At times, the Informer has often imagined, managing a firm’s communications operation must be about as much fun as a trip to the dentist, when the dentist in question suffers from tremors and dismisses anaesthetic as needless pampering. And as he watched voice-to-text messaging firm Spinvox getting put through the ringer good and proper this week, the thought returned once again.

First up was the news that the firm is struggling financially. No shame in that at a time like this, of course. It’s hardly champagne and canapés at Informer Towers these days, truth be told. Still at least the brass aren’t trying to get us to take stock options in lieu of salary, which is what Spinvox is doing.

It’s not compulsory, and employees have the option to take all or part of their summer paychecks in stock. The risk for the firm if not enough employees take this offer up, is that job cuts will have to be made. Anyone that leaves the firm, Spinvox has promised, will be repaid the cash they forewent to take the stock, whether they get made redundant, fired or if they leave of their own volition.

This on its own would not have been that big a deal, but it coincided with more questions about just exactly how Spinvox works. This is an issue that arises periodically for Spinvox, mostly because the company prefers not to give anybody a definitive, proven explanation.

The firm has always claimed that the majority of the speech-to-text conversion is done by a closely guarded algorithm, and that human intervention is used “only when necessary”. For as long as these claims have been made, however, there have been plenty of nay-sayers on hand to argue that, while this might be true, it happens to be necessary a lot more often than Spinvox would have the rest of us believe. The bulk of messages, claim the detractors, are transcribed by call centre workers in Asia and Africa.

The BBC copped hold of the story and gave it some mass media attention and still Spinvox refused to cough up hard proof of its claims in the form of by revealing the proportion of messages that require manual intervention. Couple this with a reasonable number of bloggers and posters claiming to be Spinvox employees (past and present) badmouthing the firm’s strategy, business model and leadership and you’ve got a busy few days in the spin department of Spinvox.

The Informer was chatting to a mate who pitched for the original Spinvox PR contract a few years ago who told him that the technology issue came up at the time. The firm’s patents were in the public domain and those patents did not specify a particular technology, he said. Rather they specified a process; a workflow.

You might think that the best thing to do for Spinvox would be just to spill its guts. Tell the truth. After all, for end users and carrier customers who like the service-and Spinvox has only recently signed a pan-Latin American deal with Telefónica, so there’s no doubting its appeal (although the Informer never got on with it)-it shouldn’t matter whether it’s some whiz-bang computer, or someone in an offshore call centre.

But Spinvox can’t own up to that, if it is the truth, because it means that other people are listening to all of its customers’ voice mail messages; and nobody likes that idea. After all, just remember what happened when someone got hold of Prince Charles’ voicemails to Camilla Parker Bowles. And him to be King one day, and all. It’s a shame.

The Informer spoke to one of Spinvox’s partners, BestBefore Media, which uses the Spinvox API to do audio transcriptions as well as offer a service it describes as the “twitter of the spoken word,” known as AudioBoo. Mark Rock, CEO of BestBefore said that his firm used Spinvox because they were impressed by the quality, but added that he was surprised by the assertions that people managed most of the transcription manually. “The line we were spun is that humans were only used where necessary,” he said.

As well as the deception and the privacy issues that this would throw up, if it were true, it would threaten the business model. If the company uses people to transcribe messages, then the bigger the business gets, the more people it has to contract in to type up people’s messages. And that doesn’t scale nearly so well as a piece of software that does the same thing.

Spinvox has been extremely successful in the past at shrugging off criticism and allegation. And the firm posted a lengthy response to the recent reports on its blog, which you can read here.

Equally busy were the folks at Qualcomm, trotting out their trademark line in righteous indignation at the news that the Korean Fair Trade Commission is fining the Californian vendor $200m. The Koreans alleged that Qualcomm had been charging higher licensing rates for its CDMA technology to customers who chose to source their silicon from Qualcomm’s competitors (or, if you prefer, that it was discounting for its chip customers).

The vendor was cleared of dodgy dealings relating to its WCDMA business and claimed that the KFTC’s judgement on its CDMA behaviour was “based upon factual and legal errors and appears to ignore substantial benefits Qualcomm’s partnerships generate for Korea’s wireless industry,” and resolved to appeal. Does anybody do this stuff quite like Qualcomm? Nope.

