Telecoms, data and payments transactions, M&A, JVs, SHAs, network-sharing, SaaS
My eye was caught last night by a story in the Financial Times this morning reporting analyst speculation that in the wake of the approvals of the US Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice for the purchase of 51% of NBC Universal by Comcast, which in turn enabled Vivendi to complete its exit from NBC Universal, that Vivendi would make an offer…
As a new blogger, site statistics are a source of endless fascination. They are however useful – my post on TMT valuation multiples seems to have been wildly popular, so I thought it worthwhile to trawl through some other reports to see what commentators were predicting. PwC‘s technology insight presentation caught my eye. It is…
Over the festive break I was musing on the broad benefits on getting the populations of developing countries connected. Amongst the barriers hindering ‘in-country’ network roll-out are opaque mechanisms for spectrum allocation and management and concerns over the rule of law and property rights. One approach that may address some of these issues is the deployment…
This article was published in January 2011 and reflects the regulatory position at that time. For current guidance on this topic, contact Bratby Law or see our latest insights. Before Christmas, this blog flagged that last-mile fibre access (also know as next generation access, or NGA) was a commercial and regulatory issue that would be high on…
Whilst it is very tempting to blog about the new government’s reconsideration of the Bribery Act announced yesterday (and if you are not aware of this, you probably should be), my blogging guru tells me it is important to keep focussed on the main event, so its back to a lawyer’s take on technology and telecoms. Some of…
Have you ever used an international calling card? If you have, perhaps it was at a time when you didn’t have a fixed address, or were feeling the pinch? You probably saw the adverts that promised you cheap international calling and thought that they would be a great way to stay in touch with friends…
I get a regular selection of recent corporate finance deal activity summaries in my email. Last week, I got one from Regent. Their view was that with the exception of a dip in August, valuation multiples in the European TMT sector have steadily edged upwards over the year, with: price / earning at 16 (as…
Sadly I’ve not been in Las Vegas at CES, but remained at my desk in London reading the various updates. As the dust starts to settle it seems that tablets are the story of this year’s show. Not having had the opportunity to personally play with any shiny new toys, I am not in a…
There has been a lot of discussion this week of BT’s wholesale content connect product, so I thought it would be helpful to unpack the story and explore exactly what BT’s product is (and is not), and what the views are of those objecting. BT’s View Let’s start with BT’s side of the story. BT…
You might think that outsourcing is relatively recent – dreamt up in the 1980s as a way for hardware manufacturers to move out of one-off box sales and into lovely long-term recurring revenue contracts or for industrial companies to move fixed assets off their balance sheets. However, the theoretical underpinnings can be traced back further…
I’m very excited to have had my first re-tweet, so today’s post develops the thought further. The retweet was of an economist article which, in contrast to the emerging consensus that traditional telephone calls are dead quotes a recent Ofcom international research report as evidence that whilst fixed line volumes are declining across the world,…
It’s Christmas eve and I have spent the morning digging out paths from snow. As a lawyer you might think that I would have had a well-developed intellectual property strategy for this blog but in a demonstration of why cobblers children are always the worst shod I have gone from ignoring it entirely, via knee-jerk…