AllThingsD » France Telecom

Orange Exec: Android, Windows Phone and iPhones Are Gas Guzzlers and Developing World Needs a Prius

Ina Fried — Fri, 25 May 2012 19:25:39 +0000

For most of the past few years, Yves Maitre has lead the effort to ensure its Orange cellphone customers in places like Britain and France have the right selection of phones.

And when it comes to the company’s major markets in Western Europe, Maitre said things are in pretty good shape. Windows Phone, Android and iOS have paved the way for a solid set of options for both high-end devices and even midrange ones, often sold prepaid and, in some cases, under the Orange brand name.

But when it comes to serving the next 6 billion potential smartphone customers, Maitre said that none of the major operating systems is really lightweight enough from either a cost perspective or from the amount of bandwidth consumed.

In an interview Thursday, Maitre likened it to when he was growing up in France and his family had a two-cylinder Citroen. He idolized the huge eight-cylinder cars coming out of Detroit in the 1970s. And while those cars did enjoy a moment in the sun, the world realized that with more cars out there, gas wasn’t unlimited.

In the end, the car makers like Toyota that created fuel-efficient vehicles fared better.

While conventional wisdom is that low-cost Android devices will bring smartphones to the developing world, Maitre says even Google’s OS is too resource intensive. It may have started out as a four-cylinder or six-cylinder car, he says, but with the latest Ice Cream Sandwich release it is every bit the gas guzzler that iOS and Windows Phone are.

Maitre said that Orange is committed to building 3G networks in all of its markets, but that it needs more energy efficient vehicles, if you will.

“I cannot run an eight-cylinder car because it is too expensive,” said Maitre, a senior vice president at France Telecom’s Orange unit. The average selling price of phones in Orange’s developing markets is $54. And while customers might be willing to spend an extra $30 to get a smartphone, they can’t spend another $100.

“If we are not in a position to give them a smartphone at $80, we will miss the six billion,” Maitre said, adding that Orange is committed to having smartphones that hit that price. “If I cannot have Microsoft on it, if I cannot have Android, if I cannot have iOS, then I will look somewhere else, mostly likely in China,” Maitre said.

Already the company is looking at a variety of options including Mozilla’s Boot-to-Gecko project and mobile Linux options like Tizen, in addition to low-cost Android variants coming out of China.

Phones also must become more bandwidth-efficient, Maitre said, because, like gas for cars, bandwidth is a limited commodity.

Today, he said, there are about a billion people crowding the airwaves, most of whom use less than one gigabyte of data per month.

“Tomorrow, seven billion people will use bandwidth and all use [in the range of] five or six gigabits,” he said. “The bandwidth will start to become a very valuable resource.”

That Intel Phone Coming This Week: It's for India's Lava

Ina Fried — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:17:22 +0000

Intel said on Tuesday’s earnings call that the first smartphone running its chips will launch this week, but it didn’t identify the customer by name.

However, some deductive reasoning suggests that it will be Lava, a little-known Indian company that Intel announced in February as one of its early customers.

Lenovo and France Telecom’s Orange also plan devices this quarter, but both of those companies have announced dates for later in the quarter. Lenovo’s first Intel phone is coming in May, while Orange’s is expected in June.

Intel is hoping to make a dent in a market that until now has been dominated by the likes of Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia.

“We have ambitions to not be a minor player here,” CEO Paul Otellini said back in February.

Part of Intel’s strategy has been to create a near-complete reference design that aspiring players — like Lava — can use to quickly get into the smartphone game.

Intel also announced a longer-term partnership with Motorola Mobility, though it has yet to convince most big-name phone makers to adopt its chips.

EC Confirms Inquiry Into Possible Telecom Collusion

John Paczkowski — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:57:09 +0000

The European Commission is questioning five of Europe’s largest telecommunications companies over concerns that a series of meetings held among them may have constituted collusion.

Targeted in the query are the so-called E5 — Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, and Vodafone — whose CEOs met occasionally, beginning in 2010, ostensibly to discuss major industry issues.

Topics of discussion reportedly ran the gamut of innocent topics — from mobile payment platforms to the creation of a common app platform. But evidently the EC is concerned that more nefarious things may have been discussed, and if that was the case, whether the meetings constituted collusion.

The European Commission confirmed the inquiry, but stressed that at this stage no formal investigation has been launched.

“The requests for information relate to the manner in which standardization for future services in the mobile-communications area is taking place,” a spokesman for EC Competition Chief Joaquin Almunia explained. “These fact-finding steps do not mean that we have competition concerns at this stage, nor do they prejudge the follow-up.”

So this may not necessarily lead to an official investigation. That said, such requests do often signal that a more detailed probe is in the offing.

Intel Announces More Phone Customers, Plans for Speedier Chips

Ina Fried — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:23:01 +0000

Intel, which is looking to crack the phone market, announced a few new partners on Monday, as well as plans to speed up its chips.

France Telecom’s Orange unit and Indian cellphone maker Lava International both plan to sell devices based on the reference phone design Intel created. China’s ZTE will also use Intel chips as part of a multiyear partnership, with its first Intel-based device slated to ship in the second half of this year.

“This is the first step,” ZTE Executive VP He Shiyou said at an Intel press event in Barcelona.

The Orange phone will go on sale first in France and the U.K. this summer.

At January’s Consumer Electronics Show, Intel announced that Motorola and Lenovo would use its processors. Intel had promised it would have more to say in Barcelona.

The announcements with Orange and Lava, in particular, show that Intel is having some success with its strategy of not only offering chips, but also a ready-to-go phone design that customers can use to get quickly into the Android smartphone business.

The company also offered up a look at where it is headed on the chip side.

“It wouldn’t be an Intel presentation if we didn’t show a road map,” Intel CEO Paul Otellini quipped at the briefing with reporters.

Intel said its Z2460, formerly code-named “Medfield,” will run at up to 2GHz. Meanwhile, the company announced a successor chip, which will sample in the second half of the year and ship in products next year. That chip, the Z2580, is designed to double Medfield’s performance. The company also announced plans for a lower-end chip aimed at “value” smartphones that can sell for less than $150 unsubsidized.

