WCA September 2012

Telecom news

market, with around 2.9 million con- nected TV sets to be sold there in 2012. According to BITKOM every sixth household in Germany now has a connected TV set, with that 17 per cent saturation seen as rising to 22 per cent by the end of the year. As an interesting aside, the association estimates that only slightly more than half of the owners of connected TV sets actually hook up their units to the Internet.

Telefónica and Vodafone are to join forces into one grid running independent networks in Britain

With the British government planning to sell broadcast spectrum for LTE (long term evolution) service by the end of this year, European mobile network operators have given thought as to how they might benefit. On 7 th June, Spain’s Telefónica and Britain’s Vodafone announced that they will combine their wireless phone grids in Britain and jointly build a superfast network to keep pace with the market leader: Everything Everywhere, a joint venture of Germany’s T-Mobile and France Télécom. According to the London-based GSM Association, an industry group, the 60-odd distinct network operators active in Europe’s mobile phone market have created an infrastructure density about three times that in North America and Asia. Thus collaboration with rivals on grids to reduce present and future costs is on the rise. Combining the networks of O2 UK – the No 2 British operator, owned by Telefónica – and Vodafone UK, the No 3, will enable Telefónica and Vodafone to share the expense of building a national mobile broadband network using LTE technology. Vodafone and Telefónica plan to place their British networks into a 50-50 venture encompassing a combined total of 18,500 cell tower masts, an increase of about 40 per cent for each operator. Telefónica already shares its network with Vodafone in Spain and with T-Mobile in the Czech Republic. The British venture expands on a previous equipment-sharing partnership between O2 and Vodafone, called Cornerstone, that began in 2009. Writing from Berlin in the International Herald Tribune (7 th June), Kevin J O’Brien observed that it was the expense of building LTE networks in saturated European markets that prompted Telenor, a Norwegian operator, and Tele2, a Swedish operator, to merge their networks in Sweden. In Germany, O2, the nation’s No 3 mobile operator, and E-Plus, the No 4 owned by KPN of the Netherlands, are also examining venture options for their businesses. ✆ Mr O’Brien noted an anomaly of the Vodafone-Telefónica partnership, even as it promises savings on operating and equipment costs in Britain. The two carriers intend to continue to run competing services and even bid against each other in the upcoming British spectrum auction.

France’s doughty little Minitel falls victim to the Internet

“We invented a lot of today’s technology with the Minitel. The Internet, all online networks, it all stemmed from the Minitel.” The speaker was Jean-Paul Maury, former director of the Minitel project at France Télécom, which on 2 nd July announced that, after three decades of service, a French technological wonder had been closed down. Developed as a paper-saving measure in the 1970s by France Télécom, then a state-owned monopoly, the government-supported Minitel was distributed free to every household as part of an upgrade of the telephone network. On its demise the text-only terminal that brought real-time banking, transport updates, weather reports, ticket booking, sports results, and much else into French homes was fondly recalled around the world. Catherine Field of the New Zealand Herald wrote: “Users received a beige plastic cube with a flipdown, clunky keyboard, and black-and-white screen about the size of a paperback. It was plugged into the phone socket and used landlines to carry the data.” Ms Field noted that, at the Minitel’s peak in the mid-1990s, 25 million people using 26,000 of its services averaged two million connections a month. Many of these employed “Pink Minitel,” the forerunner of the online forum. Tens of thousands of businesses sprung up around the device, which at the height of its popularity accounted for $1.5 billion a year in connection fees for France Télécom. The company tried to promote it abroad, but was overtaken by events.

Some 46 per cent of TV sets sold in Germany – almost every second unit – can be connected to the Internet As reported by Jörn Krieger in RapidTVNews, TV sets with Internet access have gained in popularity in Europe, with the number of connected TV sets sold expected to rise by 68 per cent (to 19.1 million) this year compared with 2011. Citing the German industry association BITKOM, Mr Krieger wrote that at least one in three flat-screen TV sets sold in Europe (37 per cent) in 2012 will be Internet-compatible. Referencing current figures compiled by the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO), BITKOM looks

for the turnover in these devices to increase by 40 per cent to $18.4 billion by the end of the year. (“Connected TV Sets Boom in Europe,” 6 th June). The average price of a connected TV set was found to have dropped 17 per cent this year (to $969) compared with 2011, despite the fact that sets now on the market offer more features than previous models. The lower price can be attributed to strong competition among manufacturers and retailers. The largest single market by far is Germany, where 4.6 million connected TV sets will be sold in 2012, for an increase of 36 per cent over 2011. This means that 46 per cent of TV sets sold in Germany (almost every second unit) can be connected to the Internet. Britain is the second-largest

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Wire & Cable ASIA – September/October 2012