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Enders Analysis provides a subscription research service covering the media, entertainment, mobile and fixed telecommunications industries in Europe, with a special focus on new technologies and media.

Our research is independent and evidence-based, covering all sides of the market: consumers, leading companies, industry trends, forecasts and public policy & regulation. A complete list of our research can be found here.

 

Rigorous Fearless Independent

Overall reported revenue growth in the top 5 European markets increased by 1.6ppts, to growth of -1.7%. With little change in regulation during the quarter, underlying growth also saw a sharp uplift, rising 1.7ppts and building on the 0.4ppts increase seen in the last quarter. The European mobile market is now firmly in recovery following a very difficult 2009

There were approximately 18.7 million fixed broadband lines in the UK at the end of March 2010 including those used by small and medium enterprises (SMEs)

Year-on-year subscriber growth in Q1 increased for the first time since the early years of the industry, although the increase, from 5.7% to 5.9% was very slight. In our view it should be interpreted as a stabilisation

Looking at net additions in the quarter, Q1 saw the sequential growth drop back to a more normal level of 9% after the 54% spike in the previous quarter, but year-on-year growth, at 21%, was the first really substantial increase since Q3 2005, when market growth was coming to the end of its exponential phase

Oftel appears to believe that such an arrangement would be acceptable if it 'allowed the delivery of 3G services earlier and at lower prices' than would otherwise be the case. It notes that the 3G licences do not ‘a priori exclude infrastructure sharing’ and that some forms of sharing, e.g. masts, are positively encouraged.

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.