Vonage Shifts Tactics

In its efforts to control marketing cost, Vonage has been targeting geographic regions where it has a greater chance of signing up customers with high need to call international destinations. For the most part that means urban areas with large immigrant populations.

So although Vonage's marketing up to this point has been able replacing other landline services, the new value pitch is more nearly the "cheaper long distance" segment whose buyers might otherwise be looking at calling cards, dial-around or other ways of calling globally for less money.

The move highlights a perhaps under-appreciated aspect of the voice communications business. Though most executives think "voice is a commodity," and are right in most respects, an argument can be made that voice is not actually a "commodity" in a classic set, but rather a set of "commodities," or perhaps not a classic commodity at all.

Sugar, salt and flour generally are classic commodities. But sugar is not a substitute for salt or flour. In that sense, mobile communications is not generally a substitute for landline voice, a business phone system, PC-to-PC communications or texting, though in some ways each of these modes is partially a substitute for each of the others.

Even email, surely something most people would say is a commodity, is not completely so. Mobile email is a different product than Gmail, or else everybody would be using mobile email. The point is that the mode of consumption, the cost of consumption, the places and time where consumption occurs, as well as the essential required features for successful use, are not so substitutable as to make all of them fully interchangeable commodities.

And the point of that observation is that industry proponents sometimes do not work hard enough at understanding the real differences that make each of these modes and use cases "different products." Which is to say, no commonly interchangeable commodities.

The point at hand is Vonage's new marketing pitch. True, for some users Vonage is a substitute for legacy wired voice service. For others, it is a substitute for long distance calling, calling cards, callback service or dial-around.

To say voice is a scale or volume business, a low-margin business or even a "bulk" business is one thing. To say it is a "commodity" business might be more correct within a single segment or use case. It is wildly incorrect across the full range of use cases that "voice" now represents.

Some might point out that short message service (text messaging) is a distinct business. Others will say it is part of the mobile voice business. Some might say it sometimes is part of the mobile business, and sometimes a "PC-initiated" and "mobile terminated" business.

If such opinions can exist, it is confirmation of the "non-commodity" (in the sense of non-interchangeability) nature of the business.

That isn't to say differentiate is easy. It is hard. But to argue it cannot be done, because voice is a commodity, is off the mark. That isn't to say it is easy to differentiate without obtaining scale. Providers might rationally choose not to differentiate. But that is different from arguing "they cannot."

Android, iPhone: Finding the New in the Old

Sometimes the insight that leads to an assault on a new market is to discover the new market hidden in the weeds of an older and established market. Incumbents in the mobile phone market have dismissed the Apple iPhone simply because the volumes of devices shipped by the leading players is so overwhelming.

Though it is less often said, the same sort of dismissal could be aimed at Android, the open-source operating system under development by Google and 30 or so other partners.

And it's hard to argue with that perspective. Unless you dig in the weeds and reimagine a market. If one looks at smart phone (perhaps more aptly described as mobile PC or mobile Web device)penetration, it is still quite low.

Looking just at smart phones, which have low penetration, the market volume to be shared by all players is still quite small, so the market share doesn't have nearly the same meaning it would in a large volume market.

"Smart phones" or "mobile Web" devices or "conference in a pocket phones" or "email in a pocket" phones remain a developing market, not a saturated market. So new players still have a shot of ultimately achieving significant influence and share, no matter how small their efforts might appear if the market is defined as "mobile phones."

Hughes de la Vergne, Gartner analyst, estimates that even powerful Symbian has just two to three percent share of the U.S. smart phone operating system market, for example.

But that's just the U.S. market. The numbers certainly look daunting just about everywhere else.

SMEs Ripe for IP Managed Services, Says Nortel

Fifty percent of SMBs surveyed have voice networks three or more years old, and despite the fact that nearly half characterize themselves as "early adopters" or "on the leading edge of new telecommunications technology," only 40 percent have actually implemented VoIP or any IP-based mobile convergence solution.

"The research clearly indicates a great opportunity for service providers to target SMEs," says Alf deCardenas, Nortel general manager.

