The Canadian-style quadruple play is being adopted in the UK with cable operator NTL acquiring Virgin Mobile for about £1B. The deal also includes licensing of the Virgin brand for the next 30 years for at least £8.5M per year.

Bundling TV, internet, phone and mobile services is new to the UK. The Virgin brand is very powerful and is being seen as helpful for NTL to shed a reputation of less than stellar service.

Keep in mind that Virgin has no network of its own – it operates as an MVNO in all of its markets. It has a youthful subscriber base, highly-energized and motivated employees and a powerful brand.

There are lessons to be learned from Virgin for all of the stodgy companies out there. Note that Andrew Black, president and CEO of Virgin Mobile Canada, will be speaking on June 14 on the Consumer Services Panel at The Canadian Telecom Summit.

Solutions Research Group is releasing new information about Wireless and Telecom usage among new Canadians, part of its Diversity in Canada study. According to CARTT, the study indicates that new Canadians are avid users of mobile phones and alternative long distance calling options.

No surprise for people who track the continuing success of alternate LD providers, such as Telehop. But there are other interesting trends that SRG has been tracking with ethnic communities and advertising.

Kaan Yigit, President of SRG, will be moderating the Consumer Services panel at The Canadian Telecom Summit and is sure to present some interesting insights.

The CRTC is clearing out some old files – maybe working its way to the bottom of the IN basket?

Last week, it gave final approval to Bell’s High Speed Metro service. This is a local fibre based service to allow businesses to buy direct, point-to-point optical connections. Bell filed the original application for the service nearly 3 years ago (June 10, 2003).

Maybe the paper was starting to yellow from age; more likely, it’s foreshadowing the Commission will be dealing with other high speed applications on Thursday when it releases its decision on Local forbearance.

Watch for Thursday’s decision to possibly combine the outcomes of two Public Notices – Local Exchange Services (PN 2005-2); and High Speed Intra-exchange Services (PN 2005-8).

It’s a deal… Lucent and Alcatel have tied the knot and will be merging to form a US$25B telecom giant.

The merged company, to be headed up by Lucent president Pat Russo will be cutting about 8800 jobs – 10% of the current workforce – and some of those are possibly going to be in Ottawa. Although on one hand, the public statements boast that the combined company will have “The industry’s premier R&D; capabilities, including Bell Labs, with 26,100 R&D engineers and scientists throughout the world“, the press release indicates that savings will:

Leveraging R&D; across a larger base could mean that Lucatel or Alcacent will be looking at labs that duplicate efforts. The companies are both strong players in DSL – watch for Bell Labs to come out on top in any turf battle, given that Russo is the CEO. Alcatel has a large presence in Canada, with both sales, operations and research – thanks to its acquisition of Newbridge nearly 6 years ago.

Bell Labs will continue to be headquartered in New Jersey and Lucent is preserving certain corporate structures in order to continue to fulfill US Government obligations for some strategic contracts. Other corporate structures are also being created to fulfill French requirements.

There is an opportunity for Canada to grow its role in the combined company as global mandates are defined during the integration activities. It seems to me that some locations will be winners and some will be losers. Winners will perform R&D; for the combined entity and will see their budgets (and staff counts) grow; losers will see some of their staff offered jobs elsewhere and the rest let go.

Our governments – federal and provincial – have created incentives to keep auto and airplane assembly lines open. We’ll soon see where telecom R&D;, Ottawa’s technology core, fits into Canada’s industrial priorities.

Musings on a weekend…

There are a bunch of people who have made a career out of calling the Internet a stupid network¹ – to distinguish it from the Intelligent Networks of traditional telecom service providers. We are told that ‘Stupid’ is the new good – Intelligent is evil.

I’m not sure the model fits. Thinking about the evolution of the network, with tiers for business, PVNs, managed services, deep packet inspection, prioritization, gatekeeper fees, etc. Is that really a stupid network?

Increasingly, it seems that IP networks are becoming application-aware. And conversely, some applications are now needing to consider more of the network characteristics, their variations and their limitations.

Why? In part, it may be because the communist ideal hasn’t worked. Certain applications appear to have human like behaviour: they hog as much bandwidth as they can without consideration for other applications or other users.

Hence the need to apply a little control, a little discipline. I have written about ‘Irrelevant Networks‘ where I wrote:

If another user or application wants to break through the traffic jam of mediocrity, and indeed, the user is willing to pay a premium to do so, network providers will be happy to accommodate them. Perhaps this puts another spin on the Shaw – Vonage file.

The intelligence of the network may have migrated to the edge, but there still seems to be smarts in the network. The new architecture lays the foundation for access network providers to custom design access to match user needs. It might explain why network providers are looking at charging differential fees to tune the service to match the user expectations for service quality.

That sounds like a reasonable business practice and maybe not so ‘Stupid’ afterall.

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¹ Look at David Isenberg’s The Rise of The Stupid Network for the root of the terminology.