MVNO commodities

In France, mass distribution eventually makes it into the MVNO arena* : after Auchan Mobile (by Auchan Telecom - auchantelecom.fr) on SFR, Carrefour Mobile (carrefourmobile.fr) picked up Orange.
If Auchan's Hyperlibre prepaid cards claim a fun and content factor, Carrefour delivers a much cheaper message : mobility metaphorically lies on the same shelves as eggs, mineral water or pasta, the equivalent of commodities in foods, basic products for which the World's #2 retailer holds an impressive market share.
Not as impressive as that of #1 Wal-Mart if it were to purchase Carrefour... but right now, WM has its own fishes to fry in the US (Movida - only 100,000 subs to date and 500,000 expected by the end of 2007) or in Germany, where even hard discounter Aldi* struggles.
A retail and / or financial know-how definitely makes sense for tomorrow's MVNOood (and Rabobank is considering its home market in the Netherlands), but it takes more to succeed than a strong brand or an expertise, be it in content (look at Disney struggle in the US and postpone its launch in the UK). A MVNO is a service provider and service should remain the major, even with a discount / content / mcommerce / mwhatever flavor. Pure players can succeed provided they can - well - provide and deliver the goods (ie TracFone - tracfone.com).
Consider Mobile ESPN's failure in the US : ESPN is a beautiful brand but only a one channel brand. Like TF1 Mobile, you like to have it on your mobile but you want all other channels as well. Quad players stand a better chance : Qwest Wireless makes a living, but US cablecos have yet to really enter the race (Comcast with T-Mobile again ?). In the UK, the NTL - Telewest - Virgin / NTV combo should deliver because Virgin being Virgin, Virgin Mobile refreshes the parts other MVNOs cannot reach.

Niche MVNOs keep blooming and ethnic MVNOs flourishing : MobiSud** targets Europe's Moroccan community, Ay Yildiz (ayyildiz.de) the Turkish diaspora and Red Pocket Mobile delivers 24/7 Mandarin and Cantonese service in the US. Others prefer to focus on the "international calls" dimension of the service across minorities, like Oblio Telecom's Bravo Cellular in the US or Ortel Mobile in Belgium (ortelmobile.be).
In a Marketing 101 frenzy, Firefly Mobile (fireflymobile.com) targets mobile kids, Xero Mobile (xeromobile.net) college teens***, Jitterbug by Greatcall (gojitterbug.com) seniors and technophobic Baby Boomers, and as the name suggests, GAYmobile (gaymobile.dk) doesn't target homophobes. No one dares launching a truly green mobile service but you can still subscribe to a feel-good provider : Call4care (call4care.nl), which federates all major NGOs including the Red Cross.
Yet, youth-oriented MVNOs remain the main variety.
And a demanding job. Ask Helio, which reached the audience it wanted, but not the kind of wallets it expected. The younger generations love the handsets but SKT and EarthLink would rather have them actually purchase the damn gizmos.
Amp'd Mobile isn't playing in the big leagues either with its 50,000 customers, even going on 150,000 by the end of the year. Yet, it goes international : Canada with TELUS (now a major shareholder) and Japan on KDDI (TTM march 2007). I don't think Amp'd impressive slugging average (a $100 ARPU) will remain that high when the saint subscribers go marchin' in, but Let's see if TELUS can be as efficient as Sprint Nextel with Boost Mobile (boostmobile.com).
To be continu'd.


* Virgin, FNAC or Darty happen to be retailers, but with a strong flavor / major.
* see "CAPEX and the city - curb your enthousiasm or six feet under" (20051205)
** see "MSN, Mobile Centric, Mobisud" (20061019)
*** if they really want to launch next January, they must first target deep pocketed and short sighted investors

