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mobilkom joins mobile TV group (Austria)

  • June 9th, 2008
  • 3:03 pm

Austria’s largest cellular operator by subscribers, mobilkom, has signed an agreement which will allow it to offer DVB-H mobile TV services. The deal has been reached with Austria’s DVB-H network operator, Media Broadcast, and its two operating partners, ONE and 3 Austria. The consortium was awarded a licence to offer mobile TV transmissions over UMTS 3G networks in February this year.

   

 

Orange Switzerland reveals Euro 2008 coverage plans

  • June 3rd, 2008
  • 3:08 pm

Orange Switzerland has revealed in a press release that it will be offering unlimited access to its Orange World football section for CHF8 (USD7.7) during the European football championships to be held in Switzerland and Austria between 7 June and 29 June. The offer includes mobile TV broadcasts, live tickers, match schedules and news. The operator’s Orange LiveTV service is based on streaming via UMTS/HSDPA, allowing customers to watch all the matches of Euro 2008 on their mobile phone. For HSDPA-handset owners, the service will be broadcast in HD quality.

   

 

 

T-Mobile to keep iPhone exclusivity in Germany

  • May 20th, 2008
  • 2:17 pm

T-Mobile TMOG.UL expects to remain the only seller of Apple’s coveted iPhone in Germany, T-Mobile Chief Executive Hamid Akhavan said on Tuesday.

“We have a very good relationship with Apple…at least in Germany it is exclusive, and we expect it to remain as such,” Akhavan told the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Paris.

“If and when there is a 3G iPhone we expect to have it exclusively in Germany as well,” referring to a yet-unconfirmed new model of Apple’s touch-screen device that will support third-generation mobile phone networks with faster data speeds.

In April, T-Mobile began offering the iPhone for 99 euros ($154.10) in combination with the most expensive T-Mobile contract of 89 euros per month, giving rise to speculation it was trying to clear the shelves for a new version of the iPhone.

A string of recent deals announced by other operators such as Vodafone and France Telecom imply that Apple is selling the iPhone on a non-exclusive basis in several countries, a break with previous deals done in the United States, Germany, Britain and France.

Parent firm Deutsche Telekom has been selling the iPhone in Austria, for instance, but last week Orange, France Telecom’s main brand, announced it would sell the iPhone there as well.

Last week, Apple’s online store listed the iPhone as “unavailable”, a possible sign that the company is reducing inventory before the unveiling of an updated version of the device, expected next month.

   

 

Mobilkom places world’s fastest I-HSPA call at 10.1Mbps

  • May 9th, 2008
  • 2:50 pm

On Wednesday Nokia Seimens Networks (NSN) and mobilkom Austria demonstrated the world’s fastest data call on a mobile device using the vendor’s Internet High Speed Packet Access (I-HSPA) technology. The downlink speed reached a maximum of 10.1Mbps during the trial.
I-HSPA is designed for heavy data transmission and multimedia usage. The ‘flat architecture’ is a new architecture of 3G networks based on W-CDMA technology that allows the base station to be connected directly to the internet and eliminating Service GPRS Support Nodes (SGSNs) and Radio Network Controllers (RNCs).

   

Yahoo outsources Messenger calls

  • May 1st, 2008
  • 2:44 pm

Yahoo is outsourcing the internet phone functions of its instant messaging (IM) programme to Jajah, an Associated Press report said.

Jajah will connect the calls to and from users of Yahoo Messenger and handle billing and customer care, the company said.
Terms of the deal where not announced. No employees are moving over to Jajah.

The deal is an important win for Jajah, which has grown rapidly since it was founded in 2005 in Austria. It is now based in Mountain View, California, and has 10 million customers.

Yahoo Messenger has 97 million users, but the company has not revealed how many of them use the premium Phone In and Phone Out features.

The Associated Press report quoted Jajah CEO’s Trevor Healy saying that users will see no change to the service.

The Jajah brand may appear in some places, along with Yahoo’s.

Privately-held Jajah said it hopes to attract more corporate customers like Yahoo with a package of managed services for voice calls, and is talking to phone and cable companies.

   

Telekom Austria outlook hit by fixed-line migration (Austria)

  • February 29th, 2008
  • 11:35 am

Operator still eyeing Bosnian mobile market in 2008, but insists there are ‘no concrete plans’ for expansion.
The biggest threat to Telekom Austria’s financial performance is fixed-line migration in its home market, which is impacting the growth it is enjoying at its Eastern European mobile subsidiaries, said the operator’s CEO Boris Nemsic Thursday.  

Reporting its 2007 financial results yesterday, the operator said fierce competition in the Austrian mobile sector had led to declines in prices and accelerated fixed-mobile substitution.

“It’s a very simple calculation. If we lose 200,000 fixed-line connections, that’s 200,000 multiplied by the fee multiplied by 12 months,” Nemsic.

“These declines, plus the interest on its acquisition costs for Belarus-based MDC, mean that Telekom Austria said it expects a 12% decline in net income for 2008, with modest revenue and EBITDA increases of 5% and 3% respectively, helped by growth in its international operations.

Still, Nemsic said he was encouraged by the financial performance of the company over the course of 2007, given the number of subsidiaries and greenfield deployments it has undertaken.

“2007 was the biggest year of expansion in the history of the company… We’ve raised our customer base by over 50%, doubled the number of addressable markets to eight, and increased the number of addressable consumers to 44 million,” he said.

According to the telco’s full-year results, it now has a total of 15.4 million subscribers across its entire base of operations.

In 2007 Telekom Austria began operating mobile services in Serbia and Macedonia, and in Belarus following its October acquisition of local operator MDC, all of which Nemsic said have performed in line with expectations.

