UK first battleground for European convergence
Posted by Chris Leckness on 06/12/06 in Smart Phones
The UK is shaping up to be a key battleground as the major operators start to put their convergence theories 
into practice.
Vodafone is looking for ways to add broadband access to its mixture of services, the wired-wireless incumbents have put the elements of the quadruple play in place already and are now taking their first steps towards unified service bundles.
Orange UK has announced its free 8Mbps line to mobile monthly contract customers who spend more than £30 ($56). Orange has also launched new VoIP services including one called Anytime, which offers free evening and weekend calls to UK landlines and has free calls to Orange mobiles for just £6 ($11) a month.
Eventually, Orange will bring in a "One Phone" offering, a dual-mode handset that hands off between the broadband and cellular networks using Wi-Fi, taking on BT Fusion; and it has promised to merge address books across mobile and broadband telephony
Its all change in the UK, and as long as the quality of service does not suffer from the reduced costs, I am more than happy to merge all my telco providers to a single company that can offer me a large cash saving.
Orange has thrown down the gauntlet by offering free fixed broadband to customers who spend a certain amount on its mobile services – making the long anticipated shift to free broadband a reality, and one to which the other operators will have to respond. Orange is also the common brand now adopted by its parent France Telecom for all its quad play (and enterprise) services including broadband access, ISP services, IPTV, VoIP and mobile.
The Orange free broadband offer builds on the offer by T-Mobile – that cellular revenue and customer retention can be driven by offering another service at low cost. Some smaller operators are already taking the same approach, notably Carphone Warehouse (also in the UK), and the other majors are likely to copy – leaving those cellcos with no broadband network at a severe disadvantage.
For those with broadband to offer, however, the pressure to move to converged bundles has been stepped up by Orange’s move. This is the first blow in the long awaited confrontation between France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, British Telecom and to a lesser extent Telefonica, which is likely to change the telecoms landscape and take in all the new Europeans to the east. It is a war that is based on using a quadruple play where unbundling of the local loop and broadband wholesaling legislation across all of Europe has made it possible for ISPs to enter other broadband markets.
Written by Chris Leckness · Filed Under Smart Phones
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