Category: Telecom

As the industry moves quickly from triple play to quad play, the NTL/Virgin Mobile merger brings a new twist to the industry- great personalities like Sir Richard Branson, who cleverly turned a boring telecom term “quadruple” or “quad” play, into Four Play- cheeky given that the NTL/Virgin merger will be rebranded as Virgin! It seemed Read More

The ITU is holding its once in every four years conference in Turkey for the next 2-3 weeks to elect a new management team, and lay out a new framework for its policy making and actions over the next 4 years. From what I know, the candidates for: Secretary General are -Mr Hamadoun Toure (current Read More

There are many barriers to introducing triple play (fixed voice, data and vide0) and quadruple play (voice, data, video and mobile). In some places, it is regulatory issues (as each service is licensed differently) that is not allowing for easy cross pollination or convergence of services. In other cases, it is the lack of business Read More

Very interesting to read about telecom liberalisation efforts in Africa. Uganda Communications Commission has announced that it will completely liberalise telecom provisioning in Uganda now that an exclusivity license has expired (see http://allafrica.com/stories/200611010423.html ) Meanwhile, South Africa that had already liberalised, seemed to be moving towards creating a new state run operator. Interesting comments on Read More

As discussions of quad play, triple play etc are being discussed and debated, it is interesting that note that not all debates have the user at the core. Each wireless, mobile and wired services currently meets differing needs and it is unclear if studies can indeed predict the future of usage and deployment where one Read More

In a room full of mainly software and hardware entrepreneurs, Mr Sanjeev Ahuja gave a very refreshing angle of the telco industry compared to one I have heard from an incumbent telco over my last 20 years in this industry- i.e. looking at things from a customer point of view! He very deftly answered questions Read More

Ever since I have been involved in telecom (i.e.1986) I have heard the message of convergence and how it will impact the lives of users being sung over and over again. Whether it be discussed vis a vis ISDN, ATM, Internet, Mobile, triple play, quad play, I have always been waiting to see it finally Read More

Yesterday, 26th October 2006, at the Marriott Hotel in San Mateo, a group of students, businesses and other interested parties gathered to listen to Singapore government officials on the vision of an Intelligent Island for 2015. The vision is to have free broadband access to all in Singapore up to 512kbps for 2 years. This Read More

I was reading the recent Gartner report entitled “Telecom New Zealand Pioneers a new kind of Carrier-Vendor Business Model”. It discussed how TNZ decided that given it being a relatively small carrier, that it will focus on customer related services (value added services) and be reliant instead on only one vendor. One vendor has been Read More