Even after the culinary tragedy that is Barcelona, there’s no break from the carbohydrates this week as AWIW picks up a distinctly Italian flavour. Local incumbent Telecom Italia made the extraordinary move of delaying its financial results for 2009, as its wholesale unit, Sparkle, came under the spotlight as authorities investigate a massive money laundering scheme.

This week the carabinieri issued arrest warrants for a total of 56 people in connection with a €2bn tax fraud and money laundering scam reportedly linked to the ‘Ndrangheta – the Calabrian mafia – which took place between 2003 and 2006. Italy’s second largest fixed broadband provider, Fastweb, is also embroiled in the investigation and company founder Silvio Scaglia, who had an arrest warrant out for him, made the police an offer they couldn’t refuse by turning himself in this morning. Scaglia no longer has anything to do with Fastweb, which he sold to Swisscom in 2007, but headed up the firm during the time of the allegations.

The authorities claim that the service providers faked transactions to avoid paying certain taxes and have seized around $400m from Sparkle while the investigation proceeds. Parent Telecom Italia released some unapproved results for 2009, which revealed that organic EBITDA for the year was in line with 2008 at €11.3bn, while revenues were down 5.6 per cent year on year to €27.2bn, reflecting a repositioning strategy away from handset sales where revenues were down 22.1 per cent to focus increasingly on services, where revenues fell by just 4.2 per cent.

Web giant Google also fell foul of the Italian authorities, with two employees and one ex-worker who left the firm in 2008, convicted of breaching Italian privacy regulations. The case started in 2006 when students at a school in Turin, Italy, uploaded footage of themselves bullying a schoolmate to Google Video (this was prior to the acquisition of YouTube).

Google removed the video at the request of the police, but a public prosecutor in Milan pressed on with an indictment of the Google employees. At the outcome of that trial this week, a judge in Milan issued six month suspended sentences to the Google staff for failure to comply with Italian privacy laws. This suggests that content hosting companies, like Google Video or YouTube, would be criminally responsible for the content of videos uploaded by users.

Commenting on the decision, Matt Sucherman, VP and deputy general counsel for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Google, said: “European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbour from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence.”

A notice and take down regime of this kind is designed to help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy, Sucherman said. But, if “sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them – every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video – then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.”

Yes, it’s the sort of incident that gets the hackles up, giving everyone, including the British government, a chance to jump on their soapbox and shout down some foreign draconian autocracy, right before they tell the nanny state to put its hands over our eyes ‘for the sake of the children’. The UK Home Office this week released research claiming that kids are being increasingly exposed to sexual imagery online and it should be the job of the internet service providers – fixed and mobile – to police all the content their customers can get access to. Good luck with that, or as the Calabrian mafia probably say, “fuhgedaboutid”.

Unfortunately for Google, it’s not just the Italians, but Europe as a whole that’s got it in for the firm. Earlier this week Google confirmed that it has been notified by the European Commission of the receipt of complaints from three companies: a UK price comparison site, Foundem; a French legal search engine called ejustice.fr; and Microsoft’s Ciao! from Bing.

The crux of the complaints is that Google’s algorithms demote these sites in Google’s search results because as vertical search engines themselves, they compete with Google to some extent. So the issue here, which the EU may or may not choose to investigate, is whether Google is using its majority share of the search and advertising markets to suppress competition.

Julia Holtz, Google’s senior competition counsel, denies this: “Our algorithms aim to rank first what people are most likely to find useful and we have nothing against vertical search sites – indeed many vertical search engines like Moneysupermarket.com, Opodo and Expedia typically rank high in Google’s results,” Holtz said.

Never mind policing web content, the operators have probably got more pressing issues on their minds – to continue the theme from World Congress – just what to do about all this data traffic. This week UK broadcaster the BBC announced record breaking requests for its IPTV-based iPlayer application. During the month of January, requests for the BBC iPlayer across all devices including Virgin TV set top boxes, topped 120 million, driven by on demand viewing.

While iPlayer is used for TV at roughly the same time of day as linear TV viewing, on demand makes up the great majority of TV programme requests with only eight per cent of requests for live simulcast streams, although two thirds of requests for radio streams are for live programmes.

