Love a Career in Telecoms. Since 2007.
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?
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. Continue reading “Mozilla enters the Mobile Browser market”
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. Continue reading “The European Commission vs. Qualcomm”
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.
A good part of the last couple days has been spent looking for missing call waiting tones. Call waiting tones are the soft background beeps that usually are heard when you are talking on the phone and someone else tries to call your phone. The sound you’ll typically hear is a double beep of around 440 Hertz for 300 milliseconds. Well, we lost ours.
We’re not entirely certain when we lost it. Looking back, it appears that the first subscriber report may have been received in mid-September. Only recently have the volume of complaints risen to a level that caused anyone to intervene. (There’s probably a process improvement or two lurking within that statement.)
Because call waiting tones are provided by a component of the Nortel switch, we immediately opened a dialog with their Technical Assistance Service (TAS.) Starting yesterday morning several engineers at Nortel TAS with on a conference bridge with several of our Engineers trying to isolate the problem. Continue reading “Our Call Waiting Tone Went Missing”