Swisscom is experimenting with a new take on ‘all you can eat’ bundles, with a range of unlimited tariffs that differentiate on data speed rather than consumption. The Natel infinity bundles offer a choice of five tariffs costing between SFr59 (€49.12) per month and SFr169, each of which offers unlimited domestic voice calls, text messaging and data access. The plans let users choose a data rate from sub-1Mbps to 100Mbps.
Malaysian 4G vendor Greenpacket and its chip partners Sequans have announced a dual-mode WiMAX/LTE CPE unit targeted at operators, like its first user ‘ Packet One of Malaysia ‘ which migrating between the two 4G standards and running them in parallel, at least for a while.
China Mobile says data traffic on its mobile network will surge more than 150% this year, and the company expects the sharp rise to continue in coming years. Chairman Xi Guohua told Mobile Asia Expo that wireless data traffic grew by 181.3% year-on-year in the first quarter, helping to stabilize ARPU, which has fallen as customers have increasingly adopted multiple SIM cards.
Infrastructure spend on carrier Wi-Fi is expected to reach $2.2bn by 2017 as mobile operators look to offload strategies. ABI Research thinks that, by 2017, carrier Wi-Fi will be almost half the size of the more established enterprise or consumer/SoHo Wi-Fi segments. ‘The majority of the total market in 2011 was accounted for by Cisco, Ruckus Wireless and Ericsson/BelAir, and as traditional mobile infrastructure vendors add Wi-Fi to their portfolios, these early market share rankings will fluctuate,’ says ABI. ‘Wi-Fi data traffic offloaded is expected to grow to around 30% by 2017.’
Telef’nica O2 this week launched LTE services in the Czech Republic. The network covers the municipality of Jesenice and its surroundings, a total population of almost 10,000. The network runs in 1.8GHz spectrum and is supplied by Huawei.
Sprint wants its Nextel customers to move to its CDMA network so it can accelerate the switch-off of the legacy network, freeing its 800MHz spectrum for LTE. To lure customers, Sprint is offering them three times the coverage they currently get with their Nextel phones by expanding its CDMA-powered Direct Connect push-to-talk service to its entire 2G footprint.
Headed by former Wind and Vimpelcom executives, Digital World Capital (DWC), a new London-based hedge fund, has received $75m of seed funding from Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris to acquire underperforming telcos in Europe. Some of Europe’s largest institutional fund management groups have been approached by DWC to invest in the private equity fund, with the aim of acquiring holdings in smaller telecoms groups struggling in the tough economic conditions in Europe, or that are being touted for sale by larger heavily indebted operators. The fund will be managed by Accelero Capital, which is part-owned by Sawiris.
America Movil has struck a deal to buy an extra stake in Telekom Austria from investor Ronny Pecik, having already acquired a 5% stake from Pecik’s Marathon Zwei Beteiligungs recently. This will be topped up to just under 23% subject to regulatory approval. Earlier this week the Mexico-based giant raised its stake in KPN of The Netherlands to 7.3% though it has offered to buy almost 28%.
Operators around the world will drive a significant spike in capex this year as they seek to launch LTE networks and carry out other big wireless projects, according to Infonetics Research. ‘We’re expecting a telecom capex hike in 2012 as operators around the world ramp their spending like crazy to launch LTE networks, modernize their mobile networks, and carry out national wireline broadband initiatives,’ said analyst St’phane T’ral. ‘The key capex contributors in 2012 will be Clearwire, Sprint and T-Mobile USA in the US; NTT DoCoMo and Softbank Mobile in Japan; and KT, LGU+, and SK telecom in South Korea.’ The analyst also points to China’s recently announced $58bn economic stimulus package, designed to fund a fresh round of investment in telecom infrastructure, and to capex increases by Europe’s big five. Global carrier capex is estimated to have grown by 3% last year to reach $301bn, with spending increasing on every type of network equipment except TDM voice, which continues its steep decline. Asia-Pacific was the largest capex region, followed by Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Infonetics predicts that worldwide telecoms capex will spike in 2012, then level out in 2015 and 2016 at around $345bn. Wireless operators’ share of that capex is forecast to grow from a quarter to nearly a third between 2012 and 2016.
Australian carrier Optus has completed its acquisition of Vividwireless from Seven Group Holdings. With the new spectrum this brings in the 2.3GHz band, Optus will accelerate the build-out of a national TD-LTE network in 2013. Optus also plans to expand its existing 4G network, which was launched in Newcastle and the Hunter region of New South Wales in April, to capital cities including Sydney, Melbourne and Perth by middle of the year.
