Update: I’ve added some links to the pieces that I’ve done since on the blog.

I attended the Ericsson North American analyst event yesterday and came back with lots of ideas for pieces to write over the next couple of months. One or two of them may end up being blog posts here but the rest will likely be content published for Ovum’s paying customers (I’ll try to share some snippets here regardless). Here is a list of most of them:

• 5 things regulators can do to help telecoms to continue to grow in a sluggish economy. This was sparked by some comments from one of the speakers at the Ericsson event who talked about regulators screwing up markets - and it made me realise that much of Ovum’s regulatory content (which now sits within my practice) is pretty much after-the-fact commentary rather than prescriptive advice for regulators.
• The impact of a billion new middle class consumers on the global telecoms market. The 1 billion number is the estimate of a number of (non-telecom) analysts about the additional members of the ‘middle class’ (whatever that means on a global scale) who will come out of China, India and other emerging markets in the next few years.
• How real are economies of scale and scope in telecoms? We talk about this a lot as if it’s an obvious fact of life in telecoms, but I’m not sure much analysis has been done on how real the impact is compared with the price (specifically, acquisition and integration expenses and associated disruption) that is often paid to achieve them. Not yet sure how to measure that but it’ll be an interesting challenge.
• Advertising and its impact on the telecoms market. Much has been made of the entry of Google and others into the telecom market, and their potential for disrupting traditional business models with advertising-funded, free-to-the-consumer services. Much has also been made of the opportunity for mobile advertising and other forms of advertising telcos can take advantage of. But how big is the advertising pie really, and how much impact will it have on telcos?
• Bandwidth and storage. Since both the bandwidth available to consumers and the price of storage are vastly improving at a rapid pace, what is the future of content delivery likely to look like? Does cheap storage enable models where vast amounts of content are distributed to users under lock and key, and they merely unlock them by paying for what they use? Or does the availability of abundant bandwidth (including increasingly wirelessly) mean we are likely to use streaming to obtain content? In all likelihood the answer is both, but I’m interested in the mix of the two.
• Mobile broadband overtakes fixed broadband. Ericsson makes much of the fact that mobile broadband will overtake fixed broadband in terms of subscribers next year. In practical terms, there are multiple users for every fixed broadband subscriber, so that’s not as straightforward as it sounds, but increasingly the world will be made up of as many mobile Internet users as fixed ones - how will this change the shape of the Internet, the way websites are designed, the way content is displayed and delivered?
• Inertia as a factor in telecom. I’m constantly struck by how many standalone long-distance subscribers AT&T, Verizon ( through MCI) and Sprint still have even several years after they stopped marketing services (because of DO NOT CALL) and with local incumbents aggressively marketing bundles of local and long-distance. This is a reminder of the power of inertia among users slowing market shifts and preserving calm even in the face of dramatic changes at the leading edge.

• A review of the BlackBerry Bold (still haven’t done this but did one on the Storm here). I was just sent one of these by RIM - thanks RIM, as always. I’ve been playing with it a bit already but only just got it hooked up to my corporate email account. So I’ll be playing with it some more and doing a review of sorts here on the blog (not much call for this sort of thing in Ovum’s published content). Particularly keen to compare its performance with the iPhone, which has replaced my Curve as current phone of choice. Might make that either an audio or video post - haven’t decided yet.

If you have any ideas, input or suggestions for any of these pieces please let me know - I’d love to hear it. If you’re interested in any particular piece let me know that too and I can let you know when I’ve written it.