about-electronics.eu

Guardian: The cost of ringing home from Europe on a mobile phone could be capped at about 30p a minute (0,43 euro) from the early summer after telecoms ministers from the EU’s 27 countries agreed in principle yesterday to cut operators’ “roaming” fees by up to 70%.The ministers, who reached a deal during informal talks at the CeBIT technology fair in Hanover, hope to wrap up a legislative package by early June after it gains approval from MEPs in May, with the new law coming into effect by early July.

Heavily promoted by heads of government at their spring summit in Brussels last week, the new law is seen as effective proof of the EU as a consumer champion that is willing and able to act on behalf of the interests of its 500 million citizens.

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AV Zombie: DVB-H could soon become the de facto mobile video standard for Europe. Despite the adoption of competing platforms by some mobile vendors, the European Commission is piling pressure on the European telecommunications industry to announce a single broadcasting standard for the region, and it favours Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds technology, aka DVB-H, as the best option.
The European commission estimates that the mobile TV market has the potential to generate 11.4 billion Euros worldwide by 2009. But only with a single standard and wide interoperability, is mobile video likely to take off. Live broadcasting of major sporting events is seen as the key driver to adoption in Europe.

Kari Lehtinen, VP of hardware brand Modeo agrees: “DVB-H will be like Bluetooth in a few years. Every device will get it sooner or later.” The US company has been Beta-testing DVB-H in New York since January, with eight music and six video channels available. Modeo has also demonstrated DVB-H tuners able to fit into the SD Card slot of smartphones.

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Cellular News: The European Commission is calling upon the European telecommunications industry to step up its efforts in mobile television and make a decision soon on a single broadcasting technology standard, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding said Tuesday.

Reding told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview that she views the Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds technology, or DVB-H, as the best broadcasting technology for the region’s telecom industry.

DVB is an open standard for digital television developed by a European industry consortium. Some telecom companies are already using DVB-H, but others are using rival technologies making it difficult for handset makers to come up with cellphones that can connect to the different broadcasting technologies.

Mobile television in Europe has been largely unsuccessful so far, due to technical issues and a lukewarm response to the new service from consumers.

But industry experts point to the fact that mobile TV in general is still in its infancy, and only in few countries – for instance South Korea – has it taken off and led to extra revenue for telecom companies.

Hamid Akhavan, the head of the wireless unit of Europe’s largest telecom company by revenue, Deutsche Telekom, recently said he doesn’t expect mobile TV to become a big revenue generator in the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, Reding said the European Commission has high expectations for the future of the medium. The commission estimates that mobile TV will generate EUR11.4 billion in revenue globally in 2009, with around 50 million handsets able to receive a mobile TV service.

Europe can and must play a “decisive role” in this industry, Reding said.

She points towards China and the country’s big efforts to launch a mobile TV service for the Olympic Games being held in Beijing in 2008.

“Against this background, I’m not very impressed with the progress the industry and governments in Europe have made so far,” Reding said.

She called upon both legislators and the telecom industry to speed up the decision-making process. “The time for decisions is now – otherwise mobile TV will miss the boat to the European soccer championships in 2008,” she said.

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Engadget: The 27 leaders of the European Union have decided that all member states will have to use energy efficient lighting before 2010. The switchover, which will affect all of the EU’s 470 million+ citizens, was developed with the aim of meeting targets to reduce energy usage by 20 percent by 2020.

To that end, a commission will be accepting proposals for enabling the switchover “for office and street lighting to be adopted by 2008 and on incandescent lamps and other forms of lighting in private households by 2009.”

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Reuters: European Union consumer chief Meglena Kuneva has hit out at Apple Inc.’s bundling of its popular iPod music players and its iTunes online music store, according to German weekly magazine Focus.

“Do you think it’s fine that a CD plays in all CD players but that an iTunes song only plays in an iPod? I don’t. Something has to change,” EU Consumer Protection Commissioner Kuneva was quoted as saying in a preview of an interview to be published on Monday.

Apple could not be immediately reached for comment on the report.