Still, it was getting a run for its money in the indignation stakes this week from Canada’s Research In Motion. The BlackBerry vendor was snapping at the flesh on the Nortel carcass, but was prevented from sating its appetite by Nortel itself, RIM alleged.

You’ll remember that NSN proposed a bid of $650m for Nortel’s LTE and CDMA assets, with the bankruptcy auction scheduled to take place on this very day. It looked like NSN would be the sole bidder, however RIM’s outburst may change that, especially seeing as RIM is willing to almost double NSN’s offer.

Jim Balsillie, RIM’s co-chief executive officer said that the firm would be prepared to pay in the range of $1.1bn for the CDMA and LTE businesses and certain other Nortel assets. He also said that in its attempts to be qualified as a bidder in Nortel’s auction bidding process, RIM was told it could be qualified only if it promised not to submit offers for other Nortel assets for a period of one year-something which it intended to do.

“RIM is extremely disappointed that Nortel’s world leading technology, the development of which has been funded in part by Canadian taxpayers, seems destined to leave Canada and that Canada’s own Export Development Corporation is preparing to help by lending $300 million to another bidder…RIM has found itself blocked at every turn,” said Balsillie.

But RIM and NSN aren’t the only interested parties. MPAM Wireless, an affiliate of investment firm MatlinPatterson Global Opportunities, which targets distressed securities (probably quite busy at the moment, then) has issued a proposal to acquire the LTE and CDMA for $725m.

While way short of the RIM bid, the investment firm may have an edge, as its advisory team on the proposed acquisition includes a line up of former Nortel executives including former North American president Dion Joannou; Richard Piasentin, former Nortel VP of sales; and Tony Pirih, former head of Nortel R&D. The advisory team also includes former executives of AT&T Wireless, Alltel and Motorola.

MatlinPatterson believes that it could spin the CDMA and LTE business off as a “New Nortel,” bolstered by additional bolt on acquisitions, partnerships, reinvention and new ideas from within the technology asset base. Swedish kit vendor Ericsson is also thought to be interested in Nortel’s leftovers, which are due to be auctioned off later on Friday.

In related news, enterprise networking firm Avaya signed an agreement to purchase Nortel’s enterprise solutions business for $475m. The proposed acquisition includes the Nortel Enterprise Solutions voice, data and government systems businesses.

From New Nortel to New Clearwire, which this week launched its Mobile WiMAX service in the glittering playground of the stars/tawdry hellhole (delete as appropriate) that is Las Vegas. But this wasn’t the only WiMAX news around this week, with the former CEO of Orange, Sanjiv Ahuja, unveiling his new firm’s emerging markets WiMAX play.

Founded in 2007, Augere is headquartered in London but will focus on emerging markets in Asia and Africa, where it will offer services under the Qubee brand. The launch market was Pakistan, with Bangladesh soon to follow.

The company’s senior management is made up almost entirely of ex-Orange executives, with director of networks Martin Swinburne previously director of radio design and strategy at France Telecom, director of spectrum and regulation Paul Franklin formerly group VP of regulation and policy at the French carrier, and Augere’s IT, HR and finance directors all Orange alumni.

Only Martin Harriman, director of commercial and business development does not herald from Ahuja’s former firm. Surprisingly, for a WiMAX-oriented outfit, Harriman comes from Swedish vendor Ericsson, which is known for its decidedly downbeat assessment of the prospects for WiMAX.

The France Telecom connection is reflected in the company’s ownership, with the French incumbent holding 22 per cent (FT’s CEO Didier Lombard also sits on the board). Two private equity firms-Vedanta and New Silk Route-hold 33 per cent between them, with Ahuja himself owning a 44 per cent stake.

Even those within the industry who lack belief in WiMAX concede that it has potential as a fixed substitute in emerging markets. Perhaps Ahuja’s new operation can prove them right.

In this week’s most tenuous link, you’ll remember that not so long ago, ad-funded MVNO Blyk (which partners with Orange in the UK) was denying suggestions that it was radically reshaping its business. This week the firm announced that it was radically reshaping its business. The firm has pulled the plug on its MVNO model, a move that some will no doubt see as an admission of defeat.

