The Blackberry 8800 has been snapped up by operators across Europe. O2, Vodafone and Orange are all offering the handset.

New features include built-in GPS, a multi-media player and an expandable memory slot.
The built-in GPS works with BlackBerry Maps and a range of location based applications and services.
“The BlackBerry8800, will be an absolute must for many of our corporate users,” said Kyle Whitehill, director of Vodafone UK’s Enterprise Business Unit.

That the consortium buying LogicaCMG’s telecoms division was headed up by Larry Quinn will not have escaped the notice of many in the wireless world.

Quinn has been this way before, when his company Aldiscon merged with the Dutch IT services giant in 1997. Quinn served as ceo of the merged company’s Mobile Networks division from that date until 2002.
Now Mr Quinn, or at least the money he represents, has bought the 1700 people, €378 million division, for €392 million cash. That’s a figure 11.5 times its 2005 EBITDA, and 19.5 times the division’s 2005 adjusted operating profit. The company’s 2006 numbers were said to be “broadly stable” compared to 2005, in a 23 January 2007 trading update.
So what future does Quinn’s team see for the acquired division? First off, it will be renamed Acision.
One strategy will be to work with other systems integrators and services companies apart from Logica. The other strand will be to build away from the core text and MMS business into “converging technologies.”
LogicaCMG has for some time seen itself as the natural platform for delivering merged IP services. Acision’s management may well look to other tie-ups and partnerships that can see it exploit  these areas.
Paul Harvey, partner at Atlantic Bridge Ventures, said that the deal represented “the return of the empire”.
“It’s not just Larry Quinn, it’s Gilbert Little, Jo Cunningham, the founders of the SMS industry whose Aldiscon platform formed the messaging platform for CMG. These guys are so passionate about messaging and getting more people to use and send messages.”
Harvey said that the company intended to use other SI relationships to open up other markets, such as Russia and the USA, where LogicaCMG has not done so well.
As for acquisitions of other companies, Harvey acknowledged that there may be other companies out there with technologies they have not been able to market because of the strength of LogicaCMG’s operator relationships.
“They [Logica] have systems that provide the service that provides the most valuable equity stream for operators, so here is a real opportunity for expanding the reach and product offering within that customer base.”
As for the price Atlantic paid, Harvey said he thought the 4% increase in Logica’s share price reflected the “fair” price Atlantic had paid.
“I am so pleased to be owning this asset, we can do a lot with it and free up the business. Not that Logica managed it poorly, they just didn’t have the resources.”

VoIP over Wi-Fi equipment revenues are expected to reach over $82 billion (bn) by 2012. North America will lead the market at $35bn in revenues, along with EMEA (Europe, Middle East Africa) with $23bn and Asia Pacific with $21bn.

Juniper Research Report Author, Basharat Hamid Ashai, says that “the dual mode handset market will pick up much faster in the coming years than the single mode Wi-Fi handset sector.
The handset market is moving to a stage where no one wants to carry two or three devices in their pocket, so the ability to have a single device for all calls is a compelling proposition. Most single mode VoIP over Wi-Fi handset manufacturers are actively either designing or planning to ship dual mode phones”.
Another Key Trend, says the report, will be the use of Wireless Mesh technologies for VoIP. Currently these networks are in their infancy and are being used primarily for data applications.
However this market will be ripe for wireless VoIP during the coming years. VoIP using Wireless Mesh will be a key move, Ashai reported.
Further details from the report include:
Dual Mode Mobile Handsets (Cellular/VoIP over Wi-Fi) will dominate this market generating almost $68 billion in revenues by 2012 out of a total market of $82 billion.
 Single Mode VoIP over Wi-Fi Handsets will continue to see a conservative uptake primarily due to high pricing – resulting in revenues of only $1.5 billion by 2012.
 Enterprise Access Points (supporting VoIP) will generate over $5 billion by 2012.
Enterprise WLAN Switch/Mobility Controllers (supporting VoIP) will reach almost $8bn by 2012.

Telekom Austria Group has announced that its mobile subsidiary, mobilkom austria, has begun a DVB-H pilot project, in a joint effort with ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation), Hutchison 3G, Siemens Österreich, ORS (Austria Radio Broadcaster), the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg and with the support of the Austrian Regulatory Authority – Rundfunk und Telekom Regulierungs-GmbH (RTR).

