Telenor Pakistan Launches Internet.org Bundle

Telenor Pakistan has launched Internet.org in Pakistan, making available to Telenor Pakistan's customers free access to 17 basic online services including Accuweather, BBC, BabyCenter &MAMA, Malaria No More, UNICEF Facts for Life, Bing.com, ESPN Cricinfo, Mustakbil, ilmkidunya, Telenor News, Urdupoint Cooking, OLX, Facebook, Messenger, Wikipedia and Telenor WAP MobilePortal, using either the 2G or 3G platforms.

Consumers can use Internet.org aps directly from Internet.org or by downloading the Android app.

Internet.org is a Facebook-led initiative bringing together technology leaders, nonprofits and local communities with the goal of making internet access available and affordable to the two-thirds of the world that is not yet connected and bringing the same opportunities to everyone that the connected world has today.

Internet.org was first launched in July 2014 in Zambia and in less than a year it made valuable online services accessible without data charges for millions of people in Tanzania, Kenya, Colombia, Ghana, India, Philippines, Guatemala, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malawi and now in Pakistan.

The M Hotel Singapore  |  10-11 September 2015

Will Internet.org be allowed to provide value, or will regulators ban the practice? REGISTER NOW Spectrum Futures 2015 will look at the ways Internet.org and other initiatives are trying to bring Internete access to billions of people who do not yet use the internet. Spectrum Futures 2015will bring together regulators and service providers from throughout the Asia-Pacific region to allow the exchange of ideas about key policies to help emerging markets like India, the Phillipines, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and Myanmar connect to their populations to the Internet within the next decade. Join the conversation at Spectrum Futures 2015.

VISIT THE SPECTRUM FUTURES WEBSITE FOLLOW US ON

914 Coolidge Street | Honolulu, HI 96826-3085 | +1.808.941.3789 | spectrumfutures.org |spectrumfutures@ptc.org

"More Spectrum Than You Can Imagine" is Coming

"More new spectrum than everything else we now can use" is the promise of commercialized millimeter wave frequncies, used in conjunction with small cell architectures, to support mobile and untethered applications.

Such abundance will have many business implications. It might change thinking about the scarcity value of spectrum overall. It definitely should lower the cost of bandwidth for billions of people using the Internet.

But fundamental decisions must be made: how to release the spectrum; what spectrum to release; when to release and how to allow access are key issues. 

We will discuss then at Spectrum Furures.

The M Hotel Singapore  |  10-11 September 2015

Regulators Face Unprecedented Challenge: Licensing More New Spectrum Than Everything Else We Now Use REGISTER NOW Spectrum Futures 2015 will examine spectrum abundance Licensing use of spectrum impossible to use in the past Sharing spectrum without clearing existing users Releasing 10 to 100 times more bandwidth than presently in use Spectrum Futures 2015will bring together regulators and service providers from throughout the Asia-Pacific region to allow the exchange of ideas about key policies to help emerging markets like India, the Phillipines, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and Myanmar connect to their populations to the Internet within the next decade. Join the conversation at Spectrum Futures 2015.

VISIT THE SPECTRUM FUTURES WEBSITE FOLLOW US ON

914 Coolidge Street | Honolulu, HI 96826-3085 | +1.808.941.3789 | spectrumfutures.org |spectrumfutures@ptc.org

Customers Do Not Care About, Will Not Pay for 99.999% Availability

Verizon Communications says “very few” of its customers purchase battery backup features for fixed network phone service. With widespread use of cordless telephones, that also means that when local electrical power is interrupted, so is phone service.

Consumers do not seem very bothered by that state of affairs, in part because of widespread mobile phone use, and also because they long ago discovered that unless they use corded phones, they lose use of the phone service when power goes out, even if the circuit stays up.

For those of you with long memories, that is a big change. Fixed line phone service used to be required to function in the event of local power outages, with availability at the old 99.999 percent uptime standard.

These days, in practice, most communication services probably have availability of only one nine.

Devices crash and need to be rebooted with some frequency. And there are more devices to fail, with operating systems and apps that crash rather frequently. So whatever the reliability of circuits, end user experience is affected by all the devices in the delivery chain, with cascading impact on system reliability end to end.