Otellini promised that his company will bring its legacy of performance, but won’t sacrifice on battery life, promising 14 days of standby time.

“We take battery life seriously,” he said.

Intel has also inked a deal with Visa to ensure that its phones are ready for mobile commerce, and Visa has certified Intel’s reference design as working with its payWave effort.

Intel faces steep competition in the mobile chip business from current leaders Nvidia, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, in addition to others looking to crack the market, such as Broadcom. The company has been trying to get into the business for some time, but last year began showing a slim Android design it said would, at long last, get it into the game.

Asked what might prompt more bigger-name cellphone makers to adopt Intel chips, Otellini said that the initial products from some of these smaller partners should “light a fire” under the likes of Samsung.

“We have ambitions to not be a minor player here,” he said.

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Orange to Bring Free Wikipedia Access to Cell Users in Africa and Middle East

Ina Fried — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:44:01 +0000

Mobile carrier Orange said on Tuesday that it plans to offer mobile customers in Africa and the Middle East free, unlimited access to Wikipedia.

Orange said it plans to roll out the free service over the course of 2012 to customers in 20 countries, with access in the first countries launching early this year. The service will be available on any phone with an Orange SIM card and the ability to view the mobile Web, with no data plan required.

“In countries where access to information is not always readily available, we are making it simple and easy for our customers to use the world’s most comprehensive online encyclopedia,” Orange Executive VP Marc Rennard said in a statement. “It is the first partnership of this kind in the world where we are enabling customers to access Wikipedia without incurring any data charges.”

Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said the partnership with Orange will give Wikipedia access to millions who have not had it.

“Wikipedia is an important service, a public good, and so we want people to be able to access it for free, regardless of what device they’re using,” Gardner said.

AT&T's De La Vega: Shared Data Plans Still in the Works

Ina Fried — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:27:48 +0000

AT&T still hopes soon to be able to allow customers to share a pool of megabytes or gigabytes across multiple devices. However, getting all the details ironed out is taking longer than the carrier would have hoped.

“We’re still working on that,” AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega said in an interview on Monday, just after wrapping up his keynote speech at AT&T’s developer conference in Las Vegas. “It just takes a little more time than we all would want it to take. But sometimes it’s better to make sure you take your time and get it right.”

Verizon has said it expects to see such plans arrive this year and de la Vega himself said at last year’s D9 conference that AT&T was also looking to let customers pool their data into a single plan.

“We’re working on one,” he said at the time. “It will be soon. I can’t comment on a quarter (when it will launch) but it will be soon.”

France Telecom already offers such plans in some of its European markets.

The need for such plans was further highlighted on Monday by one of AT&T’s announcements. The company plans to sell a bundle with Pantech’s LTE phone and tablet for just $249. It is a good deal, of course, but the annoying catch is that it requires signing up for two separate data plans.

De la Vega talked about a number of other topics during our chat, including why he thinks Samsung’s 5-inch Galaxy Note phone/tablet hybrid stands a chance and why Motorola and Research In Motion were entirely absent from Monday’s talk.

I’ll have more from our interview in a bit.

Those Family Data Plans Are Finally Coming to the U.S. Next Year

Ina Fried — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 19:26:13 +0000

The days of needing a data plan for each wireless device one owns may be numbered.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said on Wednesday that he expects his wireless unit to be offering some form of shared data plans by sometime next year. Such plans would allow multiple devices to share a single pool of megabytes or gigabytes.

“I think in 2012 we’ll see it,” McAdam said. “We’ve been working on this for a couple of years, frankly.”

McAdam noted that the company expects some customers to be viewing content on four or even five devices.

“Customers don’t want — and neither do we, by the way — want an individual account for each one of those devices,” McAdam said. “It drives them crazy and it would raise our costs a lot. Getting to one bill and having account-level pricing is the right way to go.”

AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega said at our D9 conference in June that his company is also working on such a plan and expects it to be available before too long.

“We’re working on one,” he said at the time. “It will be soon. I can’t comment on a quarter (when it will launch) but it will be soon.”

Such plans have been widely anticipated and have popped up in a few places already. France Telecom, for example, is offering a couple of different plans in certain European markets.

McAdam sees a continued shift away from feature phones and into smartphones.

“I don’t see any reason why 70 percent (penetration) isn’t in our future,” McAdam said.

McAdam also defended the company’s practice of introducing high-end phones at prices higher than the $199 entry-level iPhone 4S price.

“They are selling very well,” he said of those $299 Android phones. “To me, the issue is ‘are we going to have the applications that justify it?’ And if we do, then I think we will be fine.”

One thing that is going to decline, McAdam acknowledged, is the revenue the company gets from things like text messaging, amid the rise of third-party voice- and data-messaging applications.

“I do expect SMS to be under attack,” McAdam said, noting that has already started to happen in some European countries.

“We haven’t seen as much of it on our side, frankly, but I think it is going to come,” McAdam said. “It’s kind of like long distance and the other stuff you saw fade away.”

The key, he said, is always having the next great thing, whether that is video or adding wireless to new kinds of devices.

On the mobile payments front, McAdam said things are reaching the prototyping stage with the Isis consortium that Verizon is a part of, with trials slated for next year.

“That should be significant deployment by the end of next year,” he said. “I think it becomes a real revenue stream for us in 2013.”

Orange Friends Facebook in Effort to Boost Smartphones, Feature Phones

Ina Fried — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:26 +0000

France Telecom’s Orange unit plans to start selling a range of home-grown phones with dedicated Facebook buttons and tight integration with the popular social network.

The three new devices are part of an effort that the French carrier hopes will increase its appeal to both younger phone buyers and those in emerging markets in Europe and Africa.

The phones will start showing up in a handful of markets next month, arriving in most countries early next year. One of the phones is a low-end Android phone, while the other two are even less expensive feature phones. All three are made by TCL Communication Technology, the Chinese company that acquired the Alcatel device business and brand name.

