As both Vodafone and Kabel Deutschland said on Wednesday in near-identical statements, the British telecoms giant has made a preliminary approach regarding a possible takeover, but “there is no certainty that any offer will ultimately be made nor as to the terms on which any such offer might be made.”

The Financial Times has noted that Vodafone has been eyeing up Kabel Deutschland since February at least, and also that John Malone’s Liberty Global – which recently gobbled up Virgin Media in the UK to become the largest ISP outside China — might turn out to be a rival bidder.

For Vodafone, the second-biggest cellular carrier in Germany, Kabel Deutschland might prove a handy way to step up its fight against Deutsche Telekom, the country’s leading carrier on both mobile and fixed-line fronts.

Vodafone already has several million broadband subscribers in the country – funnily enough, it signed an agreement to resell Deutsche Telekom’s up-to-100Mbps VDSL connectivity just last month — but Kabel Deutschland has around 8.5 million subscribers, many of whom (such as myself) are already basking in the glow of similar speeds.

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That’s kind of unsurprising, as EE currently has a monopoly on 4G in the UK — the carrier has been “refarming” all the lovely 2G 1800MHz spectrum it already holds for 4G services, and rivals will only enter the LTE game later this summer using other spectrum they bought at auction earlier this year. Still, EE’s numbers seem to show an acceleration in takeup, as less than 2 months ago it reported a total of 318,000 LTE subscribers.

That said, with those rivals (Vodafone, O2 and Three) about to launch their own 4G services, EE seems aware that it needs to evolve its own offering. So it’s about to start providing two new twists, namely shared 4G plans – for multi-device or multi-person use – and its first pay-as-you-go 4G plans, for tablets and laptops only.

Pricing and availability are yet to be announced, but EE is coming to the end of its 4G-exclusivity honeymoon phase and it would be foolish to make these offerings too pricey. Of course, it would be pretty dumb to make them too cheap either – no-one in the uber-competitive British mobile market wants a race to the bottom just as they spend billions upgrading their networks.

“By the end of June, we will have rolled out 4G across 55 percent of the population, and will continue to switch on new towns and cities,” EE CEO Olaf Swantee said in a statement. ” And with commuters spending an average of 75 minutes travelling every day, EE will also roll out 4G across the busiest airports, commuter routes and shopping centres across the UK.”

EE aims to have 98 percent population coverage by the end of 2014. The next towns and cities on its rollout list are Aberdeen, Bath, Bournemouth, Brighton, Cambridge, Ipswich, Middlesbrough, Northampton, Norwich, Poole, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Swansea and York.

Incidentally, EE says its average 4G download speed is 19.4 Mbps at the moment. That’s decent, but it’s worth noting that its average download speed across both 3G and 4G is a still-respectable 13.6 Mbps — bearing in mind that EE has around 26 million customers, 98 percent of whom will still be on 3G technology, that’s a handy reminder that modern HSPA networks can do a pretty good job too.

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The short answer is no. The Sunday Times (paywall alert) may have billed its story as being about the potential sale of 27 million people’s details to the cops, but the reality is somewhat less alarming. As Ipsos Mori has been forced to explain in response to the exposé:

“In conducting this research we only receive anonymized data without any personally identifiable information… We do not have access to any names, personal address information, nor postcodes or phone numbers. We can see the volume of people who have visited a website domain, but we cannot see the detail of individual visits, nor what information is entered on that domain. We only ever report on aggregated groups of 50 or more customers. We will never release any data that in any way allows an individual to be identified.”

So what does this data tell us? According to the original article, it provides insights based on “gender, age, postcode, websites visited, time of day text is sent [and] location of customer when call is made”.

Reverse engineering

Now, as we discussed recently, it is easier than you might think to de-anonymize data due to the uniqueness of our personal movement patterns — as long as you have the will, the datasets and the pieces of identifying information that can be correlated with the anonymized individuals effectively described in those datasets. So those horrified reactions to the weekend’s revelations are not entirely groundless. They are over-the-top, though.

There is a significant difference between a register of communications (who contacted whom and when) and a pool of anonymized data where the most fine-grained nugget of information that might be reverse-engineered would tell you that Person X visited the Gmail domain while within a 100 meter radius of the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. To assume equivalence between the two ideas is to ignore the elements of intent, will, data-crunching capacity and, frankly, competence. In short, there are far easier ways for the police to track individuals through their handsets, such as just going to the carrier and demanding to do so.

(The Sunday Times said sources claimed “officers had been enthusiastic about the potential for tracking users of pay-as-you-go phones,” but – quality of sources notwithstanding — I suspect those officers may have been slightly overestimating their own data-crunching powers. They may have also overlooked the fact that the operators would have no idea of their pay-as-you-go users’ age or gender, making it near-impossible to tease out an individual from the anonymized mass. Either way, they backed off once the story broke.)