In fact, most people assume some degree of instability, and have protocols to compensate. “I’ll call you back;” “I’ll switch to landline;” I’ll switch to another app” or I’ll reboot” are all ways of compensating for less reliability--of apps, devices, operating systems or networks.

The same applies to user expectations about app quality. Now used to mobile audio quality, VoIP audio wasn’t a shock.

Without battery backup, most devices will fail with local power outages. Few consumers seem to care, anymore. Most apps, devices and operating systems are assumed to be a little flaky. People know what to do in the case of momentary failure.

The point is that customers do not experience, do not especially mind, and will not pay for, 99.999 percent availability. “Good enough” seems to be the new standard for most products.

You Cannot Predict the Future

The reason we all use so much bandwidth these days: video represented 64 percent of all consumer Internet traffic and 55 percent of all mobile traffic in 2014.

And that trend is going to increase. In the U.S. market, time spent interacting with digital media has been growing on mobile, if flat on PCs and other devices, since 2008.

Of course, it sometimes helps to remember where we have come from. In 1995, the year before the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first major reform of U.S. communications law since 1934, only about 10 percent of Americans used the Internet at all.

At the time, the key to spurring innovation and competition was thought to be allowing access into the voice business. It might sound crazy, but that’s what people thought.

The point is that some of us learned from that experience. And what we learned was that it is hard to impossible to predict the future, because the framework one is using is going to be proven wrong.

Imagine you are in 1995, and assigned to a research project, as I was, in 1995. The task was to examine the impact of a range of new technologies on communications pricing and therefore industry revenue.

Consider the challenges. This was a time when only 10 percent of people used the Internet, a time when mobile usage was about the same.

We were making forecasts three years before the founding of Google. The web browser many of us were using was “Alta Vista.” We were about a year after the creation of what became the Netscape Mosaic browser.

It wasn’t clear whether voice over frame relay, voice over ATM or voice over IP was going to become widespread, at least in the business markets.

We were two years from the start of the Internet bubble and five years before the top of the Internet bubble, six years before the crash, which ultimately destroyed $5 trillion in telecom asset value.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had not yet been passed.

And we were just nine years after the AT&T monopoly had been broken up, creating eight firms, none of whose brand names--with the exception of AT&T-- continue to be used today. And the firm using AT&T’s name is not the former AT&T.

We were forecasting 17 years before the iPhone and 15 years before the iPad.

The main point is that our forecasts were based on an extrapolation of present trends. We could not correctly model the Internet, ubiquitous mobile adoption, smartphones, applications using Internet Protocol.

We could not model an unprecedented wave of telecom  investments and then massive destruction of communications wealth and assets, within just a few years.

The clear lesson some of us learned was that things we are not looking at are going to have more impact on the future course of things than the things we are looking at. We also learned the futility of linear forecasts.

Messaging Apps are Becoming Hubs

Messaging apps are trying to become communications “hubs” for commerce, identity applications and context-driven actions, argues Mary Meeker, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers general partner.

Meanwhile, mobile service providers are trying to protect “messaging” revenue by dropping prices, bundling messaging and voice as a “network connection” fee and in some cases creating branded over the top messaging apps.

That is “fighting the last war.” The messaging apps already have moved on.

Video Dominates Mobile (55%) and Consumer Network Traffic (64%)

The reason we all use so much bandwidth these days: video represented 64 percent of all consumer Internet traffic and 55 percent of all mobile traffic in 2014.

And that trend is going to increase. In the U.S. market, time spent interacting with digital media has been growing on mobile, if flat on PCs and other devices, since 2008.

2015 Internet Trends Report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Competitive Markets Enable and Cause "Cherry Picking"

Since 1996, in U.S. telecom markets, it has been lawful for telecom providers to cherry pick   the areas where the service providers wanted to compete, and where they wanted to invest.

Initially, that was primarily an issue for competitive local exchange carriers serving business customers in metropolitan areas. There is, for example, no requirement to serve all potential customers in an area, or to build facilities in all areas.

