CBC is reporting, “Google launches Nexus One in Canada“. Good news for WIND Mobile customers.
By the way, I will write more about my WIND Mobile experiences when I can find some time. I’ve become a WIND customer since last week. I am so glad that I didn’t stay on with Bell Mobility and signed that 3-year contract.
If you are going to get a Nexus One in Canada, please leave a comment and share your experiences.
Ref: Google’s blog entry about shipping Nexus One to Canada.
“”Today for Tomorrow”, produced in Sweden by Ericsson Telecommunications back in 1985.” [HT dailywireless.org]
Filed under: advertising, Telecom, Video, YouTube 
Updated: The executive summary of the National Broadband Plan is out today, and in addition to the stuff we’ve already covered, we finally know how the FCC plans to treat the issue most responsible for the current state of broadband in the U.S. — the lack of competition. The FCC has proposed collecting more data, which is good, but what matters is how it uses that data, which isn’t outlined in the plan. If the FCC uses the data it hopes to collect as a means to rule and impose conditions on mergers, as well as enforce certain polices around special access reform or sharing fiber, then that’s going to have an impact.
Despite outdated maps showing that most areas are hotbeds of competition, the FCC has no real data on which Internet service providers serve individual homes, what those ISPs charge and what speeds they deliver. We’ve discussed the fallacies of spending $7.2 billion in government money toward better broadband without such data, and have called for such data for years. But now that the FCC plans to get it, what else will they do to enforce competition?
One element is a broadband certification program — or a so-called “Schumer box” for broadband — that gives a defined format for broadband that shows customers what they should be getting for their dollar. So instead of paying $45 a month for speeds advertised as up to 7 Mbps, but which really average out at 3 Mbps, the FCC would require that I get a more accurate assessment of the service, based on reality. Other elements include:
Taken together, better information about broadband speeds and pricing, special access reform, making it easier to build out municipal fiber, and open set-top boxes will likely have the greatest impact on consumers, while the ability to get better data on services could have the most far-reaching effect if the FCC decides to use that information to promote competition. For more details, we’ll have to wait for and read the several hundred pages of the complete plan coming out tomorrow.
Update: Other than competition, the plan also includes a requirement that 100 million homes should have access to 100 Mbps down (which we knew), but also requires 50 Mbps upload speeds — a real coup. We’ve written about the need for better upstream speeds, and by requiring that, the FCC is pushing the cable operators and telcos to allocate far more broadband capacity, especially in cable systems that rely on DOCSIS 3.0. Cable companies and those deploying fiber can reach this goal, but those using copper will be left behind.
Foreign ownership is a hot topic in Ottawa these days because of controversy over non-Canadian investment in the telecom sector. The relaxation of barriers to international money has some Canadian nationalists aroused, but Stephen Gordon, an economics professor at Laval, says the worries are misplaced. He cites a 2005 study by Statistics Canada that finds foreign-controlled plants are more productive, innovative and advanced than domestic-controlled operations.
Gordon, who co-produces the always fascinating Worthwhile Canadian Initiative blog, quotes from a lecture by Dan Trefler of the Rotman School of Business that finds Canadian managers consistently put less weight on education than U.S. managers do. Fewer than one in three Canadian managers have a university degree while almost half of U.S. managers do.
All of this suggests that a dose of foreign management may be just what’s needed to get full value out of Canadian assets. But before we drop barriers, we may want to ask some further questions. For instance, Canada’s current account performance has been far better than that of the United States over the past few years. If U.S. managers are that much brighter and better educated, why can’t they produce a reliable trade surplus for their own country? And why, if U.S. managers are so superb, are Americans suffering 10% unemployment and the worst downturn since the Great Depression while Canada has fared considerably better?
Freelance business journalist Ian McGugan blogs for the Financial Post
Subscriber growth for both fixed-line broadband and mobile service providers was “pretty decent” in 2009 even despite the faltering economy, according to TeleGeography Research, which released figures for the year this morning. But revenues failed to match that modest rise.
