Google Says "No Phone" Right Now

Andy Rubin, Google Director of Mobile Platforms says Google is not announcing today a Gphone. Google has announced the Open Handset Alliance and Android.

Android is an open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications.

The Open Handset Alliance consists of more than 30 technology and mobile leaders including Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC, Sprint and T-Mobile.

The phones will also be available through the world’s largest mobile operator, China Telecom, with 332 million subscribers in China, and the leading carriers in Japan, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, as well as T-Mobile in Germany, Telecom Italia in Italy and Telefónica in Spain.

"We recognize that many among the multitude of mobile users around the world do not and may never have an Android-based phone," says Rubin. So Google will work to ensure that its services are independent of device or even platform. "For this reason, Android will complement, but not replace, our longstanding mobile strategy of developing useful and compelling mobile services and driving adoption of these products through partnerships with handset manufacturers and mobile operators around the world."

The software developer kit is expected in about a week. Phones built on Android will be available in the second half of 2008.

Global Broadband Access Prices

Average prices in October 2007, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In the U.S. market, speeds keep going up and prices down.

Charter Communications, for example, will be upgrading speeds in most of its markets over the next three-to-four months. Charter's 3 Mbps tier will be bumped to 5 Mbps, the 5 Mbps service will be upgraded to 10 Mbps service and the company's 10 Mbps tier will be boosted to 16 Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream. Prices apparently will vary by market.

Verizon in October launched a new tier of symmetric internet access service over its FiOS network that increases upstream and downstream speed up to 20 Mbps.

Why Google Will Be a Mobile Force

Google is poised to charge the mobile Web applications for a very simple reason. Mobile advertising is an ad-supported medium it hasn't yet begun to dominate. Second, Google dominates Web applications, period, according to Net Applications.

And if you believe the mobile Web will be THE Web for billions of users, and an increasingly useful adjunct to PC-based Web apps for billions more, Google has to play.

Google and Sprint

We might know by the end of the day what the relationships are, but Sprint Nextel's fate hangs on just a couple things right now. It has to fix its customer service problems and has hired 4,500 people to get that done. Assuming that stops being a problem, it has to decide what to do about protecting its base business while dealing with its WiMAX network. Right now Sprint runs two separate physical networks and WiMAX makes three. Then there are the logical networks for voice and data. Plus back office systems that are in the process of unification, but not all there yet.

More immediately, if it can get a deal with Google, and push the device really hard, it has a chance to stop the excessive customer churn that prevents it from dealing with the WiMAX issue effectively. Google devices might help Sprint with churn, giving Sprint time to repair its customer service reputation and plot a reasonable future for WiMAX.

Most of the churn seems to come from the Nextel side of the house in any case. Is it so crazy to consider divesting Nextel and proceeding with WiMAX?

In Business, BlackBerry Users Happiest

BlackBerry devices manufactured by Research in Motion rank highest in overall customer satisfaction among business wireless smartphone users, according to J.D. Power and Associates.

RIM ranks highest in overall smartphone customer satisfaction with a score of 702 points on a 1,000-point scale, performing particularly well in the operating system factor, which includes the speed of moving between applications and speed of sending/receiving e-mails. RIM also performs particularly well in battery aspects, including the length of battery life. Treo manufacturer Palm (698) and Samsung (698) tie to closely follow RIM in the ranking.

Highly satisfied owners are more than 50 percent more likely to repurchase the same brand than those who are not satisfied with their smartphone, J.D. Power says.

Silicon Valley Wi-Fi Hits Wall

Silicon Valley has been working for nearly two years to roll out an ambitious Wi-Fi plan covering the entire area. The project continues to face delays, though, among them investment. So far, investors aren’t willing to foot the $500,000 bill for pilot testing. Muni Wi-Fi is facing problems everywhere.

