Robert Mugabe’s sudden appearance at the ITU telecoms show being held this week in Geneva must have been a considerable embarrassment to most of the event’s organisers. Deflecting the suggestion that his attendance was ‘unheralded’ – the description originally used by Telecom TV, a website – an ITU spokesperson told the Economist Intelligence Unit that the UN agency knew all about his arrival in advance. It seemed most delegates didn’t, however. And the ITU’s failure/reluctance to publicise it was hardly surprising given his notorious reputation.

International sanctions, of course, prevent Mr Mugabe from travelling around Europe at his convenience. Paradoxically, though, he is allowed to attend UN events, and probably grabbed the opportunity to enter Geneva on this pretext, check his Swiss bank account and buy some chocolates for a few Zanu-PF zealots.

What made the ITU look particularly bad was its treatment of Mr Mugabe at the event. They couldn’t stop him from railing idiotically against the West (which, during a ministerial session, he nonsensically blamed for using the airwaves to destabilise Zimbabwe). But did they have to be so courteous? The spectacle of Houlin Zhao, the ITU’s deputy secretary general, graciously leading Mr Mugabe around the exhibition floor left a nasty taste in this attendee’s mouth.

But if the ITU came out of this badly, the behaviour of various government figures was truly disgraceful. Any minister worth his badge would have quit the session to which Mr Mugabe was invited. Disappointingly, a few were seen shaking him by the hand as he entered the room.

In Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where most of the population have never seen or used a fixed line, the mobile phone is more than a tool for communication. It’s a business tool, it’s a fashion statement and it’s becoming of a mobile social networking tool. And that’s where ringbacks come in.

Like mobile banking before it, the ringback phenomena has started in the developing world and is now moving east.  Ringbacks - alternatively called caller tunes, answer tones and CBRT (for callback ring tones) - are the tunes that are activated when someone calls you. So they hear this pre-selected music instead of the brrng, brrng that we’ve all been listening to since the very first call was made more than 100 years ago.

Even better for operators keen to maximise their revenue streams, ringbacks can be selected for each and every contact in a phone – or for groups of contacts. So when your mum rings, she gets 10 seconds of Chopin, but when your boyfriend rings, he gets T-Pain. This might like sound a must-have for people lives full of gadgets. But for people whose only gadget is a phone, it’s mega.  Asiacell in Iraq for example, launched Melody Service this month allowing customers to replace the traditional ringtone with songs and jingles of their choice

According to UK-based Juniper Research, ringbacks will soon catch on in the West. In fact, it predicts ringback sales will outstrip ringtones next year. Another piece of good news for operators  – and not a bad one for the music industry.

Say goodbye to your subsidised iPhone, your mobile-broadband deal that comes with a free laptop and levels of customer service that could disgrace even the finest international restaurants.

OK, the last is a gross exaggeration, but mobile-phone customers in the UK’s hyper-competitive market have certainly been treated to some extraordinarily generous deals over the last couple of years. Those could soon disappear if Germany’s Deutsche Telekom is eventually persuaded to sell off its struggling T-Mobile UK subsidiary.

According to today’s papers, each of the UK’s three other major operators – Vodafone, France Telecom and Telefónica – is holding out for a deal with its German rival that would make it the market leader by far. Vodafone and Telefónica are each reckoned to have made substantial cash offers of £4bn for T-Mobile UK. France Telecom, meanwhile, is involved in discussions with Deutsche Telekom about merging UK assets in a joint venture.

All would obviously hope to benefit from the cost savings that typically result from M&A activity. But a tie-up or takeover would also give an operator a lot more negotiating power with handset suppliers. With Telefónica’s exclusive deal for Apple’s iPhone thought to be up for discussion, that could be a critical motivator.

No doubt, the regulator’s preferred outcome would be for a joint venture between third-placed France Telecom and trailing T-Mobile. A takeover by Telefónica or Vodafone, after all, would give rise to a company controlling about 40% of the market.

Even so, any deal will upset regulatory plans for redistribution of spectrum, which had counted on there being five UK operators (including the smaller Hutchison 3). With mobile operators expected to play an important role in extending broadband access across Britain, authorities will fear the consequences of losing a competitor.

And so will savvier consumers.

One of the most interesting things about Apple’s deal to sell the iPhone in China is that it spotlights the shortcomings of China’s government in promoting a home-grown mobile-phone technology.

Apple, of course, likes to do its iPhone deals with operators that are market leaders (AT&T in the US, Telefónica in Spain and the UK, Deutsche Telekom in Germany and France Telecom in France). In China, the obvious choice would have been China Mobile – not only the market leader by far but also the biggest mobile-phone company in the world by customers.

