l to r: Richard Moat, CEO T-Mobile UK; Gervais Pellissier, CFO of France Telecom; Timotheus Höttges, CFO of Deutsche Telekom; Tom Alexander, CEO Orange UK

It may have only been unveiled a matter of hours ago, but the PR teams at both T-Mobile and Orange have been busy assembling a veritable ream of information about the proposed merger of their two businesses. And some video too (at the end of this post).

First, some headline figures. As mentioned in the post earlier, the joint venture will create the UK’s biggest mobile operator – with an approximate 37% market share based on figures from the end of 2008. Orange have also revealed if you combined the 2008 figures from both operators you’d get revenue of approximately £7.7 billion, and EBITDA (profitability to you and me) of £1.7 billion.

People-wise, Richard Moat – T-Mobile UK’s current CEO, will take up the COO position, with the CEO hotseat being taken over by Tom Alexander, current CEO of Orange UK. Whilst it’s far too early to predict redundancies, there are already plans in place to reduce the number of retail outlets, and combine customer service, network and general/adminstration functions. These activities – along with the decommissioning of duplicate cell sites – is estimated to cost between £600m and £800m between 2010 and 2014.

Talking about cellsites and networks – most of that £600m-£800m cost will be taken up by decommissioning redundant duplicate radio network infrastructure. T-Mobile will contribute the 50% share of their joint radio network with Hutchinson 3G (3 to its friends and customers) to the pot, who incidentally already use Orange’s 2G network for fill-in coverage. Assuming T-Mobile and 3 put both their radio networks into the joint venture, you’ll end up with the interesting situation of 3 using a joint 3G network shared with Orange and T-Mobile, and a GSM network operated by Orange and T-Mobile.

Back to the subject of money, but still on the point of the shared 3G network currently (pre-merger) owned 50/50 by T-Mobile and 3, that’s clocked up gross tax losses so far of at least £1.5 billion. Looking at the bigger picture, France Telecom will be contributing, along with Orange UK, £1.25 billion of intra-group debt to the pot. Deutsche Telekom will then loan £625 million to the joint venture, which will be immediately paid back to France Telecom. After all is said and done, that leaves a joint debt of £1.25 billion, split 50/50 down the middle with £625 million of loans owed each to Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom.

So will the T-Mobile and Orange brands be disappearing from our High Street just yet? Not for a while, it seems. Both companies have committed to maintain separate brands for 18 months after the completion of the merger – so it could be at least a couple of years until we see a new (and as yet unnamed) ’super brand’ hitting the mobile world.

I sometimes think I’m like ‘Jonny 5′, the robot out of the cult 80’s movie ‘Short Circuit‘. Need input.. information, information and more information. That’s why I like Wikipedia – once you’ve done with browsing the usual mobile-tailored news portals you can pass many a dull journey on public transport by typing in something random into Wikipedia and seeing what comes up.

I started using Wapedia the other day. Whilst it’s been around since 2004, I’ve never really stumbled across it. Run by Taptu.com it gives you a nice fast way to access Wikipedia on the go – and, in my humblest opinion, looks nicer than Wikipedia’s native mobile interface.

Anyway, when I clicked on my Wapedia bookmark on my E71 a day or so ago I got the following message:

Blocked? Eh? Maybe I’d bookmarked it wrong, so I typed in wapedia.mobi into the browser. Again, the same message. So I left it a day or so, and tried again. Still blocked.

I’ve been racking my brains trying to think of a reason 3 would block Wapedia. Is it an adult site? Not that I know of – besides, from what I’ve seen there’s a different message for that (if you’ve got a 3 phone try firing up something like www.thepiratebay.org on your browser). Is it dangerous? Well, if you believe everything you read on Wikipedia, maybe. But seriously though, it worked for a few days then BANG! – blocked for no apparent reason.

I’ll fire an email to 3’s PR team and Taptu (the people behind Wapedia) shortly – hopefully it’s a simple mistake and not something more sinister.

UPDATE: Less than 24 hours after I wrote the above, Wapedia mysteriously got unblocked. Chris over at Taptu says they’ve asked 3 to look into it – but doubts they’ll get to the bottom of this little mystery. Still – all’s well that ends well.

That was the shocking claim that popped into my inbox this morning. Spend $500 on a bit of radio hardware, plug it into your laptop and you too can play spooks and listen in to someone’s mobile phone call.

