free-hotspot.com, said to be the world's largest free Wi-Fi Internet service provider, announced today that it has successfully installed its service in two Brittany airports, Quimper Cornouaille and Lannion – Côte de Granit. The installations are said to reflect a commitment by free-hotspot.com to provide its free Wi-Fi service in regional as well as international airports. The company plans further airport installations in the UK and the rest of Europe in the near future.

Equipped for several months now, the Quimper Cornouaille airport was the first to benefit from the free Wi-Fi service offered by Irish company free-hotspot.com. Within just a few months, passengers have quickly adopted the new service that allows them to stay connected and to work using their own laptops whilst waiting for flights. Use of the free Wi-Fi service has increased month on month, and now one in every 20 passengers passing through Quimper airport are said to benefit from the free Wi-Fi offering.

Lannion – Côte de Granit airport has also just partnered up with free-hotspot.com to offer free Wi-Fi to its passengers. The installation was undertaken recently, but initial feedback is claimed to already suggests that the service will be at least as successful as the HotSpot in Quimper.

Joe Brunoli, Vice President, Business Development at free-hotspot.com comments: "We are delighted to be providing our service to regional airports such as Quimper and Lannion. The increasing demand for free Wi-Fi by air passengers of all types means that our service is a must-have for all airports, and not just the major hubs."

"Airports are well suited for providing free Wi-Fi services," explained Brunoli. "Offering free Internet access means that the passengers are likely to spend more time at the airport, and may even arrive earlier to go online while in the gate area. The result is less congestion through security, a better customer experience, and more terminal revenue thanks to increased per-passenger spend," concludes Mr. Brunoli.

Allround has announced that it has been selected as vendor for Near Real-Time Roaming Data Exchange (NRTRDE) solution by MagtiCom, the growing mobile operator in Georgia. Allround says its in-house NRTRDE approach has been selected many times instead of outsourced services mainly by those operators who focus on long-term benefits.

NRTRDE (Near Real-Time Roaming Data Exchange) is a new method for reporting the subscribers' roaming activities that enables operators to detect high network usage and other fraud issues in near-real time. Since roaming fraud is a serious global concern for mobile operators, the implementation of the NRTRDE system for all GSMA members shall be done by 1 October 2008, according to the GSMA recommendation.

Answering the increasing need for high quality NRTRDE solutions Allround claims to offer a solution to GSM operators to comply with the NRTRDE requirements in a cost-effective way.

"Allround has been selected because it is proven partner of MagtiCom, being the supplier of the roaming management solution, AllRoamer. We were also impressed by the in-depth expertise that Allround showed in the roaming and NRTRDE area."  – says Nino Avaliani, Director of Customer Care Department at MagtiCom.

"We are glad that MagtiCom selected us. We are always looking for building a strategic cooperation with our customers offering the best solution that perfectly fits their business needs. Incorporating 10+ years experience in roaming and fraud detection area we strongly believe that operators will pioneer the long-term benefits of in-house NRTRDE solutions." – says Lilla Csókási, Head of Marketing & Sales at Allround.

The European Competitive Telecoms Association, the pro competition group, has given a cautious welcome to proposals from the European Parliament to amend the EU Telecoms Framework, but warned that many of the amendments approved by the European Parliament's Industry Committee on 7 July protect and favour dominant firms at the expense of competition in the telecoms sector. ECTA cautioned that, if adopted by the Parliament and endorsed by other European institutions, the advantages gained by the dominant firms under the proposed revisions to the EU legislation could undermine competition in high-speed broadband services.
 
Innocenzo Genna, Chairman of ECTA, said: "Consumers and businesses in Europe have reaped the benefits of lower telephone prices, ever-increasing broadband speeds, more investment and innovative triple-play offers that have been brought to them as a result of competition in the telecoms market. But these benefits, many of which are due to effective wholesale regulation in the sector, can disappear just as quickly as they arrived, if policy-makers make too many concessions to dominant firms." 
 
One of the key areas in which ECTA has been seeking support is for local loop unbundling rules to apply to fibre as well as the existing copper network.
 
