Global Services is the new name for BT's Ignite division. The structure of this important part of BT's business is complex and extremely difficult to understand. BT itself promotes the division as its 'hidden jewel', even though its financial performance in recent years has been little short of catastrophic. Investors rightly remain sceptical.

This note reports on the results of our latest bi-monthly survey in May 2003 of handset owners and purchase intentions for the near future. Highlights include the rising share of Nokia to 57% of the UK handset market, consistent with past survey results indicating that Nokia remains the favoured brand by a wide margin, both for new entrants and for existing users upgrading to a newer model.

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.

The long drawn out merger between the two Spanish pay-TV operators will finally be consummated in the next few weeks. As we have seen elsewhere in Europe, competition in pay-TV produces little but red ink. Investors will be pleased that Sogecable and Via Digital are finally combining. We have little doubt that this merger will eventually produce a profitable and successful business. But management appears too optimistic about the likely continuing cash drains as operations are combined and costs reduced over the next two years.

It was just like the old days. Apple started an online music service, which was immediately well received. Steve Jobs proclaimed loudly that the world would never be the same. Investment banks rushed to assert that digital downloading would save the music companies. Truly gargantuan estimates were made of the potential revenue streams. This note looks at the i-Tunes phenomenon.

Part of our regular series on the UK broadband and Internet markets, this note highlights the shifting fortunes of ISPs and cable operators in competing against BT brands on the fast growing residential broadband market.

On June 1st BT is launching a radically new pricing structure for its 10m BT Together customers, dropping the distinction between local and long distance calls, and introducing a flat rate 6p for off-peak calls of up to an hour. In this report we look at the impact of these changes on BT, its customers and its competitors.

Digital Bomb lll is our third annual assessment of the global market for digital set-top boxes and associated hardware. So far, our forecasts have been accurate and we continue to see relatively slow growth in the next few years.

Last week’s decision from the Competition Appeal Tribunal was seen as a victory for Freeserve over BT. Does this mean Oftel will have to use a different approach to regulation? Does the decision herald a new era in the regulation of the telecommunications and media industries in the UK? We think not.

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.