Month: February 2013

Airtel Vodafone Knock Delhi High Court to Retain 900MHz Spectrum

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Airtel and Vodafone have filed a case in the Delhi High Court, challenging the government’s plan to auction 900Mhz spectrum. They have taken this legal recourse stating that they have the right to extend the current contract by another 10 years. Notably, 900Mhz and 1800 Mhz spectrum is coming up for renewal by end-2014 for … Read more

Sistema Closure in 10 Circles – Positive

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Sistema announced the closure of services in 10 Indian provinces [i.e. Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, North East, Orissa and Punjab] out of 22 where it has operated so far. We see this as positive news as it is in line with the previous management guidance to reduce … Read more

Baidu Undergoing Turbulent Times as Users Move to Mobile

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Baidu’s user transition to mobile and rising competition may continue to dampen top line growth, with margins likely to be under pressure in the near term. However, given encouraging new customer acquisition and continued development in the mobile space for future growth.

Mobile search traffic has continued to grow faster than PC search in this quarter, but management notes that the growth rate has been ‘soft’. We estimate that mobile traffic currently contributes more than 25% of Baidu’s total search traffic in 4Q12. We believe mobile search traffic is largely incremental to PC search traffic and, thus do not expect significant cannibalization to PC search traffic. Baidu’s current priority

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Insight into the Oracle’s Acme Packet Deal

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Database Giant Oracle’s strategic interest is in building out its communications vertical market offering, particularly in voice over IP with upcoming demand for LTE, rather than signaling any intention to enter the software defined networking space in competition with Cisco or Juniper. Oracle already delivers database, infrastructure software and applications software to the telecom vertical. Oracle is usually opportunistic in its acquisitions, and further details on why this acquisition is taking place at this particular time may become clear with disclosures upcoming in the proxy statement.

With the acquisition announcement, Acme Packet reported 4Q numbers that beat expectations for both product and total revenues. For the full year, product revenues declined 17%, while total

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4G / LTE Patent battle Gets Hot with InterDigital Complaint

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On 31 January, the US International Trade Commission (USITC) started an investigation into Huawei, ZTE, Samsung, and Nokia for alleged patent infringement based on claims by InterDigital (IDCC US, not rated) filed on January 2, 2013. According to Forbes (“US ITC to investigate Samsung, Nokia, Huawei, ZTE for patent infringement”, 1 Feb 2013), the patent infringement lawsuit involves products such as smartphones, data cards, USB dongles, PCs, and other mobile Internet devices with cellular capabilities.

InterDigital is an R&D firm that develops wireless technologies and generates revenue by licensing those patented technologies to third parties. It owns 7.6% of 4G patents according

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Google’s Chromium NaCl SDK run on ARM based Devices

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One of the core value propositions of Google’s Android, because of its integration of Java, has been the “write once run everywhere” credo Java claims, but has not delivered so far. Though Java, Flash and HTML5 are trying for ubiquity as technology platforms so that applications written by a programmer can run across all devices, none has achieved complete success yet.

Google has updated its Native Client (NaCl) programming technology with the latest version 25 SDK release, enabling it to run apps on ARM-based devices such as smartphones and tablets. According to Chromium, Google has
taken a step further as the NaCl technology has been updated to allow it also run apps on ARM-based devices, which powers most of the smartphones, tablets and other devices. NaCl allows developers

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