subject: UK first battleground for European convergence posted: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 10:07:07 +0100
[I don't understand why consumers will be throwing out their fixed
lines - don't they need them to get their broadband access? Wifi is
great and all but it needs to be connected to a base-station, and
that station to the network - oh WiMax I hear u say, I say VDSL2 to
you, the day I get a consistent 100Mbit transfer over WiMax I will
change my views - and I expect that day to be a long way off.
Consumers like their bandwidth, and wireless just doesn't cut the
mustard in comparison, especially when there's already a wire
installed and working in every home in the country, that is faster
and more reliable (not to mention more secure, and less complex to
set up) - Stu]
UK first battleground for European convergence
By Wireless Watch
Published Monday 12th June 2006 14:12 GMT
The UK is shaping up to be a key battleground as the major operators
start to put their convergence theories into practise.
As Vodafone casts around for a way to add broadband access to its
mixture of services, the wired-wireless incumbents have put the
elements of the quadruple play in place already and are now taking
their first steps towards unified service bundles.
Orange has thrown down the gauntlet by offering free fixed broadband
to customers who spend a certain amount on its mobile services -
making the long anticipated shift to free broadband a reality, and
one to which the other operators will have to respond. Orange is also
the common brand now adopted by its parent France Telecom for all its
quad play (and enterprise) services including broadband access, ISP
services, IPTV, VoIP and mobile.
With other France Telecom brands such as Wanadoo, Equant, Etrali and
eventually MaLigne IPTV now disappeared, this is only the start of
the real shift - towards genuinely converged bundles of services (not
to mention the gargantuan effort of combining sales and service
organisations, websites and helpdesks).
The Orange free broadband offer extends significantly the principle
laid down by T-Mobile - that cellular revenue and customer retention
can be driven by offering another service at low cost, even if it is
lossmaking to the operator (in T-Mobile's case, this was the Wi-Fi
hotspot subscription). Some smaller operators are already taking the
same approach, notably Carphone Warehouse (also in the UK), and the
other majors are likely to copy - leaving those cellcos with no
broadband network at a severe disadvantage.
Vodafone is the best example, and all the mobile-only providers, and
the larger MVNOs, will have to consider how to obtain broadband
partners, or offer an alternative way to lure and retain customers.
Free mobile minutes, in return for watching adverts on the cellphone,
is one of the most promising options, building on the internet model,
and this has already been introduced by Virgin Mobile USA and hinted
at by Vodafone.
MVNO response
Many of these more innovative approaches to offering free services
are being driven by the MVNOs, which do not have the same capex and
opex considerations as the network owners.
For instance, Xero Mobile has attracted considerable attention in the
US with its soon-to-be launched advertising-based service. It plans
to give away up to 5m handsets, mainly to college students, and then
subsidise their bills by pushing adverts to those phones.
Now, Xero is looking to franchise this model to operators in other
countries, claiming it "owns and has licenses for the technology, IP
and expertise necessary to deploy this model in multiple countries".
For those with broadband to offer, however, the pressure to move to
converged bundles has been stepped up by Orange's move. This is the
first blow in the long awaited confrontation between France Telecom,
Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, British Telecom and to a lesser
extent Telefonica, which is likely to change the telecoms landscape
and take in all the new Europeans to the east. It is a war that is
based on using a quadruple play where unbundling of the local loop
and broadband wholesaling legislation across all of Europe has made
it possible for ISPs to enter other broadband markets.
The UK convergence fight
This is a fight that's been brewing for some time and although
Orange's rebranding has most impact in its native France, the opening
shots are fired in the UK, fairly and squarely at British Telecom.
Orange UK has announced its free 8Mbps line to mobile monthly
contract customers who spend more than £30 ($56). Orange has also
launched new VoIP services including one called Anytime, which offers
free evening and weekend calls to UK landlines and has free calls to
Orange mobiles for just £6 ($11) a month.
Eventually, Orange will bring in a "One Phone" offering, a dual-mode
handset that hands off between the broadband and cellular networks
using Wi-Fi, taking on BT Fusion; and it has promised to merge
address books across mobile and broadband telephony.