The firm, which launched its first operation in the UK in 2007, had planned to replicate its MVNO model in multiple markets but that expansion never happened. It looks likely that the MVNO model has proven unsustainable because it lacked the reach that advertisers look for. The UK customer base remains in the low hundreds of thousands and Blyk itself has suggested that advertisers are more drawn to its service for market research purposes than brand advertising campaigns.

Blyk revealed this week that it has shifted its focus to a managed service business model. The first partner to for the new model is Vodafone Netherlands, which had already formed a partnership with the company in 2008. Blyk said that the Netherlands has the third highest advertising spend per capita in Europe and is a hub for many global companies and ad agencies, making it an ideal market for Blyk.

It remains to be seen what will happen to its existing operation in the UK, seeing as the Blyk spokeswoman said the MVNO “is no more”. In this case it seems likely Orange will just absorb the few hundred thousand subscribers.

French conglomerate Vivendi pulled a plug of its own this week, meanwhile, ending its talks to buy the African assets of high growth regional specialist Zain. Apparently the price was simply too high ($12bn was the figure being bandied about). Zain said this week that net income for the first half of 2009 was up 4.4 per cent to $533.5m, while revenues jump 24 per cent to $4bn.

And it was results galore this week, with Ericsson leading the charge with the poor numbers. The Swedish vendor delivered an eye watering 61 per cent drop in net profits for the second quarter as losses at its joint ventures took their toll.

Profits for the quarter to end June fell to SEK800m, from SEK2bn in the same period last year. Net sales however, were up 7 per cent year on year to SEK52.1bn. Handset joint venture Sony Ericsson racked up a loss of €213m for the second quarter, while net loss at chip vendor ST-Ericsson hit $213m.

While this alone does not make a good advert for joint ventures, Ericsson’s network sales were down year over year because of the decrease in carrier spending.

There was ostensibly better news at Vodafone, however, with the world’s largest operator by revenues, held the fort during the quarter ended June 30, reporting revenues of £10.7bn, up 9.3 per cent year on year. But the global market is still tough, with organic service revenue down 2.1 per cent year on year, although data revenues helped rescue the firm’s revenues by climbing 19.4 per cent year on year on an organic basis to £888 million.

But maybe things aren’t entirely rosy over there as the firm offered little visibility into earnings and margins, saying only that, “the Group’s EBITDA margin decline during the quarter was consistent with management’s guidance for the current financial year.”

Whatever that means.

Take care

The Informer

Here’s a curious little story: Once upon a time (a few weeks ago, actually), after meeting a carrier CEO who predicted that the mobile infrastructure provider market would contract to three players within five years, the Informer decided to run a poll on the website he calls home, Telecoms.com. He wanted to know which vendors the site’s readers thought would be the three to survive, should the CEO’s prediction come true. So, up went the poll, giving readers the chance to choose three winners from Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei, Motorola, Nokia Siemens Networks and ZTE.

After a week or so, industry opinion became fairly clear. Ericsson and Huawei traded the top spot, a whisker between them, while Nokia Siemens was a small distance off in third place. The rest languished way off the pace, with Motorola sat at the bottom.

Then, on Thursday this week, something remarkable happened. The industry, it appeared, suffered a huge change of heart. In the space of no more than an hour, Motorola went from last place to first, having received a massive, life-saving injection of votes. On noting this phenomenon, the Informer rushed to the US vendor’s website to see if this volte-face had been inspired by some huge news from the firm.

Indeed not; there had been nary a press release from Motorola for a fortnight. Perhaps the inspiration was tidings of some excellent M&A activity… But the wires revealed nothing. The Informer, not for the first time in his life, was stumped.

So, just out of interest, the Informer got out his toolbox and used his ‘whois lookup’ application, to see where all these votes were coming from. He was shocked. The overwhelming majority of the votes that had reversed Motorola’s fortunes had come from within Motorola itself! Tracing the IP addresses back, it looked as if an email had gone round to different country locations, as the votes came in big blocks. One slab from the UK, one slab from Singapore. A bunch from Kuwait.