In an interview, Orange’s Vice President of Devices Patrick Remy said that despite the growth of smartphones, nearly half of customers are still leaving its stores with something other than a smartphone.

“We strongly believe we can do a better job, and we need to do a better job,” Remy said. The new Facebook-centric phones are one of several strategies that Orange is trying, an effort that also includes placing support staff in its stores to help new smartphone users, and efforts to help cull the masses of apps in the Android Market for those who may be intimidated by the selection.

Each of the phones is tightly integrated with Facebook’s existing software for Android and for feature phones. Earlier this year, Facebook acquired Snaptu, an Israeli company that focused on bringing the social network to feature phones.

The new Orange phones are separate from the work Facebook is doing on a higher-end HTML5-based platform, announced earlier this year.

Orange isn’t the first to tap the popularity of Facebook in an effort to boost smartphone sales. For much of this year, HTC has sold two phones — the Salsa and ChaCha (known as the Status in the U.S.), both with dedicated Facebook buttons. INQ Mobile also sells a Facebook-centric phone, though it has yet to be made available in the U.S.

Orange already sells the ChaCha, as well.

“The ChaCha is a great device with a good level of integration,” Remy said. But, he added, with the lower price of the Vancouver smartphone, Orange is “opening up some additional and new opportunities.”

With the Android device, Orange is looking to offer both a low-priced device and low service pricing. In Romania, for example, Orange plans to charge just 9 euros a month for a plan that includes unlimited use of the Facebook app, along with a bundle of voice minutes, 200 text messages and 60MB of data.

Orange plans to sell the pricier of the two feature phones for less than 60 Euros unsubsidized, and the lower-cost one for less than 40 euros.

In all three cases, Remy said, the goal is “making sure that Facebook was only one click a way whatever you are doing with your phone.”

T-Mobile's Bobsled Now Running on iPhone, Android and the Web

Ina Fried — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 04:01:14 +0000

Aiming to find some new territory to conquer, T-Mobile USA said on Monday that it has expanded its Bobsled IP calling service to run on Android and iOS devices.

T-Mobile notes that 20 percent of calling is currently done using IP telephony; that figure is expected to reach 40 percent over the next three years.

“We want to embrace the opportunity to get our fair share of that market,” T-Mobile Senior VP Brad Duea told AllThingsD. It doesn’t hurt that T-Mobile has the smallest share among major U.S. cellular carriers, or that it doesn’t have its own landline phone business, as do Sprint, AT&T and Verizon. “We don’t have a legacy landline business to protect,” Duea said.

T-Mobile launched the Bobsled service earlier this year, initially focused on calling between Facebook friends. The company had a little trouble getting off the ground, as Facebook took issue with the way T-Mobile was marketing it. It was eventually relaunched in May.

With the latest expansion, the service now allows calling via mobile devices as well as through Mac and PC Web browsers. Calls are free not only to other PCs but also from any device to any phone number in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico, Duea said. T-Mobile also has a group and text messaging component to Bobsled, which is currently available on three T-Mobile Android devices, and is coming soon to any Android or iOS device.

“With IP (telephony), we can extend our reach beyond our market, literally into other countries,” Duea said. T-Mobile isn’t the only carrier that sees such calling services — dubbed “over-the-top” services — as a way to expand their markets to new geographies. France Telecom’s Orange, for example, has an app called ON Voicefeed that aims to get into VoIP calling by providing a custom voicemail service.

T-Mobile is particularly interested in offering calling to young iPod touch owners, who might then be interested in T-mobile service when they get their first phone. (Of course, T-Mobile also hopes to be acquired by AT&T before that happens.) The company plans to eventually issue Bobsled customers their own phone numbers, so they can receive calls from any phone.

U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up

Ina Fried — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 20:30:36 +0000

While there is much speculation on the effect that Google’s deal to buy Motorola Mobility would have on hardware makers, another interesting question is how it will affect its always delicate relationships with cellular carriers.

The major U.S. carriers have been silent Monday in the wake of the deal, but one major carrier — France Telecom’s Orange — tells AllThingsD that it supports the deal, with Senior Vice President Yves Maitre calling it “great news” for the industry.

“I believe it is always good to have very strong players and very integrated ones,” Maitre said in an interview. “We welcome strong competitors to Apple, and Motorola and Google will be this type of very strong competitor.”

Verizon, AT&T and Sprint all declined to comment. But rest assured, their silence does not equal a lack of interest. Though they once welcomed Android as an important counterbalance to Apple’s power, many wireless carriers have grown concerned that Google has also been exerting increasing control over Android. All have a huge interest in what happens to Android, which now makes up a significant chunk of their smartphone sales.

Google also once tried to make an end run around carriers by selling the Nexus One directly, though in recent years it has worked to restore its relationship with wireless firms.

For his part, Maitre sees Google’s Motorola deal as a continuation of a trend toward a tighter tie between phones and the operating systems that power them.

“I think the industry is going more and more vertical,” he said. “You have Apple, which has been doing vertical integration. Then we have Microsoft with the same through its partnership with Nokia.”

Maitre said competition is important, but said he is not concerned that the Motorola deal will leave Android and iPhone without decent rivals.

“The market will not let Apple and Google be alone,” he said, adding that the deal may force some of the other players in the industry to think about new arrangements, including potentially more acquisitions. “It’s difficult to say, but we may see some other partnership or takeover in the next six to nine months.”

Microsoft, meanwhile, is hoping the move will give it a needed boost in the market.

“Investing in a broad and truly open mobile ecosystem is important for the industry and consumers alike, and Windows Phone is now the only platform that does so with equal opportunity for all partners,” Windows Phone President Andy Lees said in a statement to AllThingsD.

France Télécom to Bid Adieu to Minitel

Max Colchester — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:30:15 +0000

Next year, Minitel—France’s precursor to the Internet—will finally meet its maker.

For 30 years the toaster-sized screen weathered the Internet revolution. Despite a text-only service, basic graphics and snail-like speed, the terminal generated €30 million ($43.1 million) in revenue in 2010, with around 85 percent redistributed to service providers such as banks and weather forecasters, according to France Télécom SA, which operates the service.

