Misconceived messaging service

MMS or as Telepocalypse thinks it should be called; Misconceived messaging service is again taking a whacking. There aren’t too many people that think MMS is a good thing. I’ve commented on it in the past. Tom Hume also quoted a BBC article on the subject. Shall we have a bet on how long before it gets ditched?

LLU

LLU or Local Loop Unbundling is a subject that came up in a recent meeting and how it may affect the market. Here’s ofcom’s pages on what LLU is. The site goes on to give you a background including history of LLU.

Cable giants urgerd to merge

NTL and Telewest, Britain’s two largest cable companies are being urged by shareholders to merge. This would form a $7 billion company able to attack both Sky and BT

Roaming with the Treo 600

I just thought I’d record some notes about roaming with the Treo 600. Overall it worked well, it flashes between the network providers name and the word ‘roaming’ to let you know you’re using another network.

GPRS worked well too, both via Orange CH and Swiss GSM, but we’ll see what the bills come in at. The charger worked well to, you simply removed the three prong UK piece and slide in the two prong European piece.

The MP3 player came in handy on the plane and Tiger Chess kept me distracted once I’d had enough of my book.

The only thing I struggled with was the city app. It lets you adjust the clock by telling it which city you’ve moved to. But as the meetings in my agenda where for UK time, it just moved them out by an hour. That’s fine if the meeting was in Zurich, but it meant that the time of a UK based conf call was out by an hour, not good. I guess one way to get over this would be to have a city option with the agenda so that when you create an entry you leave it as the default, say London, but when you create a meeting and you adjust it so that the base location will be Zurich for example. Then when you move the city it says, ah, this meeting is already planned for Zurich time I’ll leave the time alone…maybe?

But on the whole, the Treo has really grown on me. I struggled with its size for a while but its functionality now means that it’s the first thing I pick up after my car keys.

Last week in Zurich

I spent last week on a Management course at the Zurich Development Centre. The location was outstanding and the venue can only be described as outstanding too! You can find out more here. The bit that got me, was that the Lounges had rows of fridges stocked with wine and beer and you could just help yourself, it was a real struggle not to go mad!

Newish blog on the European telecom sector

Reflections and musings on developments within the European telecom sector, with an emphasis on disruptive influences and emerging business models – by James Enck of Daiwa Securities SMBC Europe Ltd.

Looks interesting ..worth a read.

Nortel to quit making Hardware

Nortel is looking to sell it’s hardware devision. Nortel got it’s self into all sort of financial trouble recently and now they plan to sell off their hardware making division, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea, but they must see a bigger picture.

Zurich

Just some house keeping, I’m off to Zurich next week with work, so posts may or may not be forthcoming. You know what it’s like on business trips 😉

I’m packing all the usual thinkpad and wireless stuff and my Treo 600 has it’s 256mb SD card loaded with mp3’s.

Flying BA out of Manchester, 5.30am (gulp) Monday morning and I’ve been given some hints on some good bars by one of the Client Directors of Energis.

If you know of some must see sites in the city let me know.

Nokia rivals raise stakes in Symbian

Nokia was foiled in it’s attempt to buy a larger share of the British software maker Symbian. Sony Ericsson, Siemens and Panasonic all bought shares restricting Nokia’s control to less than 50%.

That’s an interesting development, as it show’s that Sony Ericsson etc. think that Symbian is too good to let Nokia control it. Nokia uses the software in it’s series 60 phones and obviously sees the software as important to it’s future.

CPE brand doesn’t matter to buyers

Last month, the Webtorials community was asked to respond to a survey concerning their plans and preferences for customer premises equipment (CPE). [via Network World Fusion]

One of the key factors for providing a reliable service is MTBF. Mean time before failure gives you a good view of how good a product is. You want to buy a product that does what it says on the tin and you want to know it’ll go on doing it without any hassle for as long as possible.

Like most peices of technology (and software) we very rarely push it too it’s limit’s so having a huge feature set itsn’t the be all and end all. The key point is it does what is says on the box and it does it for a long time.

I once did a calculation based on how much cisco kit we had in a computer suite and the MTBF for the most common box and it worked out one could fail each six week!