Business News Holding

Tag: telefonica

  • VoIP Provider Jajah Shattered By Telecom Giant Telefonica after Skype and Others Drive Prices to Bottom

    European telephone giant and 5th largest carrier worldwide, Telefonica said that it will shut down Janah, its VoIP unit on January 31st 2014. This is yet another sign of mounting trouble in the VoIP industry.

    The shattering will end what was once considered a success story in the industry. Janah was once of the very few companies offering VoIP services that survived the onslaught of consolidation in 2010. Telefonica was sold by Skype for $207 million, at a time when even competitors like Jaxtr and Jangl were sold for pennies in asset sales or went out of business.

    The closure means that Jajah Direct services and Jajah.com will no longer be offered and customers will not be able to make any calls. According to the company, Janah account holders will continue to use their accounts until31st January. However, the statement did not shed light on why Janah is closing.

    It is possible that Janah was not making any meaningful profit and may even have been getting losses. The company had clearly lost the race to Skype that was acquired by Microsoft in 2011. Earlier this year, Microsoft indicated that Skype now had 33% of worldwide VoIP calls.

    However, industry experts have pointed out that the voice traffic is dying; has become commoditized and overall prices, revenue and traffic are dropping. This means that Skype’s victory may be a hollow one for Microsoft, which has declined to indicate whether Skype is profitable or not.

    All this has not been helped by the large number of popular VoIP providers including Viber, Vonage Google Voice and FaceTime from Apple.

  • Mobile World Congress 2013: The End of Apple Dominance Is Near

    The annual meeting Mobile World Congress, ongoing this week in Barcelona, seems to mark more than any other event the end of Apple dominance in the global market for smartphones and tablets and the rise of some rivals with more open operating systems.

    Mozilla has opened the event in Barcelona unofficially. The nonprofit organization, which used Firefox a decade ago to fight Microsoft control in the online search engine market, wants to change totally the smartphone market as well.

    The industry is currently unnaturally controlled by a few companies, said general manager of Mozilla, Gary Kovacs, during the presentation of the first generation of mobile devices with Firefox operating system.

    More than 20 telecom industry executives who brought their support to the launch of Firefox OS had similar views.

    “We change the industry for the common good,” said Cesar Alienta, general manager of Telefonica, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. Spanish company chief criticized the closed operating systems, such as iOS, and warned that “the smartphone market is making a step back from the internet’s opening feature”. Telefonica wants to introduce shortly Firefox OS devices in Spain, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.

    America Movil, controlled by Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world, committed to launch Firefox OS in Mexico “and in all possible markets” soon.

    The outgoing General Director of Deutsche Telekom, Rene Obermann, called the Firefox OS release “an important step towards more competition between different systems”. Deutsche Telekom will launch Firefox OS devices starting from this summer in Poland.

    Mozilla is not the only company that wants to change the market for smartphones and tablets. Samsung and Intel are also developing an operating system called Tizen, which would be even more open and will allow software developers more important changes compared to Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

    Mobile operators are strongly attracted by the prospect of being able to strongly change the operating systems, for an interaction as direct as possible with the user.

    The irony in this case is that the success of Samsung with Tizen would make the South Korean company less dependent on Google and stronger in the smartphones and tablets market.

    The rest of the world seems to recover the distance to Apple's platform for mobile devices, and the American company must innovate again or will be cannibalized by rivals with cheaper and more accessible devices. Smartphone market seems to have matured, so that real opportunities could be in the expansion in emerging markets.

  • Acme Packet SBCs for IMS Chosen by Two Euro Carriers


    Acme Packet has been selected by two European operators to provide them with IMS-based services.

    Telefonica O2 Germany and Telnor Sweden are to use Acme Packet Net-Net 4000 series session border controllers (SBCs) at access and interconnect borders for IMS services.

    Telefónica O2 Germany will use Acme Packet’s SBCs to provide key IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) functionality at its access and interconnect borders.

    The Net-Net Session Director (SD) enables the company to deploy a secure and interoperable IMS network supporting residential retail and wholesale VoIP services and IP interconnects with other service providers.

    Telenor Sweden, the second-largest service provider in Sweden, will also use SBCs to control the access and IP interconnect borders to its IMS data centers.