PCs and laptops remained the firm favourite for viewing iPlayer content, accounting for around 87 per cent of all traffic, with mobile handsets delivering only a thin sliver of requests. But the stats do show just what other kinds of devices will contribute to the bandwidth crunch, with the Sony PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii accounting for eight per cent and four per cent of requests respectively, something which bodes well for open IPTV initiative Project Canvas.

According to research released from consultancy TNS this week, the kind of apps that are available on a mobile device are becoming an increasingly important tool in the battle for customer loyalty – something which Apple has exploited successfully in its assault on the mobile space.

Following on from a survey of 27,000 UK consumers, TNS discovered that almost one quarter of users are now placing their primary loyalties with content and application brands like Facebook, Twitter and Google – that’s the same amount that are primarily loyal to their operator.

When considered as an individual element, the single most important factor in handset choice remains look and feel (29 per cent) but available applications and content – games, music and maps perhaps – ties for second place with handset brand (13 per cent). However, this figure rises to 37 per cent among consumers aged 16 to 30, and according to TNS, almost a fifth (19 per cent) of UK users are regularly downloading applications to their devices.

Interesting stuff, as these figures claim to show a shift in how consumers are shopping for devices, although that shift is less apparent when all factors are taken into account. When all aspects of a device are considered, apps sink to the bottom of the list, with consumers more easily swayed by look and feel, handset brand, touchscreen, and genuinely interestingly, which operating system it sports.

According to Stephen Yap, group director at TNS Technology: “As uptake and usage of mobile services proliferates, we are seeing profound changes in the way that people make purchase decisions and in the brands that are the most meaningful to them.  While established handset makers are standing their ground, network operators are clearly under pressure from the rise of the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter. These content providers are increasingly capturing consumers’ loyalties and are leading the way in bringing users the benefits of the latest mobile technologies.”

Apple may have exploited this phenomenon to its advantage, but that didn’t stop Mark Doherty, Adobe’s mobile evangelist for the Flash platform, putting the boot into Apple for “restricting open technologies like Flash.”

Telecoms.com this week posted video footage of Doherty demonstrating Flash Player and Adobe Air running on Android. Yet the technology’s absence on the iPhone has been duly noted. Doherty told telecoms.com: “We have done a lot of work to build Flash Player for the iPhone, but Apple at this time haven’t decided to have Flash on the iPhone. We encourage them and have demonstrated that it works really well on other platforms and at some point in time the apple user base will start demanding the full internet.

“Today 70 per cent of games on the web are Flash based and 75 per cent of video is played back through Flash Player. Apple just seems to want to have some control over their ecosystem and effectively tax their developers. But our business model is about selling tools and enabling our developer customers and content providers to get access to consumers and that’s why they use Flash because it allows them to do that in a consistent manner across all screens.”

Doherty said he believes the pressure will build on Apple and force it ultimately to support Flash on the iPhone. “Recently seven million or so iPhone users have actually come to our player download centre to download Flash Player because they didn’t know it wasn’t available. So now we have a special page up telling these visitors that Apple is restricting open technologies like Flash,” he said.

Telecom New Zealand (TCNZ) would probably love to have the data boom headache, but unfortunately it’s got a headache of a different kind – it can’t get it up. On Tuesday, TCNZ’s chief technical officer, Frank Mount, resigned in the wake of technical problems stopping the operator from keeping its shiny, new HSPA network running for more than a couple of hours at a time.

Infrastructure partner Alcatel-Lucent has reportedly been put on notice for failing to fix the issue, and on Monday the vendor announced the appointment of Jyoti Mahurkar-Thombre as head of its New Zealand operations, following the resignation of Steve Lowe, who oversaw the TCNZ deployment.

Perhaps there was something in the industry Kool Aid this week as there was more quitting to be had. Dan Moloney, president of Motorola’s Home business, which makes set top boxes, left the company to head up a small, Philadelphia-based electronics firm – Technitrol. The news comes just weeks after Motorola announced plans to split up in early 2011, spinning off its handsets and set top box unit into one entity and its enterprise and networks arm into another.

Meanwhile, Harri Koponen, the chief of Swedish carrier Tele2, also walked out citing “irreconcilable differences” with the company. Koponen joined Tele2 in 2008 as president and CEO and oversaw a period of increased focus on profitability, with a refocusing of the company’s footprint in Russia and the CIS.Tele2 said Koponen will receive his maximum notice period of 18 months during which he will be paid. In the interim chief financial officer Lars Nilsson has been appointed CEO, while the board of directors embarks on a search for a new chief.

