/disturbing bits of news from the always fascinating Dutch market which may have been missed outside the country. It appears that an internal briefing by civil servants at the Ministry of Economic Affairs was leaked to a journalist from Dagblad De Limburger last week, in which it was asserted that the transaction values in the Essent/Casema/Multikabel deals made it infeasible for the investors (Warburg Pincus and Cinven) to generate a return without significant price hikes.

When I say significant, we're talking about ARPU rising from EUR23 to EUR83 over the next five years, which looks, um, challenging to say the least (though Multikabel has come up with some interesting strategies on "yield management," formerly called bait and switch). The Ministry is apparently concerned not only about price hikes, but also about the negative impact this would have on any plans which the investors might have for network upgrades. In turn, if the affected cable networks, accounting for more than 50% of all cable homes in the Netherlands, were to dramatically cut back on investment, it is feared that KPN would also feel less motivation to push forward its investment in FTTN.

I assume the Ministry must be concerned that the Netherlands' position in the upper echelon of the OECD broadband league table will be eroded as a result, particularly as the focus in the next phase of broadband development moves toward quality and depth rather than quantity and breadth, in my view. This situation once again seems to underline the tension, and perhaps fundamental inconsistency, between long-term infrastructure planning and the short term (2 - 5 year) investment horizons of the capital markets, both public and private.

A few thoughts from the OFCOM event

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the first day of OFCOM's international conference in London, joining a panel with Carolyn Fairbairn, Eli Noam and Jonathan Zittrain, whose talks were centered around their contributions to the book. I found the most common ground with Mr. Zittrain, and had some areas of overlap with what he talked about. I set out to talk about some issues around investor perceptions of regulation, but also wanted to give a few examples of the difficulties regulators will face in even defining what constitutes a relevant service or market in future, let alone regulating it. Unfortunately, we were running out of time and I was last, so did the right thing and stopped short to allow questions. I think the session will eventually be archived with all the others from the two day event here (frankly, posting the videos to YouTube is hip, but I'm not sure how user-friendly it is when we're talking about 30-minute speeches).

I was impressed with James Murdoch's performance, which is not to say that I agreed with his message. However, he conveyed more substance and thoughtfulness in this venue than normally comes across in the typical earnings release presentations. I'm going to be bold and predict that a) we won't see him as CEO of Sky for more than another two years, before he takes over either Fox Interactive or the entire Mother Ship; and b) I wouldn't be surprised to see him pursue a political career.

Overall, these CEO/executive presentations collectively formed a sort of public lobbying exercise aimed at OFCOM and the EU, not that we should have been surprised by this: Sky - the PSB and BBC funding formulae need to be rethought, the BBC has megalomaniac aspirations outside of its remit; Vodafone - retail roaming regulation has no legal foundation and 900MHz refarming needs to be addressed before 3G extension bands are auctioned; Hutchison 3 - refarming should include an appraisal of redistribution of 900MHz frequencies; Carphone Warehouse - transparency and process in LLU needs to improve; NTL - some action should be taken over a certain someone's monopolistic behavior in sports and film rights; Google - some action on copyright release for indexation of printed and archival material would be nice (this is entirely out of OFCOM's sphere of influence, it must be said); Channel 4 - continuity in the PSB funding formula is essential to ensure a consistent output of quality indigenous content. All fairly predictable messages, but there were some interesting stops along the way. Charles Dunstone came across as fairly humble (humbled?) and made some very sensible statements about the telcos' necessity to understand their place in the value chain or risk alienating customers. Arun Sarin, in response to questions from 3 about equity in refarming, said he assumed some transaction might take place before that which might make the whole thing unnecessary, which got a lot of laughs.

I was intrigued by some sections of the session featuring Fabio Colasanti, DG Info Soc, because my human antennae told me that his body language suggested he wasn't entirely in accordance with the company line on Television Without Frontiers, or whatever unthreatening name it has taken on now. If you ever get the YouTube video to download, you can see for yourself.

Thanks again to the OFCOM folks for inviting me along, and to the Mayor for letting us have drinks at the roof of Thunderdome (inside it's a spiral, but that's a subject for another day).

OFCOM - most prolific regulator on the planet?

The folks at OFCOM have just published what promises to be a very interesting international survey of the communications market, spanning most of the key European markets, Japan, China and the US. Among other things, the research finds, somewhat unsurprisingly, one-third of broadband subscribers cite lower television viewing habits, and the level of online viewing of video/TV content in China is, frankly, jaw-dropping.

In a separate, but related development, I am very happy to have been invited to participate in a panel at an OFCOM event tomorrow, coinciding with the launch of a collection of essays, "Communications: The Next Decade," edited by Ed Richards, Robin Foster and Tom Kiedrowski. I will be joining three very distinguished speakers: Carolyn Fairbairn, Eli Noam, and Jonathan Zittrain. More on this after the event.

Swedes at Christmas

This survey from TeliaSonera has a couple of factoids of note: a) 78% of its Swedish broadband customers interviewed said they could use a webcam on Christmas Eve to communicate with distant family members; b) webcams apparently rank second only to the PSTN as a preferred means of communications with friends and family. I don't know how representative Sweden is given some of its peculiar cultural traits around Christmas celebrations, but I'd like to think this maps pretty well across a lot of Europe.

I'm too sexy for my blog

I'd like to extend a very warm EuroTelcothankyou to someone signing himself simply as "jon k," who has very kindly nominated me in Wired's 2006 Sexiest Geek competition (comments section, time stamp 5:20 PM 27th November). Not sure how I'll do in the swimsuit competition...

Elementary, my dear

Rather than the IP n-play, I wonder what telco churn rates would look like if they marketed services which might be genuinely useful to their customers? The ever-excellent alarm:clock euro alerts me to the Wattson from DIY Kyoto. The site is designed in Flash, so I can't link directly to the "Online" page, but there we see that this is not merely a clever device for saving energy within the home, but it also has a social element to it, around which communities of interest could develop. Elegant, useful and relevant - how often do you find yourself using those words to describe a telco-supplied experience?

Video boom in Italy

Stumbled across this press release from Nielsen//NetRatings today. My Italian is not too good, but I believe it says a couple of interesting things: 1) web usage in September surpassed 17 hours per week for the first time, a YoY increase of 32%; and 2) there has been a notable increase in traffic to video sharing sites such as YouTube and Metacafe, but if I understand this correctly, they also cite the contribution of local player Libero (Wind's ISP/portal) in driving this change.

The next generation

Deutsche Telekom is probably hurriedly trying to buy some cancellation insurance for its regulatory holiday - the EU has reportedly been talking tough all day, and I understand that there is a reception in Berlin this evening where Ms. Reding is apparently going to be telling it like it is. Back here in the UK, mega-uber-hyper regulator OFCOM, apparently having "been to school" on the turmoil evident in the Dutch and German markets, has released a position paper on next generation access which looks to clarify a few key issues before they come to a head. Interesting passages so far:

"The level in the network where regulatory remedies may be applied to next
generation access networks may differ substantially from the current copper
local access network. Therefore, one key consideration for any next generation
access regulatory policy is the correct level in the network to mandate access
to promote downstream competition. This will, in part, depend on technology
choices made by industry. The levels may vary for different technology
deployments, but could include: access to ducts; unbundling options, including
sub-loop or fibre unbundling; or access to a wholesale bitstream product."

and

"It is not the role of the regulator to protect investments made by competitive communications providers against market risks. These risks may include the emergence of new technology developments, such as next generation
access that superseded operators’ current market propositions. However, it is
appropriate for Ofcom to consider the interests of existing competitive
operators in ensuring the continued availability of and terms for current
wholesale inputs to their products, during the lifetime of the assets in which
they have invested. We also need to ensure that a suitable migration path for
existing infrastructure investments is allowed for following the deployment of
new technologies."

UPDATE: T-Regs has some valuable additional insight on the situation in Germany.

