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The Orange Prospectus

We have forecast that the increase in the number of users during the whole of 2001 will be as follows

Broadband update document.

Microsoft has never made much impact on the Internet. As a result, we still have a proliferation of standards and competing suppliers of the underlying technology, of which the most obvious is Java. Almost all the new generation of Internet access devices, such as phones, PDAs and TVs, all use underlying software that does not work well with Microsoft technology. Genuine interoperability is not yet available.

The key points we make are as follows:

The purpose of this report is to look in more detail at the actual capital expenditures that 3G operators can be expected to make. We show that costs will be very much lower than expected. This is because most operators will be able to offer a good service to large numbers of customers by installing relatively few base stations. This is excellent news for operators, but infrastructure vendors such as Ericsson and Nokia will see much lower volumes of equipment orders than most analysts are projecting. The evidence for our conclusions is derived both from an analysis of actual 3G infrastructure orders and from an analysis of theoretical capacity.

We see European handset shipments down from 140-150 million in 2000 to 100 million in each of the next two years.

By contrast, NTTDoCoMo is putting its money firmly behind mobile data. Its investment plans in Japan provide capacity for huge amounts of data transmission. Three years from now, NTTDoCoMo will have invested, it says, 1 trillion yen (10bn Euros, if our maths is correct) in obtaining 6 million 3G customers. This investment, it says, will be enough to handle over 15m subscribers and provide coverage of 97% of the population. The major services it mentions as needing 3G bandwidth are music downloads and 'image clipping'.

This note considers the so-called 'digital dividend' in light of the recent ITV licence renewals.

The UK online population reached 17 million in February 2001, up around one-quarter on the year, on the strength of rising participation of women (to 44% of users) and of young people. We expect 4 million users to be added to the online population by February 2002, to reach 21 million, with growth at a lower rate than in 2000.