Genna continued: "We are pleased to see that access to fibre networks has been reflected in the Parliament Committee's proposals. This is a very positive signal. But the devil is in the detail: unless the price and the access conditions to the local loop are reasonable then the change is ineffectual and incumbents will have a return to the monopoly they are looking for. And here we fear that dominant players have gained the upper hand."
 
Dominant operators have argued that regulation must be weakened to allow them to invest in expensive next generation fibre access networks. However, recent research from WIK Consult has found that incumbents would incur 30% lower costs in rolling out fibre networks than competitors because they already own crucial elements of the infrastructure. In addition, incumbents' high share of subscriber lines and ability to make efficiency savings by selling local exchange buildings significantly reduces their risk in upgrading their access networks.
 
A critical concern is that the Committee has proposed to replace the current, positive, principle of ensuring a fair and risk-adjusted return on investments by dominant firms with the concept of ‘risk sharing'. ECTA believes the main result of risk sharing will be to further decrease the risk for dominant players and increase the costs and risk for competitors with substantially lower revenues and profits.
 
Some parts of the telecoms sector are characterised by very high scale economies, similar to energy and post. This means that essential parts of the infrastructure will inevitably be in the hands of the one or two biggest players in each country. It also means competition and consumer choice in the vital broadband market is largely dependent on competitors being able to access that infrastructure, in particular the ‘local loop'.
 
Genna continued: "Former incumbents' main goal has been a clandestine return to their old monopoly position. They have sought to undermine access conditions for competitors, weakening the intense competition that has been developing in the past few years. Seemingly harmless concepts such as risk sharing among operators have been put forward with the less positive aim of pricing out smaller rivals from essential parts of the network."
 
In addition to introducing ‘risk sharing' dominant firms also succeeded in watering down the remedy of functional separation, which was proposed by the Commission and endorsed by the European Regulators Group as an option that should be available to regulators to strengthen competition in the sector. Whilst not adopted by the Committee, some MEPs had also argued that the Framework for competition as a whole should be phased out as early as 2014.
 
ECTA urged the European Institutions to stand up for consumers and competition, and reject deals aimed at supporting dominant firms.

DeviceAnywhere has unveiled the new Forum Nokia Virtual Developer Lab (VDL) – a remote testing service designed to reduce the time and resources required to develop, test, monitor, and deploy applications and content for Nokia handsets. The on-line service supports the most popular Nokia devices running on the Series 40 and S60 platforms and is available globally to all members of the Forum Nokia developer community. 
 
Forum Nokia VDL is powered by DeviceAnywhere, a revolutionary online service that provides access to real mobile handsets that are each connected to live networks. These devices are accessible remotely over the Internet, allowing members of the Forum Nokia community to meet all development, porting, testing, and monitoring needs without acquiring a physical device. DeviceAnywhere employs real, physical handsets – therefore, anything that a user can do with a device in his/her hand, he/she can do with the handsets in DeviceAnywhere – in real-time. This includes tasks such as pressing device buttons, tapping on touch screens, connecting/disconnecting the battery, viewing the LCD, listening to ringers and speakers, and opening/closing a handset.
 
DeviceAnywhere is an enabling technology that allows developers to collaborate on one project regardless of differing geographic locations. Community members can share devices among developers in different regions of the world, as well as save test results to share at a later time. This synergy empowers developers to create better, higher-quality content, as well as enables faster time-to-market.
 
"Increasing availability of high-bandwidth networks and improvements in mobile device functionalities are fueling consumer expectations for increasingly sophisticated applications and services," said Shiv Bakhshi, Ph.D., director of Mobile Device Technology & Trends program at IDC. "But creation of innovative mobile apps and services requires that developers have easy, and fast, access to mobile devices so that they can test and optimize their offerings. Unfortunately, given the ever burgeoning portfolio of mobile devices from handset vendors, this can be very expensive both in terms of time and money. The situation seems to beg for a solution that allows developers, distributed in time and space, prompt and continued access to new devices without imposing any serious financial burden."
 