The Washington-based market research firm said the number of worldwide mobile users increased 15 percent last year, while broadband saw a 14 percent boost. However, the 20 largest service providers registered less than 2 percent growth in aggregated annual revenues, TeleGeography said, “most of which was the result of M&A activity,” and fourth-quarter revenues barely surpassed those of the same period in 2008.
But while fourth-quarter growth of fixed-line broadband was slightly less than anticipated — an indication, perhaps, that the short-term market ceiling “may be a little lower than predicted,” according to TeleGeography — wireless rebounded in the second half of the year after bottoming out in the second quarter. Emerging markets such as India and China accounted for the lion’s share of that growth, while more mature markets in Europe and North America slowed as penetration rates neared the saturation point.
TeleGeography’s figures regarding mobile echo some of the findings on U.S. operators released last week by Chetan Sharma. Both reports indicate there’s still plenty of low-hanging fruit for mobile carriers in emerging markets, but growth is becoming stagnant and ARPU (average revenue per user) is decreasing elsewhere. So operators in more mature markets will have to find ways to better monetize the increasing data traffic on their networks. Which means you’ll be paying more for all that great mobile data you’re using.
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Metered Mobile Data Is Coming and Here’s How
Image courtesy TeleGeography
As much as those in Silicon Valley like to avoid politics, it’s becoming increasingly clear that if they want their companies to get ahead, they need to stay tuned to what’s going on in Washington. With that in mind, I’d like to point out three items worth reading today that cover what’s happening in our nation’s capital as it relates to any online business.
First up is The Hill’s interview with Rep. Rick Boucher, the man who will oversee the implementation of the National Broadband Plan if he stays in office. Boucher, the chairman of the House’s Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, is an influential congressman when it comes to broadband policy. He’s up for re-election this year in what’s expected to be a hotly contested race; in the interview he talks about a spectrum inventory bill, how he proposed weakening the plans to take broadcast spectrum for mobile broadband and how he intends to regulate online privacy.
Also in congressional news, Rep. Eric Massa, who was the New York representative that tried to ban tiered pricing by ISPs, resigned today. Stop the Cap provides more details, but Massa, who is battling cancer as well as allegations of ethical misconduct, was paying attention to the broadband consumer even if his legislative efforts there didn’t get very far.
Finally, for those who want to question the Federal Communication Commission’s authority to regulate the Internet — as well as get into a philosophical debate about the status of network transport — read this two-part blog post by Susan Crawford, a respected privacy advocate and the former co-lead on the FCC Agency Review team for the Obama-Biden transition team. Crawford writes about how the FCC, when it determined to regulate the cable companies differently from DSL providers because they provided services and not just transport, may have subsequently boxed itself in when it comes to its ability to regulate those cable providers.
Her second blog post on the topic explores how the agency’s wishy-washy stance on regulating cable is now coming back to haunt it, as exemplified by Comcast challenging its ability to regulate net neutrality in light of the way the FCC had classified the cable service years back. Comcast argues that the FCC can regulate transport providers but not those providing services on top of the transport. As Crawford notes, the FCC can cave to the ISPs or it can reclassify all broadband service under a different jurisdiction that would ultimately put the ISPs in a far more regulated environment — and make their dumb pipe status a regulatory fact.
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Forget Twitter, the Real Firehose is Government
A bullish outlook on BCE Inc. from Barron’s has the stock moving higher.
The closely-followed magazine suggested that the Canadian telecom player’s shares could “easily” trading 10% higher over the next year, offering a percentage return in the high teens.
"In the Olympic Men's Hockey Finals, the Canadian and U.S. teams were both impressive, with the slight but decisive edge going to the team from up north.," the article said. "Enjoying a similar edge: Canada’s BCE, versus the States’ AT&T and Verizon Communications. All are big, integrated, former-monopoly North American telecom companies. And all boast inviting dividend yields, healthy cash flow and strong brands. Yet BCE has the advantage of better growth opportunities and greater capacity to increase cash payouts to shareholders."
