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Martin Creaner's Blog
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Everytime we hear a story about mergers and acquisitions in the Telecom industry we get excited by the strategic opportunties. There will be economies of scale we hear, there will be new marketing critical mass created we hear, and of course there will be huge benefits to the consumer base from more integrated services, etc., etc., . This weeks story of the potential merger between Vodafone and T-Mobile in the UK is a classic example. The headline stories are the potential $5bn price tag and the fact that this would catapult Vodafone back to being the UK market leader with around 40% of the market share. But as we head into the second week of stories I suspect a much more complicated picture emerges. Economies of scale and marketing critical mass are all very nice buzz words, but anyone who has ever been involved in a merger of two telecoms giants will know that the real challenge is the successful integration of the two beasts. This is a mating of two very different animals that have evolved...
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There are no new mistakes - just old ones that we make again and again. This truism applies to all aspects of life and business, and never more so than to the launch of a new mobile generation. It seems that everytime we begin the process of launching a new generation of mobile (1G to 2G; or 2G to 3G) we delete the painful memories of how we got it wrong the last time, and blindly repeat the usual mistakes. Lets try and break this cycle with LTE! First of all lets talk about the easy bit of launching 4th generation mobile - the network. This is the bit that has absorbed billions of dollars of investment, has been standardised to the N th degree, has been developed, designed and tested for large scale deployment. This is the bit that the whole industry focues on, and which causes the major media splashes when it is eventually switched on. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that rolling out the next generation of network is not an achievement, but it is one part of a three part puzzle...
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The speed at which Cloud computing has planted its feet firmly in the center stage of the IT and Communications world is quite interesting. It's not a technology play - in fact I would be hard pushed to identify a single piece of new technology that is fundamental to cloud. And unlike Twitter or Facebook it's not a social-psychology phenomenom in any real sense - there is no "man-in-the-street' movement that is driving the uptake or need for cloud computing. It is one of those rare beasts - a practical, common-sense driven initiative. Putting it simply, cloud computing makes much more efficient use of resources. In the early stages these resources are essentially processing power and storage, but increasingly the focus of cloud will converge on efficient use of software resources from a bewildering array of sources. The concept of a user being able to gain access to and pay for these resources on a per-use basis makes great economic sense for everyone from the lone mobile...
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The topic of Net Neutrality has waxed and waned over the past three or four years as more fashionable and sexier topics have dominated the media. But it has not gone away - nor can we expect it to. In truth Net Neutrality is a central issue for the future of communications. In its simplest form it is an argument about whether the people who provide and operate the networks should be able to charge differently depending on which type of service is consuming their network capacity. The Operators argue that unless they can do this they will not be able to justify more and more investment in bandwidth to meet the insatiable requirements of web based video. Net Neutralists argue that flat fee access for fixed bandwidth is what has enabled the net to grow, and to introduce significantly new business models will stiffle the innovation. And this is not (as is often thought) a US-only issue. I noticed with interest this week that BT has waded into the discussion. The Financial Times has reported...
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As anyone who regularly reads my blog will know I am a fan of the potential of LTE . In terms of speed of growth, my gut feel tells me that it will move on a much faster curve than 3G - but in reality it couldn't be much slower! A recent report by Pyramid research tells us that LTE will grow at around 400% between 2010 and 2014 - much faster than 3G. To date, 27 mobile operators worldwide have publicly committed to deploying LTE, with 12 of them expected to roll out commercial services in 2010 and the remainder during 2011 and 2012. This continues to be very aggressive. How the TM Forum addresses the management and monetization challenges of LTE is rapidly moving up our agenda. We are just kicking off a group to address this topic and it is aiming to address topics such as whether there are border cell issues in a multi-vendor network environment; whether the fact that 4G/LTE pushes a lot intelligence and automonuy to the nodes, will present any special challenges to network management...
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When you hear the term “benchmarking” you might think about a row of servers or other computer hardware being pitted against each other to see which processor is fastest. But instead of just determining who’s the best and greatest, benchmarking goes way beyond that to give you the means for improving business effectiveness through critical analysis of data. If you look specifically at the communications industry, today more than ever service providers can’t take anything for granted. Even if you’ve got the biggest market share, we all know how things can change in a heartbeat, and before you know it you can find yourself at the bottom of the heap. Business benchmarking is just one tool in the arsenal for providers interested in maintaining profitability, hanging onto customers and pushing forward with new services and initiatives, but it takes on a whole new angle in today’s economic climate. TM Forum launched our Business Benchmarking program about five...
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A few weeks ago I blogg'd on the topic of LTE and how it was going to bring the divided mobile world all back together . The energy and speed behind LTE is making it stand out in stark contrast to the sluggish way 3G rose to prominence. Today I came across two interesting news snippets about this - one supporting my optimism and one raising fears that LTE will be just another marketing-fest followed by slow delivery. Motorla announced today that they were going to double their LTE investment in the coming year. This isn't all new money, because most of this increase is coming at the expense of reducing their investment in WiMax, but it shows a serious ambition about the potential of LTE. Interestingly they seem to be focusing on the more niche TD-LTE opportunity - which might be a very smart move indeed! Meanwhile Verizon delivered the (almost inevitable) news that the LTE commercial launch dates they announced only last February have already slipped back by at least six months...
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Last week at Management World Nice I was struck by the continued use of a surprising phrase. While there was alot of talk about technology and business models and even mo netization , the unexpected phrase that I heard several times that caught my attention was 'Social Psychology' . The context for this was in discussions about the direction of the industry. I heard people pronounce that we are no longer a technology led industry, we are a mass market lifestyle & fashion industry. What we do is not driven by the art of the possible as much as it is driven by the way our customers want to live, love and interact. The psychology of society is going to determine where our industry goes, what services we offer, how we price our offers and how we structure our infrastructure. This is a bold statement for what is perhaps the most technology driven major industry on the planet. Of course is should not be surprising that an industry expects to be led by its customers demands. But this...
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Lots of mergers and acquisitions underway across the world these days. The two big ones that caught my attention this week are Oracle buying Sun and Tech Mahindra buying Satyam. Two very different acquisitions! I think the Oracle/Sun merger is interesting - insofar as it is Oracle aiming to stand shoulder to shoulder with IBM and HP. This sort of ambition has it's costs of course, quite apart from the $7bn and change that they paid. One of the costs might be Oracle continuing to have to spend even more money to fill out it's portfolio with a top class services and consultancy arm to become a credible peer. The other cost might mean Oracle having to reassess some of its partnerships now that it is stepping up to be a credible rival to HP and IBM. Oracle also has a hard decision to make as to whether it retains Sun's hardward business or just it's considerable software assets. The Tech Mahindra acquisition of Satyam is a bit more of a shot in the dark. As far as I'm aware...
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This week the EU Commission is tightening the screws on the area of deep packet inspection . Where this will end up is anyones guess, but we are heading down a road that will kill the promise of the communications industry getting into Advertising. The buzz surrounding this topic has been waxing and waning for several years now. Everyone gets the concept, but little seems to be happening on the ground. More broadly, there is a growing belief that service providers can bridge the revenue gap left by the collapse of traditional voice services, by adopting various business models that make use of end user data . But this seems to make the implicit assumption that Service Providers 'own' their customer data - a notion which various regulators are disabusing them of! The only way out of this conundrum is for SP's to realise that they need to broker the user data rather than simply try to exploit it. Let the users share in the upside of the transaction and they will be flooded with...
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