Despite the service still being profitable, the telecommunications operator has decided to swing the axe. “The Minitel will die on June 30, 2012,” said a France Télécom spokeswoman on Friday, explaining that the architecture the Minitel runs on has become obsolete.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

As Unlimited Data Plans Go Away, Consumers Struggle to Make Sense of Their Data Use

Ina Fried — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:00:04 +0000

For smartphone customers, the unlimited data plan appears to be on its last legs.

AT&T stopped offering such plans to new customers last year, while T-Mobile has put restrictions on its unlimited plans and Verizon is set to end its unlimited data plans soon. Sprint remains the holdout among the majors, continuing to offer largely unlimited data options for most of its smartphone lineup.

For many people, the shift means at least a headache, if not ultimately higher bills.

Unlike minutes on the voice side, which are fairly easy to get your head around, it’s not so easy to understand how much data you’re using. On the data side, users are most often asked to sign up for a plan that covers a certain amount of megabytes or gigabytes per month, but those numbers don’t mean much to the average consumer.

Phone carriers have come up with a variety of tools that allow users to estimate how much data they might use based on their activities. Verizon Wireless, for example, has a calculator on its Web site, as do AT&T and T-Mobile. Some carriers offer other types of estimates of how much use one can get for a particular tier of data.

Most carriers allow customers to track their usage in real time or receive text message alerts when they hit a certain threshold, or both.

But even with such mechanisms, data usage can be uneven and unpredictable. It’s further complicated by the fact that some applications use way more data than others. Watching high-definition video over the cellular network is one of the biggest data hogs, but downloading apps, streaming audio and sending big files can also gobble up data quickly.

Data usage rates also depend on how the particular program is written. So two programs doing seemingly similar tasks might consume widely different amounts of data.

Carriers also vary how they handle things once users hit their usage threshold. Most carriers charge an overage fee for each additional gigabyte or other amount of data users consume beyond their set limit. T-Mobile, on the other hand, doesn’t charge overages; instead it significantly ratchets down the speed of data transfers once users hit their paid-for limit. T-Mobile customers also have the option of upgrading to a higher rate plan to keep surfing at full speed.

All of that is a big reason why consumers like unlimited plans, whether or not they use a ton of data. Recent studies show that even those with tiered plans tend to use only a fraction of what they are paying for. To some extent that may have to do with the fact that consumers generally don’t know how much data they are using and are probably trying to err on the side of caution.

“Consumers are generally risk averse and generally overbuy to get a predictable monthly bill, even though a variable priced option would save them money over the course of three or twelve months,” said analyst Roger Entner.

Indeed, while the top couple percent of customers use more than a gigabyte of data per month, the average consumer uses far, far less, according to various studies. A recent study by Validas showed that while average use was around 300 to 400 megabytes per month, that number was raised significantly by the heaviest users. Some 60 percent of consumers used less than 200MB per month (see chart), while the median usage level — as opposed to the average — was slightly less than 100MB per month.

“This discrepancy between average data use versus most people’s data consumption points to a data hog minority whose extremely heavy usage rockets up the overall average and inflates the apparent necessity of bigger data plans,” Validas said in a blog post earlier this month.

The move away from unlimited data packages, though annoying to consumers, was inevitable, most carriers insist, given recent explosions in data traffic and the rise of faster networks and more capable devices, as well as the discrepancy between typical users and those consuming the most data.

And things continue to shift toward even heavier usage. While T-Mobile’s average user may only use a little over 100MB a month, the typical smartphone on the company’s faster 4G network is used to consume more than 1GB a month. Entner notes that while only a couple percent of customers use multiple gigabytes per month today, next year probably some 6 or 7 percent of consumers will be using more than 2GB of data.

There are alternatives to the current usage-based pricing beyond just an unlimited spigot. Users could be charged based on how fast a connection they use, as opposed to how much data they consume. More complicated to set up but potentially more appealing to consumers would be some sort of service-based pricing, offering unlimited use of certain services.

While some say moving away from unlimited pricing is just a way for carriers to make more money, others see an opportunity for customers to benefit as well. If done right, such service-oriented pricing could open some doors, Qualcomm Internet Services President Rob Chandhok said.

“After voice and SMS, what is the next most-used service?” Chandhok said. “Probably Facebook or Twitter. If you gave an 18-year-old (paying their own bills) a choice between voice plus $30 for ‘unlimited’ (data) or voice plus $5 for Facebook and Twitter, you might be surprised.”

The Data Plan of the Future is Available Now, at Least in Europe

Ina Fried — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 12:00:12 +0000

While carriers in the United States have talked about having one data plan that can be shared among a number of digital devices, one international telecom company is already putting the plan into action.

For a couple of months now, France Telecom’s Orange unit has been allowing iPad owners in Austria to share one allotment of data with a phone, while other shared data plans were recently launched in France, the United Kingdom and Spain.

Although the plans vary somewhat by country, the basic premise is the same. Users pay an extra couple of dollars a month for each additional device that shares data — similar to the way families and businesses here have long been able to share minutes between multiple phones.

“We believe that’s really a way for the future,” said Olaf Swantee, senior executive vice president for France Telecom’s Orange unit.

And while France Telecom appears to be the first major carrier to offer such plans, others are likely to follow suit. At last month’s D9 conference, AT&T executive Ralph de la Vega confirmed that some sort of shared plan is in the works.

“We’re working on one,” de la Vega said in the onstage interview. “It will be soon. I can’t comment on a quarter (when it will launch) but it will be soon.”

An AT&T representative declined to comment further. Verizon CFO Fran Shammo also said recently that company is exploring such an offer.

The move to offer such data plans could become increasingly important as carriers look to shift away from unlimited data plans, in favor of those where customers pay for a certain amount of megabytes or gigabytes. Although the concept is inherently a bit tricky for users to get their heads around, it could ultimately become more palatable if all those bytes could be shared among different devices.

