France Télécom’s forthcoming Chief Executive Officer, Stéphane Richard, is considering a radical shake up and potential U-turn of Orange’s TV ‘content’ strategy, initiated and driven by CEO Didier Lombard

Orange could withdraw entirely from supplying premium pay-TV channels (sports and film) and distribute only third party content, as has been the focus of other broadband suppliers

A retreat of Orange from TV content would enable a more active cooperation with the Canal+ Group, benefiting both partners, who have largely overlapping subscriber bases

O2’s plan to launch competitively-priced ‘home phone’ offers in March should help sustain its current growth in fixed broadband, but is unlikely on its own to transform O2 into a significant player in UK fixed telecoms

The company’s fixed line foray is unlikely to reduce its mobile churn significantly, but nor does it look likely to increase it, with any residual net effect muted by the relatively small scale of O2’s fixed business

Demand for residential fixed telephony is declining gradually, and O2’s play is likely to make life more difficult for some established players, notably TTG, which is relatively dependent on demand from more price-sensitive customers

France Télécom’s Orange TV premium strategy presents an interesting example of diversification into low cost ‘light’ pay-TV offers by an incumbent telecoms operator. Orange Sport and Orange Cinéma Séries are offered exclusively to Orange's 2.55 million TV subscribers, and five quarters after launch, adoption is 20%. This report draws several lessons on this type of venture for other incumbent operators

This report on the French broadband market examines growth trends in 2009 and forecasts to 2012, updates our previous assessments of the commercial significance of IPTV in the triple play (a bundle of broadband, telephony and TV), and details the state of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment

Shrugging off the recession (milder and shorter than in the UK), the French broadband market is set to reach 19.6 million connections by the end of 2009, up 1.9 million on 2008 – only 12% less than the level of net adds of 2008. With 2009 better than we expected, we now anticipate a sharper slowdown in net adds in 2010, with 1.4 million net adds projected. We still expect the total to reach 22.8 million connections by 2012 (70% household penetration)

T-Mobile and Orange’s plan to merge their UK businesses into a JV would create the UK’s largest mobile operator by some margin, and the enormous planned synergies of £545m per annum are actually quite unaggressive given the cost overlap

This achievement would be moderated by ‘integration leakage’, i.e. increased churn caused by customers leaving who were initially attracted by an aspect of one of the operators that disappears after integration, but the net result should still be positive for the JV

The remaining UK operators will benefit both from this churn and the reduction in competitive intensity associated with five players dropping to four. While all the operators may win, UK consumers might lose, with regulatory clearance thus still far from certain

This report looks at the UK broadband and telephony market up to Q2 2009. The key trend is that the steep reduction in UK broadband net additions continued in Q2 2009, to 176,100

This report contains the 2009 edition of our annual review of UK mobile user trends, based on a survey of 1,000 adults

We look at handset ownership, replacement trends, handset manufacturer choice, network operator choice, 3G handset ownership, usage of existing services such as photo-messaging and the mobile internet and, finally, interest in new services such as mobile TV, datacardsand femtocells

UK broadband subscriber growth continued to decline in Q4 2008 year-on-year. We expect declining growth throughout 2009, with the growth rate remaining positive, but in single figures

Ofcom’s statement on Next Generation Access (NGA) gives BT the maximum possible incentive to invest by allowing a high degree of pricing freedom and some short cuts to reduce implementation costs

But Ofcom cannot guarantee that BT will make a return from NGA, only the existence of an opportunity to make one

Ofcom’s statement is certainly positive for BT, but we remain sceptical of the business case for BT NGA, particularly given the low price of all-copper based offers and Virgin Media’s roll-out of 50 Mbit/s broadband

Ofcom has come up with a new 900MHz spectrum refarming/redistribution proposal, in which only 5MHz of spectrum is taken from Vodafone and O2, as opposed to the 15MHz it previously proposed

We still think that disrupting the voice and text services of existing customers in order to extend the availability of little-used 3G data services makes little sense, and that rearranging a small amount of intensively used spectrum when a far larger amount of unused spectrum is about to become available makes even less sense

Should Vodafone and O2 continue to oppose having their spectrum taken away, as appears likely, the delays to new spectrum auctions are likely to continue