Telecommunications (International Edition) articles from March 2004

Telecommunications (International Edition) archives from March 2004

Recovery in a cold climate.(Commentary)(Editorial)
March 1, 2004... Is the industry due a substantial revival purely on a rotation basis, or do the recovery signs reflect a relief that the bad news (as far as we know anyway) is out of the way? So, recovery has begun (at least according to stock prices and...

TIM boosted by GSM in Brazil and MMS at home; Italy.(Financial Perspectives)(Global System for Mobile Communications, Multimedia Messaging Service)
March 1, 2004... "We have outperformed our own targets," declared Marco De Benedetti, CEO of the TIM Group, at a press conference held in Milan last month. Presenting TIM Group's preliminary financial results for the year ended 31 December 2003, Benedetti said...

There is money in broadband and in the WAN; UK.(Financial Perspectives)(wide area network)
March 1, 2004... Among the trends highlighted at the ISP Forum in London at the end of February, two stood out. One is that IP voice services have matured enough to be on the point of going mainstream. The other was that lots of capacity bundled with attractive...

The FALCON has landed: Middle East and India.(Global News Analysis)
March 1, 2004... Flag Telecom, the transoceanic cable operator recently revived from Chapter 11, has spectacularly consolidated its position by announcing a new cable project which ties what are probably the two most underserved regions in the world--Middle...

Vodafone plays its 3G data card; Europe.(Global News Analysis)
March 1, 2004... Vodafone, in a clear attempt to portray itself as a 3G front-runner among the major mobile operators, announced last month it was going to offer 3G/GPRS data services to business customers across Europe 'over the next four weeks'. The service...

POF to bring magic to cable?; Europe.(Global News Analysis)(plastic optical fibre)
March 1, 2004... What can a company do if the market for two of its main products is not quite what it might be? Nexans, the cable manufacturer spun off from Alcatel in 2001, is faced with long-term falling demand for copper cables, but there is still some way...

Telecommunications slowly leaves icy regions.(Advetorial)(Interview)
March 1, 2004... The telecom industry seems to be recovering slowly. Is this just a temporary thaw, or is the ice age is now over? Unterberger: After what we have experienced in the past years, most people in our industry have become rather cautious when it...

Reach won't overstretch: it may not be able to mould the market, but it can keep itself in shape, says CEO.(View from the Top)
March 1, 2004... Many wholesale carriers have fallen by the wayside--KPNQwest and Carrier 1 are notable pan-European examples. The capacity such companies built out, however, is still with us--a fact that is not making life easy. Dick Simpson, the CEO of the...

What now for submarine telecom? Overcapacity, valueless assets, and no pricing power--are there any reasons to be cheerful in an industry that finds itself under financial water?(Public Network Revial)(Editorial)
March 1, 2004... The submarine telecom industry--which knits together the global infrastructure backbone--remains in a depressed state. Nonetheless, slowly but surely, the sector is changing its shape as it struggles to adjust to post-bubble times and prepares...

Have you got IT? As networks converge, telcos look to increase their role in the IT space?(Public Network Revival)
March 1, 2004... There has been a lot discussion about telcos moving into IT services. On the surface, it sounds compelling. Take all those bits and bytes and complicated cables and put them altogether into one nice, simple bundle--particularly as voice and...

If you can't beat them, join them; mobile operators, whether they like it or not, will have to embrace public wireless LANs to avoid being outrun in the race for data traffic.(Public Network Revival)
March 1, 2004... Mobile operators, no matter what they might say in public, will--deep down--probably wish the public wireless LAN hotspot phenomenon had never happened. This desire will be particularly earnest from those who have invested heavily in 3G licence...

In search of WDM in metro Europe: growing demand for storage and ethernet services should encourage greater metro WDM investment by European service providers.(Public Network Revival)(Service providers)
March 1, 2004... Metro WDM has a mixed report card. On the one hand, wavelength services--once the darling of the bubble years--have taken a back seat as pragmatism and customer demand now rules network investment. On the other hand, MWDM systems have proven...