None of the other vendors did this to boost their own rating on what is, let’s face it, a poll that is now of interest predominantly because Motorola staff have tried to nobble it. Interestingly, six Illinois-based Motorolans were bound by some wider moral code to play the game properly, at least in part, attempting to offset their blind corporate loyalty by voting for Ericsson and Huawei as well. Most, it appears, didn’t vote for another two players at all. Talk about climbing the slippery poll…

Anyway, Motorola should be thankful for the constancy of its employees. It’s a different story over at Nortel, where workers at a French factory have threatened to blow the plant up if they don’t get decent layoff terms from the malingering Canadian vendor. The workers clearly had one eye on historical precedent as this unusually dramatic threat was levelled at Nortel, amusingly, on Bastille Day. Vive La Révolution!

Workers placed gas cylinders around the factory, which is just outside Paris, where 480 jobs are about to be guillotined as part of Nortel’s dismantling. Certainly blowing a factory up is a novel way to distribute a firm’s assets. There were suggestions, though, that the workers were bluffing, and that the gas cylinders were empty.

One company certainly not firing on all cylinders at the moment it struggling handset JV Sony Ericsson. The firm reported its fourth consecutive quarterly loss this week, shedding €213m in Q2 this year. If your glass if half full, you’ll be interested to know that this represents a sequential improvement, given that the firm misplaced €293m in Q109.  If your glass if half empty, however, you’ll note that sales nose-dived to €1.68bn from €2.82bn for the same quarter last year. Unit shipments were down 43 per cent year on year to 13.8 million and the firm blamed market conditions, particularly in Latin America, for the slump. It estimated its own market share at five per cent.

Sony Ericsson’s in good company, though, as market leader Nokia had some woes of its own to share. Nokia’s bad news, though, tends to be more related to smaller profits, rather than smaller losses. Q2 net income dropped to €287m, a massive drop from last year’s €1bn. Shipments were down 15 per cent year on year to 103.2 million, although this was a sequential increase of 11 per cent. In more bad news, the firm’s average selling price dropped by another €3 to €62.

News like this makes the handset business sound like one that nobody in their right mind would really want to be in. But there are still firms out there which believe they can pull the sword from the stone. The latest of these is PC manufacturer Dell. This has been expected for a while; since 2007, in fact when Ron Garriques, head of Motorola’s handset unit was poached by Dell to lead its consumer division.

Garriques spoke at a Dell analyst event on Tuesday this week, managing to confirm the company’s entry in to the mobile space while remaining almost completely vague as to exactly what form this entry will take. Since he spoke of consumer desire for 16″ screens, however, it seems likely that some kind of smartbook/netbook approach is where the firm is headed.

“Operators want us to create a set of products that work together with a common user interface as well as operator services,” Garriques said. “Operators don’t care how we execute that strategy, they just want us to be the integrator, providing an end to end solution that supports LTE or WiMAX,” he waffled.

“We’re really onto the 3G to 4G transition now, and consumers are looking for up to 16″ displays on portable devices. Carriers want end to end solutions, bundled with software that makes everything work,” he said.

Garriques said Dell is targeting the top three or four operators worldwide to see what their needs are, because there are “massive needs that are not being met at present.” The company might also look to Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturers to build the device and just put their own branding on them, he hinted.

However, Garriques also revealed a somewhat simplistic, over-optimistic view of the handset market when he said: “The late entrants to the handset space have done very well. The door is open and they have just walked in.” Is that because the long term players, like Motorola, aren’t offering any serious competition? Why could that be?  Is it really that easy, though? Even for Apple? The Informer doesn’t think it’s all strawberries and cream.

One of the keys to Apple’s success, it turns out this week, has been hard-headed brutality towards its opponents. The Californian vendor struck a blow against comeback wannabe Palm and its flagship Pre device, by removing the Pre’s ability to function as an iPod.

Palm had made a big deal of the Pre’s ability to interface with iTunes, allowing consumers to transfer and manage their music using the popular program. The Palm website still claims customers can, “use the Palm media sync feature to transfer your DRM-free iTunes music, podcasts, photos, and more to your Pre.”

However an iTunes update released Wednesday, taking the application to version 8.2.1, addresses an “issue with the verification of Apple devices.” In a nutshell, this means its puts a stop to the Pre’s ability to mimic an iPod. Earlier versions of iTunes still work with the Pre as Palm advertises, and users can still transfer music by treating the device as a USB drive, but it’s unsurprisingly clear that Apple is keen to protect its own innovation and new-found market share in the mobile space.

