Nokia Unveils N96

As its name implies, the N96 is the successor to the N95, Nokia's former high-end device. The dual slider device comes with 16 gigabytes of internal storage, plus a microSD slot, something the N95 8GB lacks. Like the N95, the N96 retains the
5-megapixel autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens.

But "flash" support is improved by the use of two LEDs to provide lighting. There is an integrated DVB-H mobile TV tuner. As audio support on the N95 was robust, we would expect the same from the N96.

On such a device one would expect Wi-Fi support and global positioning satellite capabilities, and both are included. The N96 is supposed to launch in Europe in the third quarter this year.

Microsoft Buys Danger

Microsoft is acquiring Danger Inc., a provider of social-oriented messaging software and services. Danger provides real-time mobile messaging, social networking services and other applications that historically have proven popular with younger users.

The acquisition further reinforces the importance Microsoft attaches to the mobile computing space.

Nokia Launches Mobile Ad Network

Nokia today announced the launch of the Nokia Media Network, a premium advertising network including over 70 properties including AccuWeather, Discovery, Hearst, Reuters, and Sprint.

Nokia touts the venture as the first global mobile ad network of top tier publishers. There is no doubt a story here: First, that advertising is becoming part of the revenue model for the mobile business. Second, that handset providers are carving out new space for themselves in the value chain. Third, that mobile handset manufacturers and service providers now are in the media business.

Google isn't going to have this market to itself.

Starbucks Chooses at&t for Wi-Fi

If you are a T-Mobile Hotspot user, don't panic. Your service will still work at Starbucks. But if you are anybody else, Starbucks and at&t are serving up something even more tasty.

Namely, two free hours a day of Wi-Fi access at Starbucks. Additional hours will cost $3.99 for additional two-hour chunks of time.

Under the earlier plan with T-Mobile, Starbucks customers needed a paid subscription to access the in-store Wi-Fi service.

Users also will have a choice of monthly subscriptions costing $19.99 that will enable access to other AT&T hot-spot locations in addition to Starbucks.

At&t broadband customers will be able to surf at the more than 7,000 Starbucks locations in the U.S. for free, as well. The new Wi-Fi partnership is expected to be introduced gradually at Starbucks locations this spring.

So seating is going to be harder to get, and access more congested. It's still a great deal.

Sony Ericsson Embraces Windows Mobile

Sony Ericsson will drop its own Symbian-powered operating system in preference for Windows Mobile 6 for a new high-end Web-capable smart phone. The move does not mean Sony Ericsson is abandoning Symbian for other devices, but does suggest that as mobile Web devices become more prevalent and important, a "PC-like" experience might be growing in importance. The move also suggests growing acceptance of Windows Mobile as an mobile operating system.

The Xperia X1, which it says is the first new brand to come from within Sony Ericsson, is the first device to use Windows Mobile 6.

The X1 handset is designed around media player applications and Web browsing and features a full QWERTY keyboard.

How Much Bandwidth is Enough?

Nobody yet knows how much Internet access bandwidth a typical user will need in the future, at peak times (average usage doesn't much matter). It is easier in many ways to model bandwidth requirements for entertainment video services. 

If a provider uses a "broadband" approach(in the sense of all linear channels being delivered to the user, whether or not the user is watching), it is a simple matter of ascertaining how many discrete video feeds one wishes to deliver, how much bandwidth each feed requires, and then doing some simple multiplication. 

 If one then decides to deliver all on-demand programming, one needs a switching infrastructure, and then must make some assumptions about simultaneous peak viewing. Will a typical user, at the peak viewing hour, want to watch one feed, two feeds or three, keeping in mind that one of the feeds might be recorded for later viewing while a second is actively watched. 

The Internet access portion of the planning exercise is more murky, but still hinges on video behavior. If business logic allows it, users might be able to stream video, even HDTV video, over IP connections. Whether this bandwidth is of the "public Internet" type or the "walled garden" type is less important, in some sense. 

 Assuming there is a revenue model, how much bandwidth must a service provider be able to provide? Whatever end users may think, a service provider will deliver bandwidth in amounts that allow it to make money, and no more. 

