BT to open access to underground ducts (UK)
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Open access to underground ducts is under preparation by British fixed line incumbent BT. BT’s rivals installing their own fibre-optic cabling in the duct can be seen on the implementation of this plan. The cable will effectively allow them to operate rival high speed broadband networks without facing the cost of digging to lay the cables.
According to Ian Livingston, BT’s chief executive, the company told regulator Ofcom last year that it is willing to provide open access to its ducts and although it’s unlikely to get fibre to every home, open access to all ducts might help BT and others extend coverage and so they expect government support.
Safaricom & KPLC sign fibre-optic cable deal
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Safaricom entered into a deal with Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) to lease fibre-optic cable capacity across its national network. With this deal, the company will come on a par with backbone operators such as Telkom and Kenya Data Networks.
Under the deal, a fibre-optic pair on KPLC’s 1,500km Optical Ground Wire (OPGW) system will be operated by Safaricom as built across the national power grid.
According to Safaricom CEO, Michael Joseph, with this new fibre system, they are entering a new realm as a data carrier which will be a major complement to the massive investments made in the country’s main undersea cable ventures and will definitely be offering a better end-to-end data proposition to both retail and wholesale customers.
France rings to competitive tune
Neuf Cegetel, the telecommunications operator, was a popular newcomer to France’s CAC 40 index this week, making its market debut after one of the year’s biggest initial public offerings in the sector.
Its shares were priced at EU22.08 on Tuesday, at the top of the indicative range, valuing the company at more than EU4.4bn. The shares have risen 6 per cent to EU23.45 since trading began on Wednesday.
Alongside its arch-rival Iliad, Neuf Cegetel has been one of the beneficiaries of deregulation in France’s fixed-line market, seducing customers away from the incumbent France Telecom through inventive, cut-price offers.
In particular, the French love of broadband – more than 11m households have a high speed internet connection – has allowed the alternative carriers to gain ground in the growing market for voice over internet protocol telephony, which could account for40 per cent of residential calls by the end of the year.
The country has also outstripped other European markets in its enthusiastic adoption of the “triple play” services bundling television and telephony services delivered over broadband along with internet access.
“All the other companies are trying to learn from France,” said one sector analyst. Investors in the Neuf Cegetel float will be hoping to tap into this dynamism, which has lifted the newly-profitable Iliad’s shares 60 per cent in the past year.
While the rash of new entrants has helped to speed take-up of the new services on offer, the intense rivalry between operators has also led to spiralling marketing costs and prices for triple play as low as EU30 a month.
Some consolidation has taken place in broadband. Neuf Cegetel, created from the merger last year of Neuf Telecom and SFR’s Cegetel, agreed last month to pay EU288m for the French arm of AOL, the US internet provider, which said the market was “too competitive” to work without a partner.
Analysts say there could be more to come.
There is no let-up in competition between the established players. Iliad, perhaps piqued by its rival’s flotation, said in September it would spend EU1bn on a fibre-optic cable network that can deliver advanced services such as high-definition television.
The investment is widely viewed as ambitious, but France Telecom will this year spend similar amounts to Iliad on its own fibre optic infrastructure, and Neuf Cegetel has promised to speed up its roll-out of the technology.
All three also claim strong recruitment figures, with Iliad saying on Thursday its growth in subscribers had jumped almost a third in the past quarter.
France Telecom, long suffering an exodus from traditional fixed-line phones, fought back this week, saying it had maintained its share of the French residential broadband market in the third quarter and limited the decline in residential landlines.
France Telecom is now pinning hopes for its mature markets on convergence of fixed and mobile services, a strategy that Terence Sinclair, an analyst at Citigroup, described as a concern, because “it tends to involve excessive discounting”.
Indeed, the new battleground may be in mobile services, where Neuf Cegetel is joining newcomers such as Tele2 and Virgin in challenging the three market leaders – SFR, France Telecom’s Orange and Bouygues Telecom.
Given the number of new entrants, SFR, which remains Neuf Cegetel’s biggest shareholder, may have done well to keep a stake in the emerging competition.
“Prices have gone down and churn has gone up,” said Raj Sinha, analyst at JPMorgan, describing the current situation as “the calm before the storm”.
In particular, recent weeks have seen a new influx of MVNO (mobile virtual network operators) – companies that buy minutes wholesale from existing telecoms operators to sell their own mobile brands to retail customers.
Some are targeting a niche market, such as the radio station NRJ, which offers a pre-paid, free-texts service aimed at a teenage audience. The supermarkets Auchan and Carrefour, set to launch pre-pay services, could find a wider public.
“It’s not right to think of a blood bath . . . but somebody gets damaged,” said Mr Sinclair. “It becomes a much more price-focused market.”
In a telling sign of the battle for subscribers, the broadcaster M6 this week said telecoms spending had been an important prop for advertising revenues. With an ever-larger field competing for customers’ attention, could the advertisers soon be making more money than the operators?
Source- http://news.yahoo.com