Norway, a European country that is not in the EU, is battling Apple for the same reason. In January, it said the computer and software giant must liberalize its music download system by October 1 or face legal action.
Pressure on Apple has been building, with consumer rights organizations from Germany, France, Finland and Norway recently agreeing a joint position in their battles against iTunes. (…)

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ESA: Today, ESA awarded a contract to Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (UK) for initial activities leading to the construction of a second spacecraft for the Galileo satellite navigation system. Named GIOVE-A2, the new satellite (estimated total value 25 to 30 million Euros) will be based on the company’s proven GIOVE-A technology. From now on, there will always be a European navigation satellite in space.

ESA wishes to guarantee the continuity of the Galileo programme with the permanent presence of a spacecraft in orbit. This will maintain European rights to the frequencies and allow continuation of the experiments initiated with the successful GIOVE-A mission and planned for the upcoming GIOVE-B satellite.

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Yahoo: The European telecoms industry is looking for new, higher frequencies to make up for a shortage of airwaves that can be used to enable consumers to watch television on the go.

This is likely to lead to rising costs for mobile handset vendors and possibly also for telecoms operators, which will in turn mean higher prices for consumers, hampering the fledgling mobile TV business before it has started to take off.

The largest players in the handset industry, led by top handset maker
Nokia, are pushing for a DVB-H standard using broadcasting spectrum, like traditional television’s UHF band, for mobile television. But that will not be available across Europe until analog broadcasts are switched off across the continent around 2012.

“One of the fundamental principles impacting the industry is the availability of frequencies,” Peter MacAvock, executive director of industry body DVB Project, told Reuters in an interview.

Cell phone makers and operators are keen to tap the potentially lucrative market for mobile TV, but so far only a few countries have a dedicated spectrum for a mobile TV network.

“Spectrum is a disaster. It could be many years before spectrum is available for DVB-H,” said Ben Wood, a consultant at CCS Insights.

Researchers at Strategy Analytics expect sales this year of 20 million cell phones designed to receive TV broadcasts.

Mobile operators hope that additional income from mobile TV services, which may generate another 5 to 10 euros in revenues a month from each user, will compensate for declining revenues from voice calls.

Many operators already sell mobile television over their third generation networks, but picture quality and the number of channels are limited. Handset industry executives say they hope the take-up of 3G television will get people interested in watching TV on their handsets.

“At one point the network faces capacity limits, and then it is wiser to switch to broadcasting,” said Harri Mannisto, a director at Nokia’s multimedia unit.

–MERGING WITH 3G NETWORKS?–

On Thursday DVB Project said at a news conference at the 3GSM mobile communications trade show it had approved the technical specifications for S-band, opening an available high spectrum across Europe for mobile television broadcasts.

The new DVB-SH would battle with Qualcomm’s MediaFLO technology; Ericsson’s MBMS, an evolution of 3G technology; and many others.

“Fragmentation is one of the problems for the industry,” said analyst Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics.

The DVB-SH standard would use radio frequency above current 3G networks, which would enable use of the existing 3G networks and antennas for receiving mobile TV broadcasts of up to 90 channels, said an official from Alcatel-Lucent, the largest promoter of the standard.

“There is one major problem for the standard — Tier 1 vendors are not supporting it,” said Mawston.

The European Commission, meanwhile, is investigating the possibility of opening part of the L-band for mobile TV broadcasts across Europe. EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding is set to unveil the Commission’s next move in a speech at the March CeBIT trade show in Germany.

Building a network for L-band, however, would cost two to three times more than for the UHF band and would raise costs for handset vendors, industry players said.

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Heise: According to information provided by the Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding the EU will before the year is out introduce a cap on the costs of using a mobile phone in another EU member state.

The regulation would come into force before Christmas and the cap mandated thereby would lead to roaming charges dropping significantly below those of today, Ms. Reding told the German daily Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.

The EU had been forced to take this step, because the mobile operators had not been prepared to lower their unreasonably high roaming charges of their own accord, the Commissioner observed. “This is a good example of how EU policy as a whole should work,” she said.

