Friday afternoon noteworthy tidbits

• Samsung yesterday laid out its wireless vision and strategy at its wireless summit in New York and said that “4G is WiMAX”. Uups, that will trigger lots of nervous talk/comments among the Unstrung’s of the world. Now the reasons mentioned are: “time to market, greater throughput, low latency, multimedia centric, greater broadcast capacity at 2 Mbits/s per user, vehicular mobility at up to 75 mph and broad global support with over 380 companies in the WiMAX Forum. In the case of carriers, they pointed to advantages such as no subsidies for customer premise equipment, low operating expenses, low cost per megabit, availability of spectrum and mobility.” Now how’s that for an objective discussion base?
• One proof of Samsung’s statement is the WiMAX auction in Germany that is coming to an end now. Germany-wide WiMAX players will be Clearwire, Inquam (Qualcom backed) and DBD. Two regional players will be MGM and Televersa - both in Bavaria. Total bidding amount is 56 million EUR so far (in round 35), which is peanuts compared with the 50 billion that were paid for 3G spectrum back in 2000.
• Also in Bavaria, the German TV group ProSiebenSat.1 was sold to KKR and Permira and not to Dogan the Turkish/German (Springer) owned group as one might have thought. Haim Saban made a great return on his investment, and now the two private equity companies want to produce an even better one.
• Swisscom seems to be having some teething problems with its new IPTV service, Bluewin TV. Not only do new customers face 6-8 weeks of waiting lists, but also user expectations are of course based on terrestial or satellite TV watching. Waiting 2 seconds to switch from one channel to another or getting used to the fact that the content is streamed and therefore about 20 seconds delayed in live broadcasts seems a problem.
• France Telecom is also investing. This time into a FTTH network that will be built in Paris - and some other large cities - first and will reach one million households by end of 2008, of which they expect that 15-20% will become subscribers. The network should allow 100Mbps data rates and be faster than the new D-Telecom VDSL network in Germany.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 11:28 pm and is filed under News & Our 2 Cents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.