Posts filed under Mobile Operators

In what seems like an almost unprecedented move, O2 and AT&T have collectively managed to annoy their respective UK and US customers in one go following yesterday’s announcement of the new iPhone 3G S.

They’ve both come up with new pricing plans that serve to do one thing to their loyal (not to mention, extremely cash-strapped) customers: screw ‘em!

T-Mobile CTO, Cole Brodman, has revealed in an interview with GigaOm that the company is banking heavily on a mobile future filled with Android devices of all shapes and sizes.

In particular, he revealed that T-Mobile will “…follow up G1 this year with multiple Android devices in the second half that we’ll be launching with at least three partners,” and that “we will see Android [netbooks] …from different nontraditional partners, maybe HP or Dell or others.”

More details of T-Mobile’s future plans after the jump.

You may recall that I’m looking to upgrade my phone from my Nokia E90 to a T-Mobile G1 (can’t resist Android’s siren call!) However, because I was on T-Mobile’s old Just Sim tariff (old Sim-only deal that cost me £30 a month), transferring to a new contract wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. It turns out that if I want to move from a T-Mobile Sim-only deal to a new T-Mobile contract, I can’t keep my old phone number!

If I was on any other deal on any other network, then I could port the number over seamlessly. If I was on any other contract with T-Mobile, it wouldn’t be a problem, either. However, because I’m already a customer of T-Mobile, I can’t port the number over across tariffs, as porting only works across different networks. And for whatever reason, T-Mobile’s systems aren’t equipped to deal with people who want to switch from Sim-only to contract and keep the same number!

Motorola isn’t the only US mobile company doing really badly at the moment – US mobile phone telco Sprint Nextel Corp is seemingly doing much, much worse. After losing a million customers in the last three months alone, the company has announced a $505 million loss for the same period. One of the reasons is the success of the iPhone, which helped iPhone carrier and Sprint arch-enemy AT&T to gain 1.3 million customers during the same period.

However, the iPhone isn’t the only reason – Verizon also notched up an extra 1.5 million customers, yet it doesn’t carry the iPhone. No, the major reason is Sprint’s recent purchase of rival Nextel, which has led to a plethora of poor service complaints from customers, causing them to leave in their, well, million! Worse, Nextel cost Sprint $36 billion, yet may now only be worth just $5 billion – a $31 billion loss! Ouch! In response, Sprint has fired 4,000 of its employees, closed outlets, and has just begun a fierce price war to gain new customers, but it may be too little too late.

So the iPhone may not be the sole reason that Sprint is in trouble, just as it’s not the sole reason that Motorola’s handset business is also recording record losses – it’s just that it doesn’t exactly help them either!

[Source: Bloomberg]

Here’s news to make you cheer if you’re a T-Mobile user. Not content with giving users the best mobile Web data package with Web n Walk, T-Mobile are also throwing in free Wi-Fi access at over 1,000 locations, including StarBucks, airports, train stations and petrol stations.

You need Web n Walk Plus or Web n Walk Max plans to get the free service – otherwise, you’ll have pay £5 an hour to access the networks. But given that Web n Walk already provides 3GB a month of data for a fixed cost over super-speedy HSDPA, it was already a bargain, and this new offer just makes it unbeatable!

T-Mobile have announced that their Web ‘n Walk mobile Internet service will cost no more than £1 a day and will offer unlimited Internet access on your mobile. Each kilobyte of data costs just 1p initially, but once you’ve hit £1’s worth in 24 hours, well…you just keep on using the Internet, and T-Mobile stops charging you! Very generous of them!

The downside of this service is that it’s curently only available on the Motorola V3 RAZR and Nokia 6131, but T-Mobile promise it will be available on more handsets before Christmas. Oh, and you can’t use VoIP, streaming video, or your laptop with it.

[Source: The Register]

Orange has some tasty looking smartphones that they’re about to release.

Orange have traditionally rebadged HTC’s smartphones in the past, and that trend continues with the Orange SPV-C100 being a rebadged HTC Oxygen; the Orange SPV-F600 being a rebadged HTC STR TRK; the SPV-C700 being a HTC Breeze; and the SPV-M3100 being a HTC Hermes.

Orange will also be selling Samsung’s Blackberry-killer, the Samsung i320.

Details and pictures of Orange’s new smartphones after the jump.

Orange have gone mad and announced a new quadruple play package, offering customers a mobile connection, fixed line connection, broadband and IPTV service in one package with one bill. Starting in France to begin with, the company is rebranding its Wannadoo broadband package, and offering 8Mbps broadband connection, high-def IPTV, VoIP, and an unlimited mobile TV service.

The service also allows calls to be made over the mobile phone, or switched over to a customer’s broadband connection via WiFi when at home.

Vodafone has lost £21.8 billion ($41 billion), a UK record. Fortunately for the company, this staggering loss comes from Vodafone writing down the value of its assets (principally the German company Mannesman it bought for the bargain price £112 billion back in 2000), rather from it actually losing real money. And shareholders haven’t lost out (yet!) either, as the share price actually rose 2% on news that Vodafone was returning £9 billion to them.

To put these figures in context, though, the total value of BT, the UK’s primary fixed-line telco, is £19 billion, while Marks & Spencer’s, high street uber-retailer, is worth £9 billion. So with one bold strike of an accountant’s pen, Vodafone has lost the entire worth of BT or two Marks & Spencer’s! Crazy world this mobile phone business!

[Source: BBC News]

Vodafone UK began an early mobile TV service in collaboration with BSkyB back in November 2005. In the 6 months since then, they’ve registered 100,000 subscribers, who collectively consume 70,000 TV streams a day.

The success of the mobile TV service has taken Vodafone by surprise. “The message there is that customers want mobile TV and they are paying for it,” Roger Matthews, head of sports and entertainment for the Vodafone Group, told delegates at the Mobile Entertainment Market conference (MEM2006) in London. “There are more subscribers than we expected and they are paying more than we expected.”