Wants to minimse installation and backhaul  costs

Siemens Networks has developed a technical concept for radio networks. The latest members of the “One Network” product family are a W-CDMA variant for the GSM 900 MHz band and Surpass hiD 3100 system, which transfers data via  TDM, ATM and IP in the mobile transport network. Siemens is premiering the entire infrastructure for the “One Network” concept At the ITU Telecom World/3G World Congress in Hong Kong.

WCDMA over 900MHz is not a licensed product in all markets, but it does technically offer the potential to build out 3G at a lower frequency range, hence offering larger cell sites, either in new markets or in established markets where 3G access is not widespread.

“The goal is to allow carriers interested in offering new broadband applications to expand their existing GSM networks to include 3G with a minimum of installation costs,” explains Dina Bartels, Head of UTRAN Product Line Strategy at Siemens Networks.

The potential cost savings in installation are significant. If the same 900 MHz frequency is used, it is possible to keep on using not only the sites, but also antennas, cables and parts of the GSM base station.

Further cost savings can be achieved through the operation of a combined GSM/W-CDMA network since operations, maintenance and the core network are shared.
Siemens is touting its Mobile Access Gateway Surpass hiD3105 in this respect. 500 GSM and 512 W-CDMA base stations can be controlled using a single device. That significantly reduces the costs for renting space and for power and air-conditioning compared with individual solutions.

Global PDA shipments totalled 4.5 million units in the third quarter of 2006 – a 31.9% increase from the third quarter of 2005, according to analyst Gartner, while the average selling price (ASP) of PDAs in the third quarter of 2006 declined 13% from the same period last year to $351.

“An influx of new cellular PDAs which are subsidised to some degree by wireless carriers resulted in a significant drop in ASP and pushed the market to the highest shipments level in PDA market history,” said Todd Kort, principal analyst in Gartner’s Computing Platforms Worldwide group.
According to Gartner, much of the growth in the PDA market in the third quarter of 2006 was generated by cellular PDAs such as Danger’s (T-Mobile) Sidekick 3, Nokia E61/E62 and Motorola Q. 
“The Sidekick has achieved near cult status as a wireless messaging device among the 15-to-25 age group in the U.S., which propelled it to nearly 300 % growth in the third quarter of             2006,” Kort said. “We have not seen the consumer marketplace gravitate toward a particular PDA model like this since Palm’s peak of popularity over five years ago.”
  Palm continued to recede from the PDA market, primarily because it doesn’t have a PDA model that incorporates cellular capabilities and its current line is aging. However, the company is primarily focused on the Treo and its shipments totaled 484,000, but these are excluded from Gartner’s PDA numbers because they are smartphones.

Adrian Letts, ex-head of Content Global at Vodafone, and now director of a new ‘hush hush’ video distribution start-up called Blinkbox, has said that one of the biggest barriers to mobile content adoption has been the lack of consistency on operating systems and DRM.

“It’s not necessarily a bad thing that Microsoft has dominated the PC world,” he said. “It’s not necessarily  a bad thing to have full interoperability on handsets, and Microsoft OS on all handsets makes it easier.”
Perhaps revelling in being abe to speak, free from the corporate shackles of Vodafone, Letts, speaking at a round table organised by End2End, said that the fact that operators offer different file formats for PC and mobile dual downloads is also “ludicrous”. Confusion over DRM just adds to the complexity, he added.
But Tom McLennan, manager of Vodafone music, said, “From an operator and handset vendor point of view, if you give Microsoft the keys to DRM, you potentially lose control of what’s happening on the handset.”
Patrick Parodi, representing the Mobile Entertainment Forum, said, “From a price point of view, Janus is cheaper to get out of the door than OMA DRM is today. But unless you have interoperability [between the different DRM systems] you’re not going to have growth of mobile content.
The mobile industry looked like it was going to get behind OMA DRM, but that got tied up in licensing issues with patent representative MPEG LA. That left many operators plumping for proprietary solutions, including SDC and Microsoft’s DRM.
McLennan said that OMA 2.0 repesented a “new opportunity” for operators to develop a new business model.
“OMA 2.0 enables a subscription and rental sales model and in terms of the complexity of the rights objects and management is far in advance of OMA 1.0,” McLennan said.

American telecoms clearing house NeuStar has bought IP messaging company FolloWap for $139 in cash. FolloWap will be added to NeuStar’s range of services, which includes its SIP-IX suite and telephone number and routing database services.