 "Forum Nokia is committed to providing developers with the latest innovations in tools and testing services to enable them to produce rich, viable content to deliver to end-users worldwide," said Tom Libretto, VP of Forum Nokia.  "Our collaboration with a best-of-breed technology like DeviceAnywhere to establish the Forum Nokia VDL not only provides our developer community with remote access to devices, but it also enables them to collaborate and work together to ensure that Nokia customers are receiving high-quality content and benefiting from the best mobile experience possible."
 
"The mobile ecosystem mandates that OEMs deliver handsets that create seamless, unique end-user experiences – and for a world-class, global leader like Nokia, this is particularly important," said Faraz Syed, CEO and co-founder of DeviceAnywhere. "The added value of DeviceAnywhere will empower Forum Nokia developers to remotely access Nokia's most popular devices, as well as collaborate with colleagues worldwide to produce higher-quality content for Nokia's customers."
 
Through the Forum Nokia Virtual Developer Lab, developers currently have access to more than 40 of Nokia's most popular devices available both in Europe and the United States – with new devices continuously added. Some of Nokia's most popular in-market devices that are currently available through the VDL include the Nokia 7900 Crystal Prism, the Nokia N81 and the new, slim-formed Nokia 5310 XpressMusic. A Series 40 device, the flash-enabled Nokia 5310 XpressMusic is one of the most sophisticated music phones on the market, featuring Bluetooth stereo, memory expansion card slot and music playback buttons.

FTS, a provider of Billing, CRM and Business Control solutions for communication and content service providers, today announced the launch of Leap Billing & CRM – the next generation of its converged billing & CRM solutions.

The product suite is said to have been designed to inherently unify billing and CRM information, providing a holistic view of all customer events and billing events, and enabling in-depth service personalization. Based upon a process-driven design, the solution offers unparalleled flexibility, empowering service providers to quickly launch and easily manage multi-service offerings in-house, in real time, without vendor intervention.
 
Leap Billing & CRM is an end-to-end converged solution based on telecom-specific business processes that reflect the industry's best practices. The solution allows new business practices to be instantly implemented, and new services, bundles and promotions to be rolled out immediately, without involving costly billing and CRM integration projects. In this way, Leap Billing & CRM offers a long-term, viable solution to the ever-evolving needs of telecom providers.
 
"With knowledge-driven personalization becoming a critical differentiator in the multi-service environment, service providers need to quickly implement ever more specific business processes and business rules," said Teresa Cottam, Associate Principal Analyst, Analysys Mason, and author of The Next-Generation Bill: Commercial and Technical Strategies. "Being able to do this in-house in real time, without the vendor's intervention, is compelling because it eliminates a time-consuming and often costly stage in the delivery chain."
 
"While many solutions try to offer integration between billing and CRM systems, Leap Billing & CRM is a truly unified solution that improves customer experience and gives the control back to the service provider," said Amos Sivan, CEO, FTS. "Service providers can now offer their customers a much more personalized service, while maintaining full control of their business processes, as new products, bundles and promotions no longer require lengthy integration projects or external resources."
 
FTS' Leap Billing & CRM enables service providers to respond quickly and flexibly to each billing or customer event, taking full advantage of all existing CRM and billing information to increase revenues and improve customer satisfaction:
 
– Leap Billing & CRM has been designed from the ground up as a converged solution.
 
– Using a unified product catalog that centralizes product offerings across billing, CRM and order management, Leap Billing & CRM enables service providers to easily define new bundles in-house. This means they can respond immediately to market trends and differentiate themselves from their competitors.
 
– The platform utilizes SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and Oracle's BEA market leading Aqualogic(R) BPM (Business Process Management) engine to provide an open and highly flexible solution.
 
– Leap Billing & CRM offers a holistic view of all customer and billing events, ensuring efficient, effective, and seamless customer and account management.
 
– A unified desktop tool for Customer Service Representatives (CSRs), with a single view of all customer information, removes the need to navigate between multiple interfaces. Aside from enhancing efficiency, this also maximizes the value of each customer, boosting cross-sales and up-sales processes while improving customer satisfaction with service personalization.
 
– FTS' Leap Billing & CRM takes personalization one step further with multi-service billing capabilities, flexible convergent charging, and real-time customer self provisioning.
 
– Leap Billing & CRM also comes complete with FTS' patented Do Tree(TM). The Do Tree offers business control by combining in-depth business analysis with the ability to define business rules that are automatically executed when triggered by specific network, customer or balance events.

