So, Vodafone Ireland announce their launch of 4G LTE starting with Kilkenny. That’s great news. One small challenge for the telco marketers is that 4G’s a rather fluid term. This article discusses the issue of everyone naming their fast mobile data offering as ‘4G’. In some other countries, 4G is the term used to market HSPA and HSPA+ services – for example in Jamaica. Here in Ireland, Imagine.ie call their Wimax…
…something very special – any phone number in the world owned by any phone company using any technology can be called from any other phone on the planet. What a great and unique achievement! However, if an intelligent terminal can handle a multiplicity of standards, perhaps this lack of functionality has become the Achilles’ heel of the telcos? Of course, there are many things that telcos do well that the internet companies…
…SMS traffic volumes in France have slumped in the third quarter of 2012, according to this news report. Will this happen in Ireland anytime soon? Personally I can’t see it. In the longer term, yes, sure – but just not yet – the penetration of OTT services isn’t great enough – yet. But when it does come, it’ll be irreversible….
…of Telefonica – with Carlos Slim sniffing around European mobile operators, the game’s starting to change for European mobile operators. What will the impact be on Ireland? Probably nothing directly, in the short term. The much-rumoured sale of O2 IE to Three probably won’t be impeded, on reflection, and surely Eircom wouldn’t make the mistake of selling their mobile operator a second time? Mind, there was a story a…
…ground as we in Idiro experience them – our mobile operator customers worldwide are finding that their consumer users are switching in larger number from prepaid plans to postpaid. However, extrapolating this to a long-term trend is not so obvious. From when Portuguese operator TMN gave us the world’s first real prepaid mobile phone service until the advent of smartphones, the choice of prepaid vs. postpaid plans was, in the…