Vodafone blamed a harsh competitive environment and the timing of Easter for its low revenue growth in core markets reported this week. Its growth did at least not decline again, although we expect that Vodafone will again prove to be underperforming its competitors as they report their figures over the coming weeks 

CPW will also benefit from its partnership with AOL for portal advertising, content and other internet-based applications, relatively small but fast-growing value-added services in which CPW has little experience or market position, which will prove important in terms of both customer retention and margins.

True to pre-launch speculation, BSkyB has entered broadband with a price-cutting bang that will have sent tremors round the rest of the industry.

AOL UK offers buyers of its internet access business the prospect of instant scale in broadband, enabling 1,000 exchanges to be unbundled on a shared LLU basis. However, it has relatively few of the telephony customers which are necessary to exploit full LLU 

Spain’s top football club FC Barcelona (Barça) has threatened to withdraw its broadcast licence from Sogecable unless it matches an offer from Mediapro that is almost double the current annual fee for the two football seasons commencing 2006/2007 

The present TV advertising slump appears due to a uniquely British combination of very rapid digital TV growth and singular advertising airtime regulations that include the Contract Rights Renewal (CRR) remedy 

The UK market for fixed line telecoms services is undergoing huge change. Local loop unbundling is increasing price erosion in both broadband and telephony. BSkyB, BT and Orange are all planning to launch video services provided over DSL. Fixed line players unable to offer more than one service over the same network infrastructure are up for sale.

The cuts are not as bad as many had feared, and the impact on service revenue for the GSM operators will be de minimus: less than 1% at worst and a probable positive impact for O2, depending on the future level of RPI inflation. The impact will be far worse for H3G and reduce growth by about 3-4% each year until 2010/2011 

BT’s launch of ‘Total Broadband’ represents a timely improvement in the value proposition for BT’s residential broadband customers but its impact will depend crucially on the success of BT Vision and other related services yet to be launched 

Orange’s new ‘free broadband’ offer brings savings of up to 60% for Orange UK customers who pay for broadband, and may appeal to a great many of them 

Q1 2006 results show strong subscriber growth due to an enlarged LLU footprint and to promotions 

Vodafone's performance in its core European markets is continuing to worsen in both absolute terms and in relation to its competitors, and its margin progression is weak 

There is little evidence of a revenue meltdown

International subsidiaries continue to perform solidly