NeuStar thinks FolloWap will make about $25 million revenue next year, and the company aims to double that in 2008.
Mark Foster, cto of NeuStar, said that instant messaging is a natural fit with the company’s MMS-IX and other clearing services.
But he didn’t think that having one of the solutions providers on its books would affect its neutrality in the clearing market.
“FolloWap’s core functionality, the ability to provide interoperability between operators and into ISPs, is in line with the strategic goals and interests of NeuStar,” Foster said.
“Their software is just one of several solutions that operators use,” he added. Reza Jafari, SVP of Strategic Business Development, said FolloWap’s business was set to change dramatically, as it moved to a more hosted and transaction based business model – hence the predicted boost in revenues.
Meanwhile, rival IM vendor OZ Communications has lined up second round vc funding of $34 million.
Skuli Mogensen, ceo, said that the funding would be used to go after the rapidly growing converged consumer messaging market.

Telia Sonera was able to build its 3G network in Spain, which was commercially  launched on 1 December, for a benchmark low cost, according to Eva Lindqvist, svp corporate marketing for TeliaSonera’s mobile business.

TeliaSonera, using Yoigo as its brand name, is the fourth player in a Spanish market dominated by Telefonica and Vodafone, but also recently boosted by the takeover of Amena by Orange.
Its game plan for Yoigo, the brand name for licence holder Xfera, is to have a very low cost base, enabling it to offer low cost services. To do this it has worked with principal supplier Ericsson to roll out at low costs. Its total financing need, including investments in network, IP service platforms, start-up costs and spectrum fees (including accrued spectrum fees from 2002), is estimated to be less than SEK 9 billion (EUR 1 billion) for the first five years. TeliaSonera said that the operation is expected to be cash flow positive and earnings accretive within the same time frame.
The operator has done a deal with Vodafone to provide 2G coverage outside its 3G footprint, and has a distribution agreement with The Phone House as well as with Dextra moviles for logistics.
The aim is to have a 10% market share by 2015. 
Lindqvist said that across the TeliaSonera group, data revenues were still very low. The operator has introduced flat rate tariffs to try and encourage usage, as well as free access to services through its SurfPort data portal. That decision led to a 400% increase in data usage – albeit from that “very low” base.
Although a data card with single sign-on access for WLAN, cellular and fixed access had increased enteprise use, mass consumer use of 3G services was still some way off.

Sets operating margins for Nokia-Siemens Networks

Nokia President and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has said that he expects Nokia’s overall operating margin to take a hit as its networks arm start trading as Nokia Siemens Networks.

Nokia has a set an operating margin over the next two years of 15%, down from the 17% the company set for itself a year ago. It says the decrease is due to the impact of commencement of trading as the combined Networks unit, and has set the networks unit a target of 10% operating margin by the end of 2007.

Margin growth won’t be accompanied by increased sales, however, as the company expects network infrastructure sales only to be flat.

However, Kallasvuo said that he now expects overall industry device volumes to grow 10% in 2007, with the volume in emerging markets and Europe achieving less than 10%.

There will be some value growth, but with growth coming from emerging markets, there will be a slight hit on average sales prices, the company said.

However, such is the rate of growth, Nokia now thinks the industry will hook up its 3 billionth mobile subscriber in 2007, not in 2008 as it previously thought.

Kallasvuo added that the company has reorganised its design and marketing teams to exploit this rising market, especially in the area of mobile internet.

“With an estimated 850 million Nokia device users out there, we are positioned to connect more people to the internet than any other company in the world. We are actively aligning our strategy in pursuit of this major business opportunity,” he said.

Alcatel and Lucent will hold a conference on Friday this week (1 December) to launch the new combined company.

Serge Tchuruk, Alcatel chairman and ceo, and Patricia Russo, Lucent chairman and ceo, will hold a join press conference as they “give birth” to Alcatel-Lucent.

We’ll be there. so any questions for the pair, do let us know.

But not for Motorola

The Western European mobile phone market, consisting of traditional mobile phones and converged devices, grew by 9% year on year in 3Q06. Sony Ericsson moved up to a very strong fourth, putting real pressure on Motorola, while Samsung reinfoced its number 2 position.

IDC’s European Mobile Devices Tracker, said that 44.1 million devices were shipped in the quarter, compared to 40.5 million in the year before.

Jean Philippe Bouchard, senior research analyst, European Mobile Devices, said in a note that imaging-orientated handsets and media capable high end feature phones meant that there renewal cycles were healthy, with “strong prepay traction” at the low end.