    Currently Telenor Sweden offers hosted business unified communications using its IMS service infrastructure.

    Seamus Hourihan, VP marketing and product management, Acme Packet

    Seamus Hourihan, vice president of marketing and product management for Acme Packet, said IMS had passed the hype stage but actual deployments had now arrived.

    He said the majority of current deployments of IMS are in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region but in Latin America and North America is growing.

    "Acme Packet Net-Net SBCs provide critical access and interconnect border functions—securing service elements, maximizing service reach and assuring SLAs—that enable service providers to deliver IMS-based services to business and residential customers," he said.

  • HiT Barcelona: Telecoms Industry Has To "Reinvent Itself"


    Telefónica’s Carlos Domingo provided an interesting glimpse of the corporate navel-gazing underway at one of the largest fixed-line and mobile telecommunications companies in the world.

    The giant Spanish giant isn’t renowned – amongst its customers, anyway – for being at the cutting edge of innovation.

    But Domingo, Telefónica’s director of internet & multimedia and director of its R&D center, showed that it is grasping the nettle of change required if the challenges facing itself and the industry generally are to be met.

    Speaking at the HiT World Innovation Summit in Barcelona, he pointed to declining revenue growth in traditional broadband and mobile markets and the strong competition for the new revenue sources that are emerging.

    Innovation is the key to meeting this challenge, he said, but it means that companies like Telefónica have to change their mindset and innovate differently.

    Carlos Domingo, Telefónica’s director of internet & multimedia

    "The telecoms industry will have to reinvent itself in the face of the challenges ahead," he said.

    Until the liberalisation of the telecoms market in 1997, Telefónica was the only telephone operator in Spain and still holds a dominant position.

    But the incumbent has faced increasing competition in its domestic market – both in fixed and wireless.

    Aside from market changes, Domingo said the evolving telecom ecosystem had created the need for a different approach to innovation.

    He highlighted shorter time-to-market and development cycles, the need for permanent betas and the emergence of global markets, but with finer segmentation.

    The end result is that companies have to be able to anticipate the moves of competitors while coming up with their own innovative strategies.

    "We have to think more as a poker player than a chess player," he said.

    Transparency is a big part of this, according to Domingo, who outlined what he described as five "paths to openness".

    These cover the consumer, employees, the network, devices and innovation.

    The advent of social networking, where people reveal the minutiae of their lives on the likes of Tweeter and Facebook, is one such example.

    "The closed way of communicating to customers is something that they do not want because they expect to be treated the same way as they are in other parts of their lives," he said.

    "If you’re no longer speaking your customers’ language, if you no longer live in their world, the disconnect will be costly."

    As well as the need for transparency over tariffs, Domingo also spoke about how critical it is to have open tools like APIs and SDKs for developers.

    He said that telcos have "unique and valuable" assets that could potentially be mashed up with others.

    Domingo acknowledged it wasn’t always easy for developers to approach Telefónica with ideas, but he added that they can always email him directly.

    A refreshing approach and timely presentation – how that translates through a giant organisation like Telefónica will be interesting to see.

  • Hughes Completes Satellite-Based VoIP Rollout for Telefonica


    Hughes Network Systems has announced the completion of the roll-out of a HN System solution for Telefonica Espana to deliver satellite-based VoIP rural telecommunications services.

    To enable the new communications services to operate a second switching centre interconnecting the rural satellite VoIP network to the national telephony network was required.

    Hughes said the VoIP services are available to new customers based in remote/rural areas and to existing customers migrating from the existing TRAC network (Telefonia Rural de Acceso Celular — Rural Telephony with Cellular Access) to the satellite-based VoIP network.

    The network comprises approximately 8,000 terminals, of which 80 per cent are residential, 15 per cent public telephony for city councils, and 5 per cent for small/medium enterprises.

    According to Hughes, the satellite platform incorporates dedicated equipment supporting VoIP, including IP gateways and voice servers.

    It shares resources with other satellite-based networks providing broadband Internet access to rural areas of Spain and residential/SME access.

    The rural network installation by Hughes is the latest project in a 15-year relationship working with the Spanish telecoms giant.