Google Mobile Changes Paradigm

We'll know the details soon enough, but the outlines of Google's assault on the mobile business are clear enough already. Apple deserves credit for chipping away in a significant way at the closed model traditionally employed by mobile service providers. Google appears poised to transform the model altogether. In bringing an open platform and ecosystem to the mass markets for the first time, it might be fair to say that what Google is attempting is the creation of an Internet model for the mobile business.

That is to say, as any device and application can be used on the Interent, so Google proposes to allow any application or device to be built on its open model, and used as a mobile computing device. In that sense, Google is attempting to create a new mobile PC business more than take share in a mobile phone business.

Give credit to Apple for opening the door. Watch for Google to blow the door down.

More Google Partners

Japanese wireless carriers KDDI and NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Broadcom, HTC, Intel and Texas Instruments also are said to be partners for the upcoming Google phone initiative.

Google Launches Mobile Assault

Count Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile amongst its carrier partners. Count Samsung and Motorola among its handset partners. Don't look for Symbian or Nokia support, as Google will launch a rival operating system based on Linux, integrating Gmail, mapping and optimized search.

The phones are expected to come on the market around the middle of 2008 and will feature Google software as the anchor around which third party apps also will be added.

About 25 alliance partners already are working with Google.

at&t seems to have some barriers to working with Google as a result of its Apple deal, while Verizon might still be worried about facing Google as a rival network operator. Still, Google's new push will help create a new category of mobile devices not optimized around voice, email or music, but around Web applications.

Wireless 911 Stays Up, Networks Do Not

For all the effort service providers put into 911 emergency calling service and systems, the simple fact is that both wired and wireline 911 systems will crash if there is a big enough event. The 911 system can even stay up, but might not be usable, simply because callers can't get access to the network. Everybody knows that, and the recent San Jose, Calif. earthquake simply proved it.

Thousands of mobile phone users were unable to connect calls in the hour following the 5.6 earthquake that struck the Bay Area shortly after 8 p.m. Oct 30. The reason is simple enough: networks always are under-provisioned. They are designed for a "normal" peak demand, and a large unexpected demand will simply swamp any network.

Wireless carriers said traffic spiked up to 10 times higher than normal, primarily with calls to family and friends, news outlets and emergency services.

The flood of calls also tied up at&t's landline phone service.

In a strict sense, the wireless 911 network continued to function. The problem is simply that when the access network is really congested enough that call attempts are blocked, any given call--to 911 or to any other number--simply can't be completed.

The solution? Use text messaging for non-911 calls. It doesn't tax the network as much.

New Direction for Google, Sprint, Clearwire?

The only clear and unambiguous statement one can make about Google's mobile aspirations is that mobile advertising is key to Google's future growth. Everything else is open to discussion. And even as speculation remains about Google's possible interest in owning 700 MHz spectrum or even designing its own mobile devices, new possibilities continue to arise.

Under pressure for failing to protect the business it has got, Sprint executives are likely to consider some alternative future for the WiMAX network it has been touting as its fourth-generation network. Finding some way to monetize and offload the asset are among the obvious options. Merging the WiMAX assets with Clearwire is one option, though doing so without monetizing the restructured asset won't help Sprint very much, if the attempt is to lighten the capital spending and management attention burdens.

Sprint could do so if it spun off the WiMAX network in some way. And that's where Google has yet another option. The problem with owning 700 MHz spectrum is that service can't be provided until the network is built, requiring more cash and more time. Google might not want to wait.

The WiMAX network will be commercially viable long before any 700 MHz network will. So add more more wrinkle to the "what will Google do in mobile" speculation.

At this point it also seems safe enough to assume that some sort of reference design and operating system are under development, even if Google does not itself roll out its own phone. Separately, Google also is maneuvering to get prominent play for its mobile-optimized applications on existing devices and networks. And none of the tactics and strategies are mutually exclusive. Google might do some or parts of all of them.