Not damning

And then there’s the matter of this data’s innocent utility. Of all the sources of “big data” that is both largely untapped and genuinely useful, mobile operators must be among the most potentially fruitful. In societies where everyone is carrying a phone, there can be no better way to establish the density and fluidity of traffic flows and footfall. This data is gold dust, not just for retailers, but also for town planners and councils. It shows us how our cities and roads really work, and it can help us make them more efficient and pleasant to live in or use.

I feel a bit sorry for EE in this particular case. After all, its rivals Telefonica (trading as O2) and Vodafone are also offering up their customer data for analytics purposes – Telefonica’s “Dynamic Insights” program is being carried out in partnership with market research firm GfK, while Voda launched its mobile analytics play just last Friday.

“Everyone is doing it” would be a lousy apology in itself, but I don’t think any of these carriers or their partners are doing anything wrong, as long as their datasets are suitably anonymized. If people could feasibly be personally identified from this data, the carriers and their market research partners would instantly find themselves on the wrong side of existing data protection legislation — the fines in the UK for this stuff are pretty paltry, but they would also quickly lose the trust of their customers, so there’s little motivation for the telcos and their partners to cross the line.

It’s great that people are concerned and watchful about their privacy, and long may they continue to be. However, this is a case where the potential benefits of the data are both great and realistically attainable, and where the downsides are so unfeasible as to be worth discounting, at least at this stage. It’s now up to the carriers to explain this to their customers in understandable and honest terms.

There will be great battles worth fighting in the war over our personal data and its exploitation. This ain’t one of them.

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According to a Reuters story this weekend, six institutional investors have protested the $100 billion price tag that Reuters floated last Wednesday. Both of these numbers followed a wack-a-doo rumor from early April that AT&T and Verizon would jointly team up to buy out Vodafone’s 45 percent stake in Verzion in a deal valued at $245 billion. That rumor was reported by the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog. And Verizon denied it.

For those watching at home, it’s possible that you think the media has lost its ever-loving mind, or that somewhere a bored investment banker is sitting back in his ergonomic chair, fingering his Ferragamo tie and cackling with glee. But in general, when these sorts of rumors start hitting the press, it’s part of an aggressive campaign of leaks, where a company (or bank) can float some rumors in hopes of sparking a deal.

Reuters reporters aren’t getting phone calls from Verizon’s board members (although it has happened!); I think they are getting calls from bankers who want to make a deal happen. And it’s a crazy deal with crazy regulatory and possibly tax burdens, but it’s also the right sort of crazy. Verizon and Vodafone’s shared stake in Verizon Wireless has irked both companies for years.

Vodafone needs cash for investments in growing markets and Verizon has been stingy with its dividends. But, as the latest Verizon dividend payment shows, if investors can get Verizon to part with the dollars, Vodafone rewards its shareholders with cash. Meanwhile, Verizon would love to own its network outright if Vodafone would just sell back that stake. But so far Vodafone won’t. Thus, the leaks.

Of course, the two companies have broached the subject of a merger, much like unhappy spouses broach the topic of divorce. But the logistics of the deal — Verizon probably doesn’t want to pay what Vodafone thinks the stake is worth, and each side has shareholders who are, like children, unhappy with a split — have made it too much to think about.

Hence the posturing via blogs and wire services. This is a way of testing the shareholders and perhaps regulators to get a feel for what the deal might entail. This may not come from the companies as a serious play, but rather from bankers who see the fees associated with the deal and understand the lay of the land at both companies. If they can warm up the companies via the media, then they might get a chance at a pretty lucrative deal. That is what bankers get paid to do.

So grab your popcorn, and sit back to enjoy the negotiations between Verizon, Vodafone and whatever financial institution or institutions are selling this sideshow. I suppose it beats wondering how carriers will compensate for the lost of messaging revenue.

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Verizon owns 55 percent of the cellular enterprise, and – according to Reuters’s unnamed sources – it now thinks it can pick up the rest for $100 billion, half of which would come from bank financing and half of which would take the form of Verizon’s own shares. The U.S. firm apparently wants amicable discussions with Vodafone over this, but is willing to “take a bid public” if Voda doesn’t play ball.

I’ve asked Voda for comment on this latest notion, and am interested to see how any potential acceptance of the potential offer would overcome the hurdles faced in the past. The problem there, as another unnamed Vodafone investor previously explained, is that a sale of its share would hit Voda with an enormous capital gains tax bill – which is why a merger seemed more attractive.

As those in the U.K. know all too well, Vodafone is allergic to big tax bills, so let’s see how this latest outbreak of whispering pans out in reality.