Currently, the need to sign up for an entirely new data plan is acting as a disincentive for many customers to buy additional devices with built-in cellular connections. Instead, users have gravitated toward Wi-Fi equipped devices, in some cases pairing those with a mobile hotspot. Such hotspots connect to the cellular data network and then distribute that connection over Wi-Fi to any number of nearby devices. Using a hotspot, though, requires all devices being used to be nearby one another — and the hotspot is yet another device to carry around and charge.

As for the France Telecom plan, early results are encouraging. In Austria, the country where France Telecom has been offering the plans the longest, the company said that 38 percent of all iPads on its network are now using the shared data plans.

Shared data plans are just one of the moves Orange is making as digital devices and smartphones go mainstream.

Swantee said it is part of an effort to offer a broader array of services to its customers.

“We are talking to customers and not SIM cards,” he said. Over time, Swantee said, the efforts could stretch beyond rate plans and also extend to services that could be used on multiple mobile devices, as well as over landline connections.

“We really believe in the long run you will have people that want to have an experience that works across different devices,” Swantee said.

As Smartphones Go Mainstream, the Industry Works to Make Them Mom-and-Pop Friendly

Ina Fried — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 22:10:29 +0000

Once the purview of corporate road warriors and hard-core geeks, the smartphone is now the device of choice for the majority of phone buyers who are due for an upgrade. As a result, carriers around the world are shifting their approach in how they develop, market and sell the devices.

The early period of the smartphone is probably typified by Verizon’s successful Droid campaign, which focused heavily on the technical muscle of the device. Although that campaign continues, today’s carriers are at least as concerned with how to make smartphones appear easy and approachable to those moving up from feature phones.

At France Telecom, which sells phones in dozens of countries worldwide, 45 percent of all devices sold last year were smartphones, prompting the company to create a bunch of new services aimed at making the transition easier. A quarter of its customers sign up for at least one of the Orange Care services, which range from backing up contacts to call-in support.

The company is also setting up a “get started with smartphone” service that it expects to have up and running in 13 countries by the end of this month. In 300 of its stores, Orange plans to set up “Care Corners” dedicated to offering paid-for specialist support, especially help getting started.

“We want to democratize the smartphone,” said Olaf Swantee, senior executive vice president for France Telecom’s Orange unit.

Here in the U.S., carriers and device makers are also tweaking their pitch. Sprint, for example, has focused on a set of Sprint ID packs that allow Android newbies to get up and running with a collection of apps and widgets that match their interests. The concept was first introduced at the CTIA show in 2010 with partners such as Disney, MTV and ESPN. Since then, the carrier has continued to roll out new themed collections, including a NASCAR pack, a “green” pack to go along with its first eco-centric Android device and a Relay ID pack aimed at the hearing-impaired community.

“Smartphones are already mainstream,” an AT&T representative said, noting that the company sold more than 5.5 million smartphones last quarter, with smartphones accounting for nearly two-thirds of new sales to contract customers.

At the same time, even the father of Android admits that the operating system is still geared mainly to techies.

“I would probably characterize Android as it is today as an early adopters’ platform,” Google’s Andy Rubin said at last December’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference. “It’s for the tech enthusiast and people who are married to the tech enthusiast.”

Both Google and those that make Android devices, of course, are trying to change that. Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and other Android phone makers all offer their own custom user interfaces designed to make Android simpler to use.

Microsoft, for its part, has made a big part of its Windows Phone 7 pitch the idea that it is offering a smartphone for the masses. Its early ads focused on it being a phone designed to fit into, rather than take over, one’s life.

And while the exact smartphone share numbers vary somewhat in different countries, the rise in adoption and surge in mobile data use is a global phenomenon, Swantee said.

“We have countries where the GDP is $2,500 (per person),” Swantee said. “And we have countries like Switzerland where the GDP per head is in excess of $45,000. The countries all move to these products.”

The price of the devices does tend to vary by country. While the iPhone and high-end Android devices dominate in Western Europe and North America, emerging markets have seen strong sales of lower-end devices, including offerings from Nokia and Research In Motion. Increasingly, though, Android is also playing in these countries, with devices that sell for well below $100 unsubsidized expected to be available this year. In Africa, France Telecom is selling an Alcatel-branded device that offers limited data access and costs just $25.

“Mobile Internet is quickly becoming intrinsic in many people’s life,” said France Telecom Executive Vice President Anne Bouverot. “That drives quite a similar demand (worldwide).”

Exclusive: France Telecom CEO on Apple, Android and How You Can Kiss Your Unlimited Plan Goodbye

Ina Fried — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:00:46 +0000

Stephane Richard knows a thing or two about the iPhone.

In addition to carrying one of Apple’s iconic smartphones, Richard is also the CEO of France Telecom, whose networks carry traffic from more iPhones than any other carrier except AT&T. France Telecom, with its Orange brands, sells the iPhone in 15 countries.

“They just created smartphones with the iPhone,” Richard said during an hourlong chat over breakfast in Downtown San Francisco last week. “Everybody should be grateful to them to have put such a product in our market.”

But, while he praises Apple, Richard is wary of the power that the company holds by having total say in which apps do and don’t get on its network.

Unlike with Android, where the carrier can largely configure phones the way it would like to, on Apple, the company has to settle for putting various services in the App Store. And, ultimately, it is Apple that controls what makes it into the App Store.

“Everybody is talking about net neutrality,” Richard said, but “net neutrality is not only dealing with pipes.”

“It also deals with management of application shops,” he said. “If you have people like Apple managing their application store and saying ‘This is OK and I don’t want to see this app in my shop,’ it’s a problem.”

In the interview, Richard offered a blunt take on a number of other key industry players and topics ranging from the need for variable pricing to the fates of Nokia and RIM.

Richard has been outspoken before, including calls last year for those flooding networks with data–companies like Apple and Google–to help pay some of the costs of making necessary network investments.

Though RIM and Nokia both face challenges, Richard said in our interview that he is glad that there are still a number of competing smartphone operating systems duking it out.

“For us we are quite happy with the existing landscape in terms of operating systems,” he said. “A world with 90 percent of Android-based devices would not be attractive for us, but we are far from that.”