This news drummed up some interest on telecoms.com earlier in the week, with one reader suggesting that Palm should call in the lawyers, and that such activities would be illegal in the US. You can read the comments, and add your own, right here.

It’s been a handset heavy week, for sure, and the Symbian Foundation has thrown its hat into the application store ring this week by taking a refreshingly novel approach, and not launching a store of its own.

Instead the Foundation intends to function as a middle man, with Sean Puckrin, the man at Symbian who is leading the new programme – dubbed Horizon – trying to give it some rock ‘n’ roll chic by describing it as the equivalent of a record label in the music business. Nice idea that, until you realise that the record labels are dying on their backsides.

Anyway the aim of Horizon is to help developers get Symbian friendly versions of their applications into various stores. At launch, the Foundation is working with Nokia’s Ovi store, the Samsung Application Store and US carrier AT&T’s Media Mall. Services on offer will include language translation, UI construction and porting from one platform to another, as well as marketing and certification. Developers working on the launch phase of the project include UK newspaper The Guardian, Dynatech, MobileIron, National Public Radio (NPR), Skout, Ustream, and Wine.com.

The presence of dating app Skout, which has had success on the iPhone, gives a hint as to Symbian’s Strategy, which seems in part to be seeking already successful apps and offering to take the pain out of launching them on Symbian in a bid to create a reliable stable of applications.

“[Developers] see the volume and opportunity on Symbian,” Puckrin told the Informer, “but there’s a little bit of last mile work required to help operators actually seize that opportunity. We’ve had positive feedback from developers; they see it as addressing a number of the issues they foresee on going to market on Symbian,” he said.

Puckrin conceded that not all developers would feel the need to exploit the new service, which is probably a good thing for the Foundation, given that it plans to work on an app by app, bespoke basis, which could prove extremely time consuming.

“It is a lot of work,” he said, “and it won’t be thousands of applications to start with. It will scale over time and we’re expecting it to really take off around October.”

The involvement of Symbian Foundation founder member AT&T is also interesting, as it points towards the Foundation’s desire to spread the geographical appeal of its OS to developers. “One aspect of the programme is to look at companies that don’t have Symbian on their doorstep, in the US, for example, and help them understand the great opportunity worldwide that exists for them if they port their applications to Symbian.”

All of which could be taken to mean that the Symbian Foundation is worried that, left to their own devices, developers will be unmotivated to develop for its platform.

Now, in closing, it’s been suggested before that carriers don’t actually need their own networks any more and that they could all just compete on a single central network, differentiating on service and pricing strategies. Here in the UK, things could be moving in that very direction with the news this week that Ericsson, the world leader in managed services, has struck a network management deal with O2. Ericsson already looks after Vodafone, and runs MBNL, the 3G network JV owned by 3UK and T-Mobile. How long before the firm goes to the operators with a cost saving plan predicated on cutting out all the duplication involved in the Swedish firm running three more or less identical networks? Only Orange, which had to be different by going with Nokia Siemens, wouldn’t be able to play. Until, that is, the scale benefits enjoyed by the others forced it to join the fold.

The Informer doesn’t know how well Motorola fares in the managed services business. Perhaps he should put a poll on telecoms.com to find out what the industry thinks…

Take care

The Informer

There’s been a bit of a Tosh theme this week, and where better to start than with the news that the 1980s ad-theme of “Hello Tosh, got a Toshiba?” can be wheeled out for the mobile phone market. The Japanese vendor’s TG01, unveiled at the Mobile World Congress earlier this year, is now available exclusively on Orange in the UK and France, with the firm planning to sell it in Switzerland, Romania and Poland later on in the year.

The TG01, which runs Windows Mobile, is the first handset to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor and is the latest addition to a clutch of handsets of which, it’s fair to say, not many people are aware. Toshiba had a stab at mobile phones in the European market years and years ago, without making a great deal of impact. And, while it has continued to forge ahead in its native market of Japan, the firm announced earlier this year that it was shutting down its Japanese operations in the face of a dramatic slump in demand. Mobile revenues were cut in half in the year to end March 2009.

