I may be pointing out the obvious to some, but it came as news to me. I have poor to non existent mobile coverage at my home and office. At no extra cost I now have coverage. How you may ask? If you have wireless broadband, a BlackBerry which is WiFi enabled, and you are on the Orange or T-Mobile networks you can set up your BlackBerry to choose your own WiFi network at home or work and you will be able receive and make calls on your phone. How good is that?

I understand that this is only applicable to BlackBerry, but suspect that other mobiles with WiFi capability may well work. I also assume that the other networks, Vodafone, Three and O2 will be able to offer this in due course.

As reported in the media today, Orange the mobile network operator owned by France Telecom is to get the Apple iPhone, which until now was only available via O2 owned by Telefonica of Spain.

As reported in various parts of the UK media, Stephen Timms, a minister in the Gordon Brown government has proposed a 50 pence per month levy, or tax in the real world, on all fixed telephone lines, to help pay for “superfast broadband”. The tax would raise approximately £175 million each year. Working on that basis even people who do not have, perhaps never will have broadband will have to pay up! I thought that modern thinking was along the lines that any tax should be fair on those affected. Oh dear – sorry I forgot, they never ring fence money, so this is just more money to help prop up our severely ailing public finances.
Apologies for the rant!

As reported today in various parts of the media, Avaya has apparently been selected to acquire the enterprise business of Nortel for $900 million with an extra $15 million set aside for staff retention. This bid is an increase from the initial one of $475 million. The acquisition will make a business to give Cisco a serious run for their money!
I hope Avaya can take full advantage of their purchase and leverage the Nortel channel partners and technology.

Avaya has bid $475m for their enterprise division. This stalking horse bid was designed to flush out further interest. Siemens is obviously interested through its complicated ownership set up. Private equity firm Gores Group (majority owner of Siemens Enterprise Communications and Enterasys Networks) has formed a joint venture with Siemens AG, called Enterprise Network Holdings. Canadian and US law allows “Qualified Bidders” to outbid Avaya. The result, as I understand will be announced in September.

It is interesting to note that both bidders are interested in Nortel’s customer base – not surprisingly as it is huge! Neither seem interested in their technology as they both have their own technology in bucket loads.

The mobile/wireless unit looks as though it may be sold to Nokia Siemens Networks for $650m. I wonder if this will help pave the way for the Siemens deal.