10 things right back atcha

Keith McMahon and the Telco 2.0 posse have written a fasincating post, turning the tables on my "Ten Things" list to focus on shortcomings in the internet brigade which provide telcos with opprtunities, if they think laterally and rise to the challenge. I particularly like the musings on identity - I was having precisely this conversation with a journalist yesterday - and the reference to ownership of user-generated content is also destined to be a massive issue, also highlighted by Norman Lewis in his presentation last month at Telco 2.0. Following on from Ian's post yesterday, it is really satisfying to see that my message from last month has become a template for further debate, rather than just another static Powerpoint gathering moss on the web. This is precisely what I hoped would happen.

The return of hosting

Back to picks and shovels, though unlike the great hosting bubble 1.0 (anyone out there remember Exodus?), I think the dynamics are totally different this time, and much more supportive. This looks like a very interesting report from BroadGroup on projected UK hosting supply and demand to 2010. Sadly, I've already spent all my money on Christmas shopping...

Sniffing the air

Well, you've got to hand it to the folks at Nokia for their ability to read the market. Last week 3 rocked a lot of worlds with its embracing of openness, saying that consumers should have the same experience of the mobile internet as they have on fixed broadband. Of course, that stance could be interpreted in a number of ways, because the fixed broadband experience includes all sorts of frustrations and impediments. Now, a week later to the day, Nokia delivers the goods to ensure that the door remains only halfway open.

Pimp my 3D webcam

In an attempt to keep up to date with new companies and emerging technologies, I subscribe to the Venture Wire alerts, which I have found to be a good source of information. Today's issue carried an article on 3DV Systems getting funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and an Israeli VC, Pitango Venture Capital, and I thought I would share it, if only out of my sense of fascination with what they are doing. It's intriguing to think of the changes that might eventually occur in the ways we interact with devices and applications as a result of a highly accurate 3D webcam. Forget the annoying keystroke commands of the virtual world (and the interesting, but cumbersome attempts to make it more natural), and move as your character should. Add steroids to the lowly production values of your video podcast. There's a lot of other highly non-trivial stuff I can envisage around telemedicine, simulation-based training, hazardous engineering work, personal safety, and obviously some that I'm perhaps less enthusiastic about. Still, I reckon innovation like this is something to be thankful for.

Slinging another award on the mantlepiece

Congratulations to the Sling Media folks, who have been awarded the FT Disruptive Communications Technology award for 2006. It must have been a tough choice for the judges, but they beat back an impressive field, including FON, AVM and Actelis.

Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf?

Apparently the EU, judging from this whopping commitment to R&D in ICT - EUR9bn over six years, making it the single largest component of the research framework program's budget. I'm not saying there's a causal relationship necessarily, but it is interesting to note that the DTI survey of the largest 1,250 companies globally determined that a third of total R&D spend derives from the tech hardware (19.2%), electronics (7.4%), and software/computer services (6.6%) sectors combined, yet only seven of the top 50 R&D spenders were European companies with significant exposure to ICT, and only two (BT and Ericsson) registered as coming up in the top 20 in terms of increases in spending compared to the previous year. It also looks to me as if European companies (in this survey at least) score poorly on R&D-to-patent conversion rates. Maybe the results are skewed because we're talking about just the big companies, but it's also interesting to look at venture deal flow in Europe - average deal size is up, but the deal pipeline looks significantly less active than a year ago.

The trouble with telcos

I really had a great time putting together the 10 Things presentation from last month's Telco 2.0 event, but these things are really only meaningful if they stimulate some thought, discussion, and a basis for moving forward. So I'm really gratified that my mega-uber value reader and cyberfreund Ian Hay, who has a real job within a genuine EuroTelco, has taken the concept as a point of departure for a survey trying to get at something more constructive. I'm still absorbing his post, but one thing that leaps out from the list immediately is that the word "open" appears in four out of ten items on the wish list. I think this could evolve into an industry self-help wiki, if Ian has the energy to run with it.

Shameless self-promotion 3.0

Sadly I won't be able to get back to good old Memphis for the next round of the Net Neutrality slugfest early next year, but I am pleased to have been invited to take part in the Cambridge-MIT Institute event in London on 11th December.

Less power to you

Any feedback on this post would be warmly received.