Oh, and as for that report that France Telecom and Apple are working together on a standard for smaller SIM cards. That’s true, Richard said, and it’s a compromise designed to appease Apple’s desire for something smaller without resorting to a software-only virtual SIM card that Apple had initially been advocating.

Here were some of his more interesting comments from our conversation:

On the massive increase in mobile data use and the dangers that creates:

The real risk of everything is collapse. Nobody utters this loudly enough, but the real issue for the world is a collapse of the network or some local collapses.

We are the people with pipes. We are supposed to invest heavily in pipes in order to bring the capacity which is necessary to sustain the explosion of consumption and usage and data traffic in our networks. At the same time, the people that create this traffic…are not really incentivized to manage properly, globally, the traffic.

There is an unbalance in the overall system, which in our view is a major problem.

It is totally impossible to absorb such an explosion in traffic without first, clearly investing massively in spectrum and equipment, and second, without introducing some new pricing approaches.

On Microsoft-Nokia:

There are a lot of questions around Microsoft and Nokia–-capacity really to reverse the quite negative trend that they have in the market. It seems difficult, but we will see. We are still definitely in favor of seeing at least three or four big families of operating systems in the market. But it is true it is going to be difficult for them.

On RIM:

It’s not really declining. It’s still popular in Europe. They have customers and users that are quite faithful to them. It works more or less like a community of people. It’s often families that are big BlackBerry users, and of course companies.

They have had some quality problems in the recent period which is a concern, especially with the next generations of devices.

In my view as a customer, or as a partner of them, I think they really should fix very quickly their quality problems.

On Google and Android:

Android is, I think quite a solid and reliable operating system and doesn’t suffer with bugs. We have regularly problems with RIM. We have no problem with Apple and with Android. Let’s be frank and clear.

To me, the risk theoretically is more for Google to use releases–Android releases–as a weapon in their relationship with device manufacturers and indirectly with telcos than anything else. So far they have not really tried to do it.

On Apple and App Store openness:

Everybody is talking about Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is not only dealing with pipes. It also deals with management of application shops. If you have people like Apple managing their application store and saying “This is OK and I don’t want to see this app in my shop,” it’s a problem.

So far, we have been able to come to solutions with Apple people, even though they are a little tough….We are able to find solutions. We are not at war with the Apple guys. But it is true that it can be tough.

Of course Ideally we would like to have those services embedded natively in the handset which is what we do with Android-based devices like with Samsung or HTC or people like that. It is not possible with Apple. We still are in a position to bring those apps to our customers through the app stores, provided clearly we have access to the App Store.

The problem is the day when Apple says “I don’t want this one.”

Definitely if we face these kind of problems we will go to court. Because competition is not only something that should be applied to telcos and to carriers. For us it should be a principle for the whole Internet environment.

On working with Apple on smaller SIM cards:

As you probably know, Apple has been working for years on reducing the size of SIM cards because they need space in the phone. They even thought about a device without any SIM card, that is what is known as the e-SIM project.

All of us told them it was a bad idea because the SIM card is a critical piece of the security and authentication process. It would be very difficult for a telco or carrier to manage the customer relationship. I think that they understood this point. We had a very constructive exchange and dialogue with them.

We are going to work with them in order to standardize a new format of SIM which takes into accout our needs with security and authentication and also is compatible with their wishes in terms of size.

I understood that the next iPhone would be smaller and thinner and they are definitely seeking some space.

This is good evidence we can work properly with Apple people, Apple teams. In that particular case, we have been able to find, I think, a good answer which is good for everyone.

On Tablets:
To be honest, I am still a little skeptical of the size of the world market in tablets. First, I do think the iPad is very well ahead of the competition in terms of tablets. To me as a user and as a partner, there is the iPad and there is the rest.

I think there will be a world market for the iPad. What will be, really, the size of this market, is difficult to say, because in fact it is a new market.

In fact I think that in the future people will have several devices, several screens. Nobody knows what is the mix or the range of devices that we will have.

MasterCard Appoints New Head of Mobile Payments

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:01:55 +0000

MasterCard Worldwide has appointed Mung-Ki Woo to the position of Group Executive of Mobile. Woo will be responsible for commercializing and developing mobile payments for MasterCard around the world. Most recently, Woo was VP of Electronic Payments & Transactions at France Telecom, where he led the “Orange Money” mobile payment program, which was commercially available in several African countries, and deployed Orange’s mobile contactless payment services in Europe. Before that, he was CTO of a French interbank organization that specialized in electronic money systems.

Seven Questions for Ric Telford, IBM’s VP of Cloud Services

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:45:15 +0000

It wasn’t so long ago that the primary appeal of cloud computing was cost-savings. Companies struggling to slash their operational costs moved their data and applications out of their own back offices and handed them off to cloud providers. Now the question about the cloud is turning in a new direction. CIOs who last year asked, “How much can I save?” are now asking, “What more can I do with it?”

Often they’ll turn to public cloud providers like Amazon or Google or Microsoft. Those are the three names that usually get mentioned in the same breath whenever enterprise cloud services come up. But what about IT giant IBM? It turns out it’s a significant player in the cloud game, offering both public and private cloud services. Last week I sat down with Ric Telford, IBM’s VP of Cloud Services to talk about how Big Blue’s cloud business is going and what its priorities are in the year just started.

NewEnterprise: Ric, let’s start at the top. Tell me how IBM sees the cloud business right now?

Telford: Initially the cloud is all about doing more with less. Suddenly you could deliver the same IT services for less. Fast-forward to today, and it’s not all about saving money. People are realizing they can do things they never could before with the cloud. I was recently met with a small aircraft engineering company, and the guy running it described how he competes with much larger companies for defense contracts. It used to be that doing all the modeling and simulations he needed required buying hardware and software and running it all on premise. Now he can go out to the cloud, pay for what he uses and be done with it. He can now compete for contracts he wouldn’t have been able to go after before. And we’re seeing a lot of examples like that in industry after industry.