Since the launch of Google Fiber, it also has become possible to build advanced facilities (gigabit networks) serving consumers, in the same way. In other words, service providers can choose neighborhoods or parts of a city to provide advanced services, without the requirement to reach 100 percent of potential customers.

Granted, that will seem like an assault on the notion of universal service. But the key concept is the difference between basic levels of service, often with universal service requirements, and advanced services not every customer wants to buy.

Those developments illustrate the fact that competitive telecom markets are different from monopoly markets in key ways. Basic services might be “universal.” Advanced services can be delivered whenever there is a business model.

Mobile Broadband is Cheaper than Fixed Broadband in 111 Countries

The global average price of a basic fixed broadband plan (1 Gbyte) is 1.7 times higher than the average price of a comparable 1 Gbyte mobile broadband plan.

Fixed high speed access costs $52 on a purchasing power parity basis (a way of normalizing prices across countries). Mobile high speed access costs $30 on a purchasing power parity basis

That is why mobile broadband has become the typical way people get access to the Internet.

In at least 111 countries the price of a basic (fixed or mobile) broadband plan corresponds to less than five percent of average gross national income per person, the threshold of affordability used by the International Telecommunications Union.

In developing countries, average monthly fixed broadband prices (in PPP$) are three times higher than in developed countries. Mobile broadband prices are twice as expensive as in

developed countries, the ITU notes.

Spectrum Futures

A Billion People: Dozens of Ways to Connect

Over the next decade, a billion people in Asia will start using the Internet for the first time.

Nearly all of them will do so using a mobile or other untethered device, and nearly all of them live in South Asia and Southeast Asia.

Spectrum Futures, a new Pacific Telecommunications Council conference to be held in Singapore from 10—11 September 2015, will examine how all that will happen, who will do it and what key obstacles must be eliminated along the way.

Now in its second year, the two-day conference includes sessions on business models, backhaul, new spectrum, new satellite constellations, regulatory policies and mobile strategies to rapidly reach the unserved.

Spectrum Futures

And even if mobile operators still are favorites to connect most of the additional users, new satellite constellations, balloons, drones and Wi-Fi are new platforms that aim to have a role as well.

Regulators will, as always, have a private half-day session to share ideas about what they plan to do, would like to do, and have done, to rapidly extend Internet access.

Learn more and register at www.spectrumfutures.org.

U.S. Linear Video Market Concentrates

If the Charter Communications acquisition of Time Warner Cable is approved, as well as the AT&T acquisition of DirecTV, just three companies, Comcast, AT&T and the new Charter would control 82 percent of the broader linear video subscription business (including both networks and distributors), according to an analysis by USA Today.

That might overstate matters a bit, but the general conclusion seems valid enough.

Over time, every consumer communications business eventually is lead by just a few firms. Capital-intensive industries tend to encourage such outcomes.

Analysis of Leichtman Research Group data suggests that perhaps five companies (distributors) control about 75 percent of the linear video subscription market.

Some seven companies would control about 87 percent of the market, using Leichtman Research Group data.

So perhaps six companies would control about 80 percent of the linear video subscription business. That is concentrated, but not as concentrated as the USA Today analysis suggests.

More important, the linear video business is contracting, and will be replaced by streaming services, virtually all observers predict.

What is more important is the high speed access business, which is largely, and eventually largely, the foundation for all fixed network access services.

Cambodia to Get First Direct Undersea Optical Link

Cambodia is getting its first direct connection to the subsea backbone network as Huawei Marine Networks builds a new cable jointly financed by  Telekom Malaysia Berhad, Symphony Communication Public Company Limited and Telcotech Limited.

The Malaysia-Cambodia-Thailand (MCT) Submarine Cable System, 1,300 km long, connects Cherating in Malaysia and Rayong in Thailand with a branch connecting Sihanoukville in Cambodia.

Access to neighboring countries such as Laos and Myanmar will be achieved by connected terrestrial networks.

The 100 Gbps network, with a total design capacity exceeding 30 Tbps, will be commissioned and ready for commercial service by the end of 2016.

