Open the garden gate. A little.
By Keith Dyer at 3GSM, Barcelona.
Yesterday it was Nokia Siemens Networks, today it was Alcatel Lucent’s turn to outline how it has structured its combined product portfolio and how it plans to present itself to the markets.
Anyone who read yesterday’s report will not be surprised to learn that the emphasis was on convergence, multi access support and IP everywhere. There was even some of the same language, with head of convergence business unit Marc Rouanne saying that the company had no “religion” when it came to which access technology to support.
Rouanne said that the company has identified three areas to support amongst its customers, in service transformation, networks transformation and business transformation. It would support service transformation with its IMS products, its subscriber data management and its payment technologies. Networks would be transformed with IP routing, NGN networking and multiple wireless and broadband access technology support. The whole would be stitched together with control systems that are service aware and network aware, that can give quality of service dependent on what users are using.
Mary Chan, who is heading up the radio access business, outlined the product portfolio. To a point. There will be a “renovated” GSM portfolio, aimed at low cost emerging markets. There is now a rationalized W-CDMA portfolio, with a Femto Base Station Router and a Macro Remote Radio head cell solutions already announced. WiMax, LTE, W-CDMA, everything, is going to be integrated into one product, Chan said, . The three companies are each contributing, with smart antenna MIMO technology, OFDMA knowledge, and IP skills.
Chan said that the company was now winning contracts it wouldn’t have won before without the tripartite union of Alcatel, Lucent and Nortel’s wireless knowledge. One example was a femto cell announcement with SoftBank in Japan.
We also had what is now the third claim to be “number one” in IMS. As Rouanne claimed 20 IMS service contracts, and Nokia and Ericsson (who count softswitch deals as IMS sales) said they each had north of 100 contracts, it’s hard to make sense of this any more. IMS contracts numbers are the new peak data rates, it seems.
Elsewhere it was the turn of the operators. Vodafone announced deals with Microsoft and Yahoo to support their instant messaging communities within the Vodafone Live portal, and vice versa. Now, this is not the Personal Instant Messaging initiative launched last year by the GSMA. That was about network centric, operator centric communities of IM users using an operator service and interconnecting to others. These services are about a tightly integrated product between the PC and mobile, for these two communities. So that’s where Vodafone is starting and it may, it says, add new providers as time goes by.
There was not much on pricing though. The operator would not commit to flat rate data, or a bundle, or anything at all on pricing. Our hunch would be, for European markets, for a basic flat fee, and then a per service subscription on top of that.
It may look like a walled garden, but it’s not, the operator insisted. Vodafone wants to integrate certain applications with its live! site – so it can ensure a decent user experience, it says. The live! portal will become more a jumping off start page, the operator said.
T-Mobile’s Hamid Akhavan said he wanted to see net centric, thin client or browser based applications made available, harnessing the Web2.0 boom. The company wants to extend its Web’n’Walk theme so users are truly getting the mobile internet experience.
So what does that mean? Well, T-Mobile also said it would launch a mobile IM service this year. Again, they couldn’t help on pricing, nor did they even say which communities they would support, if any. That’s all to come, it seems. Both Vodafone and T-Mobile insisted that mobile IM in no way threatens SMS revenues.
Outside of messaging T-Mobile also said it would be taking social networking very seriously. Here it will be building some tariffs and products that allow people to communicate with their closest group of friends, building on its US MyFaves product. But with Vodafone having announced partnerships with YouTube and MySpace, they’re not alone there. Although it did demonstrate the difference of approach.
It would also be launching a push email client for the mass market, it said. Blackberry had done well, with 1.5 million T-Mobile Blackberry users. But it’s an enterprise product and that’s where the mass market model comes in.
Finally, T-Mobile launched its Ameo, an HTC-manufactured next gen XDA. It looked massive to us. That’s massive as in very big. Not sure when an XDA becomes a notebook, but this must be about it.