Cisco and Nokia Siemens have signed a deal to co-develop network management and operational support tools for telecoms operators. The finished items will rely on Cisco’s Active Network Abstraction (ANA) system as the basis for managing complex multi-vendor networks and on Nokia’s Open EMS Suite element management system, and the platform will offer basic fault, configuration, performance and security management, data acquisition and network element mediation and it will be able to do jobs like build links between Amdocs’ OSS applications and the core network.
The fate of Alltel, the tier 2 US cellco which has 12 million US customers, has been up in the air for some time, and this week was sold for $27.5 billion to private equity groups, which says it’s the biggest deal of this type in telecommunications history. Buyers include Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs. The deal was a 10% premium on the Alltel share price, already up, on prior takeover speculation. Shareholders must now decide if the deal is sweet enough, and if it’s not there are other Private Equity groups waiting in line to up the ante.
Video search market leader Blinkx, as expected, raised around $50 million for its investors in its IPO competed with week, giving the company a value of $250 million. Our view is that if this was a US company, that value would have been far higher. UK public search specialist Autonomy had options on the private shares and wanted a quick kill. The shares are already surging.
Broadcast Australia said it would start another DVB-H trial for a further three months with Thomson equipment and Irdeto DRM. It also reported on its last DVB-H trial which had 375 people, saying that 80% of users loved the service and most wanted to subscribe to a similar commercial service, and on average watched mobile TV for 25 minutes at time, twice a day, with new prime times in the morning, lunch and early evening. More or less identical to other DVB-H trial results.
Hewlett-Packard has finally built an IPTV system for MidtVest Bredbaand in Denmark, working alongside Cisco. The system was fiber based and offers video on demand and interactive TV for 200,000 customers and a full triple play bundle including internet, TV and voice, and web browsing on the TV. Next up is HD, DVR and remote PC data back-up.
Meanwhile Cisco said that Danish utility company Bredbaand Nord has launched video services over a Cisco Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network platform with a headend from Scientific Atlanta, and Ethernet over fiber connection to the home with 46 TV channels of video, initially delivered as analog, and a 100 megabit per second link, plus voice and data services and Linksys termination equipment for the home.
Electronic Arts the biggest independent game company in the world has spent $167 million for a 15% stake in a Chinese online game operator The9 and has also given The9 exclusive rights to operate its ‘FIFA Online’ soccer game in mainland China. FIFA Online already has 4.4 million subscribers in Korea alone, through a similar licensing deal.
Ateme, a small French encoder maker has picked up what it says is a significant order for its Kyrion encoding system from Free group, the French ISP which offers IPTV. The system can support HD but Free is only using it to deliver 18 standard definition channels, with each channel using 1.7 Mbps of bandwidth.
fring (note the lower case ‘f’) which offers VoIP on a cellphone, has teamed up with The Cloud, which operates one of the biggest Wi-Fi clouds in Europe, to offer fring mobile VoIP client, specially optimized for Cloud customers. The service allows talk to other Cloud users through fring, Skype, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger and to SIP clients, over The Cloud’s 7,500 location Wi-Fi network and other Wi-Fi, 3G and GPRS networks.
IPTV middleware company Minerva Networks says that it has completed an integration with Switzerland’s ADB, a leading set top designer, so that ADB set tops can be used off the shelf with the Minerva’s iTVManager IPTV services management platform for both SD and HD services.
On2 Technologies, the company behind the codecs that drive Adobe Flash Video, has acquired Finnish codec designer Hantro for $58.4 million in cash and stock. Hantro has got its codecs into around 200 million mobile devices and perhaps this is a pre-cursor to solving some of the special problems of pushing Flash video on handsets with Adobe’s Flash, due later this year. Hantro stockholders will own about 12% of the combined company.
France has voted to use one of its DVB-T broadcasting multiplexes to offer 3 high definition TV channels on its free to air digital terrestrial system. The channels could be up as early as the first half of 2008, and the authorities will consider more HD channels.
The BBC said that its combined international news services attracted a weekly audience of more than 233 million during 2006-2007. The UK broadcaster says an independent study said that 23 million more people used the BBC World Service radio, BBC World television and the BBC’s international online news service this year, compared to last. The BBC World Service weekly radio audience was up to 183 million, a rise of 20 million over this time last year and its news web site had 763 million page impressions during March, with 38.5 million unique visitors.
Predictably the GSM Association which represents all the cellular operators around the world, this week slammed the EU regulation to reduce roaming charges, which was voted through this week by the European Parliament. The ruling will mean there is a limit of €0.49 on outgoing and €0.24 in incoming calls. The GSMA said it was unnecessary, that it will curb competition and that it risks long term harm to consumers. While roaming charges in Europe have come down somewhat, they still result in the odd unexpected $500 phone bill, where people have traveled for just one week in Europe and received just a few calls from home.