France Telecom already has a new chief in Stephane Richard, and it was straight in at the deep end for him as FT announced a drop in profit for 2009 this week. German counterpart Deutsche Telekom was in the same boat, ahead of the March 1^st pronouncement from the EC on the proposed merger of the two carriers’ British mobile businesses, T-Mobile UK and Orange UK.

And it’s the EC that FT’s blaming for its 26 per cent year-on-year profit drop to €3bn last year. Back in 2004 the EU Competition Commission ruled that the French Government had been giving FT illegal tax breaks prior to 2003 and, last year, the carrier had to pony up almost €1bn in payback. On the upside, the firm said, it grew customer numbers 5.7 per cent across the year, although revenues were down 1.8 per cent at €46bn. The firm pledged to focus on staff welfare from now on, following a disturbing spate of employee suicides during 2009.

DT, meanwhile, saw annual profits plummet by 76 per cent to €400m, with Greek operation OTE hit by that country’s financial crisis.

Off to India now, where finally, finally (although the Informer’s not holding his breath), the long delayed auction of 3G spectrum in India has been given a new date – April 9, 2010. Commenting on the announcement, T R Dua, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said that the GSM industry had been “eagerly awaiting” the 3G auctions, which seem to have been delayed on a monthly basis for the last year or so.

Still, the news has got the local carriers digging in their pockets. This week, wireless infrastructure operator American Tower Corporation (ATC) agreed to acquire a further 4,450 wireless communications sites in India via the purchase of Essar Telecom Infrastructure – the cell site unit of the Indian carrier.

ATC’s Indian subsidiary, Transcend, will acquire the firm for a total consideration of $430m. The move will almost triple ATC’s presence in India, where it already operates around 2,550 sites. Essar’s site portfolio averages approximately 1.8 tenants per tower, ATC said. Last month, India’s biggest communications infrastructure operator, GTL Infrastructure, took over the tower assets of local carrier Aircel in a deal valued at $1.84bn. Under the agreement, GTL will take over 17,500 existing towers and will take over rights to roll out 20,000 more.

And that’s about the size of it for this week,

Ciao,

The Informer

Indian 3G spectrum auction to take place April 9, 2010

The long delayed auction of 3G spectrum in India has been given a new date – April 9, 2010.

According to information released by the Indian government on Thursday, invitations to apply to participate in the auction will be issued on February 25, with the actual auction to take place around six weeks later.

Commenting on the announcement, T R Dua, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said that the GSM industry had been “eagerly awaiting” the 3G auctions and said that the operator community is all geared up to provide high speed internet and a wide range of multimedia services to consumers as well as boosting social initiatives such as m-health and mobile education.

“3G will give a major impetus to the growth and penetration of mobile broadband services in the country and the mobile industry is keen to deliver on its promise to make affordable broadband services available to the consumers in the shortest possible time frame,” Dua said.

Nokia aims to make Ovi Maps a contextual platform at the centre of a variety of mobile applications

Eighteen months after its acquisiton of mapping and navigation firm Navteq, Nokia aims to make Ovi Maps a contextual platform at the centre of a variety of mobile applications.

In mid-January Finnish handset vendor Nokia revealed what it’s been up to with location and mapping firm Navteq, which it bought in 2008 for $8.1bn. It turns out that the world’s biggest handset vendor is shaking up the mobile space by making mapping and turn-by-turn navigation available for free to a potential 83 million users. At a London launch event hosted by Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president of Nokia, the company removed all costs associated with its Ovi Maps offering, for which it had previously charged up to €59.99 per year for a European Maps 3 Drive licence.

Besides the price, the big attraction with the revamped service is that the maps are available in both on- and offline mode. They can either be downloaded on the fly over cellular or wifi, or sideloaded in advance from the PC. Any maps that are downloaded are also cached so they don’t need to be downloaded again, and this goes for all the maps available for 180 countries. The service also features car and pedestrian navigation features, such as turn-by-turn voice guidance for 74 countries in 46 languages, and traffic information for over ten countries.

Through a partnership with Facebook, Nokia has also introduced a ‘share my location’ feature to use with the social networking service. The offering will also include free Lonely Planet and Michelin guides as standard.

