analysis & commentaryCOMMENTARY FROM OUR STAFFAre MVNOs banding together?The latest scuttlebutt has Virgin Mobile and Helio discussing a merger deal. The world is a dangerous place for MNVOs considering the rash of bankruptcies and closures in the last two years. Apparently the remaining ones are considering forming packs in order to survive... Learning by walking aroundPublic speakers often like to poll their audience on a topic to keep people engaged and to gauge how to tailor comments to match the needs and sympathies of the audience. But as a journalist who often attends telecom industry speeches, I sometimes pick up some useful information by jotting down the results of these informal polls... Five things you need to know about Sprint/ClearwireThe long-rumored deal is done. Sprint and Clearwire today formally combined their WiMAX businesses, aided by investments from Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Here’s what you need to know... Cheaper! Faster! Slimmer!In a research note released last week, Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi is recommending a carrier subsidy on the iPhone to bring the price down to the $200 level. He predicts this will lead to a significant boost in sales... Repeating historyThere seems to be one lesson that the telecom industry keeps relearning, and it is simply this: Without a business plan that includes profits, the best technology won’t succeed... The numbers don't lieEarnings reports are a study in spin -- read a press release announcing even the most dire earnings, and you'll be hard-pressed to find the gloom and doom among the highlighted statistics... Back office on the hot seatWhen I sat down to chat with Kevin Hart, chief information officer for Level 3 Communications, this week at a trade show focused on back-office operations, I expected to talk about SOA, eTOM, CRM and an array of other tech/IT acronyms... Wireless' Pivot pointThe demise of Pivot, Sprint's joint venture with leading cable companies to offer subscribers wireless services, has had many ceding the market to telecom service providers... Ethernet complexSimplicity has long been listed among Ethernet's greatest charms. (I can relate.) But some of the same folks who can't stop praising Ethernet's simplicity are constantly imbuing it with ever more complexity... MDU Odd CouplesRemember the opening to the Odd Couple TV show, which asked whether two divorced men could share an apartment without driving each other crazy? Here at the Broadband Properties Summit in Dallas today, I heard a building owner basically paraphrase that line, talking about telecom providers competing for customers in the same multidwelling unit... Devices drive data usage, operators findA funny thing happened on the way to the 3G mass market: carrier data revenues turned out to be just as dependent -- if not more dependent -- on the devices they offer than the availability or even the speeds of the data services themselves... Meeting the marketInside the telecom industry, we tend to focus on big technology trends and innovations that ultimately have little relevance in the consumer or business worlds... Who needs Washington?A nuclear bomb set off in our nation's capital could instantly eradicate our federal government. Generations of Americans have accepted that fact and lived with the threat -- maybe in part because an alternative wasn't easily imaginable... Shoe on the other footWhen the cable companies decided to get into VoIP, they didn’t go into the marketplace touting the new technology they’d discovered and trying to attract new customers that way. Instead, they called it “digital phone service” and focused on its low cost, a long list of features and reliability. The approach paid off... Rallying behind mobile TVThe CTIA Wireless show and National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) both held in Las Vegas this month are inherently different shows. One focuses solely on the (albeit increasingly harder to define) wireless industry, while the other narrows in on the digital media and content market... Mobile banking’s global currencyStill a nascent service, mobile banking is expected to reach 32.9 million users worldwide in 2008 and grow to 103.9 million in 2011, according to a study released this week by Gartner... Public/private potholesThis has been a tough week for public/private partnerships in the telecom sector. Last night the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, voted to take its Wi-Fi network back from EarthLink, which bought the 147-square-mile network a year ago for roughly the same amount it cost the city to build ($7 million)... Craig McCaw lifts offIn about 2001, I pretty much excised the satellite communications industry from my beat. Except for the sporadic bankruptcy update and the occasionally sensational story about Iridium satellites potentially crashing down to earth, there wasn’t much left to beat out of that particular sector of telecom. Now, I’ll have to rethink that decision... Serving the underservedOver the course of my 23 years of covering the telecom market, I have probably written some variation of the words "the underserved small- to medium-sized business market" hundreds of times... The Web is the Web and telecom is telecomSince returning to Telephony last fall, I've set out to try to understand the intersection of the Web and telecom... Come browse with meLast week StatCounter reported that the iPhone and iPod touch accounted for 0.23% of all U.S. Web browsing, leading all other platforms... Landline replacement as a