Joikusoft Oy has today announced JoikuSpot Premium Edition, an operator
grade secure mobile software solution that turns S60 mobile phones instantly
to mobile WLAN (Wi-Fi) HotSpots.

According to Joikusoft Chairman and Founder Mr. Tom Ojala "Premium
Edition represents a major milestone in our roadmap. Premium will bring a
long awaited corporate intraweb (VPN) and email protocol support to the
JoikuSpot software allowing business level use of the solution."

JoikuSpot installs directly to a mobile phone and allows the phone to
share its 3G internet connection wirelessly over WLAN with a laptop, iPod,
iTouch, EeePC or Nokia internet tablet. Multiple devices can be connected to
a JoikuSpot in parallel and seamlessly share the same 3G internet connection.

JoikuSpot Premium is fully secure and makes use of the maximum security
offered by the underlying powerful Symbian OS platform. The users have full
control over who gets to use their JoikuSpot internet access

JoikuSpot Premium is open for commercial licencing toward Operators, OEMs
and Corporates, and is fully customizable for the licencee branding and
feature configuration needs.

The widespread success of mobile broadband services – which now have more
than 100 million subscribers worldwide using more than 300 networks – is
sparking a data traffic boom that will revive the struggling mobile base
station market by 2011, according to Mobile Networks Forecasts: Future
Mobile Traffic, Base Stations & Revenues, a new strategic report from
Informa Telecoms & Media.

Global mobile data traffic is set to increase 1088% from 162 petabytes
(PB) in 2007 to 1,925PB in 2012, driven by a boom in advanced applications
such as mobile Internet browsing and video, according to Mobile Networks
Forecasts.

The report forecasts that global mobile traffic from YouTube and other
mobile video streaming applications will increase by 5514% by 2012.
Another key factor in the traffic boom is the rise of user-friendly
devices such as the iPhone, which can lead to a thirty-fold increase in
traffic per subscriber.

But operators will struggle to cope with the traffic boom because the
popularity of flat-rate tariffs means that mobile data revenues will not
keep pace with traffic – which has a direct impact on costs.

"We forecast that global mobile data revenues will only increase 77% from
2007 to 2012, compared to a 1088% increase in mobile data traffic over the
same period," says Mike Roberts, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms &
Media and author of Mobile Networks Forecasts. "This will push current
mobile network costs and architectures to the breaking point, and will
lead to everything from network sharing and spectrum refarming to the
launch of femtocells and next-generation networks."

The disconnect between soaring mobile data traffic and modestly increasing
revenues helps to explain why operators will keep a lid on network
investment in the short term. "The mobile base station market will be flat
for several years due to restrained operator investment in many regions
and fierce price competition among vendors, but base station unit sales
and revenues will rebound in 2011 as the mobile traffic boom forces
operators to invest in new capacity," Roberts says.

The mobile traffic boom will also lead operators to increase investment in
next-generation networks such as WiMAX and LTE, which can support higher
traffic loads at lower cost compared to traditional systems. As Roberts
notes, "This will lead both WiMAX and LTE base station unit sales to
overtake those of CDMA by 2012, as operators shift investment to
next-generation systems."

Mobile Networks Forecasts also predicts that 2011 will be the year when
global mobile data traffic overtakes mobile voice traffic, which has
always driven mobile network design, rollout and operation. "The mobile
industry is still largely structured around its key product to date,
narrowband voice, but that structure is breaking down fast due to the boom
in mobile data traffic," Roberts says. "The rapid transition from voice to
data traffic will lead to a fundamental overhaul of mobile networks, as
mobile operators and vendors shift their focus from voice to the mobile
broadband Internet. This in turn will help drive a wider overhaul of
mobile business models and strategy."

NeuStar has announced that it has partnered with Turkcell, the third largest mobile network operator in Europe, to launch the Windows Live Messenger mobile instant messaging (IM) service to Turkcell's 35.1 million mobile subscribers.