Someone said to me the other day that the cloud is going to have to have all the parts of the mainframe. Do you agree with that?

There’s a lot of parallels between the cloud and the mainframe. IBM’s view is that we have a single-reference architecture. It’s the same whether we’re delivering the service or if we build it for you. We did a deal recently with France Telecom where they are going to be a cloud services provider to their clients. They already have the network connections. But they’re not a cloud company. So they’re using IBM’s cloud architecture to give them all the pieces in one easy-to-consume bite. So we have that architecture and we use the same blueprint in all the various permutations of the cloud. For some people it’s confusing, but for us it’s all the same whether you want to have it inside your firewall or outside.

Which do your customers tend to prefer–a private cloud or a public cloud?

We do surveys every year and right now we’re seeing about a two-to-one preference for private versus public. About 60 to 70 percent of respondents say they’re working on a private cloud, and about 30 to 40 say they’re working on the public cloud. To us it’s all the same. We offer a core set of services from the IBM cloud–development, test, compute, storage, collaborations, desktop. But we can also build the same thing inside your firewall.

How big is your public cloud business?

I can’t give you a revenue figure because different business units take advantage of it to deliver different things. We just opened up a delivery center in Research Triangle Park. It’s probably one of the most advanced data centers in the world. And now we’re rolling out a model that we are cloning around the world. We just opened one in Germany and another in Canada. And then we’ll just keep adding them. We manage about eight million square feet of data centers around the world.

How does a company typically get started with the cloud?

Usually I suggest they start with their develop-and-test operations. It’s usually not mission-critical, and there’s usually a lot of hardware that’s not being used. Usually that’s the group that buys hardware long before it’s needed and it ends up sitting idle 90 percent of the time. At IBM we put our whole research division on the cloud because they were the worst hardware hoarders, putting servers under desks and whatnot. They knew that if they needed a new server it would take weeks to get it. Now they go out to the research and compute cloud, and the services they need are usually ready to use in minutes or at most an hour. It just makes a huge difference in people’s ability to get going.

So what you are your priorities for this year?

One of the big things we started seeing last year was an uptake of cloud delivery in industry-specific ways. We’re working not just on the generic things like email and collaboration, but on the specific applications that are used in various industries. Health care, banking and government are a few that have complicated regulatory needs that vary state by state and country by country, and we have the deep understanding required to work with them. We also built a private cloud to help the 29 countries involved in NATO share data on logistics and troop deployments. We also have an initiative with the consumer electronics industry. Utilities is another, and it gets tied in with our Smarter Planet initiatives.

Will IBM be making deals in the cloud this year?

IBM will make a few billion in acquisitions. Cloud is one of the four key growth areas we’re focused on. The others are Smarter Planet, analytics and the growth markets. We’ve said that in those four growth initiatives we’re going for $20 billion in additional revenue by 2014. Four initiatives, five years and $20 billion dollars. That’s certainly not all going to happen organically.

Microsoft Offers Lync to Connect Enterprise Communications

Voices — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:17:32 +0000

Microsoft today launched Lync, the successor to the Office Communications Server and, to hear the company tell it, a great supplement or replacement for PBX systems. In addition to providing a single interface to manage instant messages, voice calls, video calls, meetings and shared whiteboard sessions, Lync integrates enterprise VoIP. Happy customers already include Boeing, Estée Lauder, France Telecom, Nikon and Orange. A free 180-day trial is available now.

China's ZTE Going "Tactile" in Europe

Owen Fletcher — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 08:00:39 +0000

China’s ZTE Corp., best known as a telecommunications equipment maker but also a growing vendor of mobile phones, estimates it will ship 300,000 units of a new Android smartphone to Europe this year as sales launch in France this month, a ZTE spokeswoman said late Monday.

The smartphone, with a 3.5-inch touch screen, is ZTE’s second in France using Google’s Android operating system.

France Telecom’s Orange, which has already sold the phone in the U.K. with the name “The San Francisco” since September, will also sell the device in France as the “Tactile Internet 2? starting Nov. 18, an Orange spokesman said. It will sell the phone in France for 249 euros ($343) without any service plan and starting at 9 euros with a post-paid plan, the spokesman said.

France’s Bouygues Telecom will also sell the new Android phone as the “Blade,” the ZTE spokeswoman said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

T-Orange?

John Paczkowski — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:37:06 +0000

The European Commission has finally cleared Deutsche Telekom’s and France Telecom’s mobile joint venture in the U.K.–but only after the companies agreed to divest a quarter of their combined spectrum in the 1800MHz band and tweak a network-sharing agreement that might have threatened 3, the U.K.’s smallest mobile network.

The merger of France Telecom’s Orange and Deutsche Telekom-owned T-Mobile will create the largest mobile phone operator in the U.K. with about a 34 percent share of the market, just ahead of current market leader O2, which claims about 28 percent. It will also reduce the number of carriers in the country, which critics argue will reduce competition and raise prices.

Orange and T-Mobile disagree, of course, and claim the deal will give subscribers better coverage and improved customer service. We’ll see, I guess.

Oh, no word yet on the combined company’s name.

Yes We Can: Have the Jesus Tablet Soon! But What's in the Package?

Kara Swisher — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:18:12 +0000

The noisy kerfuffle that broke out yesterday over whether a France Telecom exec did or did not confirm in an interview whether there is or is not an Apple tablet computer coming soon would be comical if it were not so–how shall I put it delicately?–inane.

But that’s going to be the way it is for the next few weeks until Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs finally unveils what everyone in Silicon Valley pretty much knows he has been cooking up for a while now.

Which is, of course, the iSlate. Or iPad. Or the iWhatever.

There’s the planned Apple event on Jan. 27, of course, as well as a steady stream of decent reporting by many that this is exactly what’s coming.

The Wall Street Journal, for example, reported last week that Apple plans to ship the tablet in March and that it will feature either a 10-inch or 11-inch touchscreen. The paper also cited analysts who estimate the tablet will cost $1,000 and may include a built-in wireless plan.

Other than that, there is not much more new detailed information out there.

