11 May 2012
Posted in News Analysis

Telefonica has responded to the European Parliament's approval of new roaming legislation by launching a pan-EU data roaming tariff that it says is many times cheaper than the EU's mandated rate.

10 May 2012
Posted in News Analysis

Sales growing but WiFi-cellular integration to bring challengers into market

Infonetics Research has forecast carrier WiFi sales will "explode" to $2.1 billion by 2016, driven by the increased operator need to complement mobile data services and overcome spectrum challenges.

The research company said that global revenue in 2011 for what it terms "carrier WiFi equipment" grew 35% from 2010, and forecast that sales would continue to grow in "high double digits" to at least 2016.

10 May 2012
Posted in News Analysis

Nokia has dropped out of a three way partnership to bring free WiFi to London, using telephone boxes as sites for WLAN access points.

Last November, Nokia was one of three companies testing the use of the phone boxes to provide free, ad-sponsored, WiFi. The other two companies were Spectrum Interactive, which owns the phone boxes, and Selective Media, which is providing the location-based advertising platform.

10 May 2012
Posted in News Analysis

Deutsche Telekom has reported that service revenues in its mobile division "did not perform satisfactorily" in the first quarter of 2012, dropping 1.8%. The carrier also lost 107,000 mobile contract customers in the quarter. As with most if its major competitors, the operator did report strong growth in mobile data usage and sales - with mobile data revenues increasing by 20%.

In Europe, 57% of all devices sold in the first three months of the current year were smartphones. DT said this was "a major factor" in an 11% increase in mobile data rates in Europe. More than half of this growth originated in the Netherlands and Austria.

08 May 2012
Posted in News Analysis

DragonWave has claimed it is first to market with a packet microwave product that provides modulation modes of up to 2048 QAM.

At Mobile World Congress NEC announced that it would have a 2048 QAM product in its iPASOLINK range later in 2012, but DragonWave appears confident it has beaten the Japanese vendor to the punch, announcing that its 2048 QAM product is available. Ceragon has a commercially available 1024 QAM product.

So what? Well, microwave vendors are engaged in a modulation rate war because higher modulation rates on microwave links offer high capacities from the same available bandwidth. Theoretically 2048 rates would devlier around 40% (DragonWave says 37%) more capacity than current 256QAM solutions.

04 May 2012
Posted in Blog

With senior executives at Orange known not to be keen on the Everything Everywhere brand name (funny, no-one seems to ever hear from the T-Mobile side of the fence on this pressing issue), it's perhaps not surprising that there still seems to be an element of clunkiness in attempts to take advantage of the dual properties of T-Mobile and Orange.

To be fair combining the network, and offering users access to "both" networks for the price of one, went well and users definitely liked it. But something still seems a bit wrong about an offer such as this. Instead of offering broadband "from our friends at Orange", both Orange and T-Mobile could be offering "Everything Everywhere/insert new brandname" broadband.