Hints and tips:
...“Technology is changing everything . . . we have to build our own road forward.”...
...The spectrum was originally parcelled up and handed out for nominal sums in the 1980s to nascent wireless operators, such as BT Cellnet and Racal Electronics, the defence company that gave birth to Vodafone...
...O2, for example, was once the gold standard in telecoms rebranding programmes after its transformation from the dowdy BT-owned network Cellnet under the new name propelled it from fourth in the UK market...
...The Bellboy was launched in the US in 1962, followed by Motorola’s Pageboy in 1964, as telecoms companies pushed the technology into the consumer market....
...The former British telecoms monopoly has been without a strong mobile business since the demerger of its Cellnet division more than a decade ago....
...Airwave was founded by BT but was spun out as a separate company following the demerger with Cellnet, which became O2. Macquarie bought Airwave from O2 in 2007 for £1.7bn....
...But a series of bad investments and the demerger of its Cellnet division in 2001 left the group trailing its peers....
...The former state monopoly demerged the O2 business – then called Cellnet – in 2001 as part of a large scale restructuring of the company, which was crippled by debt following an ill-fated expansion....
...Thirteen years after it was forced to spin off its Cellnet mobile business under pressure from shareholders concerned about the group’s high debt levels, BT has returned to the market with some pomp, sporting...
...A return to owning a mobile network would mark a dramatic volte face for BT, whose Cellnet wireless division was spun out as a separate company in 2001 and bought four years later by Telefónica of Spain...
...However, the 2002 spin-off of O2, which was then called Cellnet, put the mobile business on the back burner as BT instead relied on rebadging networks provided by operators such as Vodafone....
...While the tech stocks in his China trust may not all have paid off in the same way, his predictions about technology have been proved right overall....
...The former state monopoly had been under pressure to demerge O2, which was then known as Cellnet, by shareholders, given its high debt at the time....
...Over the past five years, BT has spent more than £5bn on research and development and has a history in mobile telecoms given its Cellnet venture in the 1980s....
...auction next year: “We have the keenest interest in getting the spectrum, but it has never been available before 2013 anyway, so under the current programme there should not be a delay in rolling out the technology...
...Britain has missed the opportunity to be an early adopter of mobile networks based on fourth generation wireless technology that enables fast web browsing on smartphones....
...Detective Superintendent Bob Wishart said crime gangs were targeting the latest consumer technology....
...Alex King, head of technology, media and telecoms at HgCapital, said the private equity group would “provide material cash funding” for Manx Telecom’s pension scheme....
...Last month’s Budget said spectrum, the radio bandwidth all telecoms systems require to operate, was ”critical to the future of mobile communications technologies”....
...Meanwhile, BT’s global services business, which provides network infrastructure and information technology services to multinationals, remains a work in progress....
...Technology has advanced and such agreements have been struck by Vodafone and others in Spain, Italy and India....
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