Opinion Articles

Monday, October 15, 2012

Last week at The Fonecast: 15th October 2012

US government grumbles, O2 UK stumbles

Mark Bridge writes:

Can you trust a Chinese company to build a telecoms network?  Apparently not, according to the US House of Representatives. The “Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE” wasn’t at all impressed with the two companies, although most of the complaints appeared to be about a lack of cooperation rather than hard evidence. I wonder if any mysterious agents are planning to visit the new Huawei UK HQ before next year’s official opening?

It’s also not been a great week for Telefonica, which started with upbeat news about gathering customer data and focussing its BlueVia developer program on mobile payments… and ended with network problems for a couple of a million O2 UK customers when a network node failed.

Still, cheer up. There’s been plenty of good stuff happening in the UK as well. A new 5G research centre at the University of Surrey in Guildford has been given the go-ahead, with £35 million in funding coming from government and industry sources.

Mobile ad spending is up in the UK, our mobile app market is booming and we’re now one of the world’s top ten Information and Communication Technology economies.

We even have our own mobile search engine for smartphones. mazoom.mobi is designed for mobile devices and only returns results to web pages that are optimised for small screens. I wish them luck – but I can’t help feeling they’d do better if the UK government published a report describing Google and Bing as tools of US imperialism. Who’s going to start the campaign?

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James

10/15/2012 5:04 PM

Nice article Mark! Mazoom looks really cool, its nice that the UK has forward thinking start ups too! (The Google/Bing line was priceless!)

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