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Virgin Media has been providing internet access in Tube stations since the Olympics in mid-2012. The service was initially free for all, but after the Games, Virgin started charging on a daily, weekly or monthly basis for those who aren’t customers of Virgin Mobile or the company’s fixed-line services. EE and Vodafone – respectively, the UK’s first and third-largest mobile carriers — signed up as wholesale partners in November, ensuring that their customers would also get free access.

O2, the second-largest mobile operator, has now done the same, with its customers getting access from June. According to Virgin, those three carriers account for 89 percent of London’s population, leaving only overseas tourists and subscribers of other carriers – notably the smallest of the big four, Three – having to pay up for access.

“Having O2 on board is excellent news for the thousands of people that use the Tube every day,” London Underground strategy chief Gareth Powell said in a statement. “Most customers will now be able to access live travel information or use social media to plan their social life while on the move.”

London Underground also used the announcement to reveal 12 more stations that will be Wi-Fi-enabled, including Baker Street, Bank, Earl’s Court and Sloane Square. The total number of stations bearing connectivity is now 120 (the Tube network has 270 stations, although many aren’t in central London, as the Wi-Fi-enabled ones tend to be).

I’ve asked Three whether it’s talking to Virgin about getting its customers into the scheme, and will add the response in when I get it.

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However, late on Tuesday evening Verizon issued the following statement, which keeps alive the perennial possibility of Verizon buying out Voda’s stake in their joint venture, Verizon Wireless, but which is also pretty categorical on the latest rumor:

“As Verizon has said many times, it would be a willing purchaser of the 45 percent stake that Vodafone holds in Verizon Wireless. It does not, however, currently have any intention to merge with or make an offer for Vodafone, whether alone or in conjunction with others.”

The denial knocked down Voda’s share price by – at the time of writing – 2.2 percent on intra-day trading. That said, according to Bloomberg, the rumor brought a 6.1 percent bump on Tuesday, so for now it did more good (for Voda’s investors) than harm.

According to Reuters, the problem with the Verizon-buying-out-Vodafone’s-stake scenario is that the $115 billion transaction would land Voda with a $20 billion tax bill – hence the idea of carrying out a merger instead. Apparently that’s now not going to fly, so it’s back to the drawing board.

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In the U.S., this is a new thing. It was only in December that T-Mobile USA announced its abandonment of smartphone subsidies, much to the interest of other players such as Verizon, but in Western Europe things have moved on quite a bit further. In fact, according to new research from Informa Telecoms & Media, almost 30 operators there have already dropped handset subsidies for some or most customers.

What’s taking the place of those subsidies? Leasing and financing plans, such as Vodafone’s Red Hot and O2 Germany’s My Handy schemes. According to Informa analyst Francesco Radicati, this makes it easier for operators to cope with the growing popularity of expensive smartphones:

“The rising cost of devices like the iPhone means operators have to pay increasingly large subsidies to offer ‘free’ phones. Financing allows operators to continue offering phones for a low up-front price without subsidizing them; as an added bonus, it makes it easier to market smartphones to consumers on pay-as-you-go.”

Why does this matter? Partly because it spells the end for lengthy contract lock-in periods — something operators have to consider anyway due to new consumer protection laws in countries such as Denmark — but also because it means a major shift in consumers’ perception of smartphone costs.

Absorbing handset costs into the associated monthly contract payments creates the illusion of the handsets being cheap or even free. This illusion has been handy in some ways — perhaps the smartphone revolution would not have been possible at scale without it — but ultimately it distorts the market.

Expensive toys don’t really come for free, and pretending that they do doesn’t help anyone. Two-year contract terms should not be the norm. Monthly payments should reflect only the service that the consumer gets in return; nothing more. On top of that, the need to absorb more and more upfront handset costs certainly doesn’t do much for carriers’ ability to invest in their networks. If subsidies really are on their way out, then good riddance to them.

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Joyn (technically known as Rich Communications Services or RCS) is an industry-wide initiative designed to counter third-party applications such as WhatsApp by augmenting the traditional voice-and-text functionality offered by the carrier. It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense unless your contact’s carrier also supports it – and so far, only users in Spain and South Korea can be sure that theirs does.

Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom are the two biggest carriers in Germany, though, and both now support Joyn. That means quite a lot of people in the country will be able to use the service, the features of which are free. As in other deployments, initial usage will have to be through a special app – the Android version is available now, and iOS will follow soon – while upcoming handsets from manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia will have Joyn baked in.

It’s too early to tell how successful Joyn will be at this early stage. It will certainly have a tough time in the U.S., where so far only MetroPCS has set it live. In South Korea, though, operator SK Telecom said in February that it had garnered a million Joyn users in just a couple of months since launch.

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