Growth By Acquisition Works for at&t

Growth by acquisition clearly has been working for at&t, which is probably why executives there will stay on course with the strategy. The company reported a whopping 61 percent increase in second-quarter profit after $140 billion in acquisitions almost doubled revenue. This is an old strategy many competitive local exchange carriers attempted in the early 2000s, largely without success. Of course, CLECs had different problems. Investors were pushing them to grow fast, and organic growth obviously wasn't going to work. There also were more providers than customers (that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one).

It remains to be seen how well the contrasting Verizon and at&t strategies work out. Verizon essentially is betting its future on the superiority of its wired assets, while not neglecting its wireless assets. at&t arguably is investing in acquisitions that lean in the direction of wireless while economizing on its wireless upgrades.

Growth By Acquisition Works for at&t

Growth by acquisition clearly has been working for at&t, which is probably why executives there will stay on course with the strategy. The company reported a whopping 61 percent increase in second-quarter profit after $140 billion in acquisitions almost doubled revenue. This is an old strategy many competitive local exchange carriers attempted in the early 2000s, largely without success. Of course, CLECs had different problems. Investors were pushing them to grow fast, and organic growth obviously wasn't going to work. There also were more providers than customers (that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one).

Amp'd Customers Were a Collections Nightmare

Amp'd customers were heavy data consumers. Unfortunately, they also tended not to pay their bills. Amp'd apparently experienced an unprecedented growth of subscribers between November 2006, and February 2007 after running ads on MTV about the wireless phone company's lineup of mobile music and video content.

"Approximately 90 percent of the debtor's customers were on 18-month service contracts," according to Amp'd. By May this year, the number of nonpaying customers reached 80,000. That's nearly half of Amp'd's current customer base of 175,000 subscribers.

The filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, which says the company owes more than $100 million to creditors, including Verizon Wireless. Since Verizon is one of the largest creditors, it might make sense for Verizon to salvage something out of the mess, and acquire the 50 percent of customers who actually do pay their bills, and exhibit behavior Verizon wants to encourage.

Allo Goes Dark

Allo.com, a small independent VoIP provider based in British Columbia, went live in February. It apparently now is going dark. Five months.

One Reason why Skype is Not Growing So Fast

Jaxtr allows free international calls using mobile phones. Jaxtr says its membership has doubled to 500,000 users in the past month, and is signing up new users on the Web at a rate of more than 12,000 a day.

And then there are Jajah, Jangl, Rebtel and GrandCentral as well.

"No download is required, and our direct numbers can be dialed from any type of mobile phone or even ordinary landline phones," Jaxtr CEO Executive Konstantin Guericke said, contrasting its Web-based approach to certain complexities of other services.

SME VoIP: 30 Percent Annual Growth

IP Lines being installed into small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) will grow 30 percent a year over the next five years, according to the Dell'Oro Group. IP lines will grow from slightly less than 20 percent of lines shipments into SME locations in 2006 to almost 60 percent in 2011.

In contrast, digital and analog line shipments will decline at an average of 10 percent a year through 2011. Traditional systems will fair even worse, declining to less that 5 percent of the total market by 2011, Dell'Oro says.

This might be the least controversial forecast it is possible to make. Once analog-to-digital transitions really get going, it is hard to buy the older technology even if one really wants it.

Perhaps Google Can't Lose in 700 MHz Auction

If Google succeeds in getting a mandatory wholesale access requirement for the C block of spectrum, it wins. Whether Google itself wins the spectrum (probably not) or not, somebody will, so Google and Google can lease spectrum directly, or work with somebody else who will lease spectrum on its behalf.

Even if it entirely fails to win a mandatory wholesale clause, Google is no worse off than it used to be, because existing provisions for the 700-MHz equivalent of "Carterfone" will still make it easier for Google and its ecosystem to create features, devices and applications optimized for mobility.

One fact seems certain: as hard as it is to build a "wholesale-only" national infrastructure play, if mandatory access conditions are attached to the C block of frequencies, the business case will be harder for owners of retail spectrum in the other two blocks. The pricing umbrella of course will be set by the C block providers.

Clearwire and Sprint will face some issues because the radio propagation characteristics of the 700 MHz spectrum are much better than those for the 2.5 GHz blocks Clearwire and Sprint will be using to build their national 4G network. Like the old UHF broadcast stations who used the 700 MHz frequencies, signals got through walls pretty easily, even to "rabbit ears" antennae. Digital propagation should be better, since today's signal processing chips can reconstruct a signal from weaker or more refracted signal sources.

In fact, he 700 MHz signals should provide the "best" "through the walls" performance of any wireless networks, period. The higher frequencies conceivably will offer higher raw bandwidth potential (for reasons related to the more rapid oscillations of the radio signals at higher frequencies).

And there remains the possibility that the auction rules might emerge in final form someplace between formal wholesale access for the C block and hard-to-enforce "Carterfone" principles. In any event, Google's odds of winning are higher than its odds of simply being no worse off than it currently is.