 So asking how much bandwidth users may want is probably less important than how much they are willing to pay to get that level of bandwidth. 

And so far, few users seem to have shown a willingness to spend hundreds of dollars to get symmetrical bandwidth, whether that is a T1 connection or a 50 Mbps symmetrical service from SureWest Communications. To use the old but useful analogy, all of us might enjoy driving a Lexus. But not all of us do. We solve our transportation problems, but not always with a Lexus. In principle bandwidth ultimately will represent that sort of choice as well. 

Just about anybody can buy a T1 connection today. But not all businesses do so, and few consumers do so. Granted, the bulk of consumer bandwidth requirements still will remain of the asymmetrical sort (barring a massive switch to peer-to-peer), so symmetrical bandwidth might not be the best analogy. Still, the question remains: how much bandwidth will consumers pay for? "Need" is it that sense a subsidiary question. 

There's no question typical consumers are showing a clear preference for paying more for higher bandwidth. The issue is the elasticity of that demand as service providers start to move into the "scores of megabits" range, and then contemplate bandwidths an order of magnitude higher than that (100 Mbps or more). 

 If one looks simply at the price-per-megabit, users have shown a wide willingness to pay $50 to $100 a month for unrestricted use of 200 Mbps to 500 Mbps of linear video (with implicit quality of service assurances). 

 They likewise have shown high willingness to pay $50 a month for a few megabits to several megabits per second of interactive Internet access bandwidth in the downstream direction, with no quality of service assurances. 

 Assume that most also have been willing to pay $50 a month or so for a wireline voice connection and you are looking at $150 to $200 worth of monthly revenue for services offering several hundred megabits-per-second of downstream bandwidth, plus services on top, using a highly asymmetrical network. 

That does not leave lots of headroom for networks that deliver more symmetrical bandwidth (scores of megabits per second in the upstream and hundreds of megabits per second for linear and on-demand video plus 100 Mbps for interactive applications). 

 In the consumer markets, the rule of thumb has been that $10 a month of incremental spending is a big deal. Still, shown a value proposition high enough, even $50 a month in incremental spending now has become fairly commonplace. 

So the issue might be more "how much will consumers pay?" rather than "how much bandwidth will they need?", as important as that question remains. 

There always are trade-offs engineers can make: bandwidth versus processing, processing versus storage, non-real-time versus real time, bandwidth versus image quality and so forth. Ultimately, consumers are going to drive access bandwidth with their wallets.

Will Sprint Unleash Nukes?

At this point, it is fairly clear to just about anyone that Sprint Nextel has to do something dramatic to reverse its sliding fortunes in the mobile services market. Sprint no longer has the luxury of time for small incremental changes that might change its fortunes "some day."

So the issue is whether Sprint will "go nuclear," unleashing some sort of market-disrupting attack it expects its competitors will not want to match. Its a risky gambit, to be sure. AT&T completely changed the basic way mobile voice minutes of use are packaged when it launched "Digital One Rate."

But the tactic has not had long-term differentiating value because all the other major carriers simply shifted their packaging to match. So Sprint has to find a proposition that is startling and compelling to end users, but not appetizing for the more dominant providers to mimic quickly.

If the attempt is to "drive sales through the roof," nothing short of a disruptive move will work. Some suggest "unlimited calling" is one such tactic. Some smaller wireless providers such as Leap Wireless have prospered by offering unlimited local mobile calling. In so doing Leap and others have carved out a definable niche in the "wireline replacement," value calling and ethnic market segments.

There is some thinking that unlimited calling on at least a continental basis might be the same sort of market-shaking move, eliminating the "what is the right bucket size?" decision every consumer has to make, and transforming what is still a service sold on the basis of "scarcity" into a service whose premise is "abundance."

In some sense, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse actually has to hope that such an assault really would drive call volumes through the roof. Because if Sprint can do so, and its relatively generous spectrum will support the additional traffic, some other key competitors--especially Verizon and at&t--might not be able to quickly turn up additional bandwidth to match the offer.