It’s hard to grow in a saturated market, but despite 89 percent cell phone penetration in the U.S., AT&T managed to pull out some impressive revenue growth over the past three years, not because it has the iPhone but because it’s been buying other companies. We’ve written about AT&T’s dependence on the iPhone, but this chart from TeleGeography illustrating AT&T’s sales growth over the period — on par with service providers in countries where cell phone subscribers are still growing — is tied primarily to Ma Bell’s acquisitions.
The companies found in the lower part of the chart, which operate in saturated Western Europe markets, are a glimpse of the future for AT&T and even Verizon as U.S. companies run out of acquisition targets. The carriers hope that machine-to-machine communications will save them, but they’re still searching for the right business model as well as compelling applications. I suppose if times get too tough, there’s always Sprint.
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Metered Mobile Data Is Coming and Here’s How
F
orce10, the networking gear maker founded in 1999, filed for an initial public offering today, as part of a rush of companies seeking to hit the public markets while the window seems open. IPO filings are up more than 900 percent in 2010 according to Renaissance Capital, which tracks the IPO market. Despite its relative youth for an IPO filer this year, Force10 represents not a hot new startup seeking access to the public markets, but a grizzled 11-year-old veteran trudging toward an IPO because it simply has to exit, and no buyers have emerged,
At least 13 venture firms firms have invested more than $205 million in Force10 within the last five years alone. The company is seeking to raise $143.75 million through its offering. But given the amount of time its investors have waited, a history of losses, a complicated balance sheet thanks to a series of transactions, and a slew of larger competitors, Force10’s IPO looks a bit like a shotgun wedding.
Force10 sells telecommunications networking gear as well as 10 gigabit Ethernet gear for the data center. It’s the data center market that’s growing most for Force10, although the opportunity to provide aspects of the core network and backhaul components for telecommunications providers as they switch to all-IP architectures is another mid-term opportunity.
Three years ago, after a $60 million Series F round of funding, Om wondered when Force10 would file to go public. But any company that didn’t make it before the fall of 2008, and was stuck staying private thanks to the economic freeze and the credit crunch. In 2009 it purchased Turin, a maker of wireless backhaul gear. It reported pro forma sales (which combined Force10 and its Turin acquisition) of $199.2 million in 2009 and a loss of $76.3 million.
Force10’s IPO may not reflect the return of the big ticket technology IPO as much as it reflects a lack of buyers for the business and the chance to get an exit while IPOs are possible. Instead of comparing it to Tesla, the electric vehicle maker that recently filed to go public, or Silver Spring, a smart grid startup that is expected to file soon, a better comparison would be Calix, the telecommunications gear maker that has raised a similar amount of money in its long history, and filed late last year. Given that too many hot IPOs can overshadow older candidates, perhaps it’s better for Force10 that popular online businesses such as Yelp or Facebook are holding off on IPOs this year.
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Smartphones, including iPhones, were all the rage at SxSW in 2009.
Last year, the hordes of South by Southwest-attending geeks toting iPhones blew out the AT&T network around the convention center in Austin, resulting in dropped calls and crappy connections for many attendees. The subsequent news coverage showed off Ma Bell’s network failures for the entire world (or at least the world that cares about such things.) This year, having activated more than 8.7 million more iPhones since last March’s debacle, AT&T is pulling out all the stops to make sure the digerati have the coverage they want during SXSW 2010. Here’s how.
AT&T worked with SXSW event planners to make sure the system in place will suffice, and it’s not turning its back on the event this year, either. Last year, the complaints caught the carrier off guard, but for 2010 a team of AT&T network engineers will monitor the Austin network 24/7 throughout the duration of the event to make sure it stays up.
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How AT&T Will Deal with iPad Data Traffic
AT&T was named as a “most trusted company in privacy” by a survey of 99,000 consumers, according to the Ponemon Institute, an information security research company. AT&T ranked No. 20 in a survey conducted during the fourth quarter of last year. I flew in late last night from San Francisco, so as first I thought I was seeing things. AT&T, the company called out in 2005 for illegal wiretapping on behalf of the U.S. government, was on a list of companies being honored for privacy?
