Top stories 10-01-05- N46

 10-01-

After years of focus on consumer and computer markets, CES show (the biggest consumer show in the world) last week added personal communications. So, consumer and computer firms are put on a collision course, with telecom and cable companies. This year, the theme was the convergence between home entertainment and personal communications. And if technical hurdles seem to have been cleared, convergence is still under way. All players are there to compete for digital home and multimedia content to mobile. Phones play games and TV, TV is linked to PC and security systems, DVD players display photos, and DVR can have 500 Go of storage (400 TV hours!!!). In my mind, what is the most interesting is not to have a single device (a dream!!) to handle all services, but to have less specialized devices and far less remote control.

The show also highlights that head-to-head competition will be fierce between incumbents and cable companies. US will certainly be the hottest fighting place for a while, but competition will be ubiquitous. Cable companies are well positioned to race to the head of triple play offerings. They control their networks and all aspects of triple play, they can have a current speed advantage, and they also have an economic cost advantage for adding a VOIP customer ($ 267 for cable vs $ 527 for an incumbent on average). Telcos are at risk. VOIP is a threat to them, they lack of video experience and they have to deal with (satellite) TV providers. So in order to differentiate themselves, they unsurprisingly will be jumping offering quadruple play services (fixed voice, data, video and mobile voice). But if the proposition is also valid for cable companies, most telcos are controlling a cellular service, an offer MSOs cannot offer without partnering with a mobile operator (see Time Warner talking with Sprint). In addition, they are starting (Japan, US) to deploy fiber to the home (FTTx) and be more comfortable with high-bandwidth services. In fact, they have no (or few) alternative, while their core business is shrinking. And customers certainly will applaud to a cost-effective $100- $150 per month package (SBC proposition) to get everything. The battle is just starting but the pieces of the puzzle are step by step put in place. It will be interesting to look at the evolution over the next weeks/ months.

ETSI’s NGN TISPAN Working Group has selected Ting ZOU, of Huawei Technologies, as Rapporteur for a highly prioritized ETSI Technical Report within the NGN standards area. It is the first technical expert from China to be selected by ETSI and it highlights the growing power of the Chinese telecom industry.

“Super 3G” information was misleading! The report that said 26 mobile operators and vendors were driving a new standard that would significantly boost the performance (speed) of current 3G networks, was misleading according to an ETSI spokeman. The work, launched in December in Athens, is in fact part of the 3GPP activity and focused on the long term (after 2010), and all 26 members are part of the 3GPP group. No secession attempt is likely in sight!!