Convergence Conversation

[Dave Birch] I'm not the only one who wonders if political meddling in IT isn't a major cause of chaos and delay in the public sector.

Certainly when it comes to IT it's easier to think of the public sector as a series of small businesses - departments, quangos, NGOs, NHS trusts, police forces - that occasionally work together but more often work against each other, cynics would say.

[From Editor's Blog: Time to take the politicians out of technology? - Public Sector - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com]

But there's a fundamental error in that perspective. More...

The announcement yesterday that Scotland intend to aggregate the government and public sector demands for electricity to get better value for public money should start to raise questions about why governments and public sector across England and the UK are not doing exactly the same for bandwidth. And not just for public sector use.

It has long been an issue, particularly since the kerfuffle about Learning Stream contracts etc, that public sector uses public money to purchase access services eg to the internet, and provide connectivity to councils, schools (in the case of the Learning Stream contracts) and so on, but is unable to use/share the spare capacity on those networks to connect the local communities. More...

Last week saw the publication of what has become a bit of a bible in the TMT sector – Ofcom’s Communications Market Report for 2008.

Perhaps some of you who are more diligent than me and have worked through the 2inch thick report by now, may have more detailed views, which I would certainly be interested in hearing.

However, even the headline themes and stats make for initial interesting reading.

Working for the Broadband Stakeholder Group, it is no surprise that my attention immediately went to observations about the development of the broadband market.

There are no great surprises in here. More...

The next Telco 2.0 event (4-5 November, London) is looking extremely strong. A big thank you to the sponsors and partners, and to the senior industry speakers (presenters and panellists) who are participating. The latter includes:

Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com; Matt Bross, Group CTO, BT (awaiting final confirmation); Will Hodgman, EVP, ComScore; MungKi Woo, VP Payments and Contactless, France Telecom; Timo Soiminem, CEO, Habbo Hotel; Ben McOwen Wilson, COO, ITV ; Jonathan Dann, Executive Director, JP Morgan; Steve Zimba, Managing Director Global Telecoms Business, Microsoft; Will Page, Chief Economist, MCPS-PRS Alliance; Joachim Horn, CTO, T-Mobile International ; Helmut Leopold, Managing Director Platforms, Telekom Austria ; Andrew Bud, Chairman, Mobile Entertainment Forum ; Thomas Howe, CEO, Thomas Howe Company; Cenk Serdar, Chief VAS Officer, Turkcell ; Pieter Knook, Director of Internet Services, Vodafone Group . More...

After the disappointing (read: irritating as hell!) DBERR comments at the BSG conference that there was no indication that UK businesses require more bandwidth, this CMA report about business bandwidth requirements makes interesting reading!

Although many of the members are large corporates, which shows in the figures using fibre for comms currently, the number who are only able to get under 2Mbps is telling, as are the figures about latent demand within those surveyed. As the Telco 2.0 report from the BSG conference points out, there is currently no SOHO FTTH access yet in the UK, and yet there are hundreds of thousands of small businesses. More...

My school days were not school days without a BIC® pen. The story of the most famous pen in Europe started in 1945 when Marcel Bich and Edward Buffard established BIC®. After a long history of success in stationary, the yellow little man carrying a pen, the company logo, is also on the mobile phones. On the 11^th of July 2008, BIC® and Orange France launched the BIC® Phone, “the simple cell phone that is 100% ready to go”. The picture below shows how the BIC® phone looks like.

 

                           Source: More...

In Today’s Issue: Emergency! Emergency! Paging Dr. Q!; Sprint reduces Nextel value to zero, then hopes to sell it for nonzero price; Sprint exec’s unusual $1m bonus; DTAG’s minor success; Moto reacts, joins a wave of LiMo gadget innovation; Apple zaps subversives; TD-SCDMA still doesn’t work, Huawei doesn’t want it; Chinese export industries perhaps not all they’re cracked up to be; re-re-wind to the first iPhone; Stingy download caps; AOL doom; new Nokia e-mail clients

We told you Qualcomm was responding skilfully to the end of its patent monopoly years. More...

Virgin Media's statement today that it could be offering broadband speeds of 200Mbps by 2012 certainly puts the cats amongst the pidgeons in the ever noisier debate surrounding next generation broadband.

 

Last month, BT announced that it would invest £1.5bn to bring next generation broadband to 10 million homes by 2012.  The speeds that would be available were quoted in BT's release as 40Mbps to 60 Mbps for those homes serviced by a Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) deployment.  Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) could, it said, offer speeds up to 100Mbps. More...

The Internet has become life-wallpaper. New methods of staying connected are being developed to a point where the world wide web is not so much at our fingertips but seemingly behind our very eyelids. In developing countries, however, connectivity has remained an exclusive privilege. For those in rural areas whose governments do not have a pro-poor ICT policy, there is no access to the expensive technology required to connect to the Internet. This, combined with language barriers, lack of technological understanding, and the fact that most of the information on the ‘net would seem completely out of context, ensures that these people remain steadfastly on the outskirts of the global community. More...

Just a couple of articles that have caught my eye in the last few days. Firstly a nub from The Economist detailing how China has overtaken the US in having the greatest number of people online in the world: 253 million according to Neilsen research, standing imperiously above the US's 223 million people. The growth in China's internet users has been rapid—91m people have come online in the past year alone. And with a population of some 1.3 billion, there will be plenty more to come. Here's the graph from the paper.:

And from The Guardian comes this 'Google has launched a music service in China offering users free track downloads, funded by advertising to be split between the music industry and downloading site Top100.cn, Google said: More...

In Today’s Issue: Moto splits again, makes actual money; CDMA - the edge of darkness; Nortel loses customer, 15% off shares, gains WiMAX obsession, 13% back on shares; most pointless network tech announcement?; the LTE voice problem; FCC KOs TCP RST DPI; good news shock at FT, NTT; Indian WiMAX speccy shocker; IKEA is a mobile operator; BT shareholders panic; free N810s

We’ve been following the crisis at Motorola for some time. The latest reorganisation is here. As well as selling off the failing handset division, they’re now planning to split up the rump of the firm into several chunks. More...