serviceConsidering how many people are foregoing a landline phone in favor of wireless, I've been thinking that there's an opportunity for a wireless operator to create an offering specifically positioned as a landline replacement service... Post-auction panderingScan the list of A and B Block winners in the recent 700 MHz auction and you’ll see a lot of familiar names from the Independent telecom industry... Knight Rider, ad writerThe latest “Battle for the American Couch Potato” report reiterates in its conclusions the same dire warning that’s been rung out in recent years regarding the future of video advertising: It’s got to get sneakier, it’s got to blur the line between advertising and programming, it’s got to insinuate itself ever more intimately into video content so that we can’t fast-forward through commercials anymore... Reading the CTIA tea leavesThe wireless industry is doing remarkably well in face of a U.S. economic slow-down. That’s not an easy feat, but the momentum driving wireless broadband and new services/devices is just that strong. CTIA glowed with health in a way that many trade shows this year have not and will not... Not satisfied on customer satisfactionOne thing that must be said about global telecom executives is that they aren't overly self-satisfied. At least that's what a global survey, done by The Economist Intelligence Unit for Oracle, would seem to indicate... Millennials drive mobile ad acceptanceEven more than the enterprise user pushing data limits or early adopter downloading cutting-edge applications, it is the 10-year-old text message fanatic and the video game–obsessed 16-year-old who are driving the demand for handsets that can truly do anything. At a Motorola roundtable discussion at CTIA, Lewis Ward, research manager of wireless communications research for IDC, defined this category of users as the millennial generation: those born after 1980 who grew up with information technology and have an innate trust of the Internet... Do we need a single 4G standard?Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin on Wednesday called for the industry to rally around a single standard for 4G and warning that a new technology war would wreck havoc on an industry struggling to make sense of mobile broadband. He’s right in one sense, the duel between WiMAX and Long Term Evolution will create uncertainty and fragmentation, but Sarin doesn’t have much right to call... One 4G standard? What a conceptVodafone's Arun Sarin only got a smattering of applause from the hundreds of people packed into the CTIA Keynote room this morning when he said the wireless industry needs to settle on one 4G standard and avoid dueling approaches to broadband access... CTIA: application opportunity lost -- and foundIn meetings here at CTIA, one well-known carrier application vendor expressed frustration that many of the apps it has been pushing its customers to deploy for years -- converged messaging, conversational SMS, visual voice mail, single-number follow-me calling services and more -- are now being deployed with such fanfare by telco competitors like Apple and Google... |
advertisement CONTRIBUTED COMMENTARYCarrier femtocell pricing doomed?I’ve been a proponent of the femtocell concept since the first rumblings of the concept came out of the startup community. We like femtocells -- everything about the topic. And really, what’s not to like about something that gives you a “five bar” wireless experience inside your home? ... Going green: From fringe to mainstreamAlthough the mobile industry has adopted a variety of environmental initiatives, significant opportunity exists to more tightly integrate environmentally sound practices with standard business operations to strengthen brand and increase competitive advantage... Waiting for Ethernet's third guyCarrier Ethernet equipment vendors generally fall into two camps these days. Most carriers would prefer to camp somewhere else... Net ushers in experiential TVThe past five years have presented major changes in the TV industry such as extensive, free video-on-demand catalogs and time-shifting with digital video recorders... Slicing the pieThe Landscape of service providers vying for a slice of the more than $2 billion U.S. business market for carrier Ethernet services has split into three segments: incumbents, competitive providers and cable multiple systems operators... Green packets and broadbandFive global forces drive growth and transformation. They are at work everywhere, albeit at varying levels of intensity, and they will change the telecommunications world... Getting to the core of WiMAX performanceThere is more to WiMAX networks than base stations and subscriber devices. The core network plays a crucial role in delivering the performance operators need... The bandwidth requirement conundrumBandwidth prognostications today focus on only the stream side of the equation -- adding up the total bandwidth requirements of all streams concurrently supported by the multi-service experience delivered. What these prognosticators forget, however, is that files are another matter... Content still clueless on DVRFor all the sympathy content producers have tried to elicit it's still remarkable to see how little they respect the consumer’s time, money and intelligence. Get this: We no longer own the pay-per-view movies we pay for and record on our digital video recorders... Find the buried treasure hidden within your networkIn an ideal world, telecoms should already have achieved an efficient and lean operational model by now, especially after years of