Industry News Summary – Global Crossing, Skype, HTML 5 and more

How Skype plans to expand its business
Gigaom wrote an article about how Skype plans to grow its business beside offering premium features, such as group chat;
Skype success with its recent IPO is highly debated as currently the majority of Skype revenue is generated by the Skype-Out feature (86% of Skype net revenue). While the “freemium” model is rather popular and so-far proven in the case of Skype, one must wonder what will happen if major competitors will enter its field. A wide verity of business services might be just the thing Skype needs to remain a fierce competitor in the VoIP world.

France Telecom (under the Orange brand) beings offering Quad-Play deals
Under the name “Open Orange”, France Telecom will offer packages that will start at 39.9 euro per month. The offers will include mobile calls, unlimited SMS, broadband, IPTV and free calls to fixed lines in France. Triple and Quad packages are already popular at around the world, being offered by several us cable companies and in UK by Virgin Media. At IMTC 2025 we’ve talked about Triple-Play from a developer and a provider perspective:

Cable Operators to bring subscription TV to tablet devices
According to IntoMobile.com, at least seven of the ten major cable operators in the US are looking at tablets as a new platform for consuming subscription TV.  The connection between tablets and smart-phones to TV viewing seems inevitable and even too obvious  - will we see tablet offerings from the Cable operators themselves?


Lighsquared LTE swapping spectrum with Inmarsat
The new 4G whole-sale operator we mentioned in our previous post will swap channels with Inmarsat as their current satellite spectrum license isn’t LTE optimized.


Are HTML 5 and H264 a really open alternative for the Web?
Christopher Blizzard, a known open source evangelist wrote an article about H264 and his definition of “open”. Christopher warns us from the likes of GIF, a once prominent graphic format that was widely used over the web – and became less and less compelling after Unisys started to enforce their GIF-related patents.

Global Crossings – Buying or selling?
Lightreading.com wrote an article about Global Crossings latest financial projections for 2010 and future company strategy -
“CEO John Legere and Global Crossing CMO David Carey, say in an interview this week that they believe their company is operating from a position of strength, but expecting to find ways to grow both organically and by acquisition or merger.”

Either by buying or selling consolidation is an expected process in the industry – it only remains to be seen if a competitor to AT&T and Verizon will arise and if Global Crossing will play a major role in forming it.

LTE vs. 3G? An analyst viewpoint

About the writer: Itzhak Wolkowicz

Industry News Summary – LTE 4G, Telepresence, Unified Communications and more


LightSquared LTE to cover all of the USA by 2015.
Harbinger Capital Partner announced it’s plan to build a 7 billion USD, open, wholesale 4G wireless network that will cover most of the USA.
Sue Marek from Fierce Wireless wrote an article about the plan, and remained rather skeptical – Will a private a private-equity firm be able to beat the major industry players such as AT&T? remains to be seen.


A rather optimistic promotional video for LightSquared.

Ericsson is starting to ship LTE equipment in volumes
Demand for 4G LTE grow stronger in USA in particular as Verizon Wireless and MetroPCS are planning to deploy new 4G networks.

Federal help for rural areas phone network development being criticized
As wireless networks become more popular, the government funding for phone networks is being criticized, costing as much as thousand USD for a single resident.

“Chatroulette” founder wants to ditch text chat and focus on video entirely
In an interview for newteevee.com, the founder of the popular video-chat site Chatroulette wants to ditch text entirely – ” Someday we will replace the main page with the new system“.

Global Crossing is entering the telepresence market, based on Teliris Ltd. Products
Global Crossing will also offer the Teliris 6G telepresence system with scalable video coding.

UK broadband test speeds turn “shameful” for many ISPs
In UK, ISPs are “Shamed by UK Broadband Speed Tests” according to lightreading.com.
Actual broadband speeds of packages like the 8-10mbit/s DSL are actually 3.3Mbit/s. The study also shows Virgin Media Inc. supply better results than Oranke UK, BSkyB Ltd. And TalkTalk Telcom.

Polycom and McAfee Alliance to Further Secure Unified Communications and Collaboration
IMTC member, Polycom, announced an alliance with McAfee (Anti-Virus maker and computer security company) in order to develop and market Unified Communication security solutions.

Telepresence Robot from Japan
Osaka University and Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) have collaboratively developed a new portable teleoperated android robot – “Telenoid R1”. This robot mimics human appearance in a “minimal” way, thus does not look like a male or female, nor young or old. The Telenoid R1 sync its movement to the movements of the operator, remotely, via a PC with a special software recognition of eye mouth and head movements. Indeed, an unusual and futuristic approach for telepresence.

Telenoid R1 - Innovative, but rather strange.

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About the writer: Itzhak Wolkowicz