Thursday, May 31, 2012

AT&T promotes a future of even less competition

In this recent ZDNet article by Larry Dignan, AT&T CFO John Stephens waxes about the inevitability of consolidation in the US wireless carrier market. While I definitely think he has a point, what struck me as quite astonishing was his conclusion that the right market size was “two or three and certainly not six or seven competitors in any market place”.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Does Vodafone even know what Amazon is good at?

Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao recently said, “Vodafone wants to be the Amazon of telecos”, not in terms of selling but top-class customer service (according to WSJ). While I think that the presented strategy of vastly improving service at store locations combined with making it easier to buy Vodafone services and handsets online makes perfect sense, what threw me off was the Amazon reference. Does Vittorio even know what Amazon is really good at?

Friday, May 18, 2012

What is the problem with the Verizon AWS deal?

Over the past weeks, operators and other parties have lined up to question the rationale behind the Verizon bid to purchase AWS licenses from a consortium of cable operators. FCC have also started to ask questions.

What is all this fuss about? The AWS licenses owned by the cable companies have mainly been unused since the mid 2000s when they were awarded and would complement the existing Verizon LTE 700Mhz licenses very well. The 700Mhz licenses while great for coverage are unfortunately not very useful for data capacity which will become very obvious if there is a 4G iPhone in the pipeline. It all seem to make perfect sense. To prove their case even further, Verizon is offering to sell off some excess 700Mhz licenses to make the AWS deal pass regulatory muster.

If it only was this simple. There are three main problems with the Verizon - cable deal which different parties have raised.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

How do you measure success in the mobile App space?

MoDev recently hosted a great MeetUp in Arlington, VA featuring a couple of App premiers by local entrepreneurs. I was treated to really cool presentations even though the room was steamy because of no AC!

T-Mobile and Metro PCS. Why Not?

There has recently been rumors that T-Mobile is on a shopping spree and might take over Metro PCS. While there has been quite significant skepticism accompanying this rumor, primarily based on the fact that the two carriers use incompatible network technologies, I think there might be reasons to give this another look.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Apple continues smartphone dominance in the US market

According to this post at TechChrunch, Apple has significantly increased their dominance in the US smartphone market since the iPhone became available on Verizon and Sprint in addition to their launch partner AT&T. According to TechCrunch the iPhone accounts for a whopping 78% of the AT&T smartphone sales with solid numbers at Verizon and Sprint as well.