After a cup of coffee I realized that it was true, and AT&T attributes it all — not to federal immunity and short-term memory loss on behalf of those surveyed — but to improvements to its labyrinthine privacy policies. You see, last summer Ma Bell replaced 17 separate privacy policies with one and now they link to it on every single page of the web site. That’s worth a spot, right? No? Well AT&T even asked its users to comment on the policy before it went into effect. You know, kind of like Facebook did. It also has videos and cut the privacy policy down by 29,000 words.
And the revised privacy policies aren’t terrible (the policy promises an opt-in prior to using deep packet inspection to monitor web surfing), although in most cases the policies adhere to existing federal and state privacy rules rather than go above and beyond them.
However, this is a company that blatantly abused its power at the request of the U.S,. government and even sent emails and web-surfing history to federal officials without telling customers and sans a court order. Is a fresh face on standard privacy policies enough to warrant commendations? Regardless, looks like AT&T’s dollars to found the Future of Privacy think tank is money well-spent.
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Ever break something and wonder what kind of glue you’ll need to fix it? Pacer Technology, which owns Super Glue, has launched a new phone system that allows consumers to scout out the proper adhesive right away. Consumers can call (866) GLUE-911 or text "superglue" to 41411, answer "a series of short questions about the materials to be glued," and get advice on the right product for the job. (The glue maker has also set up Interactive Glue Guides in retail outlets.) Had BrandFreak known about this, she might’ve been able to successfully glue the chair she broke without super-gluing her hands. (We got it off by using a knife to carefully separate all three stuck-together fingers. Yikes!)
—Posted by Elaine Wong
Google last week said it plans to build an experimental fiber-to-the-home network that would deliver speeds of up to 1 Gbps. And this week FCC chairman Julius Genachowski outlined a goal of delivering 100 Mbps broadband to 100 million homes as part a “2020 vision” associated with the National Broadband Plan. However, amid what many perceive as good news for the wired broadband industry, the Telecommunications Industry Association and United States Telecom Association said they would not produce Supercomm, an industry trade show, due to “financial projections.” Translation: Wired broadband is in trouble. And it’s the fault of ISPs and Silicon Valley.
Despite a rollout of faster technology from some cable providers, and Verizon’s continued fiber-to-the-home buildout, the wired broadband world isn’t looking terribly exciting outside Google’s testbed project. A close inspection of the long-range FCC plan doesn’t have me overly inspired, especially as other areas of the world invest in 1 Gbps networks today.
Meanwhile, in the same time two-week period as all of this wired broadband news, the mobile industry’s largest trade show, Mobile World Congress, took place. It was chock-full of the usual mobile players as well as a who’s who of anyone in the tech scene. And issues associated with mobile broadband, from new networks to spectrum shortages (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d) and how to build applications for mobile handsets (GigaOM Pro), were all anyone could talk about.
Who Needs Wires Anyway?
Wired was tired, and mobile was basking in the glow of the spotlight and investment. But even amid the mobile lovefest, a few discordant notes were sounded. For example, Stephen Bye, VP of wireless services at Cox — a cable company that’s deploying a 3G and later a 4G wireless network — emphasized the limits of wireless broadband.
Sure, Cox has a wired network to sell, but Bye has a point when he notes the shortfalls of wireless when compared to wired broadband. Cox’s wireless LTE tests offered speeds between 10 and 25 Mbps, which are much slower than Cox’s wired Docsis 3.0 network that can deliver 50 Mbps or more. He also mentioned the increased demands Cox has seen on its wired network and said that sending that kind of traffic over wireless networks wouldn’t work. And wireless broadband traffic is only going to rise. AT&T already saw its double from 2008 to 2009 and doesn’t expect that rate of growth to slow, even as it uses more and more of its spectrum. And Cisco released information this month expecting mobile traffic to reach 3.6 exabytes per month — 39 times what it was in 2009.
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I happen to agree with Bye, and I don’t have a network to sell, but I think the events of the last weeks paint a pretty depressing picture of broadband in America. And we can only place some of the blame for the lackluster state of broadband on carriers. Some belongs with Silicon Valley and the tech community at large.
Wireless Isn’t The Answer.
