Comment

"May the Gods smite you with an installed base, and out of date mobile infrastructure!"

"Which of the Networks has a CEO brave enough to tell the truth?" asks the Digital Evangelist. The truth about Euro mobiles, he analyses, is that they are all suffocating, with "legacy systems holding back the delivery of services that might just cause customers to increase spending."

This (anonymous) consultant clearly works deep inside the mobile networks, and I get the impression he? she? (claims to be "father to three girls" but that, of course, could be misdirection!) is getting mightily frustrated by mobile telco management which dare not call a spade a spade.

"What stopped O2 from following the others leaders in the UK towards the adoption of 3G services? It was not the fact that the Executive did not have a desire to jump into broadband wireless services. It's the fact that its billing system is a basket case and as such its has forced the Executives to manage the assets better than rivals!", the Evangelist notes.

Read the analysis on his blog. You might also prepare by reading Mark Newman - known as "Thought Leader" title over at Informa - an analysis which Evangelist describes as "a well argued feature on what were the drivers behind the Vodafone CPW split."

And (I hope I'm not giving too much away here!) you might profitably pre-read this... it's HP's announcement, a year ago, of a solution to the problem. It's called HP Services Marketplace, and shows how to update an antique Services Delivery Platform. It's getting traction, at last...