Vodafone’s discussions with Softbank to exit Japan could remove its most troubled and ill-fitting subsidiary, but only if the structure allows for a clean break, which will require tricky financial engineering given Softbank’s limited ability to pay

We estimate that savings for the typical French contract customer would actually be around 5%, and therefore not worth the extra handset cost and inconvenience involved 

H3G’s new UK prepay tariff ‘WePay’, launched this week, offers the appealing gimmick of paying customers to receive phone calls. Less appealing is the 32% outbound calling price rise accompanying this change, and the estimated net impact of a 10-20% price rise.

However, we do not share NTL management’s optimism concerning the power of the ‘quadruple play’ – to date triple play has proved attractive to less than one third of cable households

Vodafone announced last week a new extension to its range of music services that will offer European subscribers interactive mobile radio through a collaboration with Sony NetServices

More prominent profile of media in Free's mix of broadband, telephony and IPTV to improve customer retention and attract content owners to Free's broadband distribution channel, while VoIP remains the principal driver for non-access revenues

Vodafone's strategic direction appears little altered since its change of CEO earlier this year. In this report we look at the company’s overall global positioning and prospects.

On 21st August Hutchison Whampoa reported on the progress of its 3G investments as part of its interim report. This brief note examines this progress compared to our expectations, and reassesses the threat to the GSM operators.

On June 9th '3' launched 2 new tariffs aggressively targeting the core of the GSM contract base. In this report we look at the potential impact of these on both H3G and the UK GSM operators.

Perhaps inevitably, ‘3’ opened for business before it was really ready. As a result, its services are patchy and unreliable. Some of these problems will be overcome in the next few weeks. Others will be more intractable. Overall, we can see some potential in 3G style services, but ‘3’ is far from being a competitor to existing 2G offerings.

With the handsets finally available and (to some extent) working, Hutchison 3G's '3' operation has finally launched in the UK. In this report we review the commercial prospects for '3' in particular and 3G in general.