The new phone is available in Germany and Spain through Telefonica O2, meanwhile, adding another dimension to that carrier’s smartphone portfolio which has been much-discussed of late. This week Telefonica O2 confirmed that it will be the exclusive carrier of the Palm Pre smartphone in the UK, Ireland, Spain and Germany. While the much anticipated Pre is already available on Sprint Nextel’s EV-DO network in the US, it will not hit shelves in Europe in its HSDPA form until December.

It was also reported this week that O2 UK will be offering Samsung’s first Android handset, the Galaxy i7500. O2 UK is starting to look like a rich old Sugar Daddy with one too many high-maintenance young ladies to keep in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Quite how it’s going to find the subsidy budget to offer the iPhone 3GS, the Palm Pre and the new Samsung number remains to be seen. No wonder it hasn’t got the N97, a fact that is still drawing wrathful comments from disgruntled O2-using telecoms.com readers.

Staying with phones, but a different kind of tosh, Nokia this week dismissed as ludicrous rumours that it is currently developing an Android handset of its own. Reports that the firm was doing just this surfaced in the Guardian, a UK newspaper, early this week. It would be a pretty surprising decision, let’s face it, given the fact that the Finnish vendor, a clear number one in the handset leagues, has dedicated itself exclusively to the Symbian OS, which we’re due to see in its first open source incarnation before too long. Certainly, if it were true, it would be an indication that Nokia had doubts about its home-grown OS.

On the topic of operating systems, Google is clearly not content to kick its heels in the smartphone OS space and announced this week the planned launch of a full-fledged desktop/laptop OS called Chrome.

In September 2008 Google launched the Chrome browser, which neatly integrates with Google’s online services and is targeted at online users. Chrome OS goes one step further and arguably represents the first OS designed from the ground up by a company that really understands the online world.

“The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web,” said Sundar Pichai, VP of product management at Google, “[Google Chrome Operating System is] our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.”

In operator world this week, French conglomerate Vivendi poured a whole can of petrol on the smouldering rumour that it is looking to enter into some kind of equity-based relationship with pan-MEA carrier Zain, by admitting that it’s true in a brief statement on Thursday this week.

“Vivendi confirms its interest for acquiring a majority stake in the Zain group’s telecommunications activities in Africa, in line with its clearly defined strategy of seeking growth opportunities in emerging countries,” the firm said, going on to stress, as these firms are wont to do, that there are no guarantees that anything will actually happen.

Last week, you’ll remember, Zain revealed that it had appointed UBS to help it figure out what to do with itself and Vivendi’s open admission of interest would seem to suggest that the Kuwaiti-headquartered firm has, as some observers have suggested, over-reached itself with its massive investment programme over the past few years.

Currently Vivendi’s mobile portfolio is limited to SFR in France, in which the firm is a joint stakeholder with Vodafone, and Maroc Telecom, the leading mobile player in Morocco. Through Maroc, Vivendi also has stakes in carriers in Burkina Faso, Gabon and Mauritania. Africa really is the centre of the global mobile imperial game at the moment, with the French (Vivendi), the British (Vodafone) and the Indians (Bharti) all looking to establish dominance through investment and acquisition.

Let’s hope for Vivendi’s sake that any relationship it does manage to establish with Zain is smoother than the one its compatriot France Telecom has ‘enjoyed’ with Egyptian player Orascom. The two have been engaged in a protracted legal wrangle over Egyptian mobile carrier Mobinil. But on Sunday this week, Orascom announced that it had dropped its proceedings, in the wake of placatory noises from FT. For more information on this frankly rather dull spat, click here.

Swedish vendor Ericsson announced a big deal this week with US carrier Sprint on managed services that could be worth as much as $5bn. Ericsson will take on operational responsibility for Sprint’s CDMA, iDEN and fixed networks, including provision and maintenance. The deal is good for seven years and will see some 6,000 cost centres (or ‘employees’) transferred from the carrier to the vendor in the third quarter of this year.

Sprint will retain ownership of the networks and any decisions as to which vendors will supply upgrade kit, so this deal isn’t necessarily a guaranteed sales stream for Ericsson. The vendor has long since recognised the importance of services which are now understood to generate more than a third of the company’s revenues.