“After six months of operations in Serbia we had over 500,000 subscribers, we launched a post-pay tariff and began selling BlackBerrys… With MDC we managed to consolidate the company in one quarter,” he added.

However, in a report from Dow Jones Newswires, Citigroup Wednesday warned that Telekom Austria’s dependency on emerging markets leaves it more exposed to investor changes in risk appetite than most peers.

“I don’t see it as a risk I see it as an opportunity,” said Nemsic Thursday.

“We have higher operating margins in emerging markets than we do in Austria where the competition is more fierce,” he commented.

Still, for 2008 Telekom Austria has no solid plans to expand into other countries, but at the same time Nemsic reiterated he is keeping a close watch on the Bosnian mobile market.

“We’re not excluding anything but it needs to be a profit and a growth opportunity for us to consider it,” he said.

In November the company’s CFO Hans Tschuden said Telekom Austria was closely monitoring the proposed privatisation of one of Bosnia’s three mobile operators BH Telekom.

“Two of Bosnia’s three mobile operators have been almost wholly privatised, the third one, BH Telekom, is starting to be privatised and we are watching that closely,” said Nemsic on Thursday.

“It’s a difficult one because Bosnia has a complex decision-making process, so we’re watching to see how it pans out,” he said.

   

 

Telekom Austria wins 1,000 IPTV users per week

  • February 1st, 2008
  • 11:32 am

Telekom Austria wins an average of 1,000 new customers per week for its IPTV service aonTV and plans to expand aonTV coverage to 50 percent of all Austrian households by the end of 2008. Telekom Austria also announced a cooperation agreement with On Demand Deutschland to enhance its IPTV Video on Demand service aonTV Videothek with more than 500 movies by the end of this year. At the same a lot of Hollywood blockbusters will become available in HDTV format. The operator also plans to expand aonTV’s portfolio to around 100 TV channels by the end of the year including Turkish TV channel TRT, Serbian TV channel RTS Sat PTC and the Croatian channel HRT. The monthly fee for aonTv will stay EUR 4.90 in combination with an aonPur or aonBlizz connection.

   

Telekom Austria Group unveils xDSL, mobile growth (Austria)

  • January 19th, 2008
  • 6:45 am

Telekom Austria Group announces that the number of fixed net access lines fell to 2.4 million at end-2007, from 2.6 million at end-2006, as the fixed-to-mobile migration continued. The Fixed Network division added 28,600 net xDSL customers in Q4 2007, compared to 23,700 customers added in Q4 2006, to reach a total of 750,600 at end-2007, compared to 693,600 at end-2006. The group boosted its mobile customers by 44.6 percent to 14.8 million in 2007, boosted by the contribution of the recently-acquired MDC in Belarus and positive development across all countries. Excluding MDC, group mobile customers reached 11.7 million in 2007, up by 14.7 percent from 2006, with 510,700 net additions in Q4, compared to 454,000 net additions in Q4 2006. Mobilkom Austria added 105,600 net mobile customers in Q4, compared to 101,100 added in Q4 2006, to end with 3.96 million customers, up by 9.1 percent from end-2006. Mobilkom Austria boosted its market share to 40.3 percent at end-2007, from 38.7 percent at end-2006.

Mobiltel in Bulgaria added 284,900 net mobile subscribers in Q4 2007, versus 231,600 net additions in Q4 2006, to end with 5.1 million customers, up 19.5 percent from end-2006. Its market share fell from 52.5 percent in 2006 to 50.3 percent in 2007 in the face of stiff competition. MDC in Belarus had 3.06 million customers at end-2007, up 23 percent from end-2006, for a market share of 43.4 percent. Croatian mobile operator Vipnet ended 2007 with 2.18 million customers, up 14 percent from 2006, adding 102,600 net subscribers in Q4, compared to 106,700 net additions in Q4 2006. Vipnet’s market share was 43 percent at end-2007. Si.mobil in Slovenia had 497,200 mobile customers at end-2007, up 18.2 percent year-on-year, adding 17,400 net customers in Q4, compared to 15,000 net additions in Q4 2006. Its market share was 26.9 percent at end-2007.

   

Tele2 Austria partners with 3 Austria for joint offer (Austria)

  • January 16th, 2008
  • 2:22 pm

Tele2 Austria partners with 3 Austria to offer a package including mobile telephony, fixed telephony and broadband services. The package is called Complete Home & Go and includes a 8 Mbps DSL connection via Tele2’s Austrian network plus telephony line, WLAN router, a 3 data card plus 3Data Fix subscription for EUR 29.90 per month. Customers who sign up before 26 January of this year pay EUR 9.90 per month during the first three months of their contract. For new customers who sign up after 26 January, the monthly fee is EUR 19.90 during the first three months. The Tele2 8 Mbps DSL connection has a maximum upload speed of 1 Mbps and 3Data Fix includes 300 Mb data volume. This partnership marks the return of Tele2 on the Austrian mobile market, after it sold its mobile customer base to Telekom Austria in the autumn of 2007.

   

Nokia Siemens completes T-Mobile, Tele.ring network merger (Austria)

  • December 20th, 2007
  • 8:33 am

Nokia Siemens Networks has completed the unification and expansion of the T-Mobile Austria and Tele.ring networks following the acquisition of the latter by T- Mobile Austria. The result is a fully upgraded single physical network serving now about 3 million users - 2 million T-Mobile subscribers and 1 million Tele.ring customers. The project consisted in the replacement and upgrade of a total of 1,300 base stations of the 2G network, an upgrade of the existing T-Mobile Austria core network equipment to increase the network’s capacity as well as a migration of Tele.ring’s prepaid customers to a charging platform at T-Mobile Austria, already installed by Nokia Siemens Networks.