For example, the idea that wireless broadband could be a real substitute for wired broadband showcases how crappy our current quality of broadband is. I’ve even weighed whether or not LTE or WiMAX would make a good substitute.
How could I not, when I’m stuck with residential broadband service that delivers 7 Mbps down and 400 kbps up? Wireless services are within striking range of that offering right now. It’s possible I might even get better upload speeds on some wireless networks within the year. My husband is even preparing to dump his pricey T-1 at the office in exchange for WiMAX service from Sprint.
Yes, I have limited choice on the wired side thanks to ISPs failing to invest, but why haven’t tech innovators and entrepreneurs given me something so compelling, and requiring so much bandwidth, that I wouldn’t even consider dumping my wired connection, lest I give up that killer application.
Think Big. Build Big.
So I will blame my willingness to cut the broadband cord on the ISPs’ failure to invest in their networks, but also on a failure of innovation and imagination from technology firms trying to deliver services over fat pipes. Give me something that needs 100 Mbps, so everyone knows why faster broadband is important. Much like Foursquare gets everyone stoked about location, we need an application that requires multiple megabits per second. I understand that there’s a bit of a chicken-and-an-egg issue here, since delivering a service before too many people have fat pipes will slow adoption, but at least 55 million homes already have the infrastructure to get 100 Mbps. Build something for them.
An emphasis on building products for fat pipes will help make wired broadband exciting again. And despite the investment required by ISPs, many — especially those with mobile networks — will win. After all, as wireless speeds get faster, consumers think they should be able to do just about everything on a mobile network that they can on a wired one.
And for most of today’s applications, that’s actually true. But if we had a bigger performance divide and different applications between wired broadband and mobile broadband then consumers might have an understanding that sometimes the mobile web just can’t compete with the wired one, and that we really need both. For carriers and consumers, that could be a winning proposition.
To learn more about this topic, join GigaOM Pro on Wed., Feb. 24, for the latest Bunker Session event: The New Broadband Buildout.
Rebecca Zacks wrote:
EveryScape announced it has raised $6 million in a Series C funding round led by SK Telecom Americas, a division of Korean mobile operator SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM), and joined by return investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Dace Ventures. Waltham, MA-based EveryScape, which provides navigable, 360-degree views of metropolitan, suburban, and rural areas, will use the financing to help develop its Asian marketing strategy and grow its U.S. business. Wade profiled EveryScape when it launched its services in 2007.
Global Crossing, the provider of bandwidth and IP-based services to corporations around the world, today reported fourth-quarter and full-year 2009 results that included a 6 percent boost in revenue and lowered losses for the year. Still the company has a hard slog ahead of it as the world recovers from an economic crisis that stifled business spending. The nature of business communications and the value of services to an enterprise are in flux.
I chatted for a few minutes today with John Legere, the CEO of Global Crossing, and Gary Breauninger, its chief financial officer for North America and Worldwide Carrier Services. I sought to understand how Global Crossing was planning to grow, and how the overall market for bandwidth will. The bad news is that prices are declining, the less bad news is that they’re not declining as rapidly as they were in the years after the telecom bust, when capacity was cheap and plentiful.
GigaOM: The services you provide are dropping in price across all of your business lines. The company is barely profitable if we take out your debt, but with prices dropping, how will that affect your margins and growth prospects?
Legere: Prices are declining at a declining rate, which is good. And compared to the incumbents, market price declines are less of an issue for us because our revenue growth is replacing old technology for our customers. So when customers come to us they are converging on IP services with us at a significantly higher margin, and we’re taking market share from the major players.
GigaOM: There is a seeming surge in demand for IP services and connectivity, how is Global Crossing taking advantage of this, and profiting from this demand?
Legere: The stats show that customers start adopting IP as a platform for some of what they do, then move into a second phase where they converge applications on IP, and then move to a third phase where adoption grows wildly. We are late in the early cycle somewhere between adoption and convergence, and this move to IP has years and years left associated with it. Customers are moving from legacy technologies to IP voice and collaboration. We are offering services to them with cost savings of around 50 percent to them and high margins of between 60 and 80 percent for us. The contracts are long-term and the services are sticky to the customer.
