Deutsche Telekom announced on Tuesday that it will use Microsoft's IPTV Edition software to deliver TV service over broadband to millions of consumers throughout Germany.
Several carriers throughout the world have been testing Microsoft's IPTV software for more than a year, and now many of those tests are turning into commercial deployments. The Deutsche Telekom agreement is the largest contract Microsoft has signed in Europe, said Christine Heckart, general manager for marketing at Microsoft.
The agreement is also the second-largest IPTV deal in the world, behind Microsoft's deal with AT&T, which is currently testing the service with a select group of residents in San Antonio, Texas. AT&T is planning a wider deployment for later this year.
Heckart said: "There were a lot of rumours that this deal would go a different way," alluding to the fact that Siemens, which is headquartered in Germany and is an important equipment supplier to Deutsche Telekom, offers a competing IPTV solution. She added: "This deal and the others we have announced recently validate our technology and show the momentum we are getting in this market."
Including Deutsche Telekom, Microsoft has announced that 13 broadband service providers will use its IPTV Edition software. Just last week, it announced that Telecom Italia signed on as a customer. Other announced customers include BT, Swisscom, T-Online France and Verizon. Three companies - Bell Canada, BellSouth and Reliance Infocomm - are still testing the software, Microsoft said.
Deutsche Telekom's IPTV service will ride over the carrier's newly built VDSL (very-high-bit-rate DSL) broadband network. The phone company plans, by mid 2006, to offer the service in 10 German cities including Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg and Munich.
Marguerite Reardon writes for CNET News.com
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http://networks.silicon.com/mobile/...39157440,00.htm WiMax comes to Westminster
Urban warrior undercuts BT business broadband...
By Graeme Wearden
Published: Tuesday 21 March 2006
A UK company is ready to start offering businesses in central London a high-speed telecoms service over WiMax.
Urban WiMax claims it will be significantly cheaper than fixed-line symmetric broadband services. It will target companies that need a reliable broadband connection but can't afford the expense of a dedicated fibre link.
Sasha Williamson, chief executive of Urban WiMax, said on Monday: "We forecast that we'll be up to 50 per cent cheaper than the comparable fixed-lined service. For a 2Mbps SDSL connection from BT, you're looking at around £200 a month but we'll be £99 to £120, depending on the offer at the time."
Urban WiMax will begin providing its WiMax service in April. However, it doesn't plan to start charging customers until the third quarter of 2006. According to the company, around 250 businesses have volunteered to take part in this free trial. An MP is also taking part, although Urban WiMax isn't prepared to reveal their identity.
The service is based on the 802.16d fixed WiMax standard, not the more advanced and still uncertified 802.16e mobile version. Companies that sign up for the commercial offering will get free installation, equipment and three months' free subscription, which Urban WiMax says is worth some £1,300.
The company's long-term plan is to offer WiMax services to companies in another nine cities. It is starting slowly, though - its first base-station will be installed in Westminster next week, and it believes it will need just three base stations to serve businesses in the Westminster area.
Urban WiMax will offer a range of services, with a top speed of 10Mbps. It also provides a guarantee of 99.99 per cent uptime, and will compensate companies if it drops below this. However, customers will only be guaranteed a "committed data rate" of one-tenth of the top-line speed of the service they sign up for. In other words, a customer on Urban WiMax's 4Mbps service would only be guaranteed a connection rate of 400Kbps.
It's likely that connection speeds would be much higher than this base level outside of peak demand times, and Urban WiMax will also offer an option to temporarily boost connection speed when needed.
Urban WiMax was only created last year but it says that its business is based on several years of research and development. The key to its offering appears to be software that can handle non-line of sight connectivity. The company has mapped London from the air, and says it is in a position to deliver near-ubiquitous non-line-of-site WiMax coverage within its target areas.
David Moore, Urban WiMax's chief technical officer, said: "We guarantee to cover 95.8 per cent of the Westminster region."
WiMax has experienced a mixed press in recent months. A recent report from Infonetics claimed that the WiMax market will be worth $1.6bn by 2009 but the OECD took a more pessimistic view, claiming that poor spectrum allocation could be its downfall.
Urban WiMax will operate in the 5.8GHz band, which is subject to a light licensing regime.
And although it's a small company, Urban WiMax hopes to offer a better customer service than fixed-line rivals such as Bulldog. It will use a CRM system that will escalate problems to a higher layer of management if they haven't been dealt with within two hours.
Williamson said: "We want to deliver excellent customer service and provide lasting value for our customers. That shouldn't be too hard for the telecoms industry to achieve today."
Graeme Wearden writes for ZDNet UK
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http://networks.silicon.com/mobile/...39157005,00.htm Mobile TV turns consumers off
75 per cent have no interest in it, survey finds
By Marguerite Reardon
Published: Monday 06 March 2006
According to a survey conducted by RBC Capital Markets, about 75 per cent of roughly 1,000 people polled said they have no interest in watching TV on their mobile phones. And about 70 per cent said they didn't see themselves using their mobile phones for musical entertainment.
The news could come as a blow to mobile operators, which have already spent billions of dollars upgrading their networks to accommodate new data services such as video and music downloads.
Three of the largest cellular operators in the US, Cingular Wireless, Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless, have already launched video services. Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless have also introduced music download services. And Cingular supports Apple's iTunes service on some of its phones.
Even handset maker Nokia, which is investing in DVB-H, is optimistic that people will spend money on watching TV on their phones.
But judging from the results of this survey and others like it, consumers aren't as excited about the new services as the carriers may have hoped. Linda Barrabee, a senior analyst at The Yankee Group, said there was a similar response to a survey her research company conducted last July.
She said: "I think it's really hard for most people to imagine what the experience of mobile TV would even be. Right now, most people are using phones that aren't even 3G compatible. I think they'll have to see how it can really work and fit into their lives before they can really judge whether they want it."
Barrabee and some other analysts suspect that early adopters of new mobile services are likely to be people 24 years of age and younger. This market is roughly 20 per cent of the 206 million mobile phone users in the US but young people tend to be the heaviest users of text messaging and ringtone downloads, according to The Yankee Group's research.
Only about 15 per cent of the respondents in the RBC survey were between the ages of 21 and 29. No one younger than 21 years of age participated in the survey.
Marguerite Reardon writes for CNET News.com