Identity crisis

A couple of articles in Technology Review caught my eye this morning, because they seem to throw up once again the yawning gap which lies between what telcos are doing and what they could be doing. In this corner, yet another vaguely delusional article about IPTV (Fastweb, yadda-yadda-yadda - a reality check is found towards the end of this piece - and I love the understatement regarding Versatel: "the company may have overestimated the importance of sports"). And in this corner, a new start-up is trying to give consumers the ability to control and monetize aspects of their identity - and hoping to create a more targeted marketing opportunity for advertisers in the process. I know which appeals more to me as a consumer.

15 minutes of fame

Doing a bit of long-overdue cleaning today, I came across this Warhol-esque mosaic of Chris Gent put together back in 2000 by a colleague. Look at the smile on his face, fueled by some beefy M&A and the undying optimism of an all-3G world.

Good riddance Q3

Personally, I found the Q3 reporting season to be really physically taxing, moreso because of the unfortunate trend of companies reporting on the same day, which reached a nadir this time around with Telefonica and Vodafone (the two largest and most complicated) reporting simultaneously. I think there must be some sort of conspiracy at work. Anyway, now that the quarter is behind me, I will be returning to more normal posting frequency here, and I have also resolved to do more on Chaotica.

An awful lot happened in the quarter, and I won't attempt to recap it here. However, my favorite and most memorable moment was in the BT presentation, where Ben Verwaayen alluded to having been invited to visit other European carriers to discuss the process behind the creation of Openreach. Near the end of the webcast, he was asked if the other carriers had sought advice about how they could replicate the Openreach model, to which he replied whimsically something to the effect that not many had exactly shown that sort of enthusiasm.

I found this really intriguing, given comments on the issue from Ken Ducatel last month at Telco 2.0. One comment of his, which I initially refrained from including in my account of the event, was that structural separation might offer a possible remedy to the chronic underperformance of telecom in the capital markets, leading to a spate of demergers/separate listings, more transparency and a greater range of choice for investors. I sense that the carriers will naturally feel threatened by the prospect of change on this scale, but then again, if regulatory shifts and pressures from the institutions converge around this issue (as I believe they will), I assume they will learn to love it.

Weekend reading

UK mega-uber-hyper-sooper-dooper regulator OFCOM has published what looks like a very informative report on the UK consumer experience in communications. Lots of very granular demographic data, as well as interesting findings on consumer awareness and satisfaction levels. Check out the increase in awareness of alternative fixed line suppliers over time (p.53), and in particular look at the comparisons of satisfaction levels between bundled telecom customers and bundled energy customers (pages 65 and 66) - bundling telecom so far seems to show no improvement in satisfaction.

Visual complexity

A Palladium Club mega-uber value reader from South Africa writes in to thank me for pointing to Pandora, and returns the favor by introducing me to liveplasma. Type in a name like "Kevin Bacon" and see if you really can connect him to Charlie Chaplin (alternatively try the Oracle of Bacon search engine). A Google search about liveplasma led me to this amazing site, visualcomplexity. Whoa, baby. Now see if you can get back to what you were doing. Happy Friday!

UPDATE: A Palladium class mega-uber value reader chips in with Musicovery, which is also a great idea with a really interesting UI.

Get slung

While I was trapped on a disrupted London Underground train to my meeting, Disruptive Dean was raving about the new 3 UK X-Series deal with native Skype, Sling Player Mobile, and a bunch of other very cool stuff, and no volume-based pricing in sight (though subscription to Orb or Sling services apparently does carry some additional access fee). Needless to say, I share his enthusiasm - at last a mobile telco which embraces the idea of delivering end-user value through providing abundance and embracing third party services.

"Just like the fixed line internet, all X-Series services will be free at the point of use, subject only to fair usage limits."

I saw a demonstration of the Sling Mobile application at Telco 2.0 last month, and it was extremely impressive. Stuart Collingwood from Sling Media, in that presentation, discussed the Viasat deal and alluded to "a couple" of carrier deals in the pipeline, so now that we have this one, I am curious as to which cellco "gets it" next. (A replay of the webcast, which I missed, is apparently going to be available in about half an hour.)

UPDATE: Even if you don't make it through the entire webcast, you should listen to CFO Frank Sixt's segment.