Orange has also said that it will launch music, gaming, communication
and security services in the near future, but we would expect even
more from the company, and an onslaught in hybrid IPTV services will
be launched right across Europe.
In the UK, British Telecom is widely thought to have nowhere to go.
It is a wireline operator that has no mobile infrastructure of its
own, and is fighting shy of offering full IPTV, because of the
strength of satellite TV supplier BSkyB and terrestrial digital TV in
the UK. This means that when Orange attacks both wireline revenue by
including mobile bundles, and offers a hybrid DVB-T/VoD-over-IP
strategy, it will be able to steal customers.
Granted, neither Telecom Italia nor Deutsche Telekom has a footprint
in UK broadband lines, but that could be easily acquired as there are
at least seven independent unbundler operations, the biggest of
which, Easynet, has already been acquired by Sky, and the next
Bulldog, already acquired by Cable and Wireless, but thought to be up
for sale again. And the German incumbent, of course, has T-Mobile UK
to spearhead the branding of such an exercise.
Meanwhile, once Virgin Mobile has been acquired in the UK by NTL, it
will form a digital cable based quadruple play, and it too can to
mobile customers in the same way as Orange.
UK IPTV service HomeChoice is up for grabs, having placed itself on
the market some months ago. This is an exceptional IPTV service,
complete with internet access and VoIP, but not access to mobile
bundling. So this might be another way into the UK for a BT rival.
Acquisition of BT?
But there's a better acquisition to be made. Deutsche Telekom could
move to buy British Telecom itself. Many think that this is only a
matter of time and price and that the price will only go down as BT
spends aggressively on its switch to an entirely IP-based network,
and as it loses market share to encroaching VoIP services.
The excellent Europe wide enterprise services that BT has could be
floated off, and DT might end up with a cut-price acquisition, at the
same time bypassing the effort of competing in the market against BT,
and adding a full quad play to T-Mobile.
Other operators have their eyes on the UK as a testing ground for
their converged bundles. In Spain the virulently strong Telefonica,
bolstered by South American mobile and broadband revenues, is likely
to yield little joy to anyone trying to enter its market in a
quadruple play. It has IPTV growing at breakneck pace, huge broadband
market share and it is the second largest mobile carrier in the
world. Telefonica might be the next company to begin quadruple play
bundling of its own in and outside its core territory, and a natural
target would be the UK, because it owns local mobile operator O2.
The UK, then, highlights the two key challenges for large operators
in Europe - for companies with just one network, how to achieve a
quad play; and for wired/wireless majors, how to remain competitive
in the converged world by taking on an increasingly internationalised
set of rivals, while ensuring that bundling sustains profitability as
well as market share.
Making profit from convergence
This may be harder than it looks. Bundling's positive impact on
customer acquisition and retention is clear - one operator can
control all of a user's activity in voice, video and broadband
access, boosting its share of that user´s spend even if the customer
is actually spending less than on discrete services. This lower total
bill and the increased buy-in to a single provider also encourages
loyalty (or customer apathy), and the convenience and predictability
of a single bill is a significant lure.
The risk is far higher when it comes to margins. The triple play,
when delivered over a single efficient IP network, can achieve
significant opex economies that offer latitude for price cutting
without too much pain for profits, but when the fourth arm of
mobility is introduced, operators need to support (or partner with)
at least two networks, and possibly more as some introduce broadband
wireless to the equation too.
A recent report by Exane BNP Paribas and Arthur D Little warned that
bundling and fixed/mobile convergence will have a "severe impact" on
major operators' margins in the coming year, especially as users
throw out fixed lines, and make heavier use of Wi-Fi at the expense
of cellular.
The report is also sceptical that consumers will pay the premium
rates for new services that would be required to compensate for the
lower spending on basic functions like voice.
The report forecasts average revenue growth in the European telecom
services market of just 3.1 per cent in mobile and 1.3 per cent in
fixed, almost one percentage point slower than last year (with the
main growth decline in mobile, which rose by 8 per cent a year in
2002-2005).