Now before you start panicking, let’s clear a few things up. This is a theoretical possibility – it doesn’t mean your calls are unsecure. Yet. However, whereas before it’d take quite a large chunk of processing power and many, many days of solid number crunching, according to a presentation (PDF) at the recent Hacking at Random (HAR) conference there’s already a plan in place.

The author, Karstan Nohl, needs help though. He’s calling for assistance in computing the rainbow tables required to decrypt the A5/1 ciphered data – all you need apparently is access to BitTorrent, and a certain kind of Nvidia video card (one with a CUDA-enabled GPU, apparently). Karstan reckons with 80 CUDA processors at his disposal he’ll have it cracked by Christmas.

Stan Schatt, Vice President and Practice Director, Healthcare and Security at ABI Research reckons GSM eavesdropping will be a real threat within the next 6-12 months. “Hackers have been quick to break into wireless LANs within the US, so there is no reason to think they won’t move to cell phones once they have the tools in place, particularly because so much valuable information is transmitted over cell phones.

“Potentially this news could have as profound an impact on the cell phone industry as the breaking of WEP encryption had on the wireless LAN industry. When people discovered that their wireless LANs were vulnerable, it slowed the sale of equipment until an industry group—the Wi-Fi Alliance –stepped in and came up with interim security standards. If people do nothing, we are likely to start to hear stories of sensitive information being compromised, acquisition information being leaked, personal financial security information being compromised, etc. We could see tales of blackmail and extortion on the rise.”

Meanwhile, over at risk management specialist Henderson Risk, spokesman Stuart Quick says he’s not suprised A5/1 is being cracked. “It remains a Holy Grail amongst the hacking community and is intriguing because of the associated conspiracy theories. It is believed that the cipher has had weaknesses engineered in to it in order to make it easier for the security services to snoop on calls and that mobile communications providers are therefore misleading or incorrectly advertising their product’s level of security.”

So what can you do to make your mobile calls more secure? A while ago I wrote an article on this very subject, citing some useful tips from Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of British tech company Cellcrypt. No article about the security of mobile calls would be complete without a word from Simon: “Everybody has known for quite some time that a theoretical hack of GSM existed. This news means that the theoretical risk will become a very real one within the next six months. Governments have taken steps to manage the threat for years and now this is a very worrying prospect for anyone that discusses valuable or confidential information over their mobile phone.”

In research soon to be published by Cellcrypt, they found in a survey of corporate mobile users in the USA that 79% regularly discuss confidential issues over the phone every few days, with 64% making such calls daily.

So is this all doom and gloom? Will the Sun and sister paper The News of the World be going shopping for this kit to make it a hatrick of sensational eavesdropping stories?* Only time will tell.

* Apart from News of the World and their recent stories apparently involving voicemail ‘hacking’, The Sun caused an uproar in the early 90’s by publishing transcripts of taped conversations between the late Diana Princess of Wales and ‘close friend’ (and apparent Lotus dealer) James Gilbey – under the rather amusing title of ‘Squidgygate‘.

I know what you’re thinking. “Oh no, not another SpinVox-bashing post”. So rather than continue Ewan’s previous run of what some people have accused of being a personal rant when it’s just merely reporting facts with a few points of personal opinion attached, I’m going to do something different here. I’ll state some “facts” from a couple of other publications, and you can make up your own mind whether we – or the world of technology media at a whole – is on a witch hunt.

Financial Mail reported the following yesterday that:

• one of SpinVox’s ‘technology partners’ is about to pull the plug over an outstanding bill of £100,000.
• another supplier last week filed three county court claims against the company for over £200,000 of unpaid bills.
• other suppliers spoken to by the Financial Mail have said they haven’t been paid for months – if at all.
• some have been threatened with legal action by SpinVox if they spoke to the press.
• one of SpinVox’s call centre suppliers is filing a lawsuit in the High Court.

A quick crunch of the numbers involved in the article and it totals around £320,000.

Meanwhile The Guardian is reporting SpinVox have raised an undisclosed amount – rumoured to be at least £5.5m – of emergency funding from existing suppliers.

Financial Mail’s sources? I count three companies – at least – who aren’t SpinVox. The source of The Guardian’s story? SpinVox itself.

So what did SpinVox say when asked to comment by the Financial Mail? “We’re naturally having discussions with our customers and suppliers as we all adapt to the conditions of the credit crunch” said the unnamed person – who added they “could not comment on matters of litigation.”