In Today’s Issue: DT/Sprint murder’n’acquisition poses world’s biggest OSS BSS MESS; shareholders scared; political egos swell; warming up by buying OTE; and a side order of Nokia Ovi content, please; Mobistar MVNO mastery;
Microhoo muffed; Yahoo+Jajah; huge Brazilian mergermonster slithers out
of rainforest, eats shareholders; Virgin Media intros
TV-over-IP-over-TV-over-IP; Globe Tel intros TV-over-3G; Sony Ericsson
offers nightmare coding turducken; all-open-source mobile dev framework
Flyer
No! Don’t do it! Think of your family! It’s one of those moments
where someone’s about to be very ill-advised indeed, and the rest of us
can but watch in horror and incredulity. Yes, we said Deutsche Telekom
was a company with a huge overseas acquisition in their future, and
guess what? They want to buy…the Telco USSR, Sprint Nextel. Apparently DTAG considered
a bid for Nextel way back when - so no wonder they’re interested in
getting it cheap, with Sprint thrown in free (they spent $40bn on
Voicestream alone - they’re now looking at $23bn for the whole Sprint
empire). But you have to wonder why anyone would want this: let’s see,
that’s German, British, Dutch and US GSM and UMTS, German DSL, VDSL and even some ISDN, CDMA2000 at mainline Sprint mobile, iDen at Nextel, WiMAX at Sprint XOHM, more GSM/UMTS in Central Europe, FLASH OFDM in Slovakia and UMTS TDD in the Czech Republic. To say nothing of their competing global carrier operations, and WLAN hotspots, and SprintLink US fibre, and T-Systems call centres...
It’s like a charming screwball comedy entitled Converge This!, in which we follow the exploits of two hilariously ill-matched OSS-BSS
engineers, Sven and Sven, as they strive to integrate the back-office
operations of a giant mobile phone company that uses literally every
network protocol in existence…no wonder the Frankfurt stock market doesn’t like it at all.
What is considerably less funny is the answer to our question: basically, the German government, which owns a large chunk of DTAG, is mad keen to see them do a “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” moment in Washington (well, Overland Park, KS) by becoming the US’s
biggest mobile operator. They may have forgotten that the character in
Raoul Walsh’s film said that whilst standing on top of a giant tank of
petrol in an oil refinery on fire, being shot at by the police….
But what is funny is that some US politicians apparently think German ownership of Sprint would be a menace to national security…
More seriously, and charitably to Sprint, Telco 2.0 experts suggest that this might actually make some kind of sense. If DTAG was
to shutter Sprint’s dodgy retail businesses and fold the customers into
their own operation, or sell them off, they would have the makings of a
strong wholesale platform in the US, and network assets and spectrum to beef up their own rather thin UMTS coverage. They’d also have some opportunities to build up their BT Global Services clone, T-Systems, in the US. But the chances don’t outweigh the general presumption against monster telco mergers.
DTAG, meanwhile, is buying a chunk of OTE; which should be enough political trouble for anyone without taking on the Congressmen From VerizonAT&T. Less scarily, they’ve also signed up for Nokia Ovi; partners, products, and platforms, people.
Speaking of those, Mobistar is reaping the benefits and pains of its MVNO-positive strategy. Its volumes are sharply up, and the MVNOS account for a near majority of net adds - this is precisely what we need channel partners for. However, the downside is clear - ARPU is declining, as the average price they charge for a minute of use converges with the wholesale rate they charge the MVNOs. They need another source of revenue…
In other M&A horrorshow news,
Microsoft has walked away from the Yahoo! deal; that’s sense, Withnail,
as they say. Apparently they can’t agree a price. Yahoo is apparently
concentrating on the league, pushing on with its new voice &
messaging development - they’ve decided to use Jajah for the voice component, a decision Telco 2.0 heartily endorses.
You don’t have to be a decadent Western plutocrat to go in for a huge merger: the rising forces of Brazil are quite keen too, with Telemar and Brasil Telecom looking at a merger.
Virgin Media, meanwhile, reckons it has the cure for the BBC iPlayer
business model explosion. They’re going to offer the iPlayer stuff
through their cable TV service. Let’s get this straight: it comes down
the same wire from the same head end, through the same STB, but for some reason these bits - call them TV bits - don’t count towards their costs? We wonder if the BBC is paying them a contribution.
Here’s an example of an innovative use of underused telco assets. Globe Telecom in the Philippines is delivering mobile TV over the circuit-switched video call channel, with the help of NMS Communications. Neat.
Sony Ericsson
wants to get into the mobile-developer game so bad they’ve invented a
hybrid of Java ME and Flash. Think of it like this: it’s a Java applet
in a webpage, with a little Flash plugin and some Flash code embedded
in the Java. That’s going to be a right one to debug…and it also
happens to break the hearts of web designers everywhere. (Couldn’t they
have broken the “back” button and worked a frame in there somewhere,
too?) This, however, looks more fun.
This Blog is republished from
www.Telco2.net/blog.
The Telco 2.0 Initiative is a new industry program focused on helping
with this thorny question: "How do we (telcos, handset manufacturers,
Media companies, IT players, NEPs, etc) make money in an IP-based
world?"