And, as it turned out, what the exec from France Telecom, which owns the Orange mobile service there, actually meant got lost in translation.

Along with doing a John the Baptist, he seems to have said that the device will include wireless and a Webcam.

But not so fast! Orange PR told paidContent that the exec’s remarks were “a few comments taken out of context, then interpreted into English.”

As paidContent further wrote:

“A full statement emailed to us has further back-tracking: ‘These responses in no way reflect Orange’s confirmation of the existence of the rumoured device. The spokesperson was merely confirming that he is aware of the speculation surrounding a launch and that Orange would be delighted to have such a product were it ever to be available.’”

Well, that clears it up!

Actually, it would be great to see more information about what is and what is not in the new device over the next days before we all get to see it, as well as much more on exactly which entertainment, wireless, publishing and other partners are involved.

That’s a lot of folks, so concentrating on finding out what’s in the package instead of wondering if Christmas for Apple fanboys is coming would be a good idea about now.

In other words: Yes, you geeks, Steve Jobs will be Santa Claus soon.

Now let’s find out whether what he’s bringing will be naughty or nice, innovative or not so much.

Until then, here is the video of that tongue-tied dude from France making a mess of it (you have to know French to understand):

L’interview politique de Jean-Pierre Elkabbach
by Europe1fr

RIM: Orange to Pull BlackBerry Bold? Guardian Alleges Software Glitches.

Tiernan Ray — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:17:47 +0000

U.K. paper The Guardian this morning reports that Orange, the mobile phone operator owned by France Telecom, is considering yanking Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry Bold from its handset lineup–presumably in the U.K. market–because of what the paper calls persistent software errors.

The curious fact of the article is that it cites no one–it is “understood,” in the passive voice, that the device will be discontinued by Orange. And the article is actually more about the BlackBerry Storm than the Bold.

Read the rest of this post

Allo? Witaj? Salut? Olá? Hallo?

John Paczkowski — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:40:26 +0000

Apple (AAPL) is expanding its iPhone empire with near Alexandrian initiative.

Today, the company struck an extensive deal with France Telecom’s (FTE.PA) Orange wireless carrier to distribute the device in more than 10 markets in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean.

Orange, which became Apple’s exclusive carrier partner in France last year, will soon sell the iPhone in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland, as well as the company’s African markets.

Interestingly, a few of these countries already have carriers with iPhone distribution agreements. It would seem then that Apple is indeed moving away from the exclusive iPhone distribution arrangements it’s been inking, as many suggested last week when Vodafone (VOD) and Telecom Italia (TI-A) both announced plans to bring the iPhone to Italy.

In any event, Apple’s deal with Orange will expand the iPhone’s reach to about 40 countries and will effectively quadruple its total addressable market. “Currently Apple’s total addressable market includes 153 million subscribers in six countries with AT&T (T), T-Mobile Germany and Austria, O2, and Orange,” Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster observed in a research note today. “These announcements increase those numbers to 575 million subscribers in 42 countries, including recent agreements with Vodafone, SingTel, America Movil (AMX), Swisscom and Orange. … To give some context to these numbers, Apple sold 3.7 million iPhones in 2007 into a total addressable market of 148 million subscribers (or 3% penetration). Taking the recent carrier announcements into consideration, we are modeling for Apple’s penetration rate to remain at 3% in 2008 and double to 6% in 2009.”

The Tech 10: iPhone Speaks French, FCC Backs Down and Amazon Beats Feds

John Sullivan — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:08:19 +0000

Note: John Paczkowski is on vacation and won’t be writing or posting videos until he returns on Monday.

To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. Our Tech 10 appears below.

Bienvenue, iPhone: France Telecom has begun selling Apple’s cellphone at selected Orange stores in Paris and other cities. The device itself will cost about $1,106 with no plan attached, or 399 euros (about $590) with one of four “Orange for iPhone” plans, Computerworld notes, adding it will cost 100 euros ($148) to unlock the handset.
FCC Says ‘Uncle’: A proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to tightly regulate the cable TV industry has been “drastically” trimmed, reports the New York Times, which noted that Martin had sought more diverse programming and reduced cable costs.
Amazon: 1; Feds: 0. The federal government has lost its bid to compel Amazon to release details about the book-buying habits of thousands of its customers, according to Declan McCullogh on his blog, The Iconoclast. The Justice Department sought the information to prove its case against a former Madison, Wisc., city official accused of evading taxes in selling used books online.
Google, Online Snitch? The search colossus has voluntarily given the IP address of an Israeli blogger who used “Google Blogger” to allegedly slander municipal council members running for reelection, the Israeli Web site Globes Online reports, calling the move “unprecedented.”
YouTube, Censor? The popular video-sharing site has suspended the account of a well-known Egyptian anti-torture activist who posted videos of alleged brutality by a number of Egyptian policemen, Wael Abbas told Reuters, claiming that about 100 images he had sent were no longer available on YouTube.
But It Doesn’t Mind those CondéNet Vids: CondéNet is announcing today that it will distribute videos from its various consumer-interest Web sites via YouTube, The Wall Street Journal reports, adding that the deal is the latest in a series for Condé Nast Publications’ digital division.
LinkedIn Link to News Corp.? A “well-placed source” has told VentureBeat that News Corp. (owner of this site) is in talks to buy business-networking site LinkedIn. But LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye told Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky that “It would take a helluva lot” to get him to sell.
The Earth, Updated: Google Maps is updating its features, prompting Duncan Riley at TechCrunch to wonder if the new features won’t ultimately send Google Earth down the path of the dodo.
Feeling Insecure: Web applications and holes in Windows Office are the top concerns of Internet users, according to the annual security report by SANS, a computer training and security organization, in its Top 20 risk assessment for 2007.
How Green Is My Gaming? Greenpeace has released a report slamming Nintendo and Microsoft for making their video-game consoles with toxic chemicals, reports BusinessWeek, noting that the enviro group’s latest ranking of electronics firms this week also highlights questions over the environmental impact of the products and how much consumers care about them.

–posted by Associate Editor John Sullivan