DoCoMo's recent foreign investments include a 26 percent stake in Tata Teleservices, India's sixth-largest mobile operator, a 30 percent stake in telecom operator Axiata's Bangladesh unit, and a 16.5 percent stake in Malaysian operator U-Mobile TOKYO, JAPAN: Japan's top wireless operator, NTT DoCoMo Inc , said it is in talks with some Asian mobile ...
Acer's plan to replace the Aspire One 751 netbook with an 11.6-inch Timeline ultraportable - which we reported last month A - has apparently come to fruition with this, the Acer Aspire Timeline 1810T.A According to macles, the 11.6-inch 1366 x 758 16:9 notebook swaps the AO751's anemic Atom Z520 processor for an Intel ULV SU3500 1.4GHz CPU, up to ...
Sprint Nextel Corp. on Thursday announced it will transfer operation of its wireless and wireline networks to Swedish telecommunications equipment maker LM Ericsson.
"It's predictable that prices decrease for consumer electronics as manufacturing volume scales up -- just ask those poor saps who paid $499 for a 4GB iPhone in 2007," Rotman Epps said. "But there's also some pricing pressure specific to the e-reader category that Amazon is responding to."
Avoiding Gadget Clutter
Amazon's price change to $299 neatly repositions the Kindle 2 between Sony's PRS-505 and its touchscreen-capable PRS-700BC, which Amazon currently prices at $269 and $349. Last month's introduction of the $249 Cool-er by U.K.-based startup Interead also signals that the barrier for entering the market is dropping.
"Taiwanese manufacturer Netronix is cranking out stripped-down, less-expensive e-readers for companies like Interead and Borders UK," Rotman Epps said. "Neither has wireless connectivity, but they each expand consumer choice for a lower price. What's more, they were developed and brought to market rapidly -- the Cool-er Reader took only six months from concept to retail."
Amazon also has to deal with reluctance by some consumers to increase their gadget clutter. Rotman Epps observes that multi-function devices such as smartphones and netbooks have put a ceiling on how much e-readers are worth. "If you can buy a fully functioning netbook for $300, it makes consumers think twice about shelling out even close to that much for a single-function device like an e-reader," Rotman Epps said.
Netbooks represent yet another low-cost platform on which eBooks can be read using software from Sony and other vendors. "Google announced yesterday that it will be launching an OS for netbooks -- it already has Android for smartphones -- so I wouldn't be surprised to see Google partnering with a device...
The seven-year deal, valued between $4.5 billion and $5 billion, will transfer about 6,000 Sprint employees to an Ericsson-owned subsidiary, based near Sprint's Overland Park, Kan., headquarters.
Sprint officials stressed that the nation's third-largest wireless provider will maintain ownership and control of its network, including future investment and strategy, while Ericsson provides day-to-day maintenance and monitoring of the network of cell towers and call switching equipment.
"This is about improving the customer experience," Steve Elfman, Sprint's president of network operations and wholesale, told reporters. "While we get the benefits of Ericsson's expertise and the tools and best practices they bring to the table, we can focus our attention on bringing great devices, great services, great applications to (customers)."
Elfman said the company expected to save money on employee and other operational costs with the agreement but declined to give details on how much. Sprint laid off 8,000 employees earlier this year, which it said provided $1.2 billion in savings.
The employees are expected to switch over to Ericsson in late third quarter, after which it will take 12-18 months to fully shift operations to Ericsson. Elfman said Sprint will retain about 2,000 employees who have network-related jobs, such as budgeting.
Jan Frykhammar, head of Ericsson's Global Services unit, told reporters the company was "excited" by the contract, its first network operation deal in North America. The company already manages global networks that serve 275 million subscribers.
"This is really a proof point of a long-term partnership between Sprint and Ericsson," Frykhammar said.
The deal, which has been rumored for months, came following a "vigorous bid process" that lasted up to a year, Elfman said.
"Our judgment over that fairly lengthy time ... they came out far...
Sprint and Ericsson today announced a pact in which Ericsson will take on 6,000 Sprint employees in a seven-year services contract. The outsourcing contract is worth between $4.5 billion and $5 billion, reports Market Watch.
Ericsson will assume responsibility for the day-to-day services, provisioning and maintenance for the Sprint-owned CDMA, iDEN and wireline networks. Sprint will retain full ownership and control of its network assets. No force reductions are currently contemplated as a result of this agreement, the companies said.
According to Wikipedia, Ericsson has officially announced more than 100 contracts for managed services with operators worldwide since 2002. In all current managed services contracts, excluding hosting, Ericsson is managing networks that together serve more than 225 million subscribers worldwide. Sprint Nextel, based in Overland Park, Kansas, employs some 56,000 people (2008).
According to reports, Ericsson will take over Sprint’s network management on September 21st. The company already has moved their offices to the Kansas City operations center.
Ericsson is currently focusing on Long Term Evolution technology, and not CDMA. Ericsson and TeliaSonera unveiled the world’s first commercial Long Term Evolution (LTE) site in Stockholm, this May. Whether that implies Ericsson will manage a LTE conversion for Sprint is unknown. Ericsson has long been an LTE backer. WiMAX — not so much.
Last year, Sprint sold some 3,080 of its cell towers to TowerCo for an estimated $670 million in cash. On Monday, Sprint said it lost $594 million in its latest quarter. Net operating revenues were $8.2 billion, down 12% from $9.3 billion a year ago.