Saving private Korea Inc - back to subsidies, but no way back

Better late than sorry. The MIC eventually allowed cellcos to subsidize handsets. Korea Inc can now boost DMB, WiBro and W-CDMA technologies at home. Bad news for SK Telecom's competitors*, good news for Samsung, LG & Co, who would have preferred this help much earlier for their international competitiveness**. Yet, note that debitel's DMB trials in Germany*** have just been confirmed, along with a nationwide coverage in 2007 (8 cities for the World Cup, 12 by the end of 2006).
The MIC set a few rules for subsidies (only 62% of subscribers can enjoy them now, and 18 to 24 month will be required between each favor)... with the notable exception of next gen handsets (DMB, W-CDMA, WiBro...). To avoid a loss of face, the Government intends to monitor the process even more closely than it does with real estate, thanks to a weird kind of reverse auction.
This Monday morning, March the 27th, each MNO will give its subsidy grid to the regulator and no change will be allowed untill April 27. You can give more but can never lower your level of subsidy.
Analysts expect a reasonable start (around KRW 100 k per handset - about $100), but all gloves are off... which might help those who'll purchase the brand new ring / wrist phones recently announced by manufacturers.
But the device of the week was presented by Samsung at their Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei. It's not a handset but the World's first SSD (Solid-State Drive) laptop : the 32 Gigabyte flash-chip drive is four times lighter than a 30 Gigabyte HDD, and the manufacturer expects the technology to snatch 30% of the laptop market with a $200 unit price by 2008 (the price is set**** at $500 right now).



* even if KTF will turn a few heads with KTF Technologies Inc's ultra-slim phone (7.9 millimeters - MP3 player - 1.3-megapixel camera - electronic dictionary with over 300,000 English words...).
** see "Subsidies : boosting subscriptions of exports ?" (20051026).
*** see "CeBIT unnovations" (20060312)
**** I don't say "fixed" because Samsung joined Hynix in sending employees in jail for price-fixing in the semi-con sector (the $300M fine paid last year didn't protect the individuals working for the company).

Telefonica's Northern Exposure

£17.7bn. Again, a lot of dough. But this time and even if this is Halloween, Telefonica is not going for spectrum or spectre with a greenfield operation in Germany : O2* are a full grown operator with positions in both the UK and Germany, not to mention other remains of the British Empire.
If Telefonica Moviles manages to be swift and efficient, Vodafone and T-Mobile should start worrying. This could also prove to be a clue for the future of T-Mobile USA within the pink team.
Whatever. Europe is catching up with America and the wave of concentration ain't over yet. Expect more Air France - KAL - style operations as well as a few low cost airlines crashes.

* about O2 : "Superfast me, O2" (20051023), "Brand new KPN - Brand new USA - Same old standards" (20050901), "One month oxygen supply" (20050827), "Over the air" (20050409)

easyMobile sees Northern Light - a Greek tragedy

I just loved the way easyMobile calculated their 10% share in UK's online mobile services : end of June, the 15k customers they signed up over the web were supposed to represent 10% of all customers signed up over the web since their launch early March (15% for PAYG customers - that's for Pay As You Go, not Play Against Yahoo! & Google).
Business is so easy when you wear pink glasses ! Frank Rasmussen could prove a perfect successor to Hans Snook or even Elton John. easy definitely does it...
Nordic M-VNOs, the early birds who caught more colds than worms, are being purchased by competitors ? And easyMobile's partner is Danemark's TDC, the mother company of Telmore, a Nordic M-VNO ? No sweat. Don't worry, be happy.
Will easyMobile.nl succeed ? Of course : Telfort x Telmore = more for Tele2, the strongest combo. Will easyMobile.de succeed ? Of course : it's on T-Mobile, the pinkest of all networks. Besides, easyMobile can leverage on a strong customer base in Germany : 3M subs to TDC's Talkline. A walk in the park, I telyou !
Actually, if you read closely, easyMobile.de happens to be a new JV between TDC and TIH Invest A/S (owned by Rasmussen himself, the founder of Telmore and CEO of easyMobile). This vehicle will be the new base to launch attacks "in up to 10 other European countries" in the name of easyMobile.
In other words, Stelios Haji-Ioannou is out of the picture : easyGroup provides the branding and lets telecom specialists handle the business. The Greek Serial Entrepreneur washes his hands : now you can fail, I won't wail.

