We’re pleased to announce that TeleTips Network is partnering with Telecom Voices, adding our voice to their coverage of Telecoms. Telecom Voices is a site dedicated to rebroadcasting blogs focused on Telecoms, allowing a wide diversity of Telecoms ideas to be found and read on a single web site. The posts of TeleTips Network will begin appearing there immediately.

It is the shared hope of Telecom Voices and TeleTips Network that this move increases the level of discussion and adds value for our mutual readers.

Give Telecom Voices a listen, and consider adding them to your daily rotation. We’ll talk to you there, too!

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Google has caved to pressure from the International Olympic Committee and pulled a video from YouTube which shows a protest about the subjugation of a peace-loving Himilayan country by an unelected dictatorship. Here is a link to the video, thanks to Slashdot.

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Information Week is reporting that  BlackBerry Users Experience Service Outage

What’s going on over at RIM?  Is this the 3rd or 4th highly publicized network failure they’ve experienced in the last year or so? Running a network is a highly repetitive, process-oriented business.  Not much sex and magic involved.  Widespread service-affecting events are signs of poor blocking and tackling:  time for RIM to get back to fundamentals.

This just has to leave user shaking their heads and heading for the exits.   Typographic error we expect to see soon: “current BlackBerry infrastructure outrage.”

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So over on Yahoo! this article is interesting.  The advantage to Motorola is clear, more cash for a business it does not appear to run well.

The advantage to Nortel is less clear.  Nortel already has switching and radio kit for a variety of wireless technologies and air interfaces. We’ll need to wait until more information becomes available.  I wonder if Nortel would get the iDEN infrastructure busines, too?

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The Mozilla foundation has recently announced that they intend to extend their web browser to allow it to run on mobile devices. I have to wonder about the opportunity they perceive. Outside the US there may well be a chance for a new browser to become popular on mobile devices.

Within the US however, the mobile operators wield so much control that it seems very unlikely the mobile browser could ever aspire to achieve the success the PC-based browser has. The path to that success for mobile devices is far more challenging. (more…)

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The European Commission has launched a case against Qualcomm for the way they license their technology to other companies. Cellular-News has the story, among others. I first caught wind of it over at Howard Chu’s HowardForums. My post there was a bit of a knee jerk reaction. Since that post I’ve done a little more reading and I have to say that my opinion is unchanged, though I also have a better understanding of why the EC is after them. (more…)

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OM Malik is one of my favorite bloggers. He generally writes about the technology industry with a focus on telecoms and the Internet. Today he covered news of Verizon Wireless and Google jockeying for position prior to the American 700 MHz spectrum auctions coming in January. It’s clear that both sides believe that much is on the line.

From Verizon Wireless’ perspective they must have at least 2 objectives in winning the auction. First, to acquire more spectrum to expand their existing business. They’d prefer additional nationwide spectrum. But I’d expect them to hedge that bet by selectively bidding for regional licenses.

Second, they can hope to eliminate a competitor, or at least reduce the scope across which a competitor might compete with Verizon Wireless. Both are clearly worth billions. Trailing 12 month revenue for Verizon Wireless is $91 billion. If a competitor or competitors could deny Verizon Wireless as little as 10 percent of that market it makes the cost of licenses pale by comparison.

A lost opportunity of $10 billion/ year has a net present value of around $25 billion. If that represented the cost of doing nothing, spending $10-12 billion to buy more spectrum seems like a way to save $15-13 billion. I count on Verizon Wireless to go all out before the auctions and to bid ferociously during them.

This show is only starting folks. don’t touch that dial.

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The second week of September in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Nortel will be hosting their users for a week-long conference of training, product demonstrations and sales. It is also expected to be a good chance for users to get together, compare notes, swap stories and have some fun. TeleTips Network will be there, blogging from the conference and calling attention to highlights and news. We’ll be showing the flag and recruiting some new members, too. If you’ll be attending drop us a note and look for us there.

Here’s a link to the Nortel CDMA Wireless Users Group Conference

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Vodafone and Verizon are again in the news. I’ve posted a recent story to our message boards, and written about them previously in the context of the upcoming American 700 MHz auctions. (Full disclosure: I used to work for AirTouch, which was acquired by Vodafone, and for Arun Sarin, now CEO of Vodafone.) The recent news is about their difficulties getting along together and about the possibility that the dividend Verizon pays to Vodafone, as a major stockholder, might not be paid again until 2010 or later. (more…)

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So today the American Federal Communications Commission decided to make the winner of the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auctions accept terminals and applications from 3rd-parties. This was at the suggestion of Google and others, and is excellent news for American consumers. It likely will lead to more handsets from which to choose and more innovative applications being available more quickly. Probably it also will mark the beginning of the end of the glory days for America’s incumbent mobile operators.

This ruling heralds much more difficult times for America’s coddled mobile operators. Handset choice and the ready access to innovative applications are not what they are known for. These will force them to change their current business models, which is likely to reduce their margins as well as their subscriber numbers. Their good times now have a hard stop.
(more…)

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