The pilot project, which will continue until June 2007, has resulted in the ‘mobile tv austria’ platform. One thousand participants are testing digital terrestrial TV via mobile for the first time in Austria. The DVB-H transmission network currently covers central parts of Vienna.
The Austria mobile TV pilot is based on the cooperation among partners from different industries including two mobile network operators and a broadcaster, allowing for a service environment under real operating conditions that can function via different terminals.
Alfred Grinschgl, Managing Director of RTR-GmbH said: “mobile tv austria is a good example for the consistent implementation of Austria’s digitalisation strategy. The rapid introduction of mobile TV contributes to leveraging the potential of digital terrestrial TV for the benefit of Austria as a business and media location.”
In addition to providing expert support, RTR is investing EUR 1.3 million in the pilot project.

Openwave Systems has joined the idle screen service discovery race with the launch of MediaCast, a  content delivery and merchandising system for mobile operators that is designed to enable easy access to and discovery of highly personalised content.

“With new market entrants vying for mobile data revenues, operators must carefully consider an on-device portal strategy that will allow them to retain ownership of their subscriber relationships and optimise their share of revenues for data services,” said Matt Lewis, research director, ARCchart.
Openwave MediaCast uses a cell phone’s idle screen to deliver a simplified, easily accessible user experience that minimises the number of clicks required to access a service or purchase premium content, by providing on-device access to pre-fetched and cached content.

David Wilkinson, ex-ceo of network optimisation company Actix has popped up as the new ceo at CommProve — another network optimisation company.

Wilkinson was ceo of Actix from June 2005 until August 2006, when he was replaced by founder Rob Dobson, who served in an interim capacity until 13 February 2007, when ex-Amdocs man Alex Hawker took over.
Wilkinson takes over at CommProve from another interim ceo, Mauro Pretolani, who is also the board representative of CommProve investor TLcom.
Radio network Quality of Service and performance optimisation is an interesting sector at the moment, as more access technologies are layered on top of each other, and data and content service take up over 3G, HSPA and other technologies increases.
“David’s experience and expertise of the wireless market in drive test systems, network planning and performance management software, will be instrumental in driving our growth,” said Mauro Pretolani, interim CEO and board representative of CommProve investor TLcom.
Not to mention his experience of, and expertise in, a major competitor.

Qualcomm has proved in its Sky trial that MediaFlo not only outperforms DVB-H, but even out-performs its own claims for the technology, President of Qualcomm Europe Andrew Gilbert said.

Gilbert said that Sky’s recent trial of MediaFlo confirmed that the technology offers twice the capacity of DVB-H. Or else the same capacity with half the base stations.
Not only that, but the announcement that AT&T will combine MediaFLO services with UMTS services means that the technology will be proven to work in an interactive and blended way with UMTS services.
But Gilbert admitted that although, in his opinion, MediaFLO is a clear leader, its adoption in Europe will have little to do with technology. Politics, regulation and markets will all play an important role. Still, he holds out hope that as there has been very little spectrum awarded (Italy and Finland so far) there is still time time for FLO. And there’s room too, he said, as there is “probably” space for two mobile broadcast networks per country/ territory.
“I also know that where MediaFLO is delivered it’s going to give DVB-H a real problem. There’s a reason nobody has chosen DVB-H in the US – and that’s because they don’t want to compete with MediaFLO.”
Despite this, Gilbert pointed out Qualcomm’s commitment to its multi mode TV chip, supporting FLO and DVB-H. Qualcomm’s presentation of the multi-mode chip is that it is aimed at giving handset manufacturers piece of mind to develop suitable handsets no matter which way the network cookie crumbled.
There was also endorsement from Gilbert of Qualcomm’s treatment of Flash OFDM since its acquisition of Flarion – Gilbert’s own former company.
“Contrary to what everyone said, Qualcomm has not buried Flash ODFM. The rollouts continue in Slovakia [T-Mobile] and Finland [Digita], and there is a small but growing ecosystem of devices around the technology,” he said.
Flash OFDM, now a proprietary standard, would migrate through 3GPP2 to form the basis of the UMB standard, Gilbert said, and Qualcomm will also be submitting elements of Flash OFDM to 3GPP for LTE standardisation, although Gilbert admitted this path would be more problematical

Dan Olschwang, ceo of while label mobile search company JumpTap, has said he doesn’t “buy” Google’s do no evil approach when it comes to mobile search.

Speaking on a panel debate on mobile search at the 3GSM World Congress, Barcelona, Olschwang said that the reason Google and Yahoo were all over the mobile industry is that they want to make money.
“Theoretically with mobile search we’re witnessing the creation of another multi-billion dollar industry. That’s the reason Google and Yahoo have booths here, that’s why they’re here,” he said.
But Jim Holden, Google’s director of global wireless strategic partnerships, said, “Our philosophy is not looking for the money but to produce and enable great services and a great customer experience, and hopefully the money will follow.”
He also pointed out that Google didn’t actually have a booth at the show.
Holden had got under Olschwang’s skin with a reply to a question about whether operators should follow own-label branded search or offer internet branded search. According to Holden Google merely tries to position itself as a partner service to fit whatever the operator wants to do in the way the operator wants to evolve it.
But the JumpTap man hit back. “I don’t buy this indifferent appearance of no opinion. You (Holden) and your team are out their chasing partners day and night. Why are they chasing the wireless industry so persistently, redirecting themselves at this new industry. I don’t buy this “Do no evil.”