TDD & TDMB, not so TDous

After all, TDMB still has a chance in Europe. Part of the lobbying I mentioned about LG is about the easiness of piggybacking on existing DAB networks, whilst DVB spectrum remains to be seen. And LG are starting this month a T-DMB trial in Regensburg, Germany, supposedly under the helm of the EU IST CELTIC Project, CELTIC standing for Cooperation for a European sustained Leadership In Telecommunications. I guess Nokia appreciates the joke, especially since they are part of CELTIC's Core Group (the same can be said about BT, FT or Telefonica). And CELTIC's "Call 2 projects tackling convergence" still includes WingTV, a program devoted to Nokia's DVB-UMTS integration. Fixed incumbents are already involved in such trials, but they are also busy taking shares of IPTV market as quickly as possible in a competitive DSL world. France Telecom's MaLigne TV could go international with a more colorful branding (the color of a juicy fruit, for instance), and Telefonica's Imagenio could leverage on the operator's reconquista of the Americas. Mobile broadcasters will be stronger if they already are strong IPTV leaders...
TD-CDMA have been back from the dead for months : Orange in France, T-Mobile in the Czech Republic, Nextel in Washington D.C.... even Japan reserved the 2GHz spectrum for IP Wireless' beloved technology. TDD could prove a quick fix for such US players as Sprint-Nextel or T-Mobile : W-CDMA is on its way (in different bands) and the HSDPA -HSUPA have the favor of many GSM players, but TDD could deliver earlier and cheaper coverage without major spectrum hurdles (especially compared to demanding HSUPA). Beyond data cards or dongles, handsets are yet to be found, and the industry needs more than IPW partnerships with Atmel or Teleca to solve this.

Mobile Real TV - LG and the H-free handset

Nokia are to duplicate in the Netherlands their Finnish Mobile TV experience, with KPN starring as Telia-Sonera and Nozema Services + Digitenne as Elisa. In this RealMobileTV* show, you don't care where the customers come from : whatever the casting, everybody ends up telling how great the experience was. Plus PR people can relieve themselves in public (in Dutch for Nozema or in English for Nok-Nok).
This time, the plot is about mixing broadcasting and mobile with as many users as possible and in a truly mobile environment (thus the coverage of railways and motorways). The Finns provide the already vintage DVB-H 7110 plus a IPDC solution (sounds like the heavy metal version of IP), the Dutch their bad taste for programming (remember where Endemol and Big Brother came from ?). Nozema already confessed an affair with the Wi-Fi - WiMAX - Mobile-Fi (802.20) family.
But guess which manufacturer could make mobile TV on handsets a true hit in Europe ? The inventors of DVB-H, Nokia ? Nah... LG decided to launch their 3G - T-DMB phone next year in Europe and China. LG-V9000 will be up for grabs Q1 2006, on time for the 2006 World Cup in Germany : LG happens to be a top sponsor and intends to become a top lobbyist for the Korean norm. Even if the Chinese team didn't make it through the qualifiers. Even if T-DMB competes more directly with DVB-T (already commercialized in many European countries) than with DVB-H. Even if no DMB network has been announced yet in Europe.
Well. LG are also into bigger TV screens, and you don't have to be a mobile operator to roll out DMB. Consumers shouldn't give a hyphen provided the service works. They might even dig the motto used to sell this rolla : "personal mobile (digital) TV".

* guess what : realmobiletv.com is available but mobilerealtv.com has already been locked by some guy living on Sunset Bvd. If he sells Palms, I gather they're not of the tree kind.

One month oxygen supply

O² + FOOT = MMS² is the official equation, but I gather O² are more interested in boosting the value of their company than MMS traffic. The exclusivity is only valid for the duration of the FIFA World Cup (June 9th - July 9th, 2006) and the German territory but getting soccer rights always pleases the audience (beyond dumb couch potatoes, dumb analysts).
Neither 0² nor Infront Sports & Media would show us the money but Oliver Seibert wouldn't give the rights to a 8M customer base holder for a song. New partners will come and / or parts of 0² or even the all shebang may be sold by the time of the kick-off and I don't think this deal will change anything. Consider it an insurance policy for the existing customer base.
Yet, Germany remains the biggest potential growth engine for this operator. Locking this kind of deals is a nice quick fix but they badly need some new partner to help them consider strategy beyond today's "our primary strategy is to create shareholder value".