New Verizon Wireless Prepay Plans

Verizon Wireless today announced new INpulse prepay plans essentially customized for various lighter use or episodic use modes.The new plans, INpulse Core, INpulse Plus and INpulse Power, charge customers a daily access fee only on the days of use and include unlimited calling to Verizon Wireless customers nationwide.

INpulse Core offers daily access at 99 cents and calls at 10 cents a minute. Text messages are charged at 10 cents for each message. INpulse Plus costs $1.99 a day, on the days a user wants to talk or text, with unlimited night minutes and voice calling at five cents a minute and five-cent text messages.

INpulse Power costs $2.99, with unlimited night minutes of use and calls at two cents a minute. Text messages cost two cents each.

Customers who set up an INpulse account with an initial payment of $15 may purchase any Verizon Wireless phone (excluding smartphones, PDAs) at the same price as Verizon Wireless customers who sign a one-year customer agreement.

In addition, INpulse Core, INpulse Plus and INpulse Power customers who decide later to move to monthly postpay customer agreements may now keep their INpulse prepay phone numbers when they switch plans. INpulse account balances will be used as a credit toward the new postpay monthly customer agreement.

Verizon Wireless offers INpulse in pre-packaged plans built around three handsets, including $10 of airtime at activation. Those phones are the Samsung SCH-u340, the
Samsung SCH-a870 and the Motorola RAZR V3m.

Google Talks to Verizon and Sprint

Google is in advanced talks with Verizon Wireless to put its applications on Verizon phones, according to the Wall Street Journal. Google reportedly also is also talking to Sprint Nextel. The talks appear to center around carrier licensing of software and anoperating system that would power a Google-optimized mobile device.

Such devices are expected to cost less than similar handsets, as part of a "Google everywhere" strategy not built on handset sales or recurring service provider revenue streams.

NetZero Shuts Down VoIP Service

NetZero Voice, the VoIP-over dial-up service sold by NetZero, is being shut down by Dec. 15. Customers who want to migrate to the Packet8 service can do so for $19.95 a month.

Since 2005, NetZero had gotten only had about 12,000 subscribers, it appears. Former NetZero customers might be a mixed blessing for 8x8, though, which now focuses on VoIP services for small businesses. One has to believe most of the NetZero customers are consumers with a high value orientation, possibly similar in profile to the high-churning value customers EarthLink has to contend with.

So not only are the potential new customers outside the desired customer segment 8x8 is chasing, they probably are high churn customers as well. Time will tell.

New Qwest FTTN Plan

Though it might be said to be a baby step, Qwest Communications has decided to up capital spending by an incremental $200 million over the next two years to bring 20 Mbps service to 1.5 million customer dwellings. The fiber-to-node plan obviously will rely on Digital Subscriber Line of some sort for the drop, but Qwest did not specify which particular approach it has in mind. It could use ADSL2 or VDSL, of course.

Basically, the company, which normally spends between $70 million and $100 million on fiber-to-node access plant, is incrementally spending the extra $200 million to pick up the tempo.

In a bit of a twist, Qwest will not deliver linear entertainment video over the network, relying instead on its DirecTV satellite service for that. Instead, it really sees the FTTN upgrade as a data services play.

As is always the case, investors seem not to like the idea. They didn't like Verizon's FiOS plan or fiber-to-customer plans launched by independent providers in France, for example. Investors fear Comcast and other cable companies will wind up spending more money on upgrades of their own as well.

Qwest is doing the right thing. Bandwidth is the reason any terrestrial wireline network has for existing. Failure to invest in bandwidth means business death. Sure, investor expectations have to be managed. But were in up to the investors Qwest would pay out a dividend and condemn itself to ulimate bankruptcy.

The program is not nearly as sweeping as upgrade programs underway at Verizon and at&t. Qwest simply can't afford that. But neither can Qwest sit still and do nothing. Investors might finally be seeing the fruits of at&t and Verizon investments in broadband infrastructure. They will see the same at Qwest, as unpopular as the investments are.