Convergence Conversation Info 21st November 2008

The Weekly Roundup: Friday 21st November

Over the last 5 days we’ve seen a fantastic mix of all things under the convergence umbrella. This week's newsletter pays specific homage to those blogs surrounding the NGA debate. From the ongoing debates surrounding intelligent pipes, to the declaration of universal broadband in the UK, and on into questions of the broadband frontier itself.

Read on to be informed, stimulated, agree and disagree with the top blogs on Convergence Conversations this week!

UK Universal Broadband - declared on Nov 5th

by mike kiely of London

The UK newish Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting, Lord Carter of Barnes in his opening speech to the Lords on the 5th of November, made four wishes, 1)full digital television service available on multiple platforms, 2) a universally available Broadband system competitively priced with meaningful speeds, 3) a truly national digital radio network, and 4) a mobile/wireless industry that will do for video what it has already done for voice.This is historic, More...

Intelligent pipes

by Benoît FELTEN of London

Back in January last year, Yankee Group CEO Emily Green and I had a discussion about Net Neutrality. One of the aspects of the discussion that I remember from back then was how framing the semantic context of a debate affects the debate itself. Emily's example was "pro-life", a superb concept branding, because it's really hard for opponents to say they're "anti-life". But "pro-choice" is a very clever response because it places the devate on a different level and it avoids going into the anti- territory. More...

Ring! Ring! Hot News, 17th November 2008

by Simon Torrance of STL partners

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; More...

Who is actually at the broadband frontier?

by Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion

There was a great story in the paper that I was reading on the train a few days ago. Not the one about the couple arrested for having sex on a train into Euston. The typically English commuters ignored them and carried on reading their papers or working on their laptops (honestly, in this day and age -- didn't any of them have cameraphones?). The newspaper I saw rather quaintly reported that the woman involved was "from Essex".

No, not that one, the one about the couple getting divorced because a virtual private detective in Second Life caught the husband's avatar fondling a call girl's avatar. More...