Consulting today

Today I have been asked to brief a media company about "convergence," or, as I prefer to think of it, chaotica. If you would like the same sort of briefing, contact me here.

UPDATE: The background on this post may be useful, because frankly, it's a bit of a weird one. The company in question is a Japanese media company which has some corporate relationships with Daiwa, I think. Anyway, they asked and I obliged. The audience wasn't necessarily well-acquainted with some of the themes I discussed, so I took along my laptop, plugged it into the projector and after my presentation, fired up some of the applications I had just talked about. We made a Skype video call with young Thomas Anglero in Oslo, started to download a Torrent file, played around with Second Life, etc. This post was made to demonstrate how to post a photo from Flickr! to the blog, update it in Blogger, and publish. The whole exercise elicited smiles of the kind I like to see - kids in a candy store.

Running to stay in place

Mega-uber value readers, I have been buried with some work commitments, but normal blogservice should be restored in a few days. I should be focusing on catching up with bloggables from the company reporting of the past week, but to be honest, Keith has done such a splendid job so far, it would be almost embarrassing for me to pick up the baton at this point. In the meantime, and in no particular order, here is some unfinished business from my "OUT" tray, which may be of interest to some of you:

A Palladium Club mega-uber value reader points me to this amazing site which converts link data from websites into a beautiful graph resembling a molecule diagram of some sort. I couldn't resist running it on this humble bloglet, and I'm amazed to see the results. Wish I had some insight into what each node in the diagram represents (maybe that's included in the upcoming premium version?).

My iPod died recently, and while I consider my next purchase, I have been consoling myself in the office by playing around with Pandora. If you haven't seen it, you should check it out, it's very impressive. Think of it as going around to a friend's house and having them play you some music they think you'd like - some you have heard, some is new and intriguing. And I like the founder Tim Westergren's style, getting out on the road in America, building awareness and also picking up some insight into the local/regional indie scene in each place. I didn't think these sorts of things happened anymore...

Apparently in response to comments I made at VON to the effect that telco video is only worth doing if it is different and relevant to the local market, a mega-uber value reader submits TV Terra, from Terra (Telefonica) in Brazil. My Portugese is not great, but it seems to be a mash-up of in-house content production and user-generated video culled from around the net (including the now-legendary Aleksey "Impossible is Nothing" Vayner), with a YouTube-like interface. Um tubo diferente, perhaps, but Terra's efforts seem to be attracting interest from mainstream advertisers, if I have gotten the gist of this segment. Perhaps telcos are getting the message afterall...

On the carousel

Poor Dr. Ricke may be feeling the sting of a boardroom coup, but elsewhere in EuroTelcoland, it's party time! Vincent Dekker at Trouw in Amsterdam published a blazing piece over the weekend about executive compensation (which he terms a "share carousel") at Liberty Global, whose flagship UPC Netherlands unit is, well, something of an object of derision to some of its customers (and some non-customers).

Meanwhile, UK cable giant NTL/Telewest/Virgin/(ITV?) was fingered by the Observer as being unable to explain what sort of performance targets underlied its Chairman's recent share windfall. I can only assume that it has nothing to do with delivering value to the end user. As a customer I've never had any trouble with NTL, though I think that may be about to change, as we have decided to dump cable in favor of Freeview. Yesterday, when I tried to call the company to ask about the procedure for changing packages (which will necessitate a move from a set-top box broadband modem to a standalone), I discovered to my shock that it would cost me 5p per minute for the pleasure, as NTL seems to have disconnected all geographic equivalents for its various "customer care" lines. Money is not the issue - I just think it's simply an outrage to charge people by the minute because they want to discuss changing their packages - what about people who want to upgrade, i.e., actually spend more money with the company? Madness, yes, but part of the overall character profile, it would seem.

Outward mobility

A Palladium Class mega-uber value reader writes in on this busy Sunday to point me to an article from Spiegel Online which says that a secret board meeting of DT last night has ousted Dr. Ricke in favor of Rene Obermann (like Ricke before him, also the bright young lad atop T-Mobile), with immediate effect. If I'm reading the article correctly, it seems to suggest that there was some serious dissatisfaction with Dr. Ricke's new proposal to transfer 45k employees (35k shared services and technical staff, and 10k call center staff) to a couple of new services units yet to be created (and, I presumed, shit-canned to some foreign buyer within a couple of years). What isn't clear to me is whether the proposal was too radical, or not radical enough.