M&As, spin-offs and transformational levers such as re-engineering, outsourcing and even offshoring... The big bandwidth liePerhaps it all started with Brian Roberts. Standing on the stage on a balmy Las Vegas morning, Roberts wowed the bleary eyed crowd by downloading a 4 gigabit collection of encyclopedias and dictionaries in just a shade under four minutes... IMS: A pregnant pauseAs a tribute to the recently deceased Arthur C. Clarke, please indulge a slight detour into science fiction to better emphasize the thesis of this column... Power crisis looming?Telecom power is a little like Rodney Dangerfield … it gets no respect! Well, not really. But, DC power is one of the last elements to be designed into a telecom network, after the packet-this and optical-that systems are selected... Wireless 2008: Hip to be greenFemtocells. LTE. WiMAX. There’s no shortage of hot wireless topics to keep people talking this year. Decoupled from technologies and standards, however, is another trend that started brewing last year and has quickly captured its own share of attention: environmentally friendly network solutions and practices... Ask Steve: IP communications and SMB adoptionIP telephony and unified communications: two great tastes that taste great together. These topics are near and dear to our hearts as we enter 2008. IP communications and SMB adoption are our topics this month in Ask Steve... Observations on the unified communications marketWe recently conducted research on the Unified Communications (UC) market, and encountered some interesting results that run against prevailing wisdom... The economics of SMB go-to-market strategyTalk to almost any communications executive today and they will tell you that small and medium businesses (SMBs), or companies with fewer than 500 employees, are viewed as an increasingly important market segment... IPTV's DVR strategy is flawedIPTV is reaching the mainstream, but there's still a big gap between what providers are offering and what consumers really want. A great example is the... Survival of the fittest -- Carriers need partners not vendorsProviders need more today than just high-quality infrastructure. In today’s climate of “what have you done for me lately,” the litmus test for choosing an infrastructure vendor is not only equipment, but also services that deliver quantifiable benefits to the top and bottom lines... Telco transformation: A do-or-die propositionFor the telcos, the 20th century was all about growth. A telco’s size was measured by its access lines. Its mission was to add more lines every year. But the 21 century offers a different challenge... Converging on an opportunityAs an industry, we see signs that the convergence of the Web, wireline and wireless networks is well underway. The next logical step is the delivery of content to all three screens – TV, PC and mobile device. What will this mean for the people who will use the services?... Unlimited offers – New plan or new business model?Much has been written about $99 unlimited voice plans recently announced by Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. The hype is deafening. But the fact remains that 99% of mobile customers don’t need $99 unlimited voice or kitchen-sink plans... Digital device usage: IDC runs the numbersOne of the nuttiest things about today’s strange digital world is that when legitimately interesting data actually comes to light, nobody cares... The next beachfront propertyLike sand on the beach, profitability in telecommunications is shifting from the subscription-based cableco/telco world of pipes to the advertising-based Internet world of portals, and the “beachfront property” in these sectors is all in play... The riddle of the convergence gatewayTo answer subscribers’ cravings for communications and entertainment services that will flow across any type of access network and display on any type of device, carriers need to reconstruct the edges of their networks to perform the session management acrobatics required to fulfill these end user expectations... The end of all-you-can eat?A number of reports have surfaced recently that claim Internet traffic will increase by 5 times over the next several years driven largely by a massive increase in video traffic. We can always quibble over the actually amount that traffic will increase, but suffice it to say it’s going to get extremely busy in the Ether... Wireless access -- What a concept!Quiet, low-key events often can have a big impact. Two weeks ago, TDS Telecom announced new WiMAX-based Internet high-speed data and voice services to 65,000 customers in Madison, Wis.... Scavenger Hunt: BarcelonaBARCELONA--If you’re reading this from somewhere other than Barcelona, there are only three possible explanations. (1) You’re not in the wireless industry; good for you. (2) You are in wireless, but following the show from afar; good for you. (3) You missed the memo about 3GSM changing its name to Mobile World Congress (MWC); you might want to start looking for a new job... Getting on the same pageI recently participated in a focus group with marketing directors from several Independent operating carriers. Our goal was to discuss and brainstorm how carriers need to adapt in these competitive times and become more market-focused... Jeff Citron, here's your answerI briefly met with Vonage at the Consumer Electronics Show, and I talked to the nice, smart people in your booth. They were demonstrating some good-looking equipment that could do neat new things, and I even gave them a few good ideas to take it a step further... |