And that's the other part of the equation. The offer must shake up user perceptions of value compared to price, as did Digital One Rate. But the offer must challenge Sprint's competitors enough that they will not immediately respond.

And at some level this is a nuclear strategy in an operational sense: if Sprint moves to provoke a non-linear increase in voice usage, can it handle the load? More important, can Sprint's competitors handle increases of the same magnitude if they decide to respond to the offer.

Likewise, there is the financial angle. If competitors match Sprint's offer, what is the level of damage they sustain in average revenue per minute of use, or average revenue per user? How does Sprint price and package so a direct competitive response is too painful to contemplate?

If Verizon and at&t can't match the offer without losing more than they gain, they won't match the offer. And if they won't, Sprint gains the distinctive positioning it seeks.

"Going nuclear" is going to be dangerous. But the only thing more dangerous at this point is thinking Sprint somehow can "creep" its way to success. The issue is where "unlimited calling" is, in itself, destabilizing enough to achieve what Sprint wants.

My sense is that it would not. Leap Wireless already offers a plan that is for most users a "national unlimited calling" plan, for about $50 a month. But there are other angles.

Unlimited texting or Web access might be more attractive. If Sprint really wants to disrupt the market, it can do something about texting plans.

FMC or Wireless Substitution?

In the coming war between mobile substitution and mobile-fixed integration approaches to unifying communications, it was inevitable that the "green" argument would appear as a weapon. OnRelay argues IP desk phones sold in 2008 alone will create 47 million kilograms of waste. Calling desk phones increasingly redundant, OnRelay argues the better path is simply to reuse mobiles as office handsets, substituting mobile for landline handsets rather than integrating the two calling methods.

"We do business in an increasingly mobile environment," says Marie Wold, OnRelay president. "Fifty to 70 percent of enterprise voice minutes are already mobile."

Her conclusion? "Landline office phones are simply a waste." In fact, her argument is in some ways similar to the argument proponents of hosted services and cloud computing take: that the public and private IP networks now are robust enough and easy enough to use that remote provisioning makes more sense.

In this case, using mobile networks in place of in-building wiring is seen as a better way to provide desktop phone equipment, at the same time avoiding the expense of new IP phones and upgrades to corporate networks to handle voice.

"An enterprise deployment of 10,000 IP extensions includes a large hidden cost of LAN switches, routers, cabling and power supplies required to support the IP voice traffic," says Wold. "Of the staggering $15.8 million total cost of the IP telephony deployment, 80 percent is related to the desk phones and corresponding LAN upgrades."

Wold argues that most, if not all, employees can manage their office communications equally well or better with just their mobiles.

Which brings up an interesting question: to what extent are fixed-mobile convergence" projects less about "converging" and more about "diverging." In other words, though FMC can be pitched as a "convergence" of wireless and wireline networks, by allowing wireline access to substitute for mobile network access, in practice such "convergence" really leads to wireless substitution.

One can argue that the lower calling costs possible when a mobile handset is able to send and receive messages using a wireline-attached base station of some sort truly is a form of convergence. One might argue it is another form of substitution. The attempt is to stimulate use of mobile minutes from indoor locations, provide better quality when doing so, and decrease network-related operating and capital costs. All of those objectives are praiseworthy, but are not actually "convergence" moves. They are about mobile substitution.

Even when a "fixed line only" operator begins deploying mobile handsets to compete with mobile service providers, that s less a case of "convergence" and more a case of trying to grab some mobile market share while ensuring a continued viable role for the terrestrial broadband network.

"Fixed mobile convergence" has been touted as a way to create new services that unify experiences between wireline and wireless domains. But it seems more likely that divergence is the more likely result, so long as the focus is on calling prices and access networks.

Matters arguably are different in an enterprise scenario, where the seamless availability of applications on desk and mobile handsets, rather than calling cost or end point choices, would seem to be the driver. But as OnRelay argues, one has to integrate desk phones and mobiles only if one insists on using both types of devices on a wide scale. If one goes with a wireless tail, there isn't much need for "convergence."