UPDATE: Well, it's a well-publicized done deal now, apparently with some pretty nasty behind-the-scenes spats and subterfuge.

Sometimes it doesn't pay to be the best

Telenor is the best performer this year among the universe of companies I follow, by a significant margin, but seemingly it is possible to be a bit too successful. A mega-uber value reader points me to the flap over Telenor's CEO Jon Fredrik Baksaas' decision to cash in $2.5m in share options. Hell, the Crooked E boys could have spent that sort of money on a single trip to Nieman Marcus, and Dennis Kozlowski undoubtedly had a shower curtain or two worth more than that. I think it's safe to assume that Barry Diller will not be emigrating to Norway any time soon.

UPDATE: An anonymous mega-uber value reader, who seems to be quite credible, writes in to observe, intriguingly, "Nothing in this situation is as it would seem. There is a very carefully scripted departure scenario for Mr. Baksaas which has been in place since day one. Maybe the added pressure from the government over share options accelerates the timetable a bit, but take every bit of news about this with a large grain of salt."

A day in the life of fiber

There are still a lot of people who play up concerns that fiber builds in dense urban areas are inherently massively disruptive to traffic and normal life. Check out these cool photos from Amsterdam, which seem to convey a slightly less apocalyptic reality - a section of pavement is dug up, fiber buried, and the pavement left clean and ready for restoration, all within a single day.

While you're at it, there are a number of other fiber themed photos in Flickr - it seems like a subject which excites people, imagine that...

Survey 2.0

Do yourself and EuroTelcoland a favor, take some time out today to complete the Telco 2.0 survey.

Berlin slides

Available here, but you can help me conserve my bandwidth allotment by opting for the Torrent version - it also gives you street-cred!

Mission creep

Nothing out of Vodafone yet, but Dutch daily Het Financieele Blagdad is reporting that Vodafone has acquired The Network Factory, a virtual network operator in the broadband space. "Asset-lite", yes, but it shows that M&A is not entirely out of the question, as we saw last month in New Zealand (interesting that no announcement of the deal has been made to Vodafone shareholders...)

Go back to the lobby...

A Dutch Platinum Class mega-uber value reader alerts me to the following post on the site of law firm Houthoff Buruma, which represents, among others, the Amsterdam fiber SPV. This document, dated 19th October, is a letter from the Dutch Housing and Environment Minister to UPC, stating that UPC's request for a prohibition on social housing corporation investment in FTTH would not be granted. UPC had argued that re-investment of social housing corporations' rental charges and service fees in FTTH represented an abuse, given these companies' limited remit to provide social housing, as well as the unfair advantage of access to cheap capital. The H&E Minister counters by stating that under new law, such companies can establish "free subsidiaries," which would be able to invest small amounts of the corporations' capital in venture projects which might be beneficial for both the corporations and the tenants. I think the underlying message here is a strong one: cable protests that housing is housing and nothing more, while the government says that housing is housing plus the greater environment, and part of that might just be an intangible benefit like access to information, which is only achieved through tangible investment.

Got my MoKo w0rKin'

Palladium Club mega-uber value reader Amsterdam Sam points me towards open-source handset in-the-making, "Neo1973," based on the OpenMoKo standard. Check out the interesting coverage here, and the slide show. Interesting that they have named it Neo - after all, he chose to take the red pill and unhook from the false reality of the Matrix. Coincidence, or hidden message?