On a similar-ish theme, meanwhile, 3 Italy and Telecom Italia Mobile have announced a co-siting agreement that will see the two firms share radio access sites. The deal is good for three years in the first instance and the companies expect to derive cost savings on the likes of poles, cables and power supply of around 30 per cent.

Meanwhile, one-time relation to 3, Hutchison Telecommunications International, has said that it is looking to high-tail its way out of Israel, by offloading its indirect stake in the market’s number three carrier Partner Communications. HTIL holds 51 per cent of the carrier, which could be worth as much as $1.3bn.

Now, earlier on we were talking about tosh and in very few places in the UK are you more likely to be guaranteed of finding tosh than in Sunday newspaper the News of the World. The kind of paper that gets delivered tucked inside other newspapers in more well-to-do parts of the country, the NotW is one of Mr Murdoch’s grubbier organs.

Big on scandal, the newspaper has found itself at the centre of one this week as it has emerged that a significant number of UK politicians and celebrities have had their mobile phones tapped as part of the newspaper’s reporting strategy. Two years ago a couple of the paper’s journalists were jailed after an investigation into just such behaviour. Now the disgruntled great and good are investigating legal action against the paper, while the police have said they are not going to launch a criminal investigation. Happy days.

Finally a technology that is claimed by its developers as best in class, and dismissed by its detractors as tosh of the most excremental kind. xMax is a network technology developed by US firm XG that the company claims can rival WiMAX and advanced cellular technologies at a fraction of the cost. This week XG said that it is field testing its solution.

In its announcement XG said that its technology, “is a radical departure from existing technologies and so the company must prove that it actually works in the real world.” As opposed to the fantasy world?

Take care

The Informer

Every once in a while this industry produces a decision that is so genuinely sensible that you feel like cracking open a packet of dark chocolate digestive biscuits in celebration. Even if the need for that decision to be taken had been so blindingly obvious for such a long time that contemplating it has actually made you a bit blind, causing you to buy milk chocolate digestives by mistake, leading to a series of tiny but crushing disappointments with every bite you take.

The Informer refers, of course, to the announcement this week that the European handset community is to standardise the jack on mobile phone chargers, ending the need for a new one to be issued with every handset. This is great news for the environment, because the need to manufacture more chargers will be negated, and packaging can be reduced. And it’s great news for customers, who won’t have to pay extra for the charger (and for that one guy in the office that comes by every now and again saying: “Has anyone got a Sendo charger?” to which somebody replies: “Of course not. You’re the only person in the southern half of this country who has a Sendo phone”).

It’s bad news for the companies that make chargers, however. The Informer was once told that the only reason charger jacks changed every few years, and were different for models from different vendors, was that the handset vendors were indulging their component suppliers, who would have made less money had a single standard been implemented. That little racket’s up now, though, as Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion (RIM), Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Texas Instruments have all pledged to use Micro-USB in the future.

Actually it doesn’t apply to all phones; any that do not have USB-enabled data transfer are excluded from the Memorandum of Understanding because, says Brussels, once this programme gets up and running most phones will be USB-data enabled.

In reaching this decision – which should see the first compatible products hitting stores next year – the industry has avoided legislation being passed by the EC to force it to produce a common charger standard. So perhaps that was the motivator, rather than all the touchy-feely enviro-worthiness. It will be interesting to see if the chargers are rolled out globally.

While we’re on the subject of European Legislation, the latest of EC Commissioner Viviane Reding’s directives came into play this week, with roaming charges slashed. From now on, a text message sent from abroad in the EU will cost no more than €0.11 instead of €0.28 previously, and the wholesale price of data will be capped at €1 per MB, compared to an average wholesale price of €1.68 per MB. The wholesale cap will fall to €0.80 in 2010 and to €0.50 in 2011.

Consumers will also benefit from further cuts in the price of mobile phone calls while roaming in another EU country. A roamed call made in another EU country must not cost more than €0.43 per minute, and no more than €0.19 to receive. Outgoing roaming calls will also be charged by the second, after the first 30 seconds, rather than by the minute, and incoming calls will be charged by the second from the first second.