GigaOM: So what are the macro opportunities around these IP services? Cloud computing?
Breauninger: With the Impstat acquisition in Latin America we have some data center operations and have since expanded into London and Amsterdam. Up to this point we have a set of on-demand data center products and a clear opportunity would be to venture into the cloud computing arena. That’s clearly an area of growth in the next 18-24 months.
GigaOM: Will you make acquisitions as part of that expansion? Other providers like AT&T already have existing cloud products today, how will you compete in a year or two?
Breauninger: We have grown the business organically from the data center business we have. And there’s no set definition for what constitutes cloud computing, and it’s an evolving space so we can still grow with products around our network and data centers as accessed through the cloud.
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We’ve kept a close eye on Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei for the last few years, and today the company justified our attention by telling me in an interview that in 2009 it grew its North American sales by 63 percent to $408 million. The base number is relatively small compared with Huawei’s global contract sales (deals that are signed, but where the revenue has yet to be recognized) of more than $30 billion, but North America is its fastest-growing market.
The company started its North American business in 2001 and now has 1,000 employees on the continent after adding 450 people in 2009. It’s cherry-picked some engineers from troubled equipment makers like Nortel and Nokia Siemens Networks for its eight offices in North America. Charlie Chen, a SVP of marketing and product management for the region, said it plans to achieve the same percentage growth in 2010, which would put it with contract sales of around $665 million.
Yesterday, the GSMA released data showing that North American operators plan to spend $19 billion in capital equipment for mobile broadband alone. Given that Huawei sells equipment for wired and wireless carriers, it’s making inroads in North America but it still has plenty of room for growth. Analyst Jonathan Goldberg, a Deutsche Bank analyst, notes that the overall capital equipment spending in North America has been flat or decreasing, which makes Huawei’s 63 percent growth look a lot more interesting, especially given the troubles in the telecommunications equipment sector.
Some highlights the company shared for the last year include:
Video is driving the projected increase in both mobile and wired broadband — but it’s not the proliferation of video that’s the problem for mobile operators so much as the relative ease with which consumers can now access it. Indeed, while mobile operators have long faced traffic congestion at cell sites thanks to peer-to-peer traffic, the widespread availability of video in formats that the average consumer can watch has changed the industry. And that’s causing mobile operators to rethink their pricing plans (GigaOM Pro, sub. req’d). In short, YouTube may be the death of unlimited mobile broadband on handsets.
Mobile video streaming rose 99 percent between the first and second half of 2009, according to data released this week by Allot Communications. The firm, which sells network management gear to broadband providers, credits the accessibility of YouTube and its ilk for the rise in video streaming on mobile networks. Video overall comprises most of the mobile network traffic, but the amount consumed via peer-to-peer traffic has fallen as the amount of streaming video traffic has risen. Jonathon Gordon, vice president of marketing with Allot, says that P2P has decreased as a percentage of mobile network traffic although it still comprises 19 percent of total traffic.
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The reason for P2P’s gradual decline is that it’s more complicated to share files via P2P, which somewhat limits the audiences that will practice file sharing. For example, it requires finding and downloading software to a mobile phone, which not everyone is willing to do. YouTube, however, can be accessed by anyone in just a few clicks. As such, YouTube traffic accounts for 10 percent of all the traffic on mobile broadband networks, and 32 percent of all HTTP streaming traffic. And it rose 90 percent between the first half and second half of 2009.
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Allot’s data proves that YouTube is a force today, but the latest numbers out from Cisco’s Visual Networking Index show the effects of streaming video on mobile broadband networks through 2014. And those effects are pretty brutal. Cisco estimates that 82 percent of mobile broadband traffic will be HTTP streaming traffic while total video traffic will account for about 2.3 exabytes of data a month.
Streaming traffic is more difficult for operators to manage simply because, as opposed to a video download, streaming is also an ongoing process. For ways companies are trying to improve this process check out our report on Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming (GigaOM Pro). Such real-time consumption of video during streaming has big implications for mobile operators’ networks, notably in that it can cause problems during periods of the day when other people want to use the same mobile network to surf the web, make phone calls or check email.
