A mobile broadband Tipping Point has been reached: HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) is ‘good enough’ for customers and prices have fallen by a factor of 16 in less than two years. Three UK (H3G UK) now offers mobile broadband prepay, 10 GBP ($20) buys up to either 1GB or 1 month of access, and […]
We’ve all experienced it: you’re on a call, not moving around, just talking and the call drops, you check the signal level on the phone and it’s gone only to return to near full strength as you check. Does the operator even know what’s just happened? And then when you’re on the move, for example […]
Overall My impression of MWC (Mobile World Congress, nee 3GSM) is it was quieter than last year, less hype and less people; however, the organizers claim attendance was up 3000, perhaps they were all the pick-pockets? I think the industry is at a crossroad, in my discussions with operators internet access is the product that’s […]
The telecom press normally focus upon consumer based services, such as MobileTV, mobile gaming, or mobile access to MySpace or Facebook. Behind the scenes is the less glamorous but more profitable enterprise communications scene with services such as: Visual Voicemail: speech to text (note its recent appearance on the iPhone); Unified Business Communications: bringing together […]
Some DSL (Digital Subscriber Loop) providers have certainly led the industry in communicating rates for their service that are unlikely to ever be experienced by their customers, with statements such as “Speeds upto 50 Mbit/s,” note that all-important ‘upto’ term. Ofcom in the UK has started an investigation into this practice. Physical loop limitations mean that […]
FMC is a tired term. Some operators and quite a few enterprises are fed-up of listening to ill-formed, technology-centric FMC pitches. Taking a simplistic view, when a consumer has a mobile phone, why do they need FMC? With virtually unlimited ‘night and weekend’ rates they already have cheap calling at home. For an enterprise, when […]