Already ten Nokia models are able to download the new version of Ovi Maps as a free update; the N97 mini, 5800 XpressMusic, 5800 Navigation Edition, E52, E55, E72, 5230, 6710 Navigator, 6730 classic and X6. Going forward, all Symbian S60 devices released by Nokia will boast this same functionality and the vendor will later make Maps available on its Linux-based Maemo platform. Devices will come preloaded with the relevant regional maps out of the box.

Research firm Gartner estimates that, globally, 26 per cent of mobile devices were GPS-enabled in 2009, with the figure leaping to 76 per cent for North America. In Europe the number is more moderate, at 30 per cent, while Asia Pacific is a long way off the pace at 13 per cent. Still, Nokia’s move threatens to take a chunk out of the PND (portable navigation device) market, and also sticks the boot into any other paid for navigation offerings. It also makes an attractive alternative to offerings like the iPhone, which boasts native mapping using Google Maps, but does not allow for caching or offline usage. In this respect Ovi Maps provides a far greater range of data and services than Google’s Maps Navigation offers, which is, for now, limited to the US.

Gavin Byrne, research analyst at Informa, notes: “Clearly, Nokia has one eye on developments in Mountain View, CA. Google’s announcement of Google Maps Navigation Beta for Android 2.0 in August 2009 was a shot across Nokia’s bows. That danger became all the more imminent in late November when Google announced that it had backported the application to Android 1.6. Suddenly it could become available to a host of in-market devices, such as the G1, Magic and Motorola Dext.”

Nokia’s proposal allows the user to sidestep heavy data roaming charges by preloading maps before they visit a county and just using GPS, which is free, rather than the data network to find their location when abroad. While the Maps application is free, data charges will apply to users downloading maps on the fly over the cellular network. For many this may be included in their data plan, but prepay users may get hit by charges. Still, Nokia claims that the vector mapping technology used by its platform is ten times more efficient than the bitmap-based offerings from other providers. An innovative feature is the inclusion of 3D landmarks on the maps, to better help the user with orientation.

Vanjoki indicated that, in the long term, Nokia hopes to gain greater revenues through the widespread adoption of Ovi Maps as a contextual platform for mobile applications, which will, of course, be sold through the Ovi store. Vanjoki said that Nokia believes the map should become “the user interface to our life,” marking another step toward positioning its mapping data and technologies as a key platform at the centre of applications.

And when asked about the potential revenue loss from making features such as turn by turn available for free, Vanjoki said the intention was to make a little money from a much bigger pool of users, rather than taking a lot of money from a smaller base. He also hinted, however, that in the long term, the platform would be good for mobile advertising, suggesting another, much hyped, revenue stream. In September of 2009, Navteq acquired location based advertising firm Acuity Mobile for an undisclosed sum. Navteq and Acuity are long-term partners with a jointly developed interactive advertising platform already deployed by the mapping firm. Navteq launched the LocationPoint advertising platform early in 2009, using Acuity’s precise location targeted advertising.

“The acquisition of Acuity Mobile further strengthens our eight plus years in location-based advertising and interactive advertising,” said Chris Rothey, vice president of advertising, at Navteq at the time of the purchase. “Our research indicates that the more finely we target advertising, the higher value it brings to consumers and advertisers alike.”

Google scrutinised over competition and privacy issues

It’s not been a good week for Google. The firm has attracted the attentions of European antitrust authorities, while executives in Italy have been indicted for breaching local privacy laws.

Both incidents highlight just how much power, real or perceived, Google is attributed with. Earlier this week Google confirmed that it has been notified by the European Commission of the receipt of complaints from three companies: a UK price comparison site, Foundem; a French legal search engine called ejustice.fr; and Microsoft’s Ciao! from Bing.

The crux of the complaints is that Google’s algorithms demote these sites in Google’s search results because they compete with Google to some extent. So the issue here, which the EU may choose to investigate, is whether Google is using its majority share of the search and advertising markets to suppress competition.

Julia Holtz, Google’s senior competition counsel, denies this: “Our algorithms aim to rank first what people are most likely to find useful and we have nothing against vertical search sites — indeed many vertical search engines like Moneysupermarket.com, Opodo and Expedia typically rank high in Google’s results,” Holtz said.