Doubling up

Looks to me like Telecom Italia is already budgeting for the proceeds of the "unsolicited" bid/bids for TIM Brasil (this must be America Movil, given its balance sheet strength and Telefonica's outstanding issues with Vivo), judging from this article in Trouw, detailing TI subsidiary bbned's more aggressive plans for network deployment in the Dutch market. So far, bbned is the number four player in retail DSL in the Netherlands (number three adjusting for KPN's Tiscali acquisition), and is the network partner in the Amsterdam Glasvezelnet project (as well as a being both network partner and end-to-end service provider on other fiber deployments via its subsidiary Pilmo brand). What comes next, according to the bbned spokesman quoted in the article, is for bbned to expand its FTTH coverage where possible, and elsewhere to piggyback on KPN's fiber deployment to do VDSL collocated in KPN's street cabinets. The two have apparently already agreed on pricing for the "last hundred feet" of copper, as well as collocation space in street cabinets, and are reportedly now negotiating prices for KPN-provided fiber backhaul to interconnection points on bbned's backbone. This is an impressive level of commitment to what is, in contrast to TI's other extraterritorial broadband markets (France, Germany), a relatively small and concentrated market. It clearly raises the spectre of a second wholesale player in access, and will further pressurize the poorly performing Orange to either up its game or get out of town.

Catch-up post from Berlin

Life goes on outside the Berlin ICC venue, even if what is going on inside isn't necessarily as exciting as I have found it in the past. Here's a few interesting items, by way of catching up.

Back in the UK, my cyberfreund Keith has been on a tear, revealing some interesting ingredients in Carphone Warehouse's broadband "roll-out" (single 100Mbps circuits from the exchanges? - no wonder he's getting such dismal throughput). He also has a nice piece on Sky, which matches many of my own views, which I was unable to write up due to work commitments. In particular, I agree the broadband roll-out contrast with Carphone Warehouse is pretty stark, much smaller in scope, but better in quality, with 88% unbundled - this is the difference between poorly-resourced land-grab effort and incremental service targeted at an existing adjacent user base. (Point of clarification - the numbers reported by Sky do not include the legacy Easynet/UK Online subs.)

A Palladium Club mega-uber value reader alerts me to an important announcement coming out of the Broadband Cities conference in Stockholm tomorrow. INEC is to announce an international declaration on open networks, including the following statement:

"Communities deserve to have open, high bandwidth infrastructures which are operator-neutral and able to satisfy current demand as well as meet the requirements of the future in terms of both the quantity and quality of information exchange."

Signatories to the declaration include: the municipality of Seltjarnarnes, Iceland; City of Stockholm; City of Amsterdam;, the mayor of one city involved in the UTOPIA project; Multimedia Super Corridor of Malaysia; PortoDigital of Brazil, and the City of Almere, the Netherlands. The Declaration has also been formally endorsed by the Dutch foundation 'Stedenlink' (CityLink) – directly representing 13 Dutch cities, among them: Rotterdam, The Hague, Arnhem, Enschedé and Eindhoven.

I think this is both very exciting and very significant news for anyone tracking the mounting tension between the "broadband market" and broadband as a lever of public policy. Here we have both highly-penetrated broadband markets in affluent countries, as well as initiatives in "emerging" economies, joining hands to say that what they're getting today from the market will not deliver the connectivity essential for where they hope to go in future. I think this is the broadband equivalent of "the shot heard round the world."

Here in Berlin, talking about the move from command and control culture to openness (at least that's what I was talking about), we today have another example from Adobe, which has announced the open-sourcing of its Flash scripting engine into a Mozilla project called Tamarin. This is massive.

Tomorrow belongs to T

UPDATE: I think I might have confused some people - this is tongue in cheek, a pun on the song title, "Tomorrow belongs to me," from Cabaret, which was set in Berlin, where I am now.

Found in the clouds

Just received a press release about a new visual "find engine" from Quintura. Enter a search query and it produces a relevant tag-cloud, with more standard text-based results below. One really supercool thing is that if you move your cursor over results in the tag-cloud and hover for a couple of seconds, you will see the associated tags change, as well as the textual results below, without having to do any clicking. The same principle applies for the image search function. Russian innovation at its very mega-bolshoi best.

Call for views/data

I am in the early stages of collaborating on a research project with a very smart, but currently anonymous person. One bit of information would be of tremendous value to us, and as I know that a high proportion of this blog's readership derives from the industry itself, I would like to appeal for some assistance. The question is:

What part of your cash cost base relates directly to what we might term the service plane? Forget about call centers, billing, sales and marketing, etc. What proportion of your cash cost base do you estimate directly relates to allowing customers to connect and communicate?

