Mobile Phone Insurance News

Vodafone, the UK based mobile phone operator, has signed a deal with TDC in Denmark that will see the Vodafone brand launch in the country.

3 the mobile operator based in UK and Ireland has seen its customer base expand by 15% last year. The two operations have a combined customer base of 6.2 million. Revenuw was down 1% to £1.5 billion, ARPU or Average Revenue Per user dropped 21% to £26.46 per month.

Rumours are ciruclating that Apple is preparing a new iPhone for release later this year. The phone will have a high def screen which should make wathcing movies more enjoyable.

Insurance2go will be launching their brand new Laptop product just after Easter. The product compliments the mobile phone insurance which lies at the core of the companies business. Watch this space for further details.

Vodafone have won a contract to suppply machine 2 machine SIM cards to British Gas. The SIMs will go into a new generation of smart meters that don’t need reading by an inspector. The meters will send through the amount of gas used over the mobile network. The initial order is for 1 million.

Look out for more and more situations like this where mobile technology helps in situations where either a command or infor needs to be sent over distance remotely. M2M or Machine to Machine calls will increase dramatically over the coming years.

Now that Carphone Warehouse has split from Talk Talk its telecoms arm, the two companies trade on the London Stock Exchange as seperate entities. Yesterday was the first day of such trading and it saw Talk Talk rise to 132 pence, whilst Carphone shares dropped by 20%.

Ericsson, the maker of mobile phone network equipment, has won two contracts from Chinese operators totalling £1.8 billion. The contracts have been won from China Mobile the worlds largest carrier and China Unicom.

..not quite telecoms. 35% of the British public make a visit to a coffee shop each week, 90% of businesses think that a coffee shop is good for an areas vibrancy.

Ofco, the UK telecoms regulator, is expected to order the UK mobile phone operators to reduce their call charges saving users around £1 billion a year. The are due to set rates for 2011 to 2015, and these are expected to fall from 4 p a minute to 2 pence a minute.

Vodafone is in talks with Verizon, its US counterpart, to resolve the development of the company over the coming years. Wathc this space.

The Carphone Warehouse and its Telecoms arm TalkTalk are to split this month. The retail part of the business is now part owned by Best Buy the US electronics retail giant. Shareholders will get a share in each business for every two they own.

This happens just as Best Buy announces their store opening plans for the Spring and Summer 2010. They have 4 stores ready to go. The company has a staggering workforce of 150,000 people worldwide and commands 21% of the US electronics market.

Insurance2go is set to launch its new laptop policy this week, the pricing, which is hugely competitive will be attractive to customers with mid to high end laptops that they’d like to protect. The move is a natural compliement to the core business of mobile phone and MP3 insurance. Final checks are happening as we write.

Research into mobile phone applications is showing that in 2011 there could be a worldwide spend of just under $30 billion on Apps for mobiles. The figure for 2010 is expected to be $6.5 billion.

The predicted growth is to come from the massive growth in the numbers of mobile users buying smartphones. Currently in the UK about 25% of users are operating on smartphones. This figure will increase dramtically over the next 24 - 36 months.There are a number of new developments that will also feed this growth.

The launch of High Definition voice, near field payment systems, really genuinely useful Applications and the desire to be in touch on e-mail wherever the user finds themselves will drive growth. With the news that Data has outstripped Voice useage for the first time in December 2009 the networks will soon reap the rewards of investing in sophisticated networks. Their challenge will be to provide enough bandwith to accomodate users who more and more will have their phones browsing the web full time.

Interesting developments ahead.

Ericsson the Swedish manufacturers of mobile operator equipment, has annonced that Mobile data traffic overtook voice traffic on mobile networks for the firts time in December 2009.

Ericsson found that data traffic has grown globally by 280% over the last two years and is predicted to double year on year for the next five years. The news will encourage network operators around the world who are looking to benefit from increased use of data to increase revenues. For Operators in the UK it could finally mean payback for the vast sums they paid for 3G operator licences. Over 200 mobile operators in 60 countries are deploying and promoting Facebook mobile products, with a staggering 100 million active users accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

Vodafone UK and Birmingham City Council have teamed up to loan over 450 children laptops with mobile broadband internet access.The pilot scheme could be rolled out to more regions if it proves successful. Insurance2go will be launching their new Laptop insurance product very soon, it’s an exciting development for the company. We have been looking forward to launching this product for a while now and it will compliment our core product offering of mobile phone insurance.