Will India Voice Revenues Be Cut in Half, in Years or Months?

Competition from over the top voice and messaging apps might reduce mobile voice revenues in India by up to half, according to industry body COAI.

The proliferation of services such as Skype and Whatsapp could carve 30 percent to 50 percent of revenue from operator's voice services, in months, COAI director general Rajan Mathews has said.

The predictions of revenue decline would not be unusual. Only the potential speed of the decline is unusual.

In 2001, in the U.S. market, for example, about 65 percent of total consumer end user spending for all things related to communications and video services went to "voice."

By 2011, voice represented only about 28 percent of total consumer end user spending.

Over that same period, mobile spending grew from about 25 percent to about 48 percent.

Spectrum Futures

You see the pattern: growth of about 100 percent of new revenue sources and losses of 50 percent in legacy revenues.

We can disagree about how much new revenue some communications service providers will have to create over a decade’s time, to replace lost legacy revenues. But the amounts are quite substantial.

If global telecom revenue is about $1.6 trillion to $2 trillion, and assuming about half the revenue is earned in mature markets, where the displacement arguably is most imminent, then the revenue subject to disruption ranges from $800 billion to $1 trillion.

Half of that represents $400 billion to $500 billion. That, hypothetically, is the potential amount of global revenue that might be lost, and would have to be replaced. And that assumption is based on voice revenue growing, not contracting, in the rest of the world.

One rule of thumb is that service providers must plan for a loss of about half of current revenue every decade or so. That might seem shocking, but simply reflects history.

In the U.S. market, one can note roughly the same pattern for long distance and mobile services revenue. Basically, mobile replaced long distance revenue over roughly a decade.

At one time, international long distance was the highest-margin product, followed by domestic long distance. That changed fundamentally between 1997 and 2007.

Over that 10-year period, long distance, which represented nearly half of all revenue, was displaced by mobile voice services.

A similar trend is underway globally. By some estimates, voice revenue has been falling, globally, since 2011.  

But it is hard to see the impact in industry revenue projections COAI itself presents. The obvious conclusion is that other revenue sources, and an absolute increase in customer base, will have even more impact than the loss of voice revenue, which some would say is reasonable enough, as a prediction.

According to Ovum, global mobile industry revenue will contract by one percent in 2018,

He said OTT competition has already taken a 30% slice of operator messaging revenues in the market.

Ovum has estimated the size of the impact of OTT services on SMS and VAS revenue in India for the last two years at $2.76 billion.

Critics say mobile operators will make more money from data services than they lose in over the top messaging and voice.  

Credit Suisse also recently named India among the companies most exposed to the OTT threat, because the nation's operators still derive 80% of their revenue from voice.

How Long to Satellite Constellations Supporting 50 Mbps to 1.2 Gbps Per User?

If everything goes right, LeoSat could begin launching its new satellite constellation in December 2018, offering bandwidth to any single user site at speeds from 50 Mbps on the low end to a high of 1.2 Gbps. 

LeoSat, which plans to launch a new constellation of 80 or more low earth orbit satellites to provide high-throughput Internet access covering every square inch of the earth, thinks its wholesale business model and high bandwidth makes it a potential partner for virtually every other satellite capacity supplier or retailer, aside from the core markets it has identified.

For starters, LeoSat is focusing exclusively on wholesale capacity for business customers, not the consumer business and not business segment retail.

“We wouldn’t compete with anybody in the current milieu,” says Fotheringham. “Our lowest service tier begins where traditional satellite ends.”

The lowest tier of service offers 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps of Internet connectivity. The middle range offers 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps while the top tier supports 500 Mbps up to 1.2 Gbps.

“We do what they cannot,” Fotheringham says of the comparison with legacy satellite services. So he believes LeoSat will have “many chances to align with incumbents who are delivery partners.”

Strictly focused on business-to-business customers, LeoSat’s primary focus will be delivering “ industrial-grade communications to major organizations,” both commercial and government, says Fotheringham.

At the same time, by using a mesh network, LeoSat will avoid a key stranded assets problem that has plagued most prior constellations using the low earth orbit.