Meanwhile, in Italy, three Google employees, including one who left the firm in 2008, have been convicted of breaching Italian privacy regulations. The case started in 2006 when students at a school in Turin, Italy, uploaded footage of themselves bullying a schoolmate to Google Video (this was prior to the acquisition of YouTube).

Google removed the video at the request of the police, but a public prosecutor in Milan pressed on with an indictment of the Google employees. At the outcome of that trial this week, a judge in Milan issued six month suspended sentences to the Google employees for failure to comply with Italian privacy laws. This suggests that content hosting companies, like Google Video or YouTube, would be criminally responsible for the content of videos uploaded by users.

Matt Sucherman, VP and deputy general counsel for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Google, comments: “European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbour from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence.”

A notice and take down regime of this kind is designed to help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy, Sucherman said. But, if “sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.”

It’s unlikely that any senior Google executive will take very seriously Vodafone and Telefonica’s recent statements that they are thinking of charging search engines to use their networks.

Before expanding on this claim, let’s look at what the operators said in a little detail.

Both Telefonica CEO Cesar Alierta and Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao – earlier this month and at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, respectively – have said that they are thinking about charging Google and other search engines to use their networks.

Alierta implied that it was unfair that search engines were using mobile bandwidth for free while Telefonica’s operations provided the network, product sales, customer care, installation and maintenance for them.

Alierta said that he was sure this situation would change and that search-engine companies would need to start paying for some of the infrastructure, possibly through the introduction of monthly fees in accordance with the amount of data generated by each site.

Colao used his keynote speech at Mobile World Congress to say that search engines such as Google and Yahoo should pay for preferential access to the company’s networks. I’m unsure exactly what Colao meant by this statement, in particular the idea of “preferential access,” but I assume he was considering charging Google et al. a fee based on the amount of traffic they generate, perhaps in return for a prominent placing on Vodafone’s portal.

I don’t think the details are of overriding importance at this stage: The key thing is that Colao wants his firm to get more money from Google than it does at the moment, in a way that corresponds to how much traffic Google generates. According to some estimates, Google generates about 6 per cent of all fixed-Internet traffic. It’s unlikely to be this high in the mobile sphere, but it’s fair to say that Google-owned YouTube would generate much more than 6 per cent of all mobile Internet traffic.

In a further broadside to Google and Yahoo, Colao alerted regulators to the lack of competition among search engines. He said that search engines such as Google and Yahoo, which control 80 per cent of the market, are damaging for users because of the lack of competition, and he asked public authorities and regulators to take a look into the issue.

If Telefonica and Vodafone did start charging search engines for using their networks, it would be a bold new step in the operators’ attempts to profit from data traffic. The question is: Would this ever work?

Vodafone and Telefonica overplay their hand

Regardless of the details of the charging mechanism Vodafone and Telefonica are thinking of, I’m sure that Google won’t be taking these statements very seriously. For now, at least. In principle, the arguments are unsound, and in strategic terms they point to a misreading by the operators of the balance of power between Google and them.

Why? Let’s take the “wrong in principle” argument first: Why should Google pay operators to allow mobile users to access its services? And why should Google – but not the BBC, Spotify, The New York Times, Facebook, HSBC or any other content/service provider – be required to pay operators for access to networks?

Although Google, YouTube and others are more responsible for the congested networks than most, operators recoup their network investments by charging end-users to access their networks to use these services and others like them. That’s the business they’re in. Asking Google to pay to access the Vodafone network is like a TV broadcaster charging a film company to show its films over its network, or Microsoft asking Google to pay for access to Windows users.

The arguments put forward by Vodafone and Telefonica are also unsound in strategic terms. At the moment, Vodafone and Telefonica need the big search engines more than these companies need them. People expect to use Google and other popular Web sites on their mobile phones. The balance of power lies with Google and co., not any individual mobile operator. Unless Vodafone and Telefonica actually block Google and other Web sites from their networks, the majority of their customers will find a way to use them, because that’s exactly why they signed up to data plans in the first place – to use these Web sites while on the go.

I think what’s actually going on is that Vodafone and Telefonica are turning up the heat on Google and other popular content providers to prepare for negotiations down the line over the amount of money these companies pay them, especially for value-added search-generated services, such as advertising. As such, these recent arguments are the beginning of a long battle over not just which party owns the customer, but over who pays what amount to enable that customer to access popular Web sites on the go. There is also the question of who earns money from value-added search-generated services such as location-based advertising, which might use the operator’s technology.

