Tag Archives: telefonica

ZTE Open, the first Firefox OS phone for consumers, launches tomorrow for $90

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ZTE Open, the first Firefox OS phone for consumers, launches tomorrow for $90

When Mozilla said devices running Firefox OS would be cheap, we didn't know they'd be this cheap. Telefónica has just tweeted that the ZTE Open will be launching in Spain tomorrow for €69, which translates to around $90 and is a good $30 less than the cheapest developer unit we'd seen until now. And here's where it gets pretty wild: that price includes €30 ($39) of airtime for prepaid customers. When we played with the Open back in February at Mobile World Congress, we weren't exactly blown away by it, but we're arguably not the target demographic. The real question is whether Spaniards will be willing to sacrifice access to Google's services and ecosystem with devices like the Vodafone Smart Mini now selling for as little as €49 ($65).

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Source: Telefonica Digital

Microsoft, Telefonica teaming up to push Windows Phone 8 devices in Europe, Latin America

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Microsoft, Telefonica teaming up to push Windows Phone 8 devices in Europe, Latin America

Windows Phone 8 may be third in the league table, but we doubt Microsoft is satisfied with its bronze medal. That's why it's signed a one year marketing deal with Telefonica that'll see the world's fifth largest mobile network pushing WP8 handsets in Europe and Latin America. According to the release, the pair will offer customers Redmond's cloud services like Office 365, Skydrive and "Xbox" in an attempt to coax users away from the 'current duopoly of Android and iOS." Unfortunately there's no details on the specifics of the deal, so we'll guess the pair teamed up purely out of a sense of altruism.

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Via: The Verge

Telefonica to sell its Irish operations to Three for $1.1 billion

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Telefonica sells its Irish mobile business to Three for $11 billion

Think you're carrying a tad too much debt? Spanish telecom giant Telefónica wants to reduce its red ink to 47 billion euros ($62 billion) by the end of the year, so it's decided to sell its Irish mobile and broadband business to Hutchison Whampoa's Three for 850 million euros ($1.1 billion). If regulators approve the deal, it'll let Telefónica hack about 750 million euros of debt from its books, while giving Three a 37.5 percent share of the nation's mobile business and a strong number two position behind Vodafone. The deal follows a £200 million ($273 million) sale of Telefónica's fixed phone line business to Sky. Considering the whopping level of debt, though, that may be just the start.

[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]

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Via: WSJ (subscription)

Eavesdropping 2.0: Samsung, Intel and Telefonica invest in voice recognition tech that anticipates your every need

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Eavesdropping 20 Samsung, Intel and Telefonica invest in voice recognition tech that anticipates your every need

Human-machine interaction -- the term sounds so clinical, yet it's the most important relationship we need to foster in the 21st century. Which is why the venture arms of Samsung, Intel and Spanish telco Telefonica have sunk considerable funding into Expect Labs' voice recognition software, an investment the trio announced earlier today. The startup's prescient tech, known as the Anticipatory Computing Engine (or ACE, zing!), aims to guesstimate a user's actions or information needs by listening in on and analyzing real-time conversations. It's understandable if the prospect creeps you out -- it should -- but the end goal isn't to invade a user's privacy (though the data mined would be significant), it's to anticipate and assist.

That three major corporations with stakes in computing, mobile and home electronics would want to proactively invest in Expect Labs' tech is a no-brainer. Apple, Samsung and Google all already offer voice navigation services (to varying degrees of success) on smartphones and the potential for current smart TVs (defined by their internet connectedness) to get smarter and change channels or record programs independently would do well by their slack-jawed worshippers. What's more, practical applications for ACE aren't some far-off prospect; the tech could easily make its way into Samsung's next Galaxy S flagship. And then every other machine in your life not long after...

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: Expect Labs

Sky to buy Telefonica UK’s fixed phone line and broadband business for up to £200 million

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Sky to buy Telefonica UK's fixed phone line and broadband business for up to £200 million

Sky already supplies fixed phone line and broadband on top of its TV services in the UK, but it's just announced it'll be gaining a few more customers. The company has shaken hands with Telefonica UK to purchase the latter's broadband and phone line business provided by the consumer-facing O2 and BE brands. As you would imagine, big bucks will change hands: Sky plans to fork over £180 million (around $273 million) right off the bat, and will write a cheque for up to a further £20 million (circa $30 million) "dependent upon the successful delivery and completion of the customer migration process by Telefonica UK." Regulators will need to give the deal the thumbs up before it's official, but if and when that happens, Sky will become the second biggest ISP in the UK after adding over 500,000 new customers to its books. Should everything progress as planned, the buyout will be completed by the end of April, which gives Rupert Murdoch just enough time to carry out the vault extension he'll need.