China Mobile, however, is stuck with a unusual 3G technology called TD-SCDMA. While most emerging markets have been happy to run with the W-CDMA and EV-DO standards developed in the US and Europe, Chinese authorities preferred to come up with their own 3G standard. The hope was this would provide a boost to Chinese tech firms, and prevent the likes of Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola from taking over. It might also reduce the royalty fees that makers of 3G equipment typically pay to Qualcomm, a US chip company behind much of the technology used in the W-CDMA and EV-DO standards.

But the outcome has been a troubling one for China’s leaders. For a start, TD-SCDMA got off to a bad start, as any commercially unproven technology is likely to do, with customers complaining about service quality and a number of technical glitches.

What’s more, Huawei and ZTE, China’s two biggest hardware companies, have become international firms in their own right, buoyed by sales of EV-DO and W-CDMA equipment to operators around the world. At the same time, western rivals have made tentative investments in TD-SCDMA, preventing Huawei and ZTE from monopolising that space.

Ultimately, though, TD-SCDMA does not have the same degree of industry support as the two older 3G technologies, and that leaves China Mobile at a disadvantage. Its network equipment is likely to be more expensive, for one thing. And most of the world’s cutting-edge handsets have not been customised to work on TD-SCDMA networks. The iPhone is no exception.

For China Mobile, this would not matter as much if it weren’t for the fact that Chinese authorities – instinctively protectionist but worried about the consequences of protectionism – allowed China’s two smaller mobile-phone operators to compete using the international 3G standards. Telecom got an EV-DO licence, while Unicom was permitted to roll out W-CDMA.

The upshot is that Apple did its iPhone deal with China Unicom, giving the operator a huge advantage over its bigger rival in the nascent 3G market. Meanwhile, China Mobile is trying to persuade handset makers outside China to come up with more attractive TD-SCDMA handsets, while struggling to convince customers its 3G service is just as good as its rivals’.

All things considered, this is one government scheme that looks to have badly backfired.

An article in the Financial Times claims that Apple is planning to upgrade its popular Ipod Touch to a 10″ tablet-sized device by Christmas. As a new user of the palm-sized version, I’m really hoping that story is true.

Indeed, the only thing wrong with the iPod Touch is that it’s a mite small given all the great things you can do with it. Within minutes of switching it on within range of a WiFi connection, I had checked my email, uploaded the latest edition of the New York Times, IM’d with a friend on Facebook, found an app which provided the recipe for that night’s dinner, downloaded Skype, and checked out the weather forecast for the next five days. And that was before I connected it to a PC.

Others might fault it for its relatively small 8 Gigabytes of memory but it took all my music, once I did connect it up to my PC. The real joy of the iPod Touch (for anyone within reach of WiFi) is its ability to put the basic PC functions into your hand. For me, turning on my PC is no longer an invitation to have fun. PCs these days are clunky beasts, full of security warnings and annoying pop-ups and, for most of us, a  reminder of the tasks we haven’t done. With the iPod Touch, you can pick and choose your responsibilities – yes to email, no to internet banking. Bliss!

Even better, through the Apps store, you can connect to any one of dozens of enjoyable passions – reading, cooking, hobbies, music, games, and so on. £1.00 for the complete works of Dickens? What’s wrong with that? Reading on its small screen is a breeze, especially for the squashed commuter who can’t open a newspaper during the daily trips on public transportation. My only hassle is that the keyboard function is a bit fiddly. The bigger version, one hopes, will solve that problem.

Try explaining to an octogenarian in east London why she should pay for her countryside-dwelling grandson to receive broadband, when she has no interest in the service herself. UK communications minister Lord Carter is unlikely to do that, especially as it has just been revealed that he will shortly stand down from his position, but he does expect her to stump up the cash.

Indeed, the most criminal aspect of his new Digital Britain report, published today, was its recommendation that all fixed-line phone users be required to pay another £6 a year to fund the deployment of new broadband technology. The aim is to ensure that all households in the UK can receive a broadband service of at least 2Mbps by 2012.

While £6 a year is unlikely to cause much pain for most households, the principle is outrageous. A recent Ofcom survey indicated that 13% of UK residents have no interest in receiving broadband whatsoever. And yet those with ordinary phone lines will be expected to give money to privately owned companies – in which they have no stake – so that others can receive a service. What’s more, that money will be wasted if few new customers sign up, as seems likely.

The recommendations are also highly discriminatory. Households that use only mobile phones and a mobile-broadband service from the likes of Vodafone or T-Mobile, and no fixed-line services, will not have to cough up the 50p a month. Those who use no communications technology other than BT’s plain old telephony service will, even though many are worse off and attribute less importance to high-tech services than their mobile-only peers.

Despite these obvious anomalies and injustices, market watchers are busy complaining about Lord Carter’s ‘poverty of ambition’, and trying to explain why 2Mbps per household isn’t good enough. Some are even arguing that high-speed broadband is as important a utility as electricity or water. Seems it’s not only the bonus-hungry bankers who’ve lost touch with reality.