A longtime NeuStar customer, Turkcell is now using NeuStar's powerful Mobile Messaging Gateway (MMG) solution to bring Windows Live Messenger to its subscribers. Turkcell has been and will continue to offer its own-community mobile IM service (Turkcell Messenger), which is powered by NeuStar's Instant Messaging Service Centre (IMSC).
 
With a simple login function and instant access to their buddy lists and presence information, Turkcell subscribers will be able to experience all the functionality of Windows Live Messenger on their mobile phones. The same familiar experience is available whether they are sitting at a PC or using their mobiles.
 
Burak Ertas, head of the Consumer Services Division at Turkcell, said: "At Turkcell, we like to bring the widest choice of services to our subscribers. Our business relationship with NeuStar has enabled us to offer two complementary mobile IM services. NeuStar built a close working relationship with our team from day one, and that has helped to shape our service. We are delighted to have partnered with NeuStar again to launch Windows Live Messenger, which gives our users further mobile IM choices."
 
Allen Scott, general manager of NeuStar NGM, added: "Turkcell's customers have roundly embraced the new opportunities for communication that IM brings to the mobile phone. Having worked on the original Turkcell Messenger service, NeuStar is pleased to have been responsible for the deployment of Windows Live Messenger, giving Turkcell's subscribers further choice. As Turkcell strengthens its position as Turkey's leading mobile communications provider and continues to innovate in this field, we have no doubts that mobile IM will prove to be increasingly important for them."

Global capital expenditure on mobile communications continues to rise due to greater emphasis on new data services, increased traffic load, and preparation for 4G deployments, according to a new report from ABI Research.

With the US economy's uncertain outlook in 2008, ABI Research says it expects North America's CAPEX to remain flat this year, while other regions will increase their CAPEX commitments for new 2G/3G deployments or expansions, all-IP service discovery platform upgrades, SoftSwitch unified core systems, and preparations for 4G. ABI Research calculates that CAPEX investment in 2007 exceeded $131 billion, and will reach $163.5 billion in 2013.
 
The Asia-Pacific and North American regions are estimated to be the biggest spenders, according to research analyst Hwai Lin Khor. "Mobile industry spending in the Asia-Pacific area is primarily driven by the emerging markets that are expanding current 2G network footprints and new 3G rollouts; many nations in this region have yet to release their 3G licenses. Mature markets such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong will be spending on service delivery platforms, 4G base stations and related components, IMS, and in-building wireless systems. North American spending is primarily driven by 3G upgrades to HSDPA/HSPA for the WCDMA evolution and EVDO Rev A for the CDMA evolution, as well as activities around mobile WiMAX."
 
Most current CAPEX is still directed to voice services and 2G networks expansion, as the majority of subscriber net adds in recent years are coming from emerging markets that are fairly contented with simple voice calls and messaging services. However, there is also increased awareness of the need for early investment to ensure that networks are ready to support the capacity demanded by higher bandwidth data services. Increased EDGE, 3G, and subsequently 4G deployments will mean higher CAPEX investment for data services and for the respective technologies.
 
"CAPEX for data services will surpass that for voice sometime in 2009 as 4G starts to arrive," says Hwai Lin Khor. "ABI Research believes that by 2013, the percentage split will be 28% for voice, 67% for data, and 5% for mobile TV."

O2 and Sierra Wireless have announced the first commercial launch of the Sierra Wireless Compass(tm) 885 USB Modem on the O2 network in the UK. Designed for mobile professionals, laptop computer users and frequent travellers, the O2 Business USB modem has a smaller, more durable USB design with download speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps (megabits per second) and upload speeds of up to 2 Mbps.

The O2 Business USB modem features the ability to roam globally, with tri-band HSPA/UMTS support and quad-band GSM/EDGE support, ensuring compatibility with networks in many countries around the world. It also includes a connector for an external antenna, allowing users in remote areas or fringe network coverage to extend and strengthen their connection to the network.

"The Compass 885 USB modem is designed to satisfy the pace and needs of busy mobile professionals," said Jim Lahey, vice president, EMEA, for Sierra Wireless. "It offers ease of use, worldwide high-speed roaming for simple, reliable connectivity while travelling, with a small, minimalist design, and we're pleased to be able to deliver it first to O2 customers in the UK."