WCA March 2013

Comparable online activity was lower among users in Germany (42 per cent) and France (40 per cent), and lowest in the Czech Republic (35 per cent). Eurostat also identified the tiny Baltic countries as Europe’s leaders in reading newspapers online. Some 90 per cent of Internet users in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania access Internet news sites. In France, only 38 per cent of respondents said they read news online. Eurostat published its findings in advance of a policy speech by Europe’s Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes. Among the topics she was expected to address are further broadband growth and possible changes to EU copyright law. Elsewhere in telecom . . . ✆ ✆ Volvo Car Group on 17 th December announced that it will use Ericsson’s Connected Vehicle Cloud to allow drivers and passengers in its cars to access services available in the cloud. The network vendor, also Swedish, said users will be able to connect with applications for information, navigation and entertainment from a screen in the car. Volvo is Ericsson’s first customer for the Connected Vehicle Cloud platform. The carmaker said it plans to partner with Internet radio providers, city governments, highway authorities, toll-road operators and others. ✆ ✆ Seeking to extend its global dominance in personal computers to mobile phones and tablets, China’s second-largest vendor of smartphones started in November to sell them in Russia. Lenovo Group Ltd is offering its S880 and P700i models in Russia, its fifth overseas market for the devices, spokesman Chris Millward said in a 28 th November telephone interview with Bloomberg News . In the four months to that point, Lenovo – which introduced its first touch-screen handset in China in 2010 – expanded its sales to India, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. The company’s mobile Internet and digital home unit, which makes smartphones, more than doubled revenue to

$1.31 billion in the first half of last year. Total sales for the period rose 11 per cent to $8.67 billion. ✆ ✆ Just a day after having scored a victory in the US with over the maker of iPhones, Korea’s Samsung Electronics on 18 th December said it was dropping lawsuits aimed at banning the sale of Apple Inc products in Europe. Over the previous 18 months the world’s two leading smartphone makers had been locked in patent disputes in at least ten countries. Apple began the lawsuit series when it accused Samsung of copying its best-selling iPhone and iPad. On 17 th December a judge rejected Apple’s request for a ban on the sale of Samsung Electronics smartphones in the United States. While the Korean company did not say that it would altogether abandon its quest for compensation at law, it announced that it was dropping its effort to stop the sale of Apple products in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. ✆ ✆ China Telecom Corp announced that it has introduced pre-paid card products that allow third generation, or 3G, network users to buy the ability to transmit specific amounts of data. The carrier is the first Chinese telecom operator to offer wireless network traffic products to customers. China Telecom said in a statement that, compared with older-type telecom contract plans, prepaid data cards are convenient to purchase, flexible in use, and targeted toward specific amounts of data demand. As reported by Shen Jingting in China Daily (12 th December), China Telecom offers 3G network data cards for 60 megabytes (MB), 150MB, and 300MB of data. The price for a 60MB card is 10 yuan ($1.60). “Data traffic management is a very important task for telecom carriers, especially when they enter the mobile Internet age,” Le Huihua, senior product manager of China Telecom’s operation management division, told China Daily .

annual shipments of small cells by 2017. The report, which looks at the wider mobile data traffic market, also forecasts 1.4 million macrocell shipments in 2017. Vendors and chipset makers including Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Qualcomm have been talking up HetNets as a means of helping carriers to expand capacity in their mobile networks without relying on traditional base- station deployments. Small cells are a key part of that equation. Phil Goldstein of FierceWireless (3 rd December) pointed out that ARCchart’s outlook for small cell shipments “is remarkable considering that the firm forecast just 261,000 annual small shipments for 2012.” ARCchart predicts a continuing trend for carriers to deploy small cells as a dense network capable of adding capacity to high-traffic areas. High-speed broadband access to the Internet tops 72 per cent in Europe According to figures released 18 th December by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, more than three-quarters of households across the 27 nations of the EU had Internet access in 2012, compared to just under 50 per cent in 2006. The growth in broadband access has been even more striking, with fully 72 per cent of Europeans now able to avail themselves of a high-speed connection to the Internet, against just 30 per cent with such access six years ago. The highest levels of broadband access were seen in the northern member-states of the EU, with Sweden (87 per cent), Denmark (85 per cent), the Netherlands (83 per cent), Germany (82 per cent), and the UK (80 per cent) showing the greatest penetration. But even in Italy and Greece, countries harder-hit by economic crisis, more than half of all households had a broadband connection. Use of social media was found by Eurostat to be highest in Portugal, where fully 75 per cent of Internet users post messages to Twitter, Facebook, and similar services.

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Wire & Cable ASIA – March/April 2013