As a result of these adjustments, European consumers are expected to save up to 60 per cent on their bill for using a mobile phone abroad in the EU.

“The roaming rip-off is now coming to an end,” proclaimed a victorious-sounding Reding, before adding a further warning, something she seems incapable of resisting: “For now, EU rules are limited to reducing inter-operator charges. I call on the mobile industry to pass these savings on to data roaming customers swiftly. The Commission and national regulators will monitor data roaming charges very carefully and assess next year whether the roaming market is finally becoming competitive.”

Heading to the UK, it is now believed that Vodafone and Telefónica O2 have entered the scrap to bag German carrier T-Mobile’s British operation. Orange and 3UK were already reported to have shown interest.

Consolidation in the mature UK market has long been expected, and a goodwill writedown of €1.8bn for the carrier on the back of its Q1 results fuelled speculation that the firm is looking to offload its UK operation. However, the recent appointment of Richard Moat as the head of T-Mobile UK was taken by some to indicate parent firm Deutsche Telekom’s commitment to the business, at least in the medium term.

Vodafone, meanwhile, has also patched up its differences with reseller Carphone Warehouse, meaning Vodafone product will soon once again be available through that high street retailer.

Still in the UK, O2 announced this week that it had sold out of its first allocation of Apple’s iPhone3GS. As if the carrier needed any more reasons to regret not offering any Android product, or the N97; now, temporarily at least, it’s got no headline grabbing handset. That could be about to change, though, as reports this week have sprung up in the mainstream press reporting what we suggested a few weeks ago – namely that O2 is going to offer Palm’s Pre.

At the other end of the handset market, it’s probably safe to say, resides the Orange BIC phone. Branded by the ballpoint and disposable razor firm, it’s no surprise that this unit is not function-rich. Orange has been selling this handset in France for the past year and is now about to take it to Spain, where the low-end prepay unit will sell for €29 with 20 minutes of airtime.

Canadian vendor Nortel’s 4G IPR is worth a little more than this, apparently, although not quite as much as the company had hoped. JP Morgan had been cited as valuing the intellectual property at $2.9bn but ABI’s chief research officer Stuart Carlaw reckoned this was a load of hooey. The $2.9bn figure was based on the assumption that Nortel’s IPR would garner a royalty rate of one per cent of every LTE device sold, he said. “This is disproportionate to their patent holdings and cannot be seen as fair and reasonable. I doubt any other single vendor will be looking for this type of return- even Qualcomm.” Like Nortel needs another kick in the swingers.

In our (very) occasional Romanian roundup, the news this week is that Greek carrier Cosmote is to acquire local carrier Telemobil, known to Romanian consumers as Zapp. Cosmote is buying the operator under a share purchase agreement worth €61m, with the Greek firm also assuming Zapp’s debt and other liabilities worth in the region on €146m.

Zapp holds a CDMA license in the 450MHz band and a 3G WCDMA license in the 2100MHz band. Its 3G network currently covers 23 Romanian cities and its total customer base exceeds 374,000 postpaid customers. The purchase is a touch of the old in-country consolidation, as Cosmote already operates Romania’s third largest cellco, with 6.6 million GSM customers (Q109), and the company is apparently looking to merge operations with its new acquisition.

A quick update on the rumour and speculation surrounding Zain’s African portfolio, which was further fuelled by the appointment of Swiss bank UBS this week to assess the company’s assets.

Zain acquired African player Celtel in 2005 for $3.36bn, and has continued to invest and acquire in the region ever since – most recently exploring opportunities in Morocco in March 2009. But while the carrier has never had any trouble raising money in the past, even the wealth of the Middle East is not immune to a global financial crisis and, more recently, the firm has been laying off staff, hatching outsourcing plans with kit vendors and launching various cost management initiatives. The figure being touted for the firm’s African portfolio is $12bn, and the buyer is thought to be French firm Vivendi.

Earlier today a Zain spokesman told the Informer that the company is “running a strategic review to enhance shareholder value,” and has an ongoing relationship with UBS. He also said that the firm: “Is continuously assessing the telecommunications landscape in the Middle East, Africa and Asia for value accretive acquisition opportunities.”

And that’s about the size of it, readers. It’s been a quiet week.

Take care

The Informer