If you read this blog regularly you might have seen a cartoon showing a guy in a boardroom telling his neighbor that he is always in conflict with - and worries about - what he writes in his blog compared to what he does there. I guess this cartoon is pretty much reality for many business bloggers. Today also for me I guess. While we have clients that serve the tele/data communications industry and sell all kinds of products and services to operators, I was recently myself more than annoyed about extremely high mobile phone roaming fees that my dear Orange Switzerland provider charged me. Usually when I am annoyed I get dangerous. This time it took me two weeks to settle this. I decided to go full Internet with all our fixed line communications using a provider in Switzerland Phonestar. This will allow me in another two weeks (if my trial is successful - and I have no doubts that it will be) to cancel all our fixed line contracts with Swisscom. A nice saving of a few thousand Swiss Francs right there. That was easy. Now I am also trying to get my mobile phone bills under control. I found this service here and ordered a $19 Motorola Motophone F3 un-locked phone and paid a one time fee of $29. Once the phone and SIM card arrives I will be able to cut my roaming charges dramatically. What I also found out is that even for calls within Switzerland it will be cheaper than my local Orange mobile phone (this includes VAT and fixed fees etc. in the calculation). Cancellations for all our mobile service contracts are on their way too. Sorry, guys, but too much is simply too much.

The magazine Forbes attracts readers with their list of top people in the world. They have a list of the richest people, a list of the top venture capitalists, most generous philanthropists, the most influential business books, the best paid CEOs, outperforming CEOs, world's most powerful women, the most influential celebrities and many many more. In a highly creative strategic move trying to win over readers Fortune Magazine now has a list too: the 25 most powerful business people. In this list we have a few (pure) ICT company leaders as well. They are:

1. Steve Jobs, Apple

4. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Google

6. Bill Gates, Microsoft

11. John Chambers, Cisco Networks

16. Mark Hurd, Hewlett Packard

Most notable difference to other lists is that Bill Gates is only on place 6.
Forbes would certainly win as the magazine with the most top people lists. But Fortune would win the title for the publication with the most influential list of influential people. I am now wondering what list we should come up with today in order to market ourselves?

The second biggest Swiss mobile operator will work with Google for mail services. This follows its recent outsourcing of web hosting services to Hostpoint. Sunrise belongs to TDC of Denmark and, while number two in the Swiss market, is often only seen as the number 3 behind Swisscom and Orange. At least customer surveys show that.

TDC seems to consistently outsource its operations. This is for two reasons. Number one is that the core competency is marketing and not operations, and number 2 the fact that they - although it's now 4 years ago - suffered from a super crash on 23 July 2003 when 550,000 hosted mail accounts and 4,000 company mails vanished forever. Three years before this incident they also made user passwords public for a whole month. I guess this track record shows why they find it better to look for other partners.

That Google is offering its e-mail services to a mobile operator seems unique, and I have not heard of them doing this for anyone else. Maybe a new trend for them? They certainly know very well how to handle scalability issues.

First court round has been won by Vodafone. A closed business model is naturally something - as distinct from the US or Asia - that the EC has a problem with. Apple might face more troubles soon. What I would like to comment on is another thing though. Vodafone has been in discussions with Apple for a Europe-wide exclusive deal. For whatever reason (of course it was the fact that Apple also requested sharing of user fees), they parted company and now Apple has formed partnerships with other operators in each major country. While Vodafone was very open to working with Apple at the time, they are now suing them for the exact same thing that they would have otherwise done if terms had looked better. I guess ethical behavior is not something that they respect a lot, but then I doubt Apple does, either, when it is about achieving their goals.

Dynamics have really been picking up in the last few weeks for both WiMAX and now also LTE. While the WiMAX supporters have been following a US-style marketing campaign for quite some time now, LTE's proponents have just been watching this all nearly silently, occasionally sending out some strong statements, such as Ericsson's announcement about not doing WiMAX as they don't see any business behind it. While LTE is backed by the powerful GSM Association, WiMAX is supported by Intel and a few vendors who lost out in the 3G deployment race because they were simply too late to the market - a market that then also stalled and developed only very slowly, due to inflated costs on the one hand, and on the other to their plain inability to deliver the big promise of true high-speed data. Today we are still waiting for true - practically usable - high-speed data over 3G networks. Surfing the Web is still not practically possible and just downloading e-mails can be done nearly as well with a GPRS or EDGE connection.

Now for a few weeks the LTE supporters have been sharpening up their efforts. I assume this has two causes: Firstly, that WiMAX got an official endorsement from the ITU, normally a domain that the traditional players assume they own entirely themselves. Not any longer. Suddenly WiMAX can compete for precious frequency spectrum. The second reason is that the market for 3G and newer technologies is slowly becoming mature as well (at least it will in 2-3 years) so now is the time to look at the next technology evolution, which is LTE. This all fits well with the latest announcement of a test group, which now claims to have shown that LTE can deliver true high-speed data. Since there are no standards for LTE yet finalized, this announcement is a pure PR activity in line with the WiMAX folks' practices. I bet we will see many more such activities now, with something of a show down at next year's 3GSM World in Barcelona - which is the industry's largest event, despite CTIA Wireless claiming that they are bigger.
Here's some more on the LTE/SAE testing initiative:

A group of telecom technology manufacturers and network operators comprised of Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, France Telecom/Orange, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel, T-Mobile, and Vodafone have announced a joint initiative aimed at driving forward the realization of the next-generation of high performance mobile broadband networks based on 3GPP Release 8 "Long Term Evolution / System Architecture Evolution" (LTE/SAE) specifications.

The new 299 EUR Linux (XP support will also come) laptop from Asus could be the surprise of the year. While everyone is talking about the iPhone and GPhone (the latter not any more), the Taiwanese have brought out a new category of laptops. They are targeting families and first time PC users etc., but I think it could be good as a second laptop for business travelers who are on a one or two day trip. It is always a bit annoying to carry around my laptop as it is still big and heavy for just using the Internet to check on e-mails and write some docs while waiting at the airport. Not to mention the stress that you expose your 2-4k USD laptop to on such trips. To buy a super expensive very small Sony Vaio or similar did not appeal to me either so far. So when I started to consider buying this thing for the kids this Xmas, I also had in the back of my mind to go for one as well for myself for business trips. Another advantage is that it starts up within just 30 seconds since it is Linux based. All the typically required applications are pre-installed as well.

An external hard-drive I think I might need with it, though actually a USB stick would most likely do as well if you are just carrying around some files. One thing that annoyed me just recently was the steep mobile phone invoices that my dear Orange Switzerland service provider has been sending me for a few months. Unwarily, I have been using my Nokia 9300 excessively for reading e-mails on trips around the world, which has now resulted in massively inflated invoices. If I force myself to only use WLAN with the Asus Eee, I bet I will amortize two of them in just one month. Laptop Magazine has given it a great review, most comprehensive and detailed - also positive - review I found in The Register; and many others were covering it as well. Battery life is with 4 hours a bit short maybe, but this might be fixed in a next product release. Bottom line comment from The Register: "Cheaper than an iPhone, less gorgeous but a darn sight more useful. But it's a shame about the battery life..."