Update: If you're worried this transaction will impact anything you're currently signed up to, you can probably rest easy. O2 has tweeted one of our editors to report "there will be no material change to a customer's broadband service and no fundamental contract change."

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Via: GigaOM

Telefonica shows off streaming 4K video on home fiber

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Telefonica shows off streaming 4K video, won't make it fit your ISDN line

The future of TV is supposed to involve streaming video, and it's also supposed to involve 4K TVs -- but melding the two has been difficult. Telefonica wants to show that the feat is at least possible with mere mortal connections: it's been using Mobile World Congress to show 4K video streaming on a 100Mbps fiber-to-the-home link. As our Spanish teammates can attest, the (admittedly very local) demo works as well as you'd hope, providing all the fine details without buffering or other hiccups. There's no estimated timeframe for a commercial service, but we wouldn't hold out hope of a version that would fit on cable or DSL when there's a raw 40Mbps bitrate.

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Source: Engadget Spanish (translated)

Ofcom announces 4G spectrum winners in the UK, snags less cash than expected

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Ofcom announces 4G spectrum winners in the UK, snags less cash than expected

UK regulator Ofcom has revealed the winners of its 4G spectrum auction after more than 50 rounds of bidding: EE, Hutchison 3G (Three), BT subsidiary Niche Spectrum Ventures, Telefonica (O2) and Vodafone. It wasn't all good news however, as the agency revealed the auction only roped in £2.4 billion pounds, less than the £3.5 billion it had anticipated. Left on the outside looking in? MLL Telecom and HKT Company. Interestingly enough it was Vodafone -- headed by CEO Vittorio Colao who famously suggested only "technofreaks" were into 4G speed -- that spent the most.

The idea is to spread high speed wireless across "almost the whole" UK population by 2017 at the latest, and the auction's intent was to create more competition in the space. Telefonica UK specifically is required to provide indoor reception to at least 98 percent of the population by then, as a condition of its bid. As seen above, the available 250MHz of spectrum was auctioned off in two separate bands, 800MHz (ideal for expanded coverage and freed up by the digital TV transition) and 2.6GHz more suited to high speed data connections. So what's next? You guessed it -- another round of bidding, to determine where in each band the winners spectrum lies, before services roll out in spring or summer of this year. Hit the source link to check out the full results for yourself and prepare for the 5G battle, expected to commence sometime after 2018.

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Source: Ofcom

Ofcom mulls letting all UK carriers reuse spectrum for LTE

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Winston Churchill is That Guy

British regulator Ofcom gave EE special license to reuse 1,800MHz spectrum for its fledgling LTE network; to put it mildly, that rubbed other carriers the wrong way. The agency may be more open to a level playing field, as it's proposing letting everyone follow a similar route, and then some. Following calls from H3G (Three), Telefonica (O2) and Vodafone, Ofcom has offered to let all UK providers repurpose both their 1,800MHz airwaves as well as the 900MHz and 2,100MHz bands. We won't have too long to wait before a decision: Ofcom will decide on the proposal in the second quarter, which might come just in time for carriers to supplement whatever bandwidth they get from 4G auctions. Especially when hardware already exists that could use the frequencies for faster speeds, success could see the trickle of UK LTE become more of a torrent.

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Via: The Next Web

Source: Ofcom (PDF)

UK carriers form alliance to speed up 800MHz LTE rollout, let us enjoy our Freeview TV

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EE 4G LTE test on HTC One X

Isn't it better when we work together? British carriers think so. EE, O2, Three and Vodafone have officially created a non-exclusive joint venture, Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited, that should speed up the deployment of 800MHz LTE by keeping Freeview over-the-air TV signals clear of interference while the partners bring their low-frequency 4G online. Previously, the networks were bound to form an equivalent company called MitCo that wouldn't have been active until after the 800MHz auction, preventing companies from getting their wireless houses in order until they'd already made a commitment. There's also a competitive angle involved to go with the cooperative work, as you might imagine: with EE's 1,800MHz LTE poised to go live on October 30th, choosing infighting over assistance would only help widen the frontrunner's lead. Whether DMSL represents altruism or pragmatism, we'll appreciate knowing that the hurdles to a catch-up in UK 4G will be more those of the technical reality than the usual political maneuvering.

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UK carriers form alliance to speed up 800MHz LTE rollout, let us enjoy our Freeview TV originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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