On 4 June 2024, Enders Analysis co-hosted the annual Media and Telecoms 2024 & Beyond Conference with Deloitte, sponsored by Barclays, Financial Times, Salesforce and Adobe. 

With over 580 attendees and over 40 speakers from the TMT sector, including leading executives, policy leaders, and industry experts, the conference focused on how new technologies, regulation and infrastructure will impact the future of the industry. 

This is the edited transcript of Session Three, covering: consolidation in the telecoms sector; fixed-mobile convergence; and the future of the fibre industry. Videos of the presentations are available on the conference website.

H3G and T-Mobile have agreed to fully share their 3G networks, with their networks being roughly doubled to a combined 13,000 sites over the next two years

Iliad is getting ever closer to securing the French 4th 3G licence on terms with which it is happy, with progress slow but seemingly inevitable, and a licence award likely in H2 2008 followed by service launch in 2010

Google has announced that it will be bidding for 700MHz spectrum in the US, after the FCC adopted most of the ‘open access’ provisions for which it lobbied

European mobile revenue growth dropped again to 1.4% from 2.8% last quarter, although the roaming cuts mandated by the EU do approximately explain the drop

Vodafone’s European revenue growth has dropped again in the latest quarter, both relative to the prior quarter and its competitors, with Spain performing particularly poorly

Google has announced that, alongside other industry partners, it is to create ‘Android’, a new operating system for mobile phones which is designed to facilitate the design and use of 3rd party applications, and which is planned to be in handsets from H2 2008

H3G has launched the ‘Skypephone’, a Skype-branded phone with a free Skype VoIP service fully integrated into the handset

Aggregate mobile service revenue growth in the June quarter was 2.7%, down almost 1%, although this is mostly explicable by regulated price cuts

The distribution side was slightly weak again, but the prospects for the Christmas quarter are much better, with the iPhone exclusivity a big help even if its sales prove to be weak