The question Olschwang could have asked Holden is. “If Google is so open to merely meeting operator needs and a great user experience, is there any example of Google providing its technology and user experience in a white label way?”

During the rest of the debate, there was general agreement on the need for decent mobile centric user experiences, and that mobile search needs to be faster and more relevant than web search, available on mass market phones and without requiring the very highest of bandwidths. But how to get there is clearly more problematical.

 • m-spatial has launched Converged Local Search —  to stimulate mass market consumer adoption of local search on mobile devices. Converged Local Search is intended to enable operators, directory providers and personal navigation providers to realise the huge potential of local search by linking access to local information across web-sites, 118/411 directory services, mobile data services and personal navigation devices.

Seth Nesbitt, vp marketing of Amdocs’ OSS division, has said that OSS/ BSS transformation projects will be helped greatly by the Amdocs 7 product suite, but that the company will still need to partner where it sees the need in specific areas.

Amdocs is position Amdocs 7 as the only industry specific software suite. Other OSS and CRM/Billing products are either point products or general products designed for several industries, Nesbitt said. And the suite offers a service solution from the network to the customer, he claimed.
“Service providers don’t have to stitch this together any more. It’s been great business for systems integrators up to now to do so, but it’s not an efficient way to manage customer interactions,” he said.
Nesbitt said that the industry has seen an OSS gap between the customer and the network, and Amdocs, with its billing and CRM expertise, has bridged that with its Cramer acquisition to give a complete network view, and offer a roadmap for NGOSS transformation.
“The most commonly quoted goal for network transformation projects is reduced time to market for new services and products – especially in OSS where there have been fragmented legacy systems, siloed systems per service which are real barriers to the market.
We reported yesterday how Telcordia, with its service management suite is attempting to stitch together NGOSS from a fulfilment/ service assurance point of view. Amdocs is approaching this from a CRM/ billing standpoint, adding inventory and content management skills in Cramer and QPass. With IBM and Oracle also acquisitive in this area, they are pretty much all claiming to offer end to end OSS/ BSS solutions, whilst portraying the opposition as lacking on one regard or another. The truth, as ever, may lie somewhere in the middle.
Nesbitt acknowledges that, and points to Amdocs’ partnership with IBM (which with its Micromuse and Vallent acquisitions is now strong in service assurance) as evidence that this is an ecosystem in which companies will need to partner to give them different areas of speciality.

Operators should not underestimate how difficult network transformation, and the move to next generation OSS is going to be, said Michael Anderson, Senior VP Global Solutions at Telcordia.

“We’ve seen the disasters, and we’ve had to come in to clear up the mess. This transformation path we’re on is not an overnight process. It’s probably a 72 month process to take down a legacy system and migrate that to a next generation environment.”
Anderson was responding to the accusation often thrown Telcordia’s way, that it is a legacy company with TDM knowledge and assets, a telephony dinosaur in an IP world.Referring to an implementation of a next gen fulfilment system with Sky EasyNet, where the operator has seen a 30% improvement in fulfilment in just six months, Anderson said true migration was about being able to work back to legacy systems from next gen systems.
“The big operators can’t afford to just switch off their legacy systems. Yet look at the way we can federate the capabilities of our next generation fulfilment systems. Now we’re federating that data, checking the data, and processing it and marrying the two systems. It is a marriage between the two.”
Anderson was speaking as Telcordia launched its new Service Management Suite, into which it has integrated its Service Director and Device Director products. The suite is about taking network and device CDR probe data, referring that to established KPIs and KQIs and distributing reports to relevant business sectors so that operators can offer differentiated, class of service and “more sticky” SLAs.
Operators can’t afford to let consumers have a bad experience. We’ll try something twice, and then give up if it doesn’t work, Anderson said. So the service management suite is about giving operators the tools to get a customer centric view of their service performance and, through trending analysis and the ability to provision adaptive network thresholds, take action before problems even occur.
With IBM’s acquisition of Vallent and Micromuse last year, this is now a fiercely competitive and consolidating area. Yet Anderson thinks it is now an idea whose time has come.
“I used to work for ADC. And when I was there Service Assurance was a solution in search of a problem. But now with IP networks operators are moving from a linear process  to a real time, personalised environment.”