Service revenue took a dip in Q4 to 1.5% as a waning price rise impact in the UK combined with the loss of positive one-offs in Germany.

We expect growth to slow further through 2024 as many operators implement lower index-linked price rises which are also coming under increasing regulatory scrutiny.

Vodafone has made progress on its turnaround plan—striking deals for its Italian and Spanish units—but it is not yet out of the woods, with ongoing challenges in Germany and approval still uncertain in the UK.

Many telcos are surprisingly advanced in exploring GenAI opportunities, mainly in gleaning cost efficiencies in managing their complex systems, but it may also provide a revenue boost.

European telco CEOs made a heartfelt—if not entirely convincing—plea for regulatory/policy help via a ‘new deal’ to help support future investment, highlighting a genuine lack of price/investment balance in European telecoms.

The most convincing specific regulatory/policy solution is in-market consolidation, with other steps either less effective, or unlikely to happen, but a general shift in regulatory attitude could prove helpful in many small ways.

Sony PlayStation’s next CEO will have hard decisions to make: compete against a resurgent multiplatform Microsoft, or retreat and defend an increasingly rickety PlayStation console model.

New gaming hardware will have an outsize influence in the year ahead, giving gamers unprecedented choice, starting with XR headsets and continuing to a likely new Nintendo Switch.

YouTube’s foray into browser-based games will be the service to watch in 2024. If successful, streaming services, including Netflix, will be on track to become heavyweight game platforms.

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

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

Ending a simmering commercial dispute, Vivendi’s Canal+ has agreed to distribute its packages to France Télécom’s Orange TV satellite customers, allowing Orange to relaunch its DTH platform (targeting 4 million customers off the DSL TV footprint) after its dismal ‘do-it-alone’ first six months

Canal+ recruitments will benefit from the resumption of active marketing for its packages over Orange TV platforms, after a poor year for subscriber growth

Canal+ catch-up TV will now be available to all Orange Canal+ DSL TV subscribers, as it is to those on Free, where it is very popular, plus Orange satellite subscribers, thus giving Orange back the leadership position on IPTV in France