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Fraud in the mobile industry: A growing issue for the marketplace

By Ewan on August 23, 2011 in Operators, Opinion

Fraud has been on my periphery for a while. It’s one of those areas of the industry (a little bit like voicemail) that doesn’t generally get a lot of attention but is actually rather important. I asked the team at WeDo to answer my questions to give us an overview of the fraud issue — [...]

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Operator Innovation: Access any airport lounge with T-Mobile GlobalPlus+

By Ewan on August 20, 2011 in Opinion

It’s time for the sixth post in our Operator Innovation series. Last week I looked at the issue of SMS and how operators still have time to leverage one of their strongest assets — messaging and the phone number identity that underpins it. This week I’m looking at added value — or semi-intangibles. I’ve often [...]

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3′s outbound sales people can only add new lines? Crazy!

By Ewan on August 8, 2011 in Operators, Opinion

I just had a phone call from 3 again. Do you remember last time, they phoned to offer me a special deal. The deal was something like X minutes, X texts, for £15 a month. I remember last time telling them, “No thanks, but I’d very much like to buy an iPad from you,” (and [...]

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If an operator is charging users for Facebook roaming, should they pay a license fee?

By Ewan on June 7, 2011 in Operators, Opinion

This post ties rather neatly in with my previous one (Would you pay €2 to use Facebook on the beach?) regarding roaming. Now then, what happens if operators were to deploy these rather innovative plans such as the one mentioned above? It’s a topic I’ve been exploring whilst I’ve been on-site at MACH Insights 2011. [...]

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This new mobile world is great, as long as stuff actually works

By Ewan on May 11, 2011 in Operators, Opinion

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch highlights a key fundamental that we often forget at the bleeding edge of the mobile world: The basic stuff has to actually work. For all the talk about 4G and LTE and genius amazing whiz-bang gizmos, the basic reality is that when I hit ‘dial’, I expect my call to [...]

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I’d love to see a ‘trusted context network’ for my phone

By Ewan on May 1, 2011 in Opinion

Well then it’s just gone 4am and I’m in the taxi on the way to RIM’s highly anticipated BlackBerry World event in Orlando. It’s sure to be an exciting one. There’s bound to be some interesting and exciting news. However this morning I’d like to raise a very basic problem I still have with my [...]

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Mobile operators? Will they not learn? Charging Google & Facebook? Come on!

By Ewan on April 27, 2011 in Operators, Opinion

Ah dear. Time for a diatribe. I had to knock out a brief comment on this Financial Times post. Here’s the first few paras: Leading European telecoms companies want to levy significant charges on Google and other online content providers through an overhaul of the regime governing how data travel over the internet. Operators in [...]

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Acision: Mobile tariffs out of step with consumer usage habits

By Ewan on April 13, 2011 in Operators, Services

I’m sure you’ll have read the headlines this week about consumers being royally nailed by their operators by agreeing to pay for a price plan that they don’t actually end up using. If not, here’s a bit of a refresher by way of Acision, the global messaging giant: New research from Ofcom-accredited mobile bill analysis [...]

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Impressed by SoftBank’s reaction to the Japanese Quake

By Ewan on March 30, 2011 in Operators

Serkan at MobileCrunch has the full story: Son said that as SoftBank’s leader, it makes him feel uncomfortable to hear that disaster victims and their friends and relatives have trouble in connecting and obtaining information. And while he was at it, he also promised that the orphans won’t be charged any communication fees until they [...]

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If an operator suffers a critical outage, should they refund customers?

By Ewan on March 30, 2011 in Operators

On the 28th of March, T-Mobile Netherlands suffered a catastrophic network outage that resulted in millions of users having their phones transformed from communications devices into paperweights. From what I’ve been told, connectivity was offline for most of the business day. T-Mobile is refusing to offer any compensation citing ‘Force Majeure’. Now then — should [...]

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Ovum: Operators should fear the threat from Facebook

By Ewan on February 22, 2011 in Opinion

Here’s Ovum‘s take on the elephant in the ultra small mobile operator room — Facebook. – – – – – Facebook is shaping up to be a strong competitor to mobile operators that are in danger of underestimating the threat it poses, according to Ovum. In a new report* the independent telecoms analyst states that [...]

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How Facebook could really nail the mobile operators

By Ewan on February 22, 2011 in Operators

I participated in an array of superb briefings last week at Mobile World Congress. The issue of the ‘data crunch’ was never far from the conversation. One company I met on Sunday morning prior to MWC was apoplectic with rage about Facebook, Google and Apple. I won’t go into detail about the company’s identity except [...]

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