Earlier this week, a short article on Total Telecom was widely distributed in broadband circles. Entitled Portugal Telecom Selling Off Its Copper it outlines how, now that Portugal Telecom has reached a critical mass of fiber to the home customers,
Regulatory Certainty Works
When I was in London a few weeks ago to talk about Structural Separation, the New Zealand example was of course very much on display. The increase in compounded shareholder value of the two companies post-separation (Chorus and Spark) is
Level Playing Field and the Scope of Regulatory Oversight
After attacking Net Neutrality head on for years, European Telcos over the last few months have shifted message to something a little bit different, namely the “level playing field” argument. The essence of the argument seems to be that since
EC Confusion and Prejudice around the OTT terminology
I have written in the past that the OTT (Over the Top) acronym is toxic and should not be used, except possibly in a very specific context of describing how a digital service is delivered to end users. The European
An Example of Spin-Off
In the last few weeks, Thomas Langer and myself have been talking about structural separation via spin-off at length, and interestingly yesterday’s news gave us an illustration of what it might look like. I’ll let Thomas describe this to you
DT didn’t shelf its variable rate plans…
There was an interesting and animated discussion on twitter yesterday about the fact that journalists systematically present network congestion due to Online Service Providers as a given. The discussion led to talk about Deutsche Telekom’s pay what you eat
The false dichotomy of competition vs. investment
I spent last week in Europe, in between Stockholm, Brussels and Paris and most of the topics I discussed, heard or addressed in public were in one way or another about policy. One thing that struck me is how the
Let’s Discuss Structural Separation
At Diffraction Analysis, we (ie. Thomas Langer and Benoît Felten) have been busy these last few months working on a series of reports on structural separation. Our starting point is not that it should happen because of market fairness issues,
PSTN Switchoff Will be the Next Big Challenge
There’s a little nugget in the last paragraph of this article on Belgacom’s deployment of ALU vectoring (in French), one that I wish had been more developed. Let me offer my own translation here:
One last point, Standaert also reveals
Can structural separation via spin-offs help Europe achieve its broadband ambitions?
With the advent of the Juncker European Commission, Digital Europe ranks ever higher on the political agenda. There is a risk however that the new Commission continues in the ineffective path of the previous one by promoting the emergence of