Sprint, Clearwire to Create One National Network

Sprint Nextel and Clearwire say they will combine their efforts and spectrum to create a national mobile WiMAX network covering the entire United States. Sprint Nextel's network would cover 185 million people while Clearwire's would cover 115 million.

Services would be sold under a common brand. The two firms have set a target of 100 million potential customers initually, by the end of 2008. There is no word on what becomes of Clearwire's VoIP deal with BCE. As part of the deal, Clearwire will have the ability to offer Sprint Nextel’s third generation voice and data services as part of a bundle or on a stand-alone basis to Clearwire’s customers, which will also allow Clearwire to provide dual-mode services to its customers.

Sprint Nextel will take the lead in establishing relationships with national distributors and other potential strategic partners, including wholesale or mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) arrangements. The initial term of the arrangement is 20 years, with three 10-year renewal periods.

Nobody has excess capital to throw into a new national broadband access network, it certainly appears.

SunRocket, Ooma, Verizon, Vodafone, at&t

So the VoIP blogging community is talking about almost nothing but Ooma this morning. But as I mentioned on my other blog (www.ipbusinessmag.com), focusing so much energy on SunRocket's travails, which was the other recent item everybody was talking about, though obviously of high interest, has almost no strategic implications for the broader communications industry. Rumors that first had Vodafone pondering buying Verizon, though almost certainly an investment banker's trial balloon, are something else.

Today Andy Abramson says his sources say it actually is at&t that is talking about buying Vodafone. Now that would be quite a deal. And while this particular rumor also could be the result of an investment banker's strategy, it does fit quite well what new at&t CEO Randall Stephenson has been saying about at&t. It is a "wireless company" that has no intentions of abandoning its grow by acquisition strategy.

Ooma is interesting. What happened to SunRocket also is a high interest event. But neither is going to have truly strategic direct implications for the global VoIP industry. Whatever one might say about the particularities of the U.S. VoIP industry, VoIP continues to grow on a global basis, almost mechanically.

Wireless increasingly is the way voice gets done. Social networking portals, instant messaging and enterprise apps also are emerging ways voice and communications gets done. All of that is a really big deal.

David Beckemeyer on Ooma

David Beckemeyer, Televolution CEO, is the one guy I think is in position to evaluate Ooma's business prospects. This is what he says: "As some may know, I have been aware of this effort and provided some early guidance for their project (VERY EARLY - I have not been involved for a LONG time).

They could have launched the idea on top of the PhoneGnome platform and been in market years ago, but they wanted to build hardware - that was a bigger driver than anything else (bigger than whether the business made any sense).

I give their stated vision/business plan no chance at all, for the exact reasons I told Ooma in 2004:

1. solving a problem (call costs) that is going away (already going to zero)

2. people won't open their wallet for a large upfront purchase, as shown by Tivo etc. and especially not for "phone stufff" which is perceived as should be cheap

3. regulatory troubles - like FON, you are asking users to violate their terms of use with their provider

4. privacy/legal/CALEA trouble - do I want to let people I don't know use my phone and get wiretapped using my number plotting their dastardly deeds?

Item 4 above is different than the Skype-like P2P in that with Ooma, you're letting people use a highly-regulated instrument, with a lot of technology and history in wiretapping (vs. my computer and encrypted sessions).

I believe they would still also have a caller-ID problem in that my calls will not be delivered with my number as the calling number, but that of the Ooma box owver who's line is making the call (or the box blocks caller ID on outgoings calls so people I know won't accept my calls because they won't see that it is me calling).

But again, we should not underestimate the impact of a lot of money and backers that probably will not have much patience. Ooma could evolve into something viable.

With the fact that PhoneGnome is now free and needs no software, basically users can get most their calls free with no investment and no hardware at all.

Ooma, PhoneGnome

Ooma hopes it can make a business in the independent VoIP space without slugging it out with incumbents, cable companies, Vonage, Packet8 and others. Ooma uses peer-to-peer technology, it reminds me of nothing so much as PhoneGnome. A user can rely on broadband and Ooma, "cutting the cord," or can keep legacy POTS and integrate Ooma with a traditional landline (the easiest way to keep 911 service). All calls within the U.S. market are free, and off-network calls are billed at Skype-like rates.

Like PhoneGnome, the revenue model is "selling boxes," not recurring revenues from services. Ooma is betting that a $400 purchase of a base hub that functions like an analog terminal adapter will appeal more than a VoIP service account. Additional Ooma adapters can be bought to add service to other analog phones on other standard wall jacks.

Perhaps the longest-lasting impact, irrespective of what happens with Ooma, is the P2P approach it uses to create a network. As with all P2P networks, each end user's client becomes a node on the network to help terminate traffic. I don't know what technology platform Ooma uses. It seems logical that Session Initiation Protocol is not what Ooma is doing on the P2P side of its platform, but it seems SIP has to be there someplace for interface to the public network at some level. But David Beckemeyer seems best placed to noodle on that.