From our colleague at Tech.view on www.economist.com:
Your correspondent likes the idea of being able to cry for help. The obvious answer is to carry a satellite phone coupled to a GPS tracker when hiking the Santa Monica mountains. In an emergency, friends and family would then know what had happened and precisely where you were stranded.

So far, however, satellite phones have been largely for commercial and government users—oil companies, news organisations, fishing fleets, armed forces, emergency services, plus well-financed expeditions to remote regions. Costing thousands of dollars and weighing a pound or more, satellite phones have not exactly been on the must-have list for weekend wanderers.

What of late has made them more practical—and cheaper—has been the trend to low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites in place of geostationary ones “hovering” 23,000 miles (36,000 kilometres) above the equator. Unlike the geo-sats that circle the Earth once every 24 hours (and so appear stationary in the sky), LEO satellites zoom overhead at an altitude of 400 to 700 miles once every 100 minutes or so. With each satellite being in line of sight for less than ten minutes, dozens of them are needed to ensure users always have at least one satellite to communicate with at any given moment.

Being closer to the ground, less power is needed to beam messages up to LEO satellites and back to receivers elsewhere on the planet. That translates into smaller antennas and cheaper handsets. There is also much less annoying “latency”—the gap between words uttered by the speaker and heard by the listener—that mars phone calls made via geostationary satellites.

Unfortunately LEO systems are very capital-intensive because they need a constellation of satellites. They also require a long lead-time to get all the birds built, launched and perched in their correct orbits—a killer for cash-flow.

No surprise, then, that quite a few satellite-phone companies have gone bust trying to provide a commercial service. Motorola’s Iridium network, which used 66 satellites in near-polar orbits to blanket the globe, was in service for barely a year before going out of business in 1999. An earlier attempt by Globalstar, which relied on 44 satellites in orbits inclined at 52º to the equator (to focus on the more populated parts of the planet), limped along until 2002.

Nowadays, both are back in business under new ownership, having been bought out of bankruptcy for a fraction of their former cost. Shorn of their early debts, they have bounced back by selling voice and data connections for satellite phones, pagers, computer modems and transceivers for tracking mobile assets such as aeroplanes, trains, trucks, trailers and shipping containers.

For consumers who have grown used to broadband speeds, satellite phones and modems are a reminder of the dawn of the internet age. But while 9.6 kilobits a second may be way too slow for uploading video clips to YouTube or downloading music from iTunes, it is good enough for voice as well as many a global tracking or messaging application.

Meanwhile, big improvements are on their way. The first generation of phone satellites are coming to the end of their natural life. After about eight years in orbit, their solar arrays have deteriorated through bombardment by radiation and space debris. The satellites are also running out of fuel for nudging them back into their correct orbit and orientation, or steering them closer to siblings that have conked out so that they might take on the dead sibling’s work.

A second generation of satellites, which are about to be launched by Globalstar atop trusty old Soyuz rockets from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, will whisk data around the planet at a far more respectable speed of 250 kilobits a second.

By later next year, when Globalstar has all 24 of its new satellites in orbit, high-quality voice and 3G data transmission will be possible from anywhere on the planet, except for polar latitudes. In making broadband available more or less anywhere anytime, Globalstar reckons it is six years ahead of the competition.

Your correspondent almost cannot wait. Globalstar already sells a tempting little $170 device called SPOT, which can send your GPS location to friends and family, along with a preprogrammed message and a link to Google Maps that lets them track your progress.

Imagine the possibilities when such a hand-held gizmo can beam video as well as voice, GPS location and instant messaging. Your correspondent will be posting his progress through the canyons and along the ridge lines on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube—with the peace of mind that comes from knowing his exact location and condition can be beamed instantly to loved ones in the outside world.

Will any mobile-phone operator look at Iran the same way again? ‘Untapped potential’ is an expression it still brings to mind in the telecoms community. But after stripping Etisalat of its newly won mobile-phone licence, it is also building up a less favourable reputation as the scourge of the private-sector investor. Years earlier, of course, it had done the same thing to Turkcell.

In that instance, the suspicion was that Turkey’s close ties with Israel (then) incurred the displeasure of Iranian president and holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. The upshot was that Turkcell’s licence ended up in the hands of South African operator MTN.

This time round, Etisalat has been accused by the Iranian state of ‘not fulfilling its obligations’. Such a criticism is normally directed at telecoms companies when they’ve failed to meet coverage targets set by the government, or not introduced a new service they’ve been authorised to offer. Etisalat, however, has barely had time to celebrate its licence win, so that can’t be the explanation.

