02/4  Swisscom Mobile: the good and the bad news

Category: Mobile Market    By editor at 18:42
The bad news first: ČESKÝ TELECOM goes - as it looks today - rather to Telefonica than to Swisscom.

The good news is that we start to get a flatrate*. The price is still much too high to be attractive to the normal consumer (approximately it's the same price that today's mobile phone users pay monthly) and the upper limit of 1 Gigabyte is a bad joke. But... we have the flatrate now. So it will be a question of time till this price comes down.

As read in the NZZ on friday (Medien und Informatik), Sunrise doesn't yet think about a flatrate and Orange will announce something concerning this topic in a few weeks. As a heavy user of mobile data, I can only encourage Sunrise and Orange to offer better flatrates with no upper limit.

And if I were Sunrise I would now offer a bundling internet-mobile internet for the same price as Swisscom mobile internet flatrate. If I were Orange I would partner with Cablecom and also offer a bundling. This forward strategy would have two positive outcomes:
a) we have some "interesting" competition again
b) the mobile internet becomes a reality for the masses.

* The Swisscom flatrate with a upper limit of 1 GByte is CHF 79.-

See also:
Vodafone invests billions in Czech Republic and Romania



02/4  Some want to filter out sports...

Category: Mobile Content    By editor at 18:33
I was chatting to a company that was pushing an internet filter for mobile phone operators in Cannes, and their literature had something like "we can bar access to pornography, gambling and sports".

I questioned what was offensive about sports and apparently lots of US companies really flap about how much time their staff spend looking at sports web sites...
John's comment via Tom Hume's Time to hitch a ride