WiMAX Threatens 3G, Fixed Wireless

WiMAX provides the right mix of
features and pricing to appeal to consumers, though business users will provide more of a challenge, say researchers at In-Stat.

The commercial user frequently requires ubiquitous coverage, which will be an issue initially.

"While early WiMAX network coverage will not be as large as 3G cellular, it will be adequate to appeal to consumers," says Daryl Schoolar, In-Stat analyst.

"When respondents were presented with
service examples and picked the one they most preferred, the one representing WiMAX was picked more than two-to-one over the one representing 3G cellular data, he says

Respondents are very interested in a wireless broadband service that
will allow them to connect multiple devices under a single service
plan, Schoolar notes.

Respondents also say they want a service that can meet both their at home and away Internet needs.

For this reason, fixed broadband operators are vulnerable to losing subscribers to WiMAX.

Survey respondents reported increased usage of public wireless broadband between 2006 and 2007, with expectations for further increases in 2008.

Belgacom Eyes Cable

A growing strategic reality in the global telecom business is the need to "go out of region" to fuel growth. Belgacom, for example, is offering €420m to the cable companies and municipal shareholders of the Belgian cablenet Interkabel.

In a statement the incumbent telco said that its offer was €70m more than had been made by its rival Telenet and 40 percent more than the upfront payment offered to the municipalities.

In this case there is the additional tactical consideration of buying customer base and revenue that is denied a key in-region competitor.

But make no mistake: organic growth is slow, tedious work these days. Leaps occur mostly through acquisition.

Sprint Churn Bottoming?

Sprint Nextel has lost one million customers since the end of 2007, a fact mirrored in surveys of ChangeWave Research members.

The more important news, though, may be a possible bottoming. It is possible Sprint finally has stabilized its churn problem.

In March 2008, for example, a survey of 3,597 consumers found 11 percent reporting they are Sprint Nextel customers.

Some 31 percent said they use Verizon while 28 percent reported using and AT&T. To be sure, that indication of market share among survey respondents does not track very well with other measurements of market share, such as the carriers own quarterly and annual reports of subscribership.

No surprise: Sprint customers are least satisfied of all of the major provider customers. When asked how likely they were to change service providers in the next 6 months, a relatively high percentage of Sprint customers (21 percent) said they're likely to switch, compared to just 10 percent of Verizon customers and 11 percent for AT&T' users.

When people do change cellular service providers, very few are switching to Sprint (three percent ). The good news is that the number of switchers looking to join Sprint actually turned up one percentage point since the last ChangeWave survey.

iPhone Sales to Triple?

Right now it's hard to say for sure, but there's sound logic behind predictions that Apple now will attempt to dramatically increase sales of iPhones, now that carriers are subsidizing the device. The rationale?

Richard Windsor, Nomura analyst, notes that higher volumes are necessary. "Apple must increase its volumes very substantially to make up the difference” between what it was making before, and what it will be making now on subsidized devices, without a recurring revenue share.

Windsor notes that a dollar from revenue share has EBIT margins of 100 percent, while hardware revenues have an EBIT margin of closer to 30 percent.

So a simple back of the envelope analysis suggests that if Apple wants revenue to grow, it will have to sell three times as many devices at the lower margins, to make up for what it might have earned under the old business model.

Cheaper iPhone = Digital One Rate

Some of you may remember "Digital One Rate," the first "bucket of minutes" wireless voice plan, launched by AT&T when Dan Hesse, now Sprint Nextel CEO, ran the AT&T Wireless business. You might also remember that Digital One Rate ignited a huge wave of wireless voice usage.

It is conceivable that the new 3G iPhone, with price points aimed at the "the other side of the chasm" crowd (the mass market), as well as the inevitable responses by competitors, could well ignite a new round of data services use by fairly "average" mobile users.

A $200 iPhone with 3G is just the sort of thing that could trigger dramatically-expanded mobile Web and mobile broadband use, driving smart phones and mobile Web services into the lead edge of the "early majority" market that mobile providers will have to crack if 3G is to become a user mainstay.

With the latest release, Apple is taking aim at the enterprise segment, one of several key smart phone segments, as well as the broader "entertainment-focused" segment. Some of us are in the less-well-defined segment that rely relies on the Web, even if we use BlackBerries, so the mobile Web element also now comes into play.

The point is that the 3G iPhone might one day be seen as a key turning point for mobile broadband.

iPhone, Other Devices Will Drive Data Revenue to $70 Billion

Goldman Sachs analysts Simona Jankowski and Thomas Lee now predict there will be 15 percent compounded annual growth in revenue in smart phones over the next five years as a result of “more affordable smart phone devices and focus by handset vendors following iPhone.”

That will result in increased email, Web and other data uses, leading to a ballooning of telecom services revenue, from $19 billion last year to $70 billion in 2012.

BlackBerry Vs. iPhone

The most-important take-away from the new 3G Apple iPhone announcement is the lower prices, which we flagged up as a barrier to uptake in the first version, says Steven Hartley, senior analyst at Ovum. But Alec Saunders over at Saunderslog.com thinks BlackBerry will start to feel some real heat, now that it is clear the iPhone and BlackBerry devices will be priced head to head.

Many of us BlackBerry users might concur, but also might note that we are quite attached to the reliability of key entry. If Apple can do just a bit better on that front, many of us will find few barriers to switching. Right now, it remains an issue.

YouTube for Business

Cisco is announcing what will surely be seen as "YouTube for business." Enterprise TV, a new YouTube-like video posting and viewing service aimed at enterprises, aims to make it easier for companies to do everything related to video: creating it, capturing it, and playing it.

Employees can capture video of meetings or training programs and upload it immediately to their enterprise networks, where employees can watch it on demand.

Social Nets Used by 22% of "40 or Older" Internet Users

About 22 percent of U.S. Internet users ages 40 and over use social networking Web sites, according to JWT BOOM/ThirdAge. A separate survey by ExactTarget fount that 39 percent of 35 to 44 year-olds used social networks, use fell sharply with age