Telcoflash: Telecom Market News

Warid Telecom had more than 3m subscribers in Pakistan in 10 months. MTS (Russia) had a subscriber base of 60.3m mobile subscribers as of February 28, 2006. Costa Rica has a mobile subscriber base of 1.2m and a penetration of 29%. Tunisie Telecom currently...

China Unicom posted revenue growth of 16% in 2005 to $10,8bn, of which $6.5bn in GSM services and $3.8bn in CDMA business. Net income reached $610m. ARPU was $6 for GSM and $9.4 for CDMA. Indosat (Indonesia) reports an EBITDA of $695m in 2005, up 12%,...

Lucent announced that David W. Hitchcock, 45, has been appointed as corporate controller.

Vendor consolidation in sight: Alcatel- Lucent It is the big announcement of the week. Alcatel and Lucent are used to talk merger (at least from 2001), but this time it seems serious. First, both companies confirmed talks, and both companies are in better...

EU to boost broadband access the EU targets that all EU citizens could have a broadband access by 2010, from current 12%-15% penetration rate. Broadband penetration has made significant gain, but mostly in urban areas or small densely populated countries....

Mobile TV needs In the US, about 3m mobile subscribers (1.5% of subscribers) watched streamed TV or played video content on their mobile devices, of which young male of 18-24 reached a penetration rate of 3.3%, and spend about $40 more per month than...

Broadband Future According to Verizon Chairman Seidenberg, the future should be wired and unwired. "The new Internet revolution will be characterized by 100 Mbit/s speeds, two-way capabilities, and broadband-anywhere mobility. It will be delivered by...

Bluetooth taking off, but .... Bluetooth technology has really started taking off. With shipments up more than 200% in 2005 and expected to reach 40m units a month sometime in 2006, Bluetooth is an established technology. But future could be chaotic....

Broadband DSL status According to the latest research from Point-Topic, the number of DSL users is still growing, but already in some countries a saturation point is already reached. For example S. Korea saw first decline in DSL lines in use last year....

Verizon-Qwest Rumor Still alive. Rumors of a possible takeover of Qwest by Verizon make sense and are still considered. Verizon could be interested to get a broad coast to coast optical networks to complement MCI, to prevent ATT to control all West Coast...