The Chancellor of the exchequer confirmed yesterday that every Broadband account would be subject to a £6 a year levy to pay for the extension of broadband services to the entire population by 2020. This is excellent news for internet operators and retailers as it widens their potential markets. It is also very good news for locations currently without broadband as the development will open up new work and employment opportunities to them that are currently not available.

The Carpone Warehouse is to split their telecoms and retail businesses, the move, which was announced ages ago has been given high court approval. Shareholders will get a share in each business for every 2 held in the current carphone group. It will be interesting to see which performs better once they begin trading as two seperate entities from 29th March.

Zain, the Kuwaiti Telecoms operator, has approved the sale of nearly all of its African assets to Bharti Airtel,India’s largest telecoms group.

Shazam, the company that recognises songs and tells you who they’re by, has said that their service has been downloaded over 1 million times on Nokia Ovi store. It is also on of the mosre popular sites on the iPhone apps store. The service is available on 40 different Nokia handsets in 200 countries.

The CBI have said that fines of up to £2 million for companies making silent calls due to automated dialling systems is disproportionate and draconian. Difficult one as the calls are very very annoying and to some old folk they can be disconcerting.

Amdocs, the billing software company has purchased MX Telecom, a UK based mobile payments company for a cool £69 million. MX will now be incorporated into the Amdocs group has operations in UK, US and Australia.

Acer have launched the Liquid handset exclusively with The Carphone Warehouse. The Acer Liquid’s features include: enhanced power management for longer battery life, the Spinlets application, which provides free streaming of music and video and HD capabilities. To insure yours with our great value mobile phone insurance visit our main site www.insurance2go.co.uk

Gordon Brown has committed to offering the entire population of the UK superfast broadband by 2020. This is more ambitious than the previous target of 90% by 2017. The growth is to be paid for by the controversial broadband levy. Not good news for mobile dongle sales or satellite broadband systems operators, many are used by customers with no domestic broadband.

Ofcom are to investigate Lycatel the pre-paid phone card company to see if they are infringing consumer protection laws.

Nokia have launched the E72 Smartphone in Purple. there is to be a campaig including Karen Brady, former MD of Birmingham City Football Club, and Savannah Miller, sister of Sienna Miller and founder of fashion label, Twenty8Twelve, promoting the E72 as the handset for busy working women juggling their careers, family life and a hectic social life. Sounds like they need to add insurance in with that and of course great value cover for all mobile phones can be found at www.insurance2go.co.uk

Tesco is in the spotlight today as there are reports that its One Stop chain charges more for goods than at its Tesco branded stores. Regulators say they are powerless to do anything about it as the chain is branded differently.

Diageo, the drinks giant, who own brands such as Jonny Walker, Gordon’s Gin, have warned the government that increasing the tax on booze may threathen jobs in the UK. The warning comes ahead of the budget on Wednesday.

Insurance2go will launch a new Laptop Insurance product within the next two weeks. The move will compliment the company’s mainstay products of mobile phone insurance and MP3 Insurance. The original product for laptops was launched about 4 years ago but was, upon reflection not flexible enough to meet the demands of the modern consumer.

Launch date is set for Wednesday 31st March. A new product for Spring.

O2 have had their revised pay offer rejected by the CWU (Communications Workers Union). O2 had offered a 2% salary increase to its retail, engineering and technical staff, which was an improved offer from their original 1.25%.

The CWU condemned the operator for making the offer conditional on union reps recommending it to members.

It said: ‘The CWU will not be forced to recommend an unacceptable offer to please O2.’

CWU hopes that O2 would negotiate on Pay Progression were also dashed. The union said it was dismayed and angry that O2 has refused to even consider meaningful talks on Pay Progression. The union have called on O2 to return to the negotiating table.

Orange will be first out of the blocks in being able to offer the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 in white. The handset will be Sony Ericsson’s first Andoid handset and therefore a pretty important first venture for the company who no doubt will be keen to claw back some ground lost to Apple and other Smartphone makers.

The handset includes the applications Timescape and Mediascape, which allow users to organise the content in their phone.

It also comes with an integrated 8.1 mega-pixel, auto-focus camera, featuring camcorder capability, a 4 inch WVGA touchscreen, A-GPS and 1Gb of internal memory with a 8Gb MicroSD card.  All this is supported by a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Wow - sounds good. Not that we necessarily understnad all that but it does sound good. Insurance2go will of course be offering its great value mobile phone insurance on the new Xperia X10 when it arrives soon.