Convergence Conversation

In Today’s Issue: Fibre from the home, says David Isenberg; DTAG humbled over VDSL rollout; Nortel reorgs yet again, keeps fibre unit; Telephony Online covers the backstabbing in real time; regional separatists rock the Telco USSR; cuts at Vodafone and BT, profits down at Telefonica; BT Vision gets ITV content; drive your Sky+ box from your iPhone; Mobilkom deploys femtocells; Hulu vs YouTube == sausage vs rose?; more MediaFLO; Qualcomm-powered netbooks will eat our cities; the standards wars are over; first GSM/WiMAX gadget; the emerging Adobe/ARM/Qualcomm mobile OS; app stores, competitive arena of tomorrow; O2 UK, T-Mobile USA fire up dev ecosystems; Facebook gets OTT messaging; Hutch adapts; Bubley the revolutionary! The first thing we do, let’s kill all the vendors…

AT&T alumnus David Isenberg has an idea; if FTTH (fibre to the home) is difficult, then what about fibre from the home, with homeowners, deve More...

We are currently analysing the huge amount of material generated by the participants at the 5th Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm last week - both qualitative and quantitative and captured by our ‘Mindshare’ method. We will share all of this with the participants next week, and highlights of it with readers of this blog over the next few weeks.

But in the meantime, below are the results of two important votes with the 250 senior execs at the event which demonstrate the growth in the perceived relative importance of the ‘two-sided’ telecoms business model versus the existing telecoms business model. More...

Last week the fifth Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm continued its theme of business model innovation at the intersection of telecoms, media and technology by welcoming back Will Page, Chief Economist at the MCPS PRS Alliance, a copyright collection society that represents over 50,000 songwriters and 5,000 publishers.

Following a teaser on this blog a fortnight ago, Will took the opportunity to present, exclusively to Telco 2.0, new research - based on an unprecedented analysis of digital music sales data gathered over a year - that opens to question the recieved wisdom around the ‘Long Tail’ theory, and helps to re-define what it actually means and for whom. More...

At our most recent Telco 2.0 brainstorm, the second session concentrated on the business opportunity in the core voice and messaging business. Here we review the key messages, and explore some of the future business model scenarios.

The timing of this discussion is rather apposite. Despite our belief in Vodafone’s long-term strength, they have just announced that their core voice business has stagnated:

The performance of the company’s European operations suffered from the tough economic climate with margins decreasing from 38.2% to 36.2% on revenues that were down 1.1% on an organic basis.

One of Telco 2.0’s key associates in the ‘Content Distribution’ space is Alan Patrick from Broadsight (see his excellent blog). He’s been working with us on a new report on Future Business Models for Online Video Distribution, which will be published later this month. Alan presented some of this analysis at the Telco 2.0 event last week. We asked him to sum up his thoughts:

Over the last two months we’ve created a hypothesis on how the online video market may evolve - based on desk research, interviews, online questionnaires, a workshop with the avant garde new media users at the Tuttle Club and a “Wisdom of Crowds” session at the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm last week. More...

The Telco 2.0 team looks at operator results through a different lens to most analysts. Rather than focusing on the minutiae of data trends, we look for hints of changes in corporate direction and the pursuit of, or potential of pursuing, more sustainable growth strategies based around a ‘two sided’ business model.

It was with this perspective that we listened in on the Vodafone 2008 half year results call. Despite being categorized by some on call as being a “large, cumbersome beast”, the Telco 2.0 team can see a possibility of Vodafone emerging as the Telco 2.0 poster child, just as it”s been the Telco 1.0 star. More...

We like it when we manage to stimulate innovative new product ideas. Here’s one from Jeremy Penston, previously a consultant and now, thanks to a convergence of stimuli at a previous Telco 2.0 event, a consumer electronics entrepreneur. Here Jeremy describes his product, which he demo’d to as many people as he could at the 5th Telco 2.0 Exec Brainstorm last week in London:

I would like to thank the Telco 2.0 team for the opportunity to write this post. Telco 2.0 has been the source of a huge amount of insight and inspiration for me as we have developed the product that I’ll describe in this article. More...

In Today’s Issue: Your churning handset market; Apple beats RIM into third; horrible quarter in the Telco USSR; astonishingly trivial jailbreak for Gphones; iPhone emergency call only function lets you call any number; AT&T’s iPhone-as-router; cap watch; MobileMe sporked; some kind of election in US spikes SMS service; CEP is your new favourite TLA; Virgin Media struggles, Iliad soars; Rio gets really fast Internet service; Orange cans IPTV; DTAG feeling better now; Turkcell stars at Telco 2.0, boosts profits 50%; 900MHz 3G in Finland; Vodacom = Vodafone Africa; Nortel MetroEthernet sale off; C&W split forever delayed due to unexpected good news; YouTube eats the world

The handset market is churning frantically, as Samsung unexpectedly races into the lead in the US and elsewhere. More...

The opportunities and pitfalls of the telcos’ vast stash of CDRs (Call Detail Records) and phone bills have been a top theme here at the "Telco 2.0 event":http://www.telco2.net/event. Last year, you may remember, we said on this blog that in the future, so many new applications will need contextual data to function that we’ll need to think of how subscribers will take their data shadow with them when they churn. It looks like this is going to be more important than ever.

Paul Magelli, head of subscriber data management at Nokia Siemens Networks, just gave a presentation in which he argues telecoms needs to invest in understanding customers in the same way it invested in monitoring and instrumenting networks in the last 10 years; we’re going from a “network driven world” to an “information driven world”. More...

We’re often noticeably keen on BT; but we’re not always right. This week, it happened. BT issued a profit warning combined with the message that it might have to chip in more cash to its pension scheme; the shares duly tanked. The hit to profits came at the company’s growth centre, BT Global Services, as its enterprise clients cut back on their IT spending. Perhaps, however, that’s a good problem to have; at least compared to those telcos whose core telecoms business is spiralling rapidly downwards.

But it can’t have helped that France Telecom announced numbers this week that were entirely satisfactory, with mobile broadband helping to compensate the steady decline of the fixed voice business. More...