The research conducted by Ronin Corporation involved surveys of some 900 SME and enterprise decision makers across the United States, France and the United Kingdom.

Among other findings, the research found that SMEs are more likely to go to service providers than resellers for voice hardware and Internet services. The ability to make phone calls over WiFi and cellular networks using a dual-mode phone is the service SMBs are most likely to consider for implementation, followed by Web services like click-to-connect and converged desktop applications that allow them to easily control calls from any cellular phone using a laptop application.

Slow Email? BlackBerry Outage

Research In Motion Ltd. says an outage left users in North America without access to their BlackBerry email service on Monday, beginning about 3:30 p.m. Eastern Standard time and lasting about three hours.

RIM says no messages were lost during the incident, which caused intermittent delivery delays. No explanation for the outage has been given.

Outages of this sort are the reason many of us are giving more thought to backup and redundancy strategies. On a recent business trip, for the first time in my life, I accidentally left my laptop at home, and was going to be gone for 14 days. True, I had the BlackBerry and another mobile as well.

But in my line of work access to the Web is arguably more important than either of those two sorts of devices, as important as they are. Because of Google Documents & Spreadsheets and Google Broswer Sync, I was able to keep working using public terminals and loaned machines, with access to Microsoft Office.

I also learned to live without access to Outlook for a bit. The BlackBerry helped, of course. The lasting change so far is that I have kept using Google Documents more than I have in the past. That's why sampling is so important. Behavior can change.

HD DVD War is Over

Consumers baffled by the competing high-definition digital video recorder standards soon will be able to go ahead and buy without concern they have backed the wrong horse in the race. Blu-ray has won.

One more sign: Netflix is going to stop carrying titles in the HD DVD format.
Netflix has stocked both Blu Ray and HD DVD titles since 2006. But all HD DVD discs will be cut from their inventory by the end of the year. Netflix also has stopped adding new HD DVD titles to its inventory.

Blockbuster last summer had made a similar decision.

The format victory is a surprisingly rare event for Sony, which developed and has pushed for Blu-ray. In prior format wars it has lost, fairly consistently. It backed Betamax, but lost to VHS.

So go ahead and buy a Blu-ray HD DVR. It's the winner.

Belgian Mobile Operator Wants to Kill Fixed Line

Belgian mobile operator Mobistar is intensifying its efforts to take market share from landline provider Belgacom by aggressively targeting its larger rival's fixed line subscribers. The Mobistar AtHome product allows users 40 hours of mobile calls from the home for 10 Euros a month.

About 35 percent of Belgian households no longer possess a fixed line telephone and another 28 percent are prepared to give theirs up if there is a good alternative, some researchers have found.

LA Will Try to Tax VoIP

Los Angeles voters have voted to extend the telephone tax to include VoIP and other Internet IP communications.

The measure was cleverly worded, saying it would lower the telephone tax rate from 10 percent to nine percent, but extend it to "a wider range of telephone-like technology and allows the city to tax the routing of voice, audio, video, data or other communication information transmitted through fiber-optic coaxial cables, power lines, broadband, DSL or wireless systems.”

The city has been taxing local access services since 1967. Further legal challenges are likely.

What does "Communications-Enabled Business Transformation" Mean?

A recent survey by analysts at In-Stat finds that 54 percent of U.S. companies that have adopted IP communications have integrated it into their operations in a way that has "changed business procedures and processes."

"Change," in this case, might not be anything like the notion of "transformation." The reason is that adoption still is driven by traditional buying decision triggers, such as equipment end-of-life, lack of capacity, business partnerships, and internal IT initiatives, In-Stat says.

The issue is whether adoption of unified communications necessarily entails "transformation" or whether it merely leads to "change," albeit changes that lead to more efficiency.

And some survey findings suggest there is less transformation going on than one would think, though efficiency arguably is higher. Less than 33 percent of businesses using IP communications currently use unified collaboration and unified messaging applications, In-Stat says.


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Opera Mini, 35 Million Users

In the two years since its worldwide launch, Opera Mini has achieved more than 35 million cumulative users, with 100,000 downloads a day of the mobile phone browser.

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.