The company saw its subscriber base continued to decline, ending the quarter with 49.1 million customers - compared to 49.3 million at the end of 2008. This includes 35.4 million post-paid subscribers (25.3 million on CDMA, 8.9 million on iDEN, and 1.2 million Power Source users who utilize both networks), 4.3 million prepaid subscribers (3.5 million on iDEN and 800,000 on CDMA) and 9.4 million wholesale and affiliate subscribers, all of whom utilize the CDMA network.
Ericsson’s long-awaited universal base station is out of the lab and into the equipment closet. Verizon Wireless will be among the first to receive the new multi-standard platform, reports Telephony, deploying it in its forthcoming long-term evolution (LTE) network.
Ericsson executives say the kit is already deployed in an existing operator’s high-speed packet access (HSPA) deployment, though they did not reveal whose. Unveiled at Mobile World Congress in 2008, the RBS 6000 is Ericsson’s first software-upgradable base station, supporting GSM, GPRS/EDGE, Wideband CDMA and eventually LTE.
Ericsson is also introducing Evo RAN, a Radio Access Network (RAN) solution enabling operators to run GSM, WCDMA and LTE as a single network. It is intended to simplify network management, lower costs and reduce power consumption. Ericsson’s RBS 6000 is now a key component of Evo RAN. The solution also includes a new common network controller, the Evo Controller 8000. Evo RAN will also be available for existing GSM and WCDMA sites based on Ericsson’s RBS 2000/3000 base stations.
LTE is cellular’s next generation (pdf) as defined by the 3GPP (Third-Generation Partnership Project) and supports operations in both the paired spectrum and unpaired spectrum. It supports channel bandwidths of 1.4-20MHz and MIMO. The wide international support for LTE ensures economies of scale, enabling cost-effective solutions for network operators.
Verizon Wireless recently announced that it has activated 11 new cell sites in Illinois in the first quarter and is on target to build a total of 96 new cell sites in 2009 in the state. Verizon is expected to become the first wireless company to offer commercial LTE-based service, starting in 2010.
What communications costs will consumers cut first in a bad economy? Not broadband, says Strategy Analytics. They say 69% of the households will keep or increase their spending on home broadband.
But mobile data plans are another story says e-Marketer.
Nearly one-half of respondents (48%) said they would drop the mobile data services completely if forced to scale back, while a further 17% would move to a lower-tier plan to save money. Pay TV and landline phones, are also on the chopping block.
According to The Pew Internet & American Life Project, 22% of US adults cut back on mobile service in the year prior to March/April 2009 to save money. Just 9% canceled or cut back on Internet subscriptions.
North American Broadband Service Providers (BSPs) added 1.9 million net subscribers in the first quarter of 2009, representing a 3% rate growth compared to Q4′08. Comcast continues to hold the number one position in the US broadband market, with 15 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2009.
The US market is on track to reach 75 million broadband subscribers by the end of the year. A substantial part of this growth is expected to come from AT&T and Verizon’s respective FTTx offerings.
When netbooks first appeared the choice was simple- the Asus Eee. While the Asus had it's fans, I found it less than inspiring and couldn't imagine it standing up to the rigors of daily use.
Craig Settles is hot under the collar about the NTIA’s announcement of using panels of volunteers to review proposals for its $4.7 billion worth of grants:
NTIA’s rationale is that (I’m paraphrasing) there are arms of government that conduct volunteer peer review to decide grant awards, so we’re just doing what other groups have done before us. RUS is going to stick with its current staff and hire additional people to review grants.This has to be THE most ridiculous and potentially most disastrous decision made by a federal agency with regard to distribution of taxpayer money. There is no way, given the short time frame to prepare people, the short window of reviewing and approving grants, and the sheer volume of money to be awarded that you can use volunteers and not have massive failures in quality control.
I’ll give the NTIA (and Jonathan Adelstein), the benefit of a doubt. I hope the process provides lots of points for joint public/private partnerships. Throwing money at non-sustainable quick-fixes could do more harm than good.
There are lots of options:
I like the “lightly licensed” model that Adelstein and the FCC developed for 3.65 GHz. Perhaps that model could be extended for city-wide municipal networks in the 2.250-2.280 GHz band as well as unused broadcast “white spaces”.
Strategy Analytics now expects the mobile TV broadcasting market to total $280 million next year. Only three years ago the firm forecast the market to reach $5.4 billion in 2010, reports Reuters.
“We’ve downgraded our forecast a fair bit to reflect the slower-than-anticipated rollout of services and limited momentum from carriers and broadcasters,” said Strategy Analytics analyst Nitesh Patel.
“Application and widget stores and mobile internet access have taken priority over mobile broadcast.”
For years beaming television to the world’s four billion cellphones was thought to be the future for broadcasters, says Reuters. Now online stores have enabled consumers to choose their own mobile television.
BBC World and Al Jazeera English have recently launched apps for consumers to watch real-time news on their iPhones, through a London-based company, Livestation. Mobile Apps like Ustream, Qik and Livestream let consumers shoot, upload and share videos. Samsung lets customers download movies to their phones.
As Facebook and Twitter disrupt business models for mainstream media, the one-size-fits-all approach of broadcast mobile TV got stuck before it even properly took off, concludes Reuters.
“It is a financial disaster,” said John Strand, a consultant who has followed the mobile industry closely for more than 12 years. “It’s a nice product, but the customers won’t pay for it.”
Mobile TV standards including ATSC-M/H, MediaFLO, DVB-SH and DVB-SH — using the broadcast model — can only transmit a dozen or so mobile tv channels at a time.
But mobile content — available over Mobile WiMAX and LTE — will be virtually unlimited. On every smartphone and MID. That seems likely to deliver a bigger audience — both free and pay — than the broadcast model.
The ubiquity of 3G/4G, unlimited content, and a multi-cast option is a knock-out combination.
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