Most of the deals I've come across recently have been up-sized, but not doubled. The coupon may be huge, I don't know yet, but what else could make this so compelling that demand could lead to a supersizing like this, especially with incineration such a strong possibility?

Having presumably already burned a lot of cash on their own company, I'm puzzled as to why the vendors would pony-up for the entire capital increase required to get the deal done, especially when the Greek regulator seems to be giving incumbent OTE more room for maneuver on marketing of bundles.

With regard to upload speeds it is seen that the speeds of mobile technology are higher than those provided by fixed technology.

Bear in mind that if you view these charts after this writing - 30 April, 2009 - they may look very different, but what they show now is Akamai (AKAM) up 10% Thursday, Savvis (SVVS) hanging tough after a 16% rise Wednesday and having more than doubled since its March lows, Switch & Data (SDXC) has also doubled, Rackspace (RAX) up 74% since early March, and Equinix (EQIX) up 68% since its own March nadir.

Sitting at the back of the room, at times I had the sense that the audience's hair was flying back, as if from some powerful blast, or the engines of a UFO landing. In other words, they seemed to be both amazed and shocked by his description of Amazon's approach to building a platform business, the process by which it decided to do so, and the sheer speed with which it has gained traction.

Historically, I think many analysts, including yours truly on some occasions in the past, have argued that telco is a defensive sector in a market downturn (as it was at least for three months following 9/11). It's therefore interesting to note that telco, on a year-to-date basis, is 14th out of 18 sectors (down 26%), and the ones below it are non-bank financials (i.e., consumer credit, et al.), construction and construction materials, retail, and banks.
 

Yes, it was an overstretched, over-leveraged empire which had engaged in a lot of strange M&A and joint ventures with very strange put/call terms with partners. An aggressive 3G license acquisition strategy certainly didn't help the balance sheet, in fact, BT's decline from net cash position to rescue rights issue and de-merger of O2 was nothing short of stunning, if only for the sheer velocity with which it occurred.

See Sky ad 03 07 here, originally uploaded by jimiinc.

Up to now the ongoing disagreements have been an area of concern, but without any visible impact on the share price. Altimo seems to have demonstrated powerfully today that throwing stumbling blocks in Telenor's way to cause uncertainty and a lack of visibility is enough to do serious damage after all - in this case a 9% decline in market cap.

TELN 1-yr chart

What's also interesting is that Google is reportedly the largest occupant of the current largest server farm in the Netherlands, Zernike, just up the road in Groningen. Looks like when planning for its future bandwidth and power demands, Google is a believer in the immortal words of Jerry Lee Lewis: "Enough is good, more is better, and too much is just about right."

Keith has a nice write-up of the Vodafone results, which he refers to accurately as the quarterly game. I can't think of many other companies where the management consistently start the presentation by repeating that they think the KPIs they are about to report are of diminishing relevance in gaging performance. In that case, why not report quarterly results with a full set of financial statements? Surely that's preferable to the current system.

"explore opportunities to provide further services such as Google's VoIP (voice over internet protocol) telephony services, enhanced storage and future product developments,"

Well done, Juris!