Also in Australia, the communications ministry has planned its digital dividend auction in 700MHz for April 2013. The auction will also include 2.5GHz licences.
Sierra Wireless has entered into an exclusivity agreement for the acquisition of Sagemcom’s M2M business for €44.9m ($56.7m) in cash plus assumed liabilities. Sagemcom, a French group active in broadband, telecom, energy and document management, was an early entrant in the M2M market. The company has built a growing M2M franchise that includes 2G and 3G wireless modules, as well as rugged terminals for GSM-R applications.
4G baseband specialist Altair Semiconductor says its FourGee-3100/6200 chipset has successfully completed TD/FD-LTE live handover testing with testing firm Rohde & Schwarz. Such systems will allow the two LTE duplex modes to operate interchangeably on the same device, and will enable global LTE roaming. Altair says it is the first firm to achieve this in a commercial device.
Beleaguered Alvarion is relying on carrier Wi-Fi to rescue it from the decline in its WiMAX business. The Israeli firm has announced a new indoor Wi-Fi access point, the WBSn-2450-I, targeted at large, crowded, indoor venues where data consumption on laptops, smartphones and tablets is in high demand.
The Polish regulator, UKE, has set a deadline of the end of June for its consultation on the proposed 1.8GHz auction, and it will issue invitations to tender in the second half of July.
ZTE will continue to grow its investment in the US market by 10% annually despite having its operations overshadowed by a congressional probe that is looking into its own and Huawei’s ties to the Chinese government. CEO Lixin Cheng said that, since ZTE entered the US market, the company’s supply chain partnership has totaled more than $13.7bn.
Renesas Mobile, the mobile chip subsidiary of struggling Renesas Electronics of Japan, could be put up for sale as part of a previously reported reorganization, according to local reports, which also said Renesas was considering closing or selling off at least 10 of its 19 domestic manufacturing plants over the next three years. Renesas has been lossmaking since its formation as a merger of the chipmaking interests of NEC and Renesas Technology in 2010. Renesas Mobile acquired Nokia’s former modem chip business.
Texas Instruments’ digital light processor (DLP) technology has been used for projectors in applications from digital cinema to smartphones and is now being adapted for large touchscreens. ‘TI is agnostic with regard to the source of illuminations since we can support lamps, LEDs, lasers, whatever,’ said Kent Novak, TI’s SVP for the product line. The latest move will turn DLP rear projectors into interactive touchscreens. By illuminating the backside of the screen with an infrared LED, a small camera can sense when a finger touches the screen. TI is currently showing a prototype to auto manufacturers as a cheap alternative to dashboard touchscreens and other applications cold include wall kiosks and tablets.
Taiwan Mobile’s co-president, Cliff Lai, has called on the government to scrap the existing WiMAX licences and obligations, and release the spectrum for LTE services.
He said: ‘The government says that telecom networks are very slow, but WiMAX is even slower’. The regulator recently said that it was planning to release additional spectrum later this year, in the 700MHz, 900MHz and 1.8GHz bands.
State-owned Colombian telco Une-EPM has begun offering commercial services over its LTE network, the first of its kind in the country. At present the service is available to 80% of the populations of capital Bogota and of Medelin, but will be expanded to Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena and Bucaramanga later this year. Une intends to achieve 90% population coverage by year end, and sign up 120,000-180,000 subscribers by that date.
Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy enterprise social network company Yammer for $1bn-plus, a move that could bolster its unified communications and CRM businesses.
Broadband and home networking chip vendor Lantiq announced a collaboration with Qualcomm Atheros to produce a broadband home gateway reference design. This integrates the Qualcomm Atheros QCA9880 3×3 802.11ac solution and the Lantiq XWAY ARX300 or VRX288 universal gateway chipsets,.
Telefonica and Grupo Iusacell, the second and third cellcos in Mexico, will share their networks to challenge the supremacy of America Movil. The partners will share towers and fiber optic cables in a five-year deal which also includes roaming agreements across the country, and the companies will collaborate on network expansion. The alliance helps cut investment costs for Telefonica.
Sharp is the latest vendor to create its own user interface, called Feel UX, to differentiate its smartphones from rival Android devices. Feel UX promises a simplified, streamlined design featuring large icons and enabling consumers to access core device functions such as camera, photo gallery and media player directly from the lockscreen. Earlier this year, Google made inclusion of its unmodified Holo theme family a compatibility requirement for all devices running Android 4.0 and above.