Archives : September 2008

mobile broadband sticker scheme aims to challenge Wi-Fi hotspots

published on 2008/09/30 by Anthony Plewes

The mobile industry is starting to get its act together on mobile broadband. Long plagued by acronym soup, the GSM Association, along with 16 of the world's biggest operators and IT companies, has taken a leaf out of the Wi-Fi Alliance's book and launched a 'sticker' scheme for mobile broadband. Instead of users trying to work out whether they can get UMTS, 3G, HSPA or Turbo 3G, they just use equipment bearing the 'mobile broadband' service mark and know that they can connect to mobile broadband services. The scheme will see communications technology preinstalled and preconfigured in laptops bearing the......

burgeoning kenyan mobile market gets fourth operator

published on 2008/09/23 by Bill Douglas

Orange is extending its footprint in Africa, one of the world’s fastest growing telecoms markets. France Telecom has announced that it will be launching a nationwide GSM network in Kenya, following the acquisition of a majority shareholding in incumbent operator Telecom Kenya. This is the fourth nationwide GSM network in Kenya, and both mobile and fixed networks will be branded Orange. The launch of cellular services means Orange becomes Kenya’s first fully integrated fixed line, mobile and Internet provider. Kenya, located in East Africa and home to 37 million people is an important regional hub for trade and finance. The......

Is ICT a ‘good guy’ or a ‘bad guy’ in Sustainable Development?

published on 2008/09/19 by Axel Haentjens

Everyone knows the statistics published by Gartner in 2007: the Information & Communication Technology (ICT) industry represents 2% of total CO2 emissions, which is as much as the whole airline industry. ICT can be seen as a bad sustainable development (SD) citizen in many ways: large data centers are consuming as much energy as small towns, the ICT industry produces hundred millions of devices every year, including laptops, routers, PDAs or cell phones, with a lifetime of between two and five years, and very little is done to collect the used devices and recycle them. On top of this, uncertainties......

ROI study sheds light on conference benefits (3)

published on 2008/09/16 by Yann Gourvennec

There are indeed - despite the undeniable quality of this document - a few grey areas which need to be underlined if we wish to refine our analysis of the Web conferencing ROI....

ROI study sheds light on conference benefits (2)

published on 2008/09/15 by Yann Gourvennec

This is part two of our article on web conferencing ROI based on the Frost & Sullivan and WebEx document dedicated to the return on investment for web conferencing services. In part one of this article, we have established that the main benefits which can be derived from web conferencing are not forcibly those that seemed obvious at first sight. The prominence of the productivity factor is obvious. However, one still has to build a business case around that and try and estimate how much productivity can be derived from the usage of this ICT tool, and what impact it can have on either sales, profits, or even other business factors such as the investment of this productive time into other activities which in turn can generate either more revenue and profits or even lead to a leaner organisation....

ROI study sheds light on conference benefits (2)