By: Jesse Cryderman

The cable landscape in the UK is about to change. Save Virgin Media, leading cable providers in the UK don’t have quad play offerings like they do in the U.S. After many spins of the rumor mill, BT confirmed it was in talks with Deutsche Telekom and Orange to purchase EE, a mobile operator founded by the two companies. The deal is valued at $19.7 billion. According to a radio interview with Gervais Pellissier, Executive Director, Orange, leaders anticipate the transaction will be complete by early 2016.

“We firmly believe that convergence is the future of telecommunications in Europe. Customers want fixed-mobile converged services from a single provider. The proposed transaction with BT offers the chance to further develop our superbly positioned mobile business engagement in the UK and to take part in the outstanding opportunities of an integrated business model," said Thomas Dannenfeldt, Chairman of EE’s Board of Directors and CFO of Deutsche Telekom.

The BT/EE deal is bound to turn the UK into a hotbed for merger and acquisition activity, as other fixed-line providers scramble to become converged multi-service providers.

Matt Howett and James Robinson, Analysts at Ovum, commented on the impact of the deal.

“If the BT/EE tie-up goes ahead, the other MNOs in the UK are likely to ask for a guarantee that wholesale products BT currently provides for mobile backhaul will continue to be offered on a non-discriminatory basis – something which has recently become an active debate in the UK.

BT was also reportedly in talks with Telefonica for its O2 brand in the UK. If the BT/EE merger goes through, Telefonica won’t be too happy. The company has expressed a desire to exit the UK for some time, and it would have a hard time competing against a quad-play provider.

“From the wireline perspective, Sky and TalkTalk may also be marginalised if quad-play proves successful, although they have not made such public proclamations as O2 to exit the market,” commented Howett and Robinson.

LTE marches on

Mobile operators around the world are continuing to evolve their LTE networks. In Finland, Ukko Mobile launched the world's first commercial LTE450MHz network with vendor Huawei. In Quatarm Ooredoo launched the first LTE-A services with up to 225 Mbps speeds thanks Nokia Networks and a network upgrade with LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation. Later in December, Sonera, one of the leading mobile operators in Finland, introduced extremely fast 300 Mbps download data speeds in certain areas of Helsinki with Nokia Networks, and Orange and Ericsson successfully used the 3.4-3.6 GHz (3.5 GHz) frequencies for testing data speeds, coverage and FDD carrier aggregation.

Mr. Antti Pellinen, CEO of Ukko Mobile Inc., commented on the impact of its innovative 450MHz deployment with Huawei. “The superior coverage area of our network combined with the very low latency of the new LTE technology provides excellent user experience and enables remote workload execution all across Finland,” said Pellinen.

Last month Nokia Networks and service provider partners China Mobile and Ooredoo also pushed the bar for mobile speed up several notches. Thanks to TDD-FDD carrier aggregation, one of the key technologies of LTE-Advanced, the trio set an industry benchmark of 4.1 Gbps. At this speed, users would be able to download a full-length 5 GB high-definition (HD) movie in just 11 seconds while simultaneously uploading a 5-minute 30 MB video clip from a concert in less than a second.

Oracle brings WebRTC to CSPs

As enterprises move to all-IP networks and cloud-based applications, communications service providers (CSPs)—facing increased competition from over-the-top providers delivering content via the Internet and independently of CSPs—must be able to offer seamless cloud-based communication and collaboration solutions that can scale for small, midsize, and large enterprises, as well as public sector organizations, in order to keep and grow market share. An early December update to the Oracle Communications Unified Communications Suite provided CSPs the capability to do just that. Later in the month, Oracle released the Oracle Communications WebRTC Session Controller 7.1, which brings WebRTC support to native mobile iOS and Android applications for a seamless, cross-device customer experience.