BT goes mobile

BT is back in the mobile game with a competitive offer for wireless service that might drive prices down across the board in the UK. The company is offering bundles of 4G data, minutes and texts for as little as £5 a month for its existing BT Broadband homes.

“Offering BT customers the UK’s best value 4G data deal is a great way to start our journey towards re-establishing ourselves as a major player in consumer mobile,” said John Petter, Chief Executive of BT Consumer. “These great value deals are a thank you from us to loyal BT Broadband homes. We are offering customers a new type of great value mobile deal that offers more than just data, minutes and texts.”

“Our customers are consuming increasing amounts of data and they want the best possible connection wherever they are. It’s our ambition to meet this demand by combining the power of our fixed fibre service with wi-fi and the convenience of mobile,” Petter added.  

The region is sure to be a hot zone of competition this year, especially since Hutchison just announced plans to purchase O2 from Telefónica. By merging it's Three brand with O2, Hutchinson would serve more than 30 million customers. Hutchinson has invested heavily in telecommunications in recent years, and plans to secure regulatory approval by this time next year.

Meanwhile, Telefónica is set to become the undisputed leader in Brazil. The multi-national company just received all necessary approvals to purchase GVT, and will serve more than 100 million customers. This makes the new Telefónica the market leader in terms of both revenue and subscribers.

Mobile network operators target businesses

No matter how you slice it, business customers account for a lot of bread and butter for communications service providers. Sprint and T-Mobile are pursuing strategies to further tap into this market segment and potentially break out of underdog status. Sprint is capitalizing on cloud parlance with its Workplace-as-a-Service, which is essentially a turnkey managed services solution for business. Sprint says the solution can cut costs for business by up to 50 percent. Meanwhile, T-Mobile is extending its Un-Carrier movement to enterprise with transparent pricing and other benefits.

Virtualization plays a big role, too, from unified communication and collaboration (UC&C) to virtualized network functions (VNFs) in an NFV environment. CenturyLink, for example, is leveraging Cyan's Blue Planet NFV Orchestrator to deliver NFV-enhanced services to enterprise and small and midsized business (SMB) customers.

Deutsche Telekom is helping businesses recognize the potential impact of new digital solutions and is focusing on transparency and value in a new campaign.

Dirk Backofen, Head of Business Customer Marketing at Telekom Deutschland, commented on the importance of IP-based communications and machine-to-machine communication for successful business. "It was important to us to show real stories, not staged presentations. We feature real entrepreneurs, the real movers in the SME segment, to show every businessperson that they too can benefit from the opportunities of digitization made in Germany.”

Jasper, IoT, and programmable cities

The Internet of Things (IoT) is hot, and few companies are more active than Jasper in the IoT space. The company announced a partnership with Salesforce last month that enables enterprises to move from product businesses to service businesses with IoT. The Jasper solution is integrated with the Salesforce Customer Success Platform.

Andy Baer, SVP global communications and media, Salesforce, emphasized other benefits as well. “This also provides Salesforce customers the ability to quickly and cost-effectively scale their IoT services worldwide through Jasper’s global mobile operator partners.”