Although Vodafone’s and Telefonica’s arguments are unlikely to worry Google et al. in the near term, it’s an open question whether they can avoid entering into some kind of close partnership with operators with a revenue-share component built in. But there’s no reason to expect that mobile operators will be able to succeed where fixed operators have failed: in getting Internet companies to pay for some of the bandwidth they use.

It’s not just that mobile operators need Internet companies much more than Internet companies need them. It’s the job of mobile operators to build the best networks they can and bill subscribers as much as they can for whatever content they use. Government policy is heading down this path in the US and Europe, and operators risk being out of step with the direction the Internet is going by publicly mulling over how to charge differential rates for certain types of content.

Application brands sway handset decisions

Branding is becoming an increasingly important tool in the battle for customer loyalty, something which Apple has exploited successfully in its assault on the mobile space. But research released this week reveals how the rise of content and application brands are now altering the mobile landscape.

Following on from a survey of 27,000 UK consumers, research firm TNS discovered that almost one quarter of users are now placing their loyalties with content and application brands like Facebook, Twitter and Google – that’s the same amount that are primarily loyal to their operator.

The handset manufacturers needn’t worry just yet however, as device brands such as Nokia, Samsung, Apple and BlackBerry (RIM) are still the biggest driver (51 per cent) when it comes to consumer brand commitment.

The single most important factor in handset choice remains look and feel (29 per cent) but available applications and content – games, music and maps perhaps – ties for second place with handset brand (13 per cent). However, this figure rises to 37 per cent among consumers aged 16 to 30.

According to TNS, almost a fifth (19 per cent) of UK users are regularly downloading applications to their devices.

These figures show an interesting shift in how consumers are shopping for devices, but that shift is less apparent when all factors are taken into account. When all aspects of a device are considered, apps sink to the bottom of the list, with consumers more easily swayed by look and feel, handset brand, touchscreen, and interestingly, which operating system it sports.

According to Stephen Yap, group director at TNS Technology: “As uptake and usage of mobile services proliferates, we are seeing profound changes in the way that people make purchase decisions and in the brands that are the most meaningful to them.  While established handset makers are standing their ground, network operators are clearly under pressure from the rise of the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter.  These content providers are increasingly capturing consumers’ loyalties and are leading the way in bringing users the benefits of the latest mobile technologies.”

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Essar sells Indian cell tower unit

Wireless infrastructure operator American Tower Corporation (ATC) said Wednesday it has agreed to acquire a further 4,450 wireless communications sites in India via the purchase of Essar Telecom Infrastructure.

ATC’s Indian subsidiary, Transcend, will acquire the firm for a total consideration of $430m. The move will almost triple ATC’s presence in India, where it already operates around 2,550 sites. Essar’s site portfolio averages approximately 1.8 tenants per tower, ATC said.

The move comes as no surprise as operators across the Indian mobile industry attempt to drum up funds to participate the country’s forthcoming auction of 3G spectrum.

Last month, India’s biggest communications infrastructure operator, GTL Infrastructure, took over the tower assets of local carrier Aircel in a deal valued at $1.84bn. Under the agreement, GTL will take over 17,500 existing towers and will take over rights to roll out 20,000 more.

BBC iPlayer requests hit 120 million in January

It’s no wonder the operator community is growing increasingly concerned over the amount of data traffic hitting the networks. This week UK broadcaster the BBC announced record breaking requests for its IPTV-based iPlayer application.

During the month of January, requests for the BBC iPlayer across all devices including Virgin TV, topped 120 million, driven by on demand viewing.

While iPlayer is used for TV at roughly the same time of day as linear TV viewing, on demand makes up the great majority of TV programme requests with only 8 per cent of requests were for live simulcast streams, although two thirds of requests for radio streams are for live programmes.

PCs remained the firm favourite for viewing iPlayer content, accounting for around 87 per cent of all traffic, with mobile devices delivering only a thin sliver of requests. The stats do show just what other kinds of devices will contribute to the bandwidth crunch, with the Sony PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii accounting for eight per cent and four per cent of requests respectively, something which bodes well for open IPTV initiative Project Canvas.