2005/06/25

C&W Seeking Energis Takeover?

C&W Seeking Energis Takeover?

Now this may make sense. Energis must be suffering badly as Wanadoo move more and more infrastructure away from them. They've already been through administration and Fidelity their new owners could do a quick deal and get rid of them.

C&W can probably afford a cash buy-out and would gain some network (but might migrate some of Energis' network on to C&W's). It would give C&W a better footprint and take another competitor off the radar.

2005/06/22

Cisco tries to pop the WiMax bubble - vnunet.com

Cisco tries to pop the WiMax bubble - vnunet.com

Another blow to WiMAX? Cisco's potentially popping the WiMAX bubble.

Though they support it, they're not investing in any radio hardware.

Undoubtably WiMAX will be used in certain areas (it could support rural broadband), but it's going to be a rocky road.

UK Telcos "you want to buy something?"

Yesterday I attended a meeting with a company and a large UK telco and was amazed.

The company was a specialist wireless provider who have rolled out several hundred hotspots. Large telco sends the account manager and a "techie". All sounds fine, but after introductions the techie launches into diatribe about WiFi and Wireless technologies, grandmother and sucking eggs came to mind.

After a bit of clarification (as in "thanks, but I think we know about wireless, what we want to know about is if you can offer connectivity options"), the techie did seem to get part of the picture. The account manager didn't.

Next stage - pricing? Just indicative ... the response was "you want pricing, that will involve work, without a commitment I'm not prepared to do that". It was almost as if they didn't want to sell anything ...

No wonder the telecoms industry is in the state it is, very sad.

2005/06/20

France Telecom tipped for Cable & Wireless takeover - ZDNet UK News

France Telecom tipped for Cable & Wireless takeover - ZDNet UK News

Is this just the rumour factory on overdrive? C&W are a big organisation and integrating it with FT just to get Bulldog seems a bit of an overkill. Bulldog are one of the local loop unbundlers (LLU) in the UK and C&W paid £18m for them.

FT probably could pay the £4bn, but would they want to? C&W have a large legacy network, they do terminate lots of call minutes for various CPS operators but C&W have a reputation similar to BT i.e. a large telco that's a bit of a monolith.

FT already own Wanadoo (the ISP) and Orange (the mobile phone comany) and Wanadoo is migrating off Energis' network on to Orange's. Do FT want another huge network and company to run in the UK.

They could of course have plans to operate a rival network to beat BT's 21CN which could be an interesting move.

Sony miffed at PSP porn

Sony miffed at PSP porn

As noted before the PSP is the prefect mobile media player. Porn on it is inevitable, though watching porn on the train home from work might not be quite the most opportune thing to do.

But lucky UK PSP owners, with either genuine UK models coming out in September or with Japanese imports will be fine as Japan and UK are Region 2 so movies should work on either model.

Skype claims VoIP lead - vnunet.com

Skype claims VoIP lead - vnunet.com

Skype are the top VoIP provider, not really a suprise there. Skype don't consider Vonage, Callvantage and others "competition" and that's maybe more of a suprise. Skype is a consumer based P2P service that runs on your PC (or variants), it just works. However it's a softclient and can be affected by other processes on the PC.

Services like Vonage supply a box that plugs into your broadband connection and utilise a normal phone. Their service just works too, but the phone aspect makes it easier to use (well not having to have the PC on all the time).

Though Skype are increasing numbers rapidly, their business model is as yet undefined, while Vonage (and others) have both consumer and business offerings which potentially do have an economic model that can work.

UK ISP's Fail To Report Child Abuse

UK ISP's Fail To Report Child Abuse

ISPs not reporting child-abuse? This is a tricky area in law. ISPs don't actually monitor websites, Usenet news or any hosting platforms. To do so would potentially make them liable for editorial control, and there's too much to monitor.

ISPs generally act on complaints (i.e. if someone reports illegal content to them) and there are various guidelines which they obide by (it all gets very messy in cases such as defamatory content where the ISP can be held liable once they've been informed).

Unfortunately with cases of child-abuse, ISPs are likely to get very few "informed" complaints as the act of downloading pornography etc with children is an offence in itself.

News

News

Sky offering on-demand movie channels, but through a customer's PC. Will that really compete with the offerings from companies like Homechoice and of course NTL and Telewest? It's not quite the same as customers will still need a seperate broadband connection. Once BT roll-out their 21CN services like this will be offered by BT as part of the network.

BSkyB have always had a problem of not having a back-channel (hitting the red button on the Sky remote dials into the Sky Active platform, but that's a 28.8Kbaud modem).

It's likely BSkyB will offer a box with broadband connectivity, but they cant afford to alienate their existing 7+m subscribers (and upgrading all the boxes would be a costly excercise).