EncryptoTel weekly digest(13.01.19)
Amazon is getting ahead of Microsoft, Apple is inferior to Google, iPhones are getting cheaper in China, and mobile operators in the US are arguing over the naming of 5G networks.
Huawei employee is accused of espionage In Poland.
On January 11, Polish authorities arrested Wan Weizin, an employee of the Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei. He is accused of espionage.
The company hurried to report that the detained employee was no longer working and was fired. “His alleged actions are irrelevant to the company,” Huawei said in a statement, adding that “this incident has damaged Huawei’s reputation.”
Polish authorities also arrested a former high-ranking employee of the Polish Internal Security Agency, who worked for the mobile operator Orange Polska SA. Both detainees will remain in custody for three months.
The espionage scandal around Huawei has been around for several months now, but tempers only rise, as more countries are getting involved. Just to remind you, that at the end of last year, the US authorities sent a letter to the allied governments calling to end cooperations with Huawei, which were accused of introducing spyware chips into telecommunications equipment in the US.
Amazon has become the largest public company in the world.
January 7, Amazon.com Inc. overtook Microsoft Corp. and became the largest public company in the world by capitalization.
E-commerce stocks rose 3.4% during the trading session, and market capitalization reached $ 797 billion. Although this is below Amazon’s record market capitalization, which exceeded $ 1 trillion in September, for the first time, Amazon was able to confidently overtake Microsoft.
The third place in terms of capitalization was Alphabet, which owns Google. Apple dropped to fourth place with $ 702 billion, although last fall Apple’s capitalization exceeded $ 1.1 trillion.
Chinese retailers cut iPhone prices by almost a quarter
Several Chinese online retailers have cut prices on some iPhone models by up to 22% this week, including such popular online platforms as JD.com and Suning. So, JD.com lowered prices on the iPhone 8 by 22% to 3,999 yuan ($ 590), and on the iPhone 8 Plus — by about 20% to 4,799 yuan ($ 710).
The decline in prices came amid a shocking statement from Apple: the company lowered its revenue forecast in Q1 2019 for the first time in 15 years from $ 89–93 billion to $ 84 billion. The company explained this by low iPhone sales in China. Because of this, Apple shares on January 3 fell by more than 9%. According to Canalys, Apple’s market share in the Chinese smartphone market declined from 12.5% in 2015 to 7.8% in the first three quarters of 2018.
Sales of the latest iPhone models in China are also adversely affected by the fact that Huawei and other local competitors offer models with similar characteristics at lower prices.
AT & T US mobile operator has been criticized for advertising the 4G LTE network under the sign of 5G
AT & T officially renamed its 4G LTE network to “5G Evolution” in early January, stating that this would be the part of the network that supports LTE-Advanced: carrier aggregation, 4 × 4 MIMO and 256 QAM. At the same time, there is no mentioning of a full-fledged transition to the 5G network. Some users will simply see the corresponding “5G E” icon on the screen, although the network will continue to use 4G LTE.
And the real 5G network, which AT & T does not yet have, will be called “5G +”.
Other major US mobile operators Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon have criticized and ridiculed AT & T’s decision. In particular, Verizon has published an “open letter” in key American publications, stating that “when we talk about 5G, we are referring to the real 5G.”
Hundreds of accounts, thousands of minutes of conversations
Two weeks have passed since the launch of EncryptoTel virtual PBX with the integrated blockchain services. Preliminary results demonstrate that the demand for our services and platform is high on the market, both from individuals and legal entities:
- 970 new accounts have been created, 690 of which were confirmed,
- users have purchased 40 virtual numbers,
- 1580 total calls, 430 of which were lasting over a minute.
Some customers took advantage of our discount offer and paid for calls using ETT platform tokens, receiving a 10% discount. Given that the launch took place on the Christmas and New Year holidays, we consider the results to be successful.
The full launch of EncryptoTel took place on December 26, 2018. There is still a lot of work ahead, but we are happy to see that the results of our efforts are beneficial and in demand.
