Ofcom: France against UK

Last Wednesday night, we were hosting Ed Richards, Ofcom's CEO from UK, as he was discussing Telecom policy, mostly on the Internet. He said that consumers need more control on the Internet and content and the regulators have to convince the providers to prioritize traffic based on applications.

The guy was a lord, sharp and he presented Ofcom's new book, where Eli contributed an essay arguing that the TV regulation will become Telecom regulation and other crazy and innovative ideas, asynch with the present but perhaps synch with the future.
The title of the book is "Communications:The next decade" . I got a complementary copy, killer book; really heavy,with very sharp edges, but very good content.

Going to the juicy and funny part, the audience thought that this guy knew everything on policy, although he was really cool with his answers, the last question bomb was hilarious. As we know France is ahead in the last mile ultrabroadband deployment, when BT is struggling to deploy a 24Mb network. The 'poor' CEO that think was my age, had to defend himself against all this traditional debate between the two countries and having the Americans teasing him and asking him all the tough questions why UK is behind France, even about Ofcom's relationship with Brussels. It really needs guts to give a speech in front of the CITI gurus and fans.
What I really like is that Ofcom is totally independent, so they can blame the politicians, as Ed did for the ultabroadband strategy. UK and BT still live in the box, conservative and secure technology deployments, expected.

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NETinst conference

Last Friday, I was at the NETinst conference on the Network Economics at NYU. Most of the papers were on modeling demand for games, licensed software issues and competition. The keynote speaker was David Heiner, VP in Microsoft that I really enjoyed his talk about Microsoft's future platforms and strategies. The whole conference had a very smooth flow and researchers came from Europe and the US, networked most with some guys from Harvard and Spain that had an interesting model on P2P networks, looking forward to bring them in the UltraBB conference at Columbia in June.


Professor N. Economides has a Call for Proposals, funded from his Institute up to $15k for summer research. Whoever might be interested..
Nick is a very interesting guy that knows everything about Microsoft's current and history, has strong relations with them and gets also funding.

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Mobile TV - time to grow

Mobile TV is one of the burning issues carrying a lot of complexities
and headache for the engineers,as they have to compete against the traditional TV screen quality and content delivery offer of ever better viewing experiences.

What are still the problems?
In Europe the debate continues to rage over what standard should be adopted for mobile TV, holding back the adaptation rate.Some 3G networks are struggling to cope with the capacity needed to stream live video and TV.

But I would really like to focus on the EU forecasts, European Commission estimates that the world mobile TV market will be worth a whopping 11.4 billion euros (15.5 billion dollars) by 2009. That makes things to move faster, more R&D investing to meet the number, but is that a pragmatic goal? It is really a growing industry, since the mobile content industry today is worth some 20 billion dollars, nearly as much as the 30-billion-dollar Internet business. Most of that revenue, though, continues to be ringtone-driven rather than mobile entertainment content. Imagine the boom when the content becomes the king and the mobile commerce grows as well! Might grow far beyond the Internet revenues.
Mobile TV is a new platform for advertising. The Korean service is free and ad-supported.The two mobile Korean TV broadcast platforms together have a staggering 4.5 million subscribers.
France Telecom reports that clients would be willing to pay around seven euros a month for the service. SFR clients pay 12 euros a month to subscribe to its 3G mobile TV service that offers 80 channels experiencing a 50% subsribers' growth the last 3 months.

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CITI- Call for papers

We are on for a new call for papers toward the book on Ultrabroadband networks, I prepare with Eli Noam. The next CITI conference is on the June 22nd and the CFP is already out, with deadline May the 1st.

France Telecom and the International Journal of Law and Communications Policy are our collaborators, looking forward to bringing more big names in the project.
France Telecom is one of the big thinkers, far ahead than British Telecom, planning soon to deploy ultrabroadband speed home networks.

Happy Easter

Although I was in Greece during Christmas, am gonna spend Easter holidays in the Big Apple.
Lots of work on the UltraBB III event, as we are on the propaganda phase, developing the collaborations and the Web interface. Spring break in Queens College, allows for some emphasis on my PhD work and catch up on some business deals and opportunities. Next week I am visiting Virginia for a CRM seminar. CRM and ERP are hot topics in the industry now, they are on demand. This seminar and the material will support my Marketing classes and expecting some good networking too.
Catching up with friends in the traditional Easter dinner in Astoria, after the church, with plenty of wine and Greek music, a real Greek happening.

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