Any assistance would, of course, be treated confidentially and very highly appreciated. However, we'd like, if possible, to focus on informed opinions or highly educated guesses rather than speculation.

Many thanks!

Breathing room

A mega-uber value reader responded to my post on the carbon footprint of the conference industry by pointing me to this amazing site, Breathing Earth.

Telling it like it is

Excellent presentation from the representative of Delft University, which seems to have shaken the Regulators up a bit. He's a P2P research and development person, so many of his views are probably pretty unpalatable to people with a conventional view of the "telecom industry." His straw poll of the audience seemed to determine that only two people in the room were familiar with the concept "mash-up." Oh dear, let's get on up that learning curve. My favorite observation was that the current leader in HDTV programming is, of course, P2P networks. Check out this graph from the excellent Plusnet customer information site, which gives a clear illustration, if one were needed.

Webcast reminder

Just a reminder not to miss the Future of Telecoms Regulation webcast, which should start in 20 minutes here.

Expanding ecosystem

I'm pleased to report that the universe of European telecom blogs seems to be expanding rapidly. Today I stumbled across Vienna Calling!

Oslo take-down

My cyberfreund Keith McMahon has some interesting thoughts on Telenor, which he presents here. I hope the team at SeekingAlpha is reading this, because it's right up your street, and once again demonstrates how the opinions of the frank, uninhibited and well-informed blogger can potentially put the brokers on the back foot. Only three out of 30 brokers have negative ratings on Telenor (I am one of them), and my suspicion is that the sell-side is glad to have a rare bit of strong performance from a sector which has been out of favor for years, and is milking it for all it's worth. True, Keith is not going head to head with the brokers - he doesn't have forecasts and doesn't spend two pages talking about scintillating topics like working capital or cash tax - but he does highlight some risk factors which are worthy of attention, especially after such a strong run this year. In particular I like the risk score he derives by weighting group revenue contribution by country according to the corruption ratings issued by Transparency International - then again, I would like it, as I am the "anonymous" collaborator he alludes to.

Scaaaary

Happy Halloween. Suitably scary numbers from KPN's consumer fixed line division today: annualized line loss of 23.5% in Q3, a level nearly four times that of Q3 2005, with EBITDA margin down four percentage points from this time last year. A full 58% of net adds on DSL in the quarter were on Direct ADSL, i.e., the raw connectivity product (H1 was 45%). Hats off to KPN for giving the people what they want.

Three's company, five's a crowd

The ever-excellent Guy Kewney has a great post (read it before someone forces him to take it down), relating gossip that 3 UK has had some German visitors at its offices of late.

Small can be beautiful too

One of the many things I love about this whole decentralized media meltdown phenomenon is that it doesn't matter how specialized your focus, you can have a voice and find the audience relevant to you. The latest example is this excellent blog devoted to Latvian telecom. If you're into it, then here is the definitive site for you. Well done, Juris!

Expanding my carbon footprint

What is the carbon footprint of the global conference industry? It's probably about time we started thinking about it. I assume it must be horrendous, but I've been cycling to work religiously for the past 15 months, so hopefully that will go some way towards offsetting the damage I will do in flying to Berlin to appear once again during the pre-lunchtime comic relief spot at VON. Maybe it's time for the telecom conference industry to harness some of the productivity tools it has been touting for so long and go virtual?

R&D and value added 2006

The UK's Department of Trade and Industry has today published its update on R&D and value added by UK companies, which also includes a global league table. Interesting reading for the industry, methinks.

The winter of our discontent

Well, it's Monday, I turned 39 again today, I have just been given a pay rise so derisory that it will cost more in administrative costs than the actual value of the extra cash they're giving me (who ever said that a high ranking, unusual ideas and interesting CV should matter to a bureaucracy which focuses on page count?), and it looks like rain. Still, I guess it could be worse. I could be an O2 customer, like Mark Kubrick (any relation, I wonder?), who seems to be having a hell of a time.

UPDATE: When I see this, I think there must be spambots at work, or the system is being gamed in some other way. We don't have 798 employees in London.