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ZDNet: The European Commission has signed on as the primary financier of a project that will allow temporary mobile networks to be set up in normally hard-to-reach locations during emergencies.

The project, called Marius (Mobile Autonomous Reactive Information System for Urgency Situations), was coordinated by the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, or EADS.

The simplified mobile networks will be headquartered in helicopters, according to a release Friday from French mobile technology company Swapcom, which is one of the companies that has been contracted as part of Marius. That way, if some kind of crisis takes place in an area where standard cellular networks are crippled or are unavailable to begin with, a “mini-mobile network” onboard one of the helicopters will facilitate communication. They won’t be able to carry cell phone calls; rather, the mini-networks will operate exclusively with SMS text messages sent en masse from authorities and rescue teams to the population at risk.

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Cellular: The European Commission’s proposed regulation to cut the cost of using mobile phones abroad (“roaming”) was discussed at a hearing held by Parliament’s Industry and Internal Market committees on Tuesday with representatives of the private sector, NGOs and the Commission itself.

MEPs and speakers generally agreed with the idea of Europe-wide price caps for wholesale and retail roaming prices to cut charges for customers.
Parliament’s rapporteur Paul Rübig stressed the need for more transparent retail prices for roaming – the fees you pay for receiving or making calls via mobile phones while travelling abroad. Both he and the Internal Market Committee draftsperson Joseph Muscat, supported a so-called “push system”, that would give consumers roaming price information in an automatic text message received on their mobiles as soon as they entered a different country. Roberto Viola of the European Regulators Group emphasised that regulation should quickly achieve substantial price reductions and tariff transparency and be fair and flexible.

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Cellular News: Europeans are switching off their mobile phones when they travel abroad because of high roaming charges, the European Commission said Tuesday.

In a poll published Tuesday, a clear majority said they use their phones less when travelling abroad than when at home, with 81% of students saying high costs are the biggest deterrent.

The new statistics are designed to bolster the commission’s intention, announced earlier this year, to force operators to slash the prices they charge consumers for making and receiving roaming calls abroad by up to 60%. The commission said the companies were gouging consumers. (…)

Analysts estimate European mobile operators make as much as 10% of total sales from roaming fees.
The GSM association, representing more than 690 GSM mobile phone operators, has lobbied to get the regulation weakened. It argues that they have made significant voluntary cuts and that the E.U. regulation could hurt investment in the industry.

In a statement, the association said the average price for making and receiving a mobile phone call when roaming within Europe has fallen by 22% since 2005, according to a new retail price index compiled by leading consultancy AT Kearney. The index shows the average price of making and receiving a call while roaming away from home has fallen to EUR0.65 a minute, or EUR2.6 for a four-minute call, from EUR0.83 a minute in 2005. (…)

The E.U. pointed out what it called unreasonably high prices. A U.K. customer roaming in Spain can pay EUR5.92 for a four-minute call and up to EUR4.48 to receive such a call. A Spanish customer roaming in Latvia can pay up to EUR9.19 and a Cypriot roaming in Belgium can pay EUR12.00 for the same call home. An Irish customer roaming in Malta could pay as much as EUR13.16 for a four-minute call home. (…)

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AV Zombie: The tax imposed by the EU on large screen DVI monitors will seriously damage the LCD industry and is really designed to protect local projection and plasma makers, like Phillips.  So says market research firm, WitsView.

Since January this year, the EU has added a 14% import duty on large-sized LCD monitors (above 19-inches) which feature expansion slots or ports for video or DVI cards, and that are not manufactured within the Union. 

WitsView argues that the law is already affecting Asian LCD exports to Europe, and will stifle demand for larger monitors with the DVI interface.

The company says: “Monitor merchants may choose to set up a factory in the EU to evade the tax, but [...]  a 5 percent import tax on LCD components is still inevitable as most panels are made in Korea, Taiwan and China. Through the new tax regulation, the EU is trying to create harsher conditions for LCD TVs makers abroad, in order to protect its own projection or plasma panel makers in the EU, such as Phillips.”

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