Belgium cable player VOO told us this week that it plans to partner with Telenet to provide a contiguous WiFi cloud from Homespots, with a reach all over Belgium and confirmed that this was also part of a joint cellular strategy.
VOO has recently won a license for 4G spectrum and has its own MVNO , as does Telenet. Both are looking to knock dents out of incumbent Telco Belgacom. Telenet is controlled, but not yet fully owned by Liberty Global and has openly talked about its trials in Homespots, a way of using a software download to separate some bandwidth on home WiFi gateways for use by passersby and cellular users.
That kind of strategy is particularly effective in a territory like Belgium and the neighboring Netherlands, because such a large part of the population can be covered, due to its high urban density and low rural sprawl.
VOO claims to have 1 million TV customers in its cable networks in the Walloon area of Belgium, while Telenet has around 2.2 million. Around 1.4 million of these Telenet homes also have broadband and WiFi. VOO is a more recently convert to installing Wifi broadband and we think it is closer to having around 400,000 broadband customers that might convert to Homespots, potentially leading to 1 million Homespots between them. These would provide much of the data backbone to any MVNO cellular offering and only voice would have to go over cellular. The more we look into it, the more that this idea of cable groups ganging together to offer WiFi offload, is taking off and given that most of Europe has little or no overbuilding, cable companies mostly do not compete with one another, something which is not true of Telcos, where a territory has more than one.
VOO also has its own Multiscreen services called VOOmotion, which has won awards and is based on the SeaChange Adrenalin video platform and Nitro subscriber experience software. And by setting up WiFi Homespots that could easily be enjoyed on the go.
This system is fully HTML5-based and gives access to 40 live TV channels and thousands of VoD assets and allows viewing beginning on one screen and swapping to another, as well as pay per event live viewing on key sports. The system also uses encoders from RGB Networks.
It looks to us that Belgacom, which has just 1.4 million IPTV customers, and 1.6 million home broadband lines, is being targeted in much the same way the UPC Netherlands is partnering with Ziggo to attack KPN, also with a planned MVNO, probably from Vodafone. In the past both of these telcos have been considered in pole position for offering new services against Cablecos.
Telenet has announced that it has trialed Homespots at 1,500 locations, with a view to offering some 50,000 of them added to its 1,200 public hotspots and 521,000 mobile customers. One unconfirmed report has it that Telenet has already upgraded some 600,000 locations into Homespots
It has also gone into partnership with the Triiing app which will enable Telenet customers to call all mobile and fixed numbers from their smartphone, via any WiFi network, at Telenet fixed line rates. Triiing is the operator’s first step in offering mobile Voice Over IP services, and it runs on iOS now and Android later.
Ziggo in the Netherlands has also said that it will add 1 million Homespots by August, and is slowly rolling them out across its footprint. Anyone who does not think that this war against the Telcos is real, needs to take careful note.