Telcoflash: Telecom Market News

IMS (converged networks and services): It is a unified architecture that can support a range of IP-based services for both packet- and circuit-switched networks and employ a range of different wireless and fixed access mechanisms. The main drivers for...

VOIP: The first remark is that service providers are moving to VOIP their own way (different timetables and with different strategies depending on their service mix). So it has lost its status of hot topic to become a mainstream service. Core pieces (softswitches,...

Rumors: During the show, many rumors circulated, mainly on vendors. Health (of Tellabs, Nortel) and strategy (of Nortel, Lucent) were questioned. Lucent and Nortel are perceived as becoming mainly wireless vendors, and their focus during the show is not...

VOIP: a hot topic in the Supercomm show. Many talks on the subject and many new products/ features were announced. A speech from a Time Warner executive, however, threw a bit of cold water on the excitement over VOIP. Earl Turner said, with is ten years...

Arcor's ADSL subscriber base base rose 200% to 510,000, and the number of ISDN customers grew by 83% to 712,000. KDDI (Japan) reached about 20m mobile subscribers in its au unit. DoCoMo posted 49.2m users in May, of which 12.9m in 3G FOMA. Vodafone KK...

Arcor (Germany) announced revenues of 1.6bn, up 14% and EBITDA rose 83% to 246m. Revenues are made 55% from consumers and 45% from businesses. Telkom (South Africa) reported net earnings of $991m, up 49%, and revenues rose 7% to $6.4bn. Sistema (Russia)...

Vodacom (S. Africa) and UK Virgin Mobile are jointly bidding for a controlling stake in Vmobile, Nigeria's No.3 mobile phone company. Portugal Telecom mobile unit, TMN, enters the second phase of deploying 3G network. It targets 1m users by the end of...

Telefonica and KPN have signed an interconnection agreement. KPN will benefit from Telefonica' s network in Latin America, while the Spanish incumbent is set to benefit from KPN's European coverage. Danish broadband operators have convinced more than...

French government has sold 6% of France Telecom for about 3.5bn. Viacom may bid for two cable channels from Telewest. Interoute (pan-European service provider) is offering a multipoint, wide-area network (WAN) Ethernet service, claiming the biggest coverage...

KPN announced new 630 jobs cuts in its call center division. KPN had announced an annual job cutting plan of 1,500 to 1,750 up to 2010. Staff has be reduced from 46,200 in 2001 to 28,000 in 2004 and could be as low as 20,000 by 2009.