The UK cable sector is now hardly covered by investment bank analysts. (It may be impossible to find anyone who isn’t tarnished by having a previous ‘Buy’ recommendation on the stocks.) But since NTL’s return from its near death experience, its share price has performed extremely well. This note takes a close look at the fundamentals for UK cable.

In this report we compare the mobile markets and operator business models in Western Europe, the US and Japan. We examine the main differences, and judge whether convergence is possible or likely.

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.

Wanadoo just reported its H1 2003 results and the FY 2003 Group EBITDA target looks well in hand thanks to the outstanding performance of the directories division. The performance of the Internet segment has been less satisfactory for two reasons: Wanadoo France is facing stiff competition from Free on the 512k DSL segment; and Freeserve in the UK and Eresmas in Spain have seen very slow subscriber and revenue growth due to barebones customer acquisition activity. Wanadoo will be ramping up DSL customer acquisition activity from September onwards to achieve Internet segment targets and may reduce prices in the UK.

Last week Enders Analysis interviewed David Elstein. Elstein is leading a team attempting to put in place a new management at ITV in the event that the merger is allowed by the Competition Commission. This note carries his views on the remedies likely to be imposed by the Commission and also on the scope for cost savings and improvements in business strategy at the merged group.

The Communications Act heralds a brave new world for commercial radio... or does it? Although newly relaxed media ownership rules vastly increase the scope for consolidation, the competition authorities have already shown they will curb excessive concentrations of advertising selling power.

BT and Yahoo! recently announced the launch of BT Yahoo! Broadband for September 2003, a co-branded DSL transport/personalised home page/broadband portal service. The goal is to revitalise BTopenworld, which lost 10 percentage points in DSL market share in H1 2003. The new service will be provided to BTOW subscribers at the same price as the DSL service today, improving BTOW's value-for-money proposition and providing clear proprietary differentiation over other ISPs.

By the 25th of July, we expect the Communications Bill will have received royal assent. The Bill, together with Oftel's new tasks as regulator pending the handover to Ofcom, represents the UK's implementation of the new EU telecoms regulatory framework. All licences issued under the existing telecoms regulatory framework will lapse and a new system of authorising providers will begin. This note covers the basics of the new regime, the existing state of play on the UK's implementation, and the main conclusion that can be drawn at this point.

Online advertising in the UK, Germany and France proved to be extremely resilient in 2002, despite a difficult advertising environment generally, victim of the soft economic conditions in Europe. Based on interviews with industry players, this report identifies the changing environment for online advertising and prospects for 2003.

Freeview is the most successful Digital Terrestrial Television service in the world. But, despite its success in attracting purchasers, it will not manage to lay the basis for the proposed analogue switch off. Not only is it attracting very small amounts of viewing to its digital channels, it is also not overcoming the resistance of large sections of the UK population to digital television.