FMC might be one of those significant detours the global telecom industry takes now and then, in a well-intentioned effort to create next-generation services. At some level, it makes sense to unify services across end user devices. But that makes most sense when assumes the existence of multiple classes of highly-deployed end points.

Over the longer term, it probably will happen that FMC winds up being less important as a way of "integrating desk phones and mobiles," and more important as it refers to making Web-based and server-based applications available on mobile devices. In the future, it might be more important to unify application access on all sorts of mobile and fixed "Web capable" devices than to unify mobile and fixed voice appliances.

Wi-Fi Plus Bluetooth Coming in 2009

A new standard will allow Bluetooth devices to switch to Wi-Fi for file transfers if Wi-Fi is available, according to Michael Foley, director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. The new features should be available in 2009.

Bluetooth also is compatible with ultra-wideband technology, but Wi-Fi now is seen as important as well. It is expected that chip vendors will start putting both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functions onto a single chip, instead of the separate approach now popular.

The combination devices will use the regular low-power Bluetooth radios to recognize each other and establish connections. If they need to transfer a large file, they will be able to turn on their Wi-Fi radios, then turn them off to save power after finishing the transfer, Foley says.

It's just one more detail for consumers to track.

More Trouble for Cable?

Once upon a time, the cable TV industry was a struggling insurgent industry, long on hope, short on finding, basically a rural market service retransmitting urban market off-air signals to areas that couldn't receive them.

All that changed during the 1980s when major metro markets were wired, channel capacities grew into scores and independent programmers changed the business from "remote channel importation" to an "add choice" model.

By the 1990s cable gradually captured 70 percent of homes. Over the last 19 years, as video penetration saturated, cable modem and voice services emerged as the growth drivers. But cable now is an incumbent. Like the telephone companies, it faces negative growth in its legacy business, partly from satellite providers but increasingly from at&t and Verizon.

As a result, cable stocks have dropped about 35 percent since last summer. UBS analyst John Hodluk thinks more pain is coming, as consumer spending slows, broadband access additions decelerate and the telcos start to make themselves felt in video service.

Hodulik says the two telcos will double the reach of their video services this year to about 18 percent of homes passed, and will double again by the end of 2010. As a result, cable basic sub losses could triple in 2008.

On the other hand, Qwest Communications might lose nearly 10 percent of its consumer lines this year as well.

The good news for most telcos is that revenue sources have diversified quite a lot over the past decade. Consider Cincinnati Bell, an independent telco.

About 83 percent of its service revenue in 2007 was earned from areas other than the traditional consumer wireline voice traffic. In 2006, Cincinnati Bell earned about 80 percent of its total revenue from sources other than consumer landlines.

Business market revenue is part of the reason. Revenue from data center managed services increased 43 percent in 2007, for example. Wireless service revenue from business customers grew by 17 percent and business access lines were actually up almost two percent. As a reflection of this growth business markets revenue represent a 57 percent of total 2007 revenue compared with 55 percent in 2006.

Which is largely what the Federal Communications Commission forecast would happen when it decided the basic competitive framework for the U.S. market would be to encourage the telcos and cable companies to have at it. That hasn't been helpful for other would-be competitors, including competitive local exchange carriers and independent VoIP providers.

But there's reason to believe the framework is working, at least to a significant extent. A great deal of the credit, though, is because of the contributions made by Internet-based application providers. That payoff seems clearer every day.

Writers Strike Encourages YouTube Sampling

There often are unanticipated consequences in life, and it appears that the U.S. entertainment industry writers strike has given people an opportunity to sample more online video clips than ever before, comScore suggests.

Its December 2007 report suggests U.S. Internet users watched more than 10 billion videos online during the month, representing the single heaviest month for online video consumption since comScore initiated its tracking service. Google saw substantial growth and extended its video market share gains, now accounting for nearly one out of every three videos viewed online.

The issue isn't so much that online videos are a replacement for network TV shows. The issue is that online video viewing is a substitute use of time and attention. Ultimately, that is crucial for any media segment and the contestants within any segment.

