2007 14
Ya.com sold to Vodafone
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Ya.com one of the companies I founded and sold to German giant Deutsche Telekom has now been sold to Vodafone for 400 to 500 million euros. I just heard about this and have not done research but I am pretty sure that this acquisition is very important not so much for its value but because it means that Vodafone has finally seen value in the fixed line business. My theory is that the world of macro cells is over and that as we evolve to high speed data in urban centers micro cells will be the norm and for that you need to be a fiber/DSL operator like Ya.com. What worries me is that Ron Sommer of DT promised to me when he bought Ya.com that he would not change its brand, and that promise was kept. Will Vodafone keep the Ya.com brand?
PS: doing this post i discovered that DT has a huge URL in English that is this one http://www.telekom3.de/dtag/cms/content/dt/en/6908;jsessionid=2358FA06CFB3839AE9526B7CDE62B155 so DT here´s a gift for you, try www.fon.gs/dt, it iwill be simpler
PS2: will we make a deal with Vodafone and call it Vodafon?
PS3: Guillermo Mercader did a great job in this deal. I recruited him at the very beginning of Ya.com as a junior financial person and he rose all the way to the top of the company. Congratulations Guillermo!
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Martin Varsavsky on May 14, 2007 ·
Yes, I have been looking at femto cells thinking about femto foneras, and have a vodafone femto at my home in madrid.
j on May 15, 2007 ·
To operate a femtocell you will need however to own the spectrum frequency so that it can handover calls to the macro and vice-versa. For regulatory purposes it will be a residential base station/node b and not an access point.
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Sergio Fogel on May 14, 2007 ·
Martin,
There is a technology that will probably get you excited (if you don’t know it yet). It is called “FemtoCells”. Think of it as a box similar to a wireless router, only instead of WiFi, it works as a tiny GSM/3G cell, installed at home. It connects to the world through the Internet. So, when you are at home, your normal cell phone is “roaming”.
Combine it with La Fonera and you have a killer.The technology is still in early stage, and it will probably never reach the pricing of WiFi, but even at $200 it can shake the world. The big question is how regulators will treat it.
Sergio