The iPhone App you never dreamed of

Are you guilty of walking and texting at the same time? Do you get really annoyed when other people walk and text in busy thoroughfares and threaten to run into you? Whatever your thoughts, the practice appears to be on the rise and the potential for injury appears to...

VCs scarce, R&D dropping – spells trouble?

I remember the days when Venture Capitalists (VCs) used to stalk telecoms conferences looking for software companies with potential. investing in telecoms applications was no guarantee of success but they knew that the potential market for the products had a...

Aussie NBN Co/Telstra deal struck (maybe)

Newspaper headlines in Australia proclaimed on Sunday that Telstra had signed a deal with NBN Co to transfer customers from its copper network onto the National Broadband Network’s fibre network and share Telstra’s infrastructure. Not surprisingly, a press...

'Big Brother' in a Box

I guess one of the advantages of running an island nation the size of a big city with virtually no opposition is that you can make any sort of decision you like and everyone has to go along with it. However, with this level of power there is always the fear that it...

Today's alchemy – turning air into gold!

Did you know that the telecommunications industry could, single-handedly, save countries from potential bankruptcy? Here’s how it’s done. Firstly, you limit the availability of something in great demand, usually by legislation and heavy regulation (sometimes by...

Small 'mistake' for Google, big problem for the rest of us

I don’t intend to dwell on the story that Google ‘accidentally’ collected 600GB of data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks in 30 countries while out taking photographs for its Street View mapping service. Nor the fact that technical details revealed in a Google audit could...

Telus CTO 'on the money' with billing comments

Either Telus CTO, Ibrahim Gedeon, is an avid reader of my blogs or he is a brilliant man in his own right (probably the latter). At this week’s B/OSS Billing and OSS Conference being held in Washington, DC he said that telecom network operators needed to be more open...

Please Mr Jobs, slow down, we can't keep up!

Please forgive me, I’m going to talk about Apple again. Yes, you’ve probably all heard about the iPhone 4 and how it’s the thinnest, smartest, most beautiful, well-designed, remarkably constructed consumer device ever produced. And that’s only...

Billing ain’t what it used to be

Metratech’s CTO, Doug Zone outlines how billing for cloud services requires new methodology and the concept of ‘dynamic billing’ where price can vary according to demand are the future of billing.

The feast is over – compulsory dieting begins now

All the signals were there and now it’s actually happening. AT&T is the first of what will certainly be a flurry of operators that will start phasing out those yummy ‘all you can eat’ packages for mobile data. AT&T will no longer offer new customers its...