John Linton .....but in France they appear to be excessive.
I read this earlier this morning:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704729304576286781968298892.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews
and the comments on employees committing suicide were disturbing because you don't usually associate the WSJ with garbage journalism. So that in itself caused me to consider the problems being faced by so many companies in this industry in a different light.
However, it was the comment that:
""In Paris alone, mobile data traffic is increasing 5% per week," Mr.
Richard said. Faced with these problems, Mr. Richard said he believes
the European telecom market will consolidate over the next few years as
companies look to cut costs."
that really caught my eye. Firstly the growth in mobile data seems to have increased quite a lot since I last saw an EU country report and,assuming that quoted figure is representative of similar growth in other ERU countries. The second thing was the comments about how difficult the EU telecommunication markets are in terms of declining land line revenues and more intrusive regulation. Now France Telecom is no giant comms company (if you do the revenue conversions its less than three times the size of Telstra in a country with about three times the number of people) but, as they claim, they are the third largest telco in the EU with investments in smaller telcos throughout Africa and Eastern Europe.
These two comments coupled with the subsequent remarks about "other types of companies reaping more benefits from their investments in mobile and land line data" gave me pause.I've read similar 'complaints' in the US media about Google, Face Book etc without really understanding what they meant.I would have thought that if the carriers are charging a realistic price for the data their end customers use then they could only be happy that their customers were using much more data every month, month on month. If I am reading this, and other articles correctly the carriers seem to be complaining that the data generated by Google etc is actually somehow detrimental to their networks and revenues - something that, at least at first sight, is difficult to understand. Why would an increasing use of mobile data lead to carrier mergers?
Having read several US companies and now France Telecom make similar 'accusations' there must be something going on that it totally unclear to me. Now, France Telecom has linked such data growth to the need for carrier mergers it is obviously something that is far more serious than just making a profit on mobile data charges. Perhaps you read this article differently - in many ways it seems to be a strange juxtaposition of disparate aspects of business conditions in the one piece of writing. But that, to me, only suggests the journalist started with one line of enquiry (probably the suicide 'topic') and was lead in to the others by his interlocutor - all of which were interesting but which he and his sub had difficulty in combining into a single cohesive 'story'....so they just used all of them...badly.
Of course, it doesn't have any relevance to Exetel at all other than we will again look at what can be done in our own tiny efforts to increase the take up of our mobile broadband services in an hour or so....but what it does do is to increase an awareness of imminent changes in the ways that mobile broadband is priced and 'sold' to the various user segments.
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