What ever happened to 'fair' trade?

1 on the telecommunications industry. I mentioned in a recent blog that governments and the regulators they control seem to be living in a past age when all telecommunications companies were government owned monopolies. Yes, we all know those old arguments about...

CSP gives itself 'bill shock'

Australian CSP, Telstra, incurred as much as AU$90 million (US$80 million) in bad debts in its past financial year, caused largely by customers that disputed and didn’t pay expensive bills. Chief financial officer John Stanhope told an analyst meeting in Sydney...

It's official: 'bill shock' is dangerous for your health!

It’s official, ‘bill shock’ can cause untimely death. At least that’s what Thai CSP, TrueMove, says. As a roaming customer of TrueMove I was trying to activate my voicemail service whilst in France. After negotiating the TrueMove website, that changes regularly from...

Is cloud security really behind Intel acquisition?

Funny how some news stories are viewed differently. This week’s big IT headline was that Intel had bought McAfee for a massive $7.68 billion, but depending where you read about the story took on multiple personas. There is no doubt that the acquisition underlines...

Can the big boys play keep Apple at bay?

NFC, or near field communications technology, should be a raging success outside of Korea and Japan, but it simply is not. Despite efforts by the GSMA to get the ball rolling with CSPs worldwide and the finance and transport industries agreeing on the profound...

Growing pains not always gains

CSPs facing the challenge of home market saturation, increased competition and lower margins have a number of options to take up in order to improve shareholder value. Cutting costs brings the fastest results both to bottom line and share price, but it’s not always...

Privacy vs Protection at what price?

I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I was starting to believe that telecoms regulators around the world were relaxing their draconian grip on an industry that has, for the most part, been ‘deregulated’ in some form or another for best part of thirty years. Before you...

Ban the BlackBerry Bandwagon Begins

The ‘ban the Blackberry bandwagon’ is on a roll  but you can’t help thinking it’s getting a little political and out of hand. After my blog on the subject earlier in the week I received a number of emails telling me that the national security arguments made by UAE and...

BlackBerry ban a very thorny issue

The United Arab Emirates has outlined plans to block BlackBerry email, messaging and Web browsing services, citing a potential security threat because encrypted data sent on the devices is moved abroad where it cannot be monitored for illegal activity. The decision...