Alec Saunders (Iotum)asks an interesting question, however. Ooma says it will try to use member POTS access to essentially avoid paying termination charges. Presumably that means invoking user phone numbers in some way. If caller ID information cannot be spoofed from the POTS phone, but only from the trunk side of the network, does that mean a user's caller ID gets delivered even when it is just a transit node between a calling party and the called party? Details are scanty at this point so I'm not sure anybody outside Oomba knows the answer.

Or maybe there isn't even a problem. Presumably Ooma would try to "terminate" a call at a local Ooma "node" and then use the Ooma P2P to retransmit the bits using the public Internet to the terminating Ooma node with no need to deliver calling number ID information.

One wonders how much longer it will be until even Tier One service providers start to take a closer look at integrating P2P in some significant way with the existing public networks, especially as those networks are upgraded for IP Multimedia Subsystem and there's more broadband in the access network.

Not P2P as an "over the top" end user application. P2P as a part of the architecture of a managed network that simply uses multiple techniques to reach deeper into the environment sitting on the other side of the traditional "network termination" point. Making customers part of the network is starting to look like good business sense.

Lessons About Price from CLEC, DSL, VoIP

TeleGeography projects that nearly 30 million consumer VoIP lines will be in service across Europe by end of 2007, up from 6.5 million at the beginning of 2006. In France and some other countries, though growth is low, penetration is high. In others, penetration is low but growth high. Compare that to the U.S. market, where growth is slow and penetration relatively low.

So here's a drop-dead simple observation from what has happened in the U.S. market for new communication services: if you operate in a market with relatively affordable communications, then competing on "lower price" doesn't get you very far. If you compete in a market with expensive communications, "lower price" is just about all you need.

In markets where communications are affordable, blunting the attractiveness of the "lower price" platform, price still can be made to work if there are other attributes are emphasized, such as "pay the same price as you used to, but get free broadband."

"Pay the same price you used to, but get mobility." "Turn a variable cost into a fixed cost." "Make the whole cost more transparent." "Reduce real estate costs." "Work with people you actually know."

In the U.S. market, attackers have not yet succeeded when the incumbents decided they wanted to play; when lower prices were the primary marketing platform and the offering wasn't highly differentiated from what an incumbent offers.

"S*** Happens, Even to Cisco, at&t and Apple

Duke University's campus Wi-Fi network reported was being flooded by Apple iPhone MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Turns out that isn't the case. It was a powering issue. Good news for Apple, as the iPhone isn't the culprit at all. Still, the outages are a reminder.

For those of you who continue to think communications infrastructure is easy, this is a reminder that "stuff happens," all the time, in unexpected ways, to the "dumb pipes" we all depend on. I just got a new Linksys Wi-Fi router to hook up to my Covad T1, for example, and though the install wizard was really nicely put together, the Linksys would not talk to the Cisco router.

It is supposed to be so easy there is no indication anywhere in any of the documentation about what Web site to go to, or what support number to call, in case installation failed, which it did, repeatedly. I finally realized I was going to require tech support so figured out where to get that from Linksys. The IM support system worked fast, and well. The connection is up. But not before reinstalling the software load.

I recall remarking to the Best Buy salesperson that I didn't have any questions, and wouldn't need any help, because I expected the hardware choice and install to be "drop dead simple." That clearly is the way Linksys designed the system, and I suspect it almost always works. Unfortunately, in this case we had to reinstall the software.

The Covad install took "longer than expected" because we were getting unexpected packet loss. To make a moderately long story short, it was a physical media failure on a short jumper in the network interface unit. Go figure. That's the last thing one would expect from new wiring.

The point is, even well designed consumer interface procedures, such that put together by Linksys, Cisco, Apple and Covad, will fail on occasion, for all sorts of apparently odd reasons. Nothing is always drop dead simple, even when well-designed processes nearly always have that intention and result.

Just because we use "dumb pipes" to some extent does not mean the networks are not occasionally "surly" and prone to failure. Far from it.

Unified Communications Stll a Tough Sell...

...at least for many smaller and mid-sized businesses, say researchers at In-Stat. Of course, that's a good thing for newly-emerging providers (can you say Microsoft?). Some providers of IP business phone systems might also appreciate the perhaps longer window of usefulness for their systems as well. Independent suppliers of unified communications platforms might feel "conflicted." Slower adoption means less robust sales now, but also means most of the market remains untapped.

Worldwide unified messaging and unified messaging-capable client shipments will reach nearly 19.5 million in 2011, say researchers at In-Stat, while traditional voice mail port shipments will shrink to zero by the end of 2009.

DoCoMo 4G: 300 Mbps to your Mobile

NTT DoCoMo is about to embark on an ambitious project that provides cellphone users the ability to achieve speeds of up to 300 Mbps on their handsets by the time 2009 rolls around. That, plus at&t's new positioning as a wireless company with landline assets, plus the fact that global "voice account" installed base and growth are killing landlines, has to be disquieting for lots of us who grew up on the wireline side of the business. Wireless is going to keep changing things more than some might like.