Consolidation has arrived in Austria, where Hutchison Austria announced it will buy Orange Austria and then sell a bit of it on to Telekom Austria. Is that too many Austria’s?

Once Hutch has got its hands on Orange, Telekom Austria will then pay Hutch EUR 390 million for Orange’s YESSSS! brand and network, including spectrum and its network infrastructure, as well as intellectual property rights to the ONE brand.

Everything needs regulatory approval, but if it goes through we will see the 740,000 subscribers on Orange’s YESSS! brand port over to Telekom Austria, as well as the annual €56 million revenues they generate.

The acquisition will leave 3 Austria holding the rest of the business, for which it is paying a net €900 million. The deal combines the number three and four players, although the group would stay in third place behind mobilkom and T-Mobile Austria.

In this excellent blog, Informa analyst Thomas Wehmeier asks if 3’s role as consolidator, rather than consolidatee, is something we might see repeated elsewhere in Europe where it trails in fourth in a four player market. He points out that its market share in Austria would be significantly more than in any of its other markets, and asks if the deal places its holdings in the likes of the UK and Italy under further pressure. 

Market analysts also said that the deal is a statement of Hutchison’s commitment to the Austrian market. It’s an interesting reversal for 3 to act as the consolidating force, but it may not be one Hutch can afford to repeat in other markets. It also occurred to me, and it’s just a thought, that if there is a buyer waiting off-stage, in the wings, then could it be that Hutch is carrying our some consolidation and cost-cutting, prior to a further sale on to a hidden entity, perhaps with other operating units as part of the deal.

Elsewhere this week there was some deep techie news, actually from last December but only announced now, for whatever reason, that Ericsson had achieved a mid-call handover from an LTE network to a 3G network using a single radio. This is a slightly esoteric point for most people, but essentially the SRVCC (Single Radio Voice Call Continuity) approach is another tool in the box for LTE operators that want to be able to support IP voice services in LTE and also to allow users to “roam” or handover onto 3G networks mid-call. That means of course that a call doesn’t drop if a user strolls out of network, but also that a user can actually benefit from IP voice functionality when they are in LTE coverage. At the moment, voice calls to LTE phones are not carried over the LTE network, as the phone is bumped back to the 2G or 3G network for voice or SMS.

Sticking with voice for the time being, there was a nugget from Swisscom that it has become the latest operator to offer HD Voice over its UMTS network. “Users will not be charged for this service” the operator said. Another indication that HD Voice is becoming a standard “value add” element for operators.

Something that many hope will become standard for operators is RCS-e or RCS-type services. Although there are no further details, it emerged in the Spanish press this week that the Spanish operators’ RCS-e service, due to be launched in the first half of this year, will be called Joyn. If I were them, I’d be busting a gut to have something available, by whatever means possible, by Mobile World Congress, but they may not make it.

Speaking of the MWC behemoth, word reaches us that the event is set for record attendance. Registrations are way up on last year, where 60,000 souls were harvested by the GSMA. We were also told that the GSMA is expecting 12,000 developers to attend, which seems an astonishing percentage of its total attendance. Google has booked more space. All exhibition space is sold out, with 1,400 companies being represented in one way or another across 70,000 square metres.  Nokia has returned. It looks set to be a proper biggie. Let, er, battle commence.

Keith Dyer
Editor
Mobile Europe

Three thousand people in a big room, and in several smaller ones, for four weeks — talking about harmonised spectrum allocation? That sounds like a party not to miss, for sure. But horrendous though the thought may be to contemplate, that is what has been occurring this week, and what will continue for the next three weeks, at the World Radiocommunications Conference in Geneva, where the ITU’s members are endeavouring to reach agreement on regulations determining spectrum usage.

Satisfying the demands of competing governments is not easy, but this is an important conference to track outcomes from, as one of the issues up for grabs is the allocation of additional spectrum for mobile broadband services from 2020.

We spoke to both the head of the RadioCommunications Bureau and the GSMA’s spectrum activity, to try and find out exactly what is at stake for the mobile industry over the next three weeks. In short, it seems that it is a done deal that the next big ITU spectrum conference, held in 2015, will decide what spectrum will be allocated to mobile broadband services, but the discussions and negotiations begin now. So when it comes to 2020, and operators are whinging about lack of spectrum (or a glut??) think back to this day, and those 3k people in a room in Geneva, determining our 5G future.

M&A activity continues apace in the industry. GigaOM reported this week, although nobody has been able to verify it, that Ericsson has decided to acquire small cell and WiFi vendor BelAir Networks. That would give Ericsson a public access (read, carrier-controlled) WiFi capability. Although neither company is willing to comment, industry watchers looking to put two and two together and come up with five may note the recent arrival at BelAir of Ronny Haraldsik as CMO. Ronny was at Flarion before it was sold to Qualcomm, and also at Shasta Networks and Bay Networks, both sold to Nortel. Probably means nothing, but worth nothing in a Firday afternoon conspiracy theory sort of a way, perhaps.

There was also a confirmed, but smaller value, acquisition in the OSS/BSS space, with Comptel adding the interesting customer analytics company Xtract. With the major NEPs all rumoured to be lining up CEM launches (and NSN already well down that road), it’s interesting to see that the OSS vendors are still adding CEM smarts to their portfolios. Somewhere in the network/policy/OSS/BSS space there will be clarity around CEM. Comptel’s “event-analysis-action” vision may be lacking the “proactive, predictive” element of some CEM pitches, but it makes sense, especially if integrated with real time charging capability.

Another interesting idea in a different, although related, area came from Stream Communications, which is providing dedicated 3G SIMs to tablet users with the promise of faster service. Details on this from Stream were sketchy, but essentially the company is using its M2M network capability to shuttle iPad and tablet traffic about. Whether this means that its M2M network is underutilised by  actual M2M traffic is another matter. But it is an interesting idea to be able to offer prioritised, speedy service to end users on an individual basis, without entering the end-to-end, QoS-enabled, policy driven, customer centric CEM world as discussed in the paragraph above. Hard to see it scaling massively, though, but still a worthwhile enterprise play.

And finally… a new(ish) approach to SIM activiation
If you bought a SIM, would you want to be able to plug it in to your phone and then have it launch a small app that lets your phone communicate with you? It could ask you what number you would prefer, and perhaps ask you to pay a small amount for that number. Would you like to be able to even choose your tariff at that point?

This is a capability that Evolving Systems can offer to operators. At the moment, when operators push SIMs out into the market, to their own shops, and to kiosks, or stuck free SIMs on the front of magazines etc they need to have already provisioned those SIMs on their network.

That means pre-allocating space in their number ranges, and on their switches, for great bunches of SIMs that may never be activated, and may never therefore make them any money. But Evolving Systems lets operators provision SIMs at the point of activation. What it requires is an applet to be pre-loaded on the SIM, so the SIM manufacturers need to be involved before they deliver the “dynamic” SIMs to the operator. The operator obviously also needs to invest in a chunk of software from Evolving Systems.

Thad Dupper, CEO of Evolving Systems, said to me this week that operators could achieve between three and ten times return on their investment within 18 months to three years, by saving on switch and number range space, and also by generating new revenues by interacting with consumers when they activate the SIMs. By asking for user details, the dynamic SIM approach also drives user registrations –  particularly apposite in markets with high numbers of prepaid users, he added.

You can look up Evolving Systems here.

Keith Dyer
Editor
Mobile Europe