In the telecom industry Managed Network Services (MNS, aka Outsourced Network Operations) is likely to be a $10B business in ’08, with a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of between 13-17%. Europe accounts for 45% of the market. The leading supplier in the market, Ericsson, rips-out other supplier’s equipment and installs its own in the […]
Over the past couple of years I’ve been helping operators understand ways they can harness open innovation. Using a quote from Henry Chesbrough, UC Berkeley, from his book ‘Open Innovation’ to explain: “Open innovation means that valuable ideas can come from inside or outside the company and can go to market from inside or outside […]
The GSMA reported in August there are now 4 million new HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) subscribers a month. The total number of HSPA users has passed the 50 million mark globally from 11 million a year ago. Mobile Broadband is definitely taking off, as discussed in this previous weblog article. When I was in […]
This article follows on from a previous article that reviewed LTE (Long Term Evolution, also know as 4G). Several people asked why I had not included a fuller discussion on the 4G core in that article. It is because LTE is an access technology; my focus of the article was on the access where there […]
LTE (Long Term Evolution, also known as 4G) is entering the hype-cycle, and being rapidly pushed up to the ‘peak of inflated expectations’, just like IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), PTT (Push To Talk), FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence), and far too many other technologies to name here. So to cut through the hype and hopefully present […]
Reviewing the financial reports of many mobile operators shows a similar story in how their costs breakdown. There’s roughly an 80:20 split between operational (80%) and capital (20%) expenditure. Capital expenditures cover the amortized investment in the licenses and building the network infrastructure. The bulk of a mobile operator’s costs are operational expenditures, hence the […]
Sigma Systems’ first User Conference (June 4th-6th, Barton Creek Resort), explored the next generation of consumer and business oriented services, including insight and discussion around emerging trends and technology developments in the following areas: targeted advertising, evolution of commercial VoIP & data services, global deployments in mobile broadband services, evolution to on-demand services, converged applications […]
As requested by reader feedback, I’m providing some foresight on up-coming conferences I’m attending, rather than just reviewing conferences I’ve attended. For June I’ll be running panel sessions at Sigma Systems‘s first user conference and at the Voice Peering Forum. Sigma Systems‘s first user conference (June 4th-6th, Barton Creek Resort, registration is free), will explore […]
“But shouldn’t our suppliers be building the developer programs?” I hear some operators asking. However, infrastructure suppliers make money by selling boxes, software licenses, maintenance and support; those suppliers do not understand the end customers as well as the operator. If they do, then the operator will likely not be independent for long. There is […]
Overall Summary / Opinion An important first step in meeting the competitive disadvantage VZW faces compared to the GSM operators. A device centric ODIS (Open Device Interface Specification) defines what a device must do to interface to the VZ RAN (between the device radio hardware and the access network), and the support structure to help […]