Key product delays and “portfolio repositioning” meant that sales of converged devices grew slower than anticipated, although converged devices should account for 8% of the total market by year end, IDC said.

But despite the growth, there may be some good deals available to operators, as IDC’s Geoff Blaber predicts that vendors will “increasingly resort to highly aggressive pricing strategies to appeal to operators by reducing the requirement for subsidisation, therefore impacting overall profit margins.”

The biggest winners in terms of market share included Sony Ericsson, which increased its slice of the market from 11.3% to 13.4 for the quarter, despite not having an entry level device. IDC noted that it is likely to build on this success with the launch of converged devices such as the P990 and W950 in the final quarter.

Samsung, which increased sales 20% and market share 1.7% to lie second in the market with 15.2%, was another with a good quarter to look back on. IDC said much of this was based on good sales of the Ultra range.

Motorola saw a very slight decline in shipments, dropping its market share 1.2%, putting it only very narrowly in third place with 13.5% ahead of Ericsson’s 13.4%. IDC attributed this to it keeping its pwder dry for the KRZR K1 and the HSDPA v3xx, to be relased in this final quarter.

Nokia remains a healthy lead, growing sales 9% and keeping its share pretty much static at 35.1%. Although the company faces competition from Sony Ericsson and Samsung at teh high end, expansion of its ow-end portfolio and the launch of further midrange devices under the Express Music brand should bolster its performance outside its high-end portfolio in the final quarter, IDC said.

No, they’re not going to call it MySpace Lite

With MySpace announcing the launch of its mobile service this week, newly-appointed head of the division, Jean-Paul Sanchez, says that the service will be aimed at meeting the demands of its 130 million MySpace users to give mobile access to MySpace services. Further details were hard to come by, although he did say that as country specific sites were added, so would the mobile versions be launched.

With sites in UK, Germany and France already, it looks like Italy and Spain will be next in line to get their own MySpace sites. 

“My priority is to take MySpace mobile, and the key driver in that will be to give the customer base access to the MySpace experience any time, any place, any where.”

MySpace talks about “core” MySpace services being made available to mobile users, although Sanchez said that didn’t mean that the mobile service would be a MySpace “light”.

“ We’re not calling it MySpace light, we’re definitely not calling that. We’re not trying to do everything at once. We have a practical approach to development.”

In terms of getting MySpace services onto phones, how does Sanchez see it working? “We’re looking at a number of different solutions, whether client or WAP based, depending on different distribution points and partners. Our ambition is to get MySpace Mobile into as many handsets as possible, through as many distribution points as possible”

Would that include working with operators, perhaps embedding the offering within an operators own portal? “You mean like on Vodafone live!? Yes. As I said we’re looking a a variety of distribution methods”

So what revenue opportunities does taking MySpace mobile offer? “I’m not going to discuss any of the commercial specifics?”

OK, but presumably going mobile means you can open up new revenue opportunities for advertisers and partners?

“In terms of the business model that underpin the mobile experience, it’s really a case of horses for courses, depending on the market dynamics, you could be looking at subscriptions, advertising, to pay as you go to free.”

“Obviously the company is built on the advertising model. We’re very well positioned to take advantage of that.”

And what will be the biggest challenge in implementing the strategy – the technology, route to market?

“There’s no one thing. It’s important to get the whole package right, technology, the proposition, the product and the distribution and marketing.”

So, to recap, the service will be about giving core functionality to mobile users, but won’t be MySpace lite. It will use a variety of methods to get to market, technically and in terms of distribution, and it will be supported on a “horses for courses” business model.
So now you know.

3’s Danish HSDPA network. launched today, will offer customers peak data rates of 1Mbps now, and 7.2Mbps next year, according to network provider Ericsson. 7.2Mbps is half the theoretical maximum of the HSDPA standard, and would represent a significant uplift on current typical user experience.

Morten Christiansen, CEO for 3 in Denmark says, “Today we launch HSPA as the first operator in Denmark – and as one of the first operators in the world at this speed. The Ericsson technology allows us to provide mobile broadband with speed up to 3,6 Mbps to the Danish people as a substitute to fixed broadband solutions.”
 
Lars Tofft, Country Manager of Ericsson Denmark says: “3 is the first operator in Denmark to offer consumer and enterprise customers the new and richer services that HSPA can deliver. Ericsson is very proud to be part of bringing true mobile broadband also to Denmark.”