Posts by Ian Fogg from August 27, 2008

IanFogg | August 27, 2008, 02:59 PM
Swisscom Markets a Naked DSL Fixed-Mobile Bundle

Another example of an innovative European incumbent: Swisscom has been bundling home broadband with mobile, without requiring a home phone. I suspect Cablecom's home phone + broadband + TV bundles drove Swisscom to innovate.

This has created enough of a stir with their rivals to prompt a referral to the competition regulator. However, now the regulator rules they may continue.

Received wisdom: Only the altnets, the competitive operators, will market these kinds of offers. Naked DSL benefits over the top VoIP players.

My take: If a competitor is successful, most European incumbents are nimble enough to respond by adjusting product strategy to maintain their market position. There is no reason for an operator not to have a home broadband + mobile offer like this as a part of their overall product portfolio.

Plus, if the mobile pricing is sufficiently cheap, and includes enough bundled minutes, then a consumer will see no need to add a home VoIP service to their naked DSL service.

IanFogg | August 27, 2008, 08:12 AM
Marketing The Whole Internet

I'm becoming increasingly bewildered by the UK's advertising standards rulings (e.g. on cable allowed to be described as fibre broadband).

Latest is that the ASA has decided that Apple's iPhone should not be advertised as offering access to all the Internet.

Interesting points:

• There's an implicit assumption here that the Internet = the web. It doesn't. Think about Skype, instant messaging, email applications, iTunes downloads, peer to peer apps, etc. etc.


• Irony is that the iPhone does offer a much greater amount of the Internet and access to more different web sites than any other mobile phone.


• Double irony is that following the same ASA logic, the Mac could not be advertised as offering all the Internet either due to the number of sites that still require Internet Explorer. There is no Mac OS version of IE6 or version 7.


• For similar reasons, and just because they don't run Windows and Internet Explorer, many of the new tiny cheap netbook-class laptops running Linux can't access some websites or some parts of those sites. Will the ASA intervene here too?


• Many of the key sites that require Flash or Java plug-ins do work on the iPhone through specific iPhone applications, or special iPhone websites. Examples: BBC iPlayer; Youtube; Last FM; iTunes shop; Truphone; Palringo; AIM; Remote Desktop; Mocha VNC etc. etc.

My take - the spirit of Apple's advertising was correct.