According to the AFP, Mohammad Soleymani, Iran’s telecoms minister, claims Etisalat still hasn’t coughed up the €300m it owes for its licence. That would certainly explain why Iranian authorities aren’t happy. Yet Etisalat insists otherwise.

This being Iran, the true story may never emerge. But Kuwait’s Zain has been the immediate beneficiary of Etisalat’s misfortune. Having come second during the original tender, it is now in talks with Iranian regulatory bodies about picking up where Etisalat was slung out. Zain shareholders will have to ask whether Iran’s huge promise is worth the risk.

Big intake of breath – Microsoft has just announced its first drop in sales in the   company’s 34-year history. According to the Financial Times, this brings to an end the “most dramatic uninterrupted growth stories in modern business.”

Or does it? Are revenues the only way to measure a company’s growth? Surely, given what’s going on globally, wealth-creation should also be a factor. And in this regard, the folks at Microsoft are still winners. Take a look at cash on hand – at the end of the third quarter, Microsoft had a cool US$25.3bn parked on its balance sheeet, up  US$23.6bn the previous June. According to Google Finance, the company sports a gross margin of 84.2%, operating margins of 39% and provides a return on equity of 50%, figures most companies would drool over.

The other figure that continues to go up at Microsoft is R&D spending. In the third quarter, despite making job cuts and other cost-saving measures, the group increase R&D spending from US$2bn to US$2.2bn in the quarter to the end of March compared to the same quarter last year.

With this kind of cash-generating power and the continued emphasis on R&D, Microsoft has an excellent chance of finding more motors for growth for the years ahead.  The recent drop in sales – all of 6% – were primarily due to declines in the PC operating systems business, which fell 16%. The company’s internet activities were also off by 14%.   The message here is simple – in the wake of its the failure of its bid for Yahoo, Microsoft needs to  find another likely partner or innovate its way into the world of web-based products and services.  

Luckily, it’s got plenty of resources to fulfill both of those goals and more.

A flood of announcements this week from the web 2.0 wunderkinds. YouTube is striking all sorts of pioneering content-sharing arrangements with film and recording studios (making it what – a repackager of professionally made content?); eBay is talking about putting Skype on the market (before it becomes so ubiquitous it makes no money); and Facebook, the ever-so popular but probably quite poor social-networking website, is apparently turning down funding offers that value it at about US$4bn (founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly thinks it’s worth US$5bn).

Anyone would think it’s 2000 all over again – not the depths of the “worst recession since the 1930s”, as we’re so often reminded.

Don’t get me wrong – I admire the innovation behind all of these companies. But I find it hard to understand how anyone can see a bright future for them unless there is a fundamental shift in the way consumers interact with the internet – that is, unless people start paying for usage.

Perhaps counter intuitively, given it’s the only one that customers do pay to use, Skype is the most likely to burn out. It’s quite literally becoming a victim of its own success, as the saying goes. People only pay Skype when they use it to call friends on mobile phones or old-fashioned landlines. So every time one of those Luddites signs up to the service, Skype is losing a potential source of revenue. Seeing it out promoting its new application for the iPhone is a bit like watching a lemming in a long preparation for its cliff jump.

The others, however, are still entirely dependent on revenue from advertising – a market that is shrinking in the throes of the current economic turmoil. Now I know that internet advertising is holding up better than more traditional forms, but YouTube, according to various pundits, is still loss-making, and Facebook might be, too. Mr Zuckerberg insists its financial position is sound, and turning down a generous offer of funding would suggest he’s not desperate. He might, on the other hand, just be deluded. And before rumours of his investment rebuff began to circulate, he’d been sniffing around the money trail like a frustrated bloodhound tracking an elusive scent.

What’s certainly the case is that many advertisers don’t like what they see from either company. Big brands have taken one look at some of the weirdness that gets posted on YouTube and decided they don’t want to be in the same data centre, let alone feature their logo on the same web page. Facebook’s efforts to lure advertisers have been similarly in vain – principally because advertisers so far have been largely ignored by the Facebook crowd.

I think the deal between studios and YouTube just shows that both are getting pretty desperate (and locking up the Pirate Bay four isn’t going to dramatically improve the fortunes of the record industry). And I think Mr Zuckerberg is a greedy fool if he’s valuing FaceBook at 25% more than some generous (and perhaps naïve) investors.

The potential solution to both companies’ problems is to start charging customers. They’re reluctant to do so, of course, because their core teens-to-twenties audience doesn’t have much disposable income and has grown up using the internet for nothing (apart from the cost of access).

But that’s actually pretty cowardly. If people value something enough, they’ll stump up a small amount to use it. Let’s see Mr Zuckerberg figure out how much his 200m customers are willing to spend, and then we’ll have a fair idea of what Facebook – and its ilk – might be worth.