Essentially, the writers strike has encouraged users to sample a new product. And sampling typically is one of the best ways to encourage users to adopt a new behavior. One of the unanticipated effects of the writers strike may be that a new group of online video viewers has been added, with a permanent change in at least some of their entertainment video habits.

“December represented a considerably strong month for online video viewing,” says Erin Hunter, comScore EVP. “With the writer’s strike keeping new TV episodes from reaching the airwaves, viewers have been seeking alternatives for fresh content. It appears that online video is stepping in to help fill that void.”

Online viewers watched an average of 3.4 hours (203 minutes) of online video during the month, representing a 34 percent gain since the beginning of 2007.

The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes and the average online video viewer consumed 72 videos.

More VoIP Patent Trouble

Verizon now is suing Charter Communications as well as Cox Communications for infringing eight VoIP patents. Included are the three patents Vonage was found guilty of infringing last year, plus several that relate to maintaining quality of service. In principle, it is not clear why every major cable company in the U.S. market is not guilty of infringement if Cox is found to be infringing, as virtually all the cable operators use the PacketCable framework.

United Online: Harvesting Cash Flow

With the latest fourth quarter and year-end reports now out from United Online, AOL and EarthLink, the expected trends continue. Dial-up Internet access, like stand-alone long distance before it, throws off cash flow, but less every year. All three leading independent Internet access providers are in the midst of transformation projects, with United Online succeeding most clearly, though it failed to pull off an initial public offering of its Classmates.com unit.

All three ISPs essentially are managing their dial-up bases to harvest cash flow and control costs, the standard prescription for managing a declining business, while seeking a new path to growth. That's the same path the independent long distance industry took as well.

Perhaps the best historical analogy is not long distance but paging. Basically, mobile phones replaced pagers, as broadband is supplanting narrowband access. But paging remains a business. It simply isn't as large a business as it once was, and is the province of specialists. That's the ultimate future for dial-up services in the medium term as well.

As this data from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission indicates, paging use and revenues have been declining steadily since 1998. Dial-up will be around for a while, but as a small niche within the broader range of access services.

VoIP Inc. Gets Out

VoIP, Inc. has gotten out of the independent VoIP business as a provider of services that replace standard phone line service. It has decided instead to recast itself as a provider of "click-to-call" applications. The Company therefore has suspended all of its telecommunications network operations including all current revenue generating operations.

The company also reduced its workforce by 25 persons, eliminating most of its network operations and software engineering staff.

Some participants in the U.S. VoIP marketplace think the next two years will see the demise of most of the independent U.S. providers who do not own their own access networks. The average revenue per user is simply too low, the profit margin too thin and the volumes too low.

Hoping is not a business plan.

Content, TV Display Key to Online Success

The most-important things online movie download services can do to succeed is offer a broad selection of content and make it possible to view that content on TVs, which is the expectation users now have for movie content. That's because the single most important ingredient for success for any video offering is the content.

That isn't to say content pitched to mobiles or PCs can't find a niche. It is to say that the broad mass market for online-delivered movie viewing won't become a mass phenomenon until user behavior is consistent with what consumers expect today.

"When it comes to movie rentals and purchases, the quality of content matters," say analysts at The Diffusion Group. The second crucial element is that "getting video downloads to the TV is absolutely imperative."

The ability to view movie downloads on any TV in the home is of critical importance, both to those that have used online movie download services and those likely to do so soon, The Diffusion Group says.

The use of mobile phones for video viewing is not considered sufficiently desirable to justify using an online movie download service, Diffusion Group researchers find. "As such, cell phone video viewing will not in-and-of-itself be a compelling attribute for an online movie download service, especially of full-length movies.

And there's a difference between users and proponents. Proponents emphasize the interactive capabilities online content enables. But users don't seem especially enamored of those sorts of features, as fond of them as interactive proponents are.

Adult broadband users don't agree. "Only 28 percent rank this attribute positively and 42.3 percent rank it unimportant," Diffusion Group researchers say.