It’s no accident that AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega singled out video streaming during a speech his answer to a question asked at an analyst event, in which he attacked the gratuitous use of network resources by iPhone owners last December. In his speech response, de la Vega said:
“I’m not going to give you in detail what we’re going to do, but if three are causing 40 percent, then we’re going to try to focus on making sure we give incentives to those small percentages to either reduce or modify their usage so they don’t crowd out the other users in those same cell sites,” de la Vega said. “You’ll see us address that more in detail in the future…What’s driving usage on the network and driving these high-usage situations are things like video or audio that keeps playing around the clock. We’ve got to get to those customers and have them recognize and change their patterns.”
I’ve suggested that AT&T might use pricing as a means to shape user behavior on the network, rather than simply forbid users from doing what they want on mobile phones. Indeed, AT&T (and other carriers) may find itself racing to keep margins high for mobile broadband as usage increases. On its fourth-quarter earnings call at the end of January, Ma Bell admitted that its data traffic had doubled while the costs to send bits had halved. So for now, AT&T is keeping its costs in line with demand. But according to a forecast from Cisco released today, the average amount of data consumed on mobile devices will rise to 7 GB per month by 2014 from just 1.3 GB per month today — a 438 percent increase. Can AT&T — or other operators — drive the cost of bits down in line with that amount?
Given that mobile resources are constrained by a variety of things, including the spectrum allotted to carriers, it’s likely that mobile broadband providers will eliminate flat-rate pricing for mobile broadband as away to keep profits and network quality up while data use expands. When that happens should we blame YouTube — or profiteering mobile operators?
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Wade Roush wrote:
Boston’s M/C Venture Partners is the big winner in the $647 million sale of NuVox, a Greenville, SC-based provider of business telecommunications services, to Windstream Corporation (NASDAQ: WIN), a deal announced yesterday. In a press release yesterday, M/C said that it became NuVox’s largest shareholder after NuVox absorbed M/C portfolio companies NewSouth in 2004 and Florida Digital Network in 2007. Little Rock, AR-based Windstream, which provides phone, Internet, and digital TV service to customers in 21 states, paid $280 million in cash and $187 million in stock to acquire NuVox, and also repaid $180 million in NuVox’s outstanding debt.
 Look at your bill and find out how much your business can save with Comcast Business Class. Internet, Phone & TV for $99. |
Senior management for BCE Inc. provided an optimistic if cautious outlook for the telecommunications giant's financial performance this year on an earnings call with analysts on Thursday.
Despite a forecast for a tepid economic recovery in the first half of 2010 as well as increasing wireless competition from the Montreal firm, analysts on the call came away bullish on BCE's ability to deliver another hike to its dividend based on its full-year guidance.
"Management and the board remain committed to dividend growth, which we think means a possible dividend increase in mid-late 2010," wrote National Bank Financial's Greg MacDonald in a research note. "If the company can execute at the high end of guidance, then the chance of an increase… is good."
The analyst was confident BCE (BCE/TSX) will, upgrading the stock to a Sector Outperform from Perform with a $32 price target.
Voice over Internet Protocol penetration among U.S. businesses will increase rapidly over the next few years, reaching 79 percent by 2013, compared to 42 percent at the end of 2009, according to research out today from analyst firm In-Stat. At this point I wonder what market demographic represents the last stand for legacy circuit switched voice. Will it be consumer landlines or will it be mobile voice over 3G networks?
Current telephone networks are gradually being phased out as the world moves to IP communications. Right now in the U.S. only 78 percent of consumer homes have a landline and only 22 percent rely on them exclusively. In the next three years I imagine both numbers will be much lower, which is why the FCC is looking at how to support broadband access (which is necessary for IP telephony) for all.
In the mobile world, legacy voice will stick around for a while longer. Even though the next-generation Long Term Evolution networks will support voice, it’s still unclear how carriers will manage voice calls over the all-IP LTE network. Plus, the existing 3G and even 2G networks will still be around delivering voice calls, so legacy voice is still going to rule on mobile phones.
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Thumbnail image from Old Telephones via Flickr
