Euronews: EE Reveals 4G Uptake

Everything Everywhere Ltd. (EE), France Télécom – Orange and KPN Telecom NV lead the charge in today's assault on the EMEA headlines.

EE, the U.K. mobile joint venture between Orange and T-Mobile (UK), has been revealing the rate of 4G uptake in its first-quarter results, and we're not talking a tsunami of subscribers. After five months of trading, EE's 4G customer base stands at 318,000 -- roughly 64,000 a month -- out of around 28 million subscribers in total. More encouragingly, more than 1,600 large and medium-sized U.K. companies have made the switch to 4G. On the financials front, first-quarter revenues were down 5.4 percent year-on-year at £1.42 billion (US$2.16 billion), though this was largely attributable to regulatory cuts in the mobile termination rate. (See EE Gets Smart With Its LTE Assets, EE's LTE Service and EE Shares 4G Lessons Learned.)

Credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's has downgraded France Telecom's debt rating a notch to BBB+, reports Bloomberg, as fears grow that 2013 revenues will be lower than anticipated in the face of fierce domestic competition. (See Euronews: FT Gets Its Flotation Ducks in a Row.)

Poland's Telekomunikacja Polska SA is looking to shed between 6,000 and 7,000 jobs -- from a current workforce of 22,114 --by 2016, reports Reuters.

Dutch incumbent KPN used its first-quarter results conference call to reveal that it is cancelling its dividend to shareholders for 2013 and 2014 as it prepares for a share sale, reports Bloomberg. First-quarter EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) fell 12 percent year-on-year to €12.01 billion ($1.31 billion). For the full gory details, click here. (See Euronews: Slim's Euro Bets Fall Flat.)

MDS, the U.K.-based purveyor of SPIT (service provider information technology), has landed a deal with Eircom, the Irish incumbent. MDS will provide Eircom with a revenue and customer management system which provides infrastructure and hosting services, as well as systems and application management.

Transmode Systems AB, the Swedish optical equipment vendor, has unveiled a new "fronthaul" offering intended for mobile operators attempting Cloud-RAN rollouts. Cloud-RAN architectures move some parts of the network control function from the antenna at the cell site to locations deeper in the network, an architecture that requires "fronthaul" connections between those centralized control functions and the cell sites.

As from April 29 Swisscom AG's IPTV subscribers will be able to watch recorded programs abroad on their smartphone, tablet or laptop, and use their iPhones and Android smartphones as TV remote controls.

TurkNet, Turkey’s largest independent fixed-line service provider, is to deploy Actelis Networks Inc.'s Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) gear. TurkNet will use the Actelis ML2300 and ML230 central office aggregation switches and ML600 series of Ethernet access devices to offer its Metro Ethernet services. — Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading