I’ve just finished work for the holidays now..horah!
It’s been an OK week, two trips to London, one to discuss and interesting network around the UK, the other to meet with a supplier.
The calendar for the new year is already filling up, with trips to Milan, Italy in mid Jan and Nice, South of France at the end of Jan.
So it’ll be light posting over the holidays and I’ll pick up again in early January.
Merry Christmas!
OFCOM has released the charges that BT must offer [via Light Reading]
My quest to find the best wireless roaming agreement has now led me to Ipass. It’s just signed an agreement with BT Openzone to allow Ipass subscribers access to BT’s 1500 hotspots. To the players I’m aware of right now are..
Boingo – Worldwide.
BT – UK
Ipass – Worldwide.
T-Mobile – US & UK. (Worldwide?)
So I’m going to keep searching for a provider that gives the cheapest subscription rate and the largest geographic coverage, so that I only really need one subscription.
The plane was delayed an hour and a half leaving Madrid. The captain announced "we now have a plane that works", that’s always worrying. Madrid was interesting went out for Tapas which was good, the food always taste better than the Spanish food that you get in the UK. The IBM location was interesting, it had piped music for Christmas and a place to smoke in the main corridor!
The Spanish Telecoms Market is interesting, customers still don’t believe IBM is in networking, which it is in a big way. So I’ll be speaking to our VP for Networking and letting him know my thoughts on the region. Telefonica has everything stitched up and acts like a monopoly…ie everything takes ages to sort out.
It also appears as if AT&T are going to do a BT, sell it’s mobile business and start again!
It’s chasing the business market, which is slightly different to BT’s strategy but still interesting.
I wonder who will be the network provider for them?
This is getting interesting now..as it looks like Verizon are going to try a hostile takeover of Sprint. [via Gigaom]
logged on via BTOpenzone at the airport. Boingo failed to spot a partner network that it would allow me to log on with :-(.
It took a whole to figure out as you have to log out and then log back in again when you update the credit on your account..duh!
I’m off to Madrid tomorrow afternoon, flying BA from Manchester. So I’m just checking out the weather over there right now. It looks like it’s about the same sort of temperatures we’re seeing here in the UK right now, between 5 and 10 degrees C.
As Om says these things happen fast! Sprint is trying hard to break into the European data market and I’m seeing plenty of evidence of that. It’ll be interesting to see what impact the merger will have on thier plans to win business in EMEA. Will they create a new strategy based on being a bigger player in thier home market? I don’t know, only time will tell. [via Reuters]
Link: VoIP Watch: HTC Really Sticks Their Chin Out.
Andy mentions how HTC are looking to pee off their customers, the carriers (Vodafone et al) by putting SKYPE onto their new products running the MS OS.
But Microsoft have to be careful too, as they have a partnership with a carrier too (can’t recall which one right now). Which is why MS are reluctant at this point to build upon the success of MSN by including a VOIP client.
UPDATE: Verizon for MSN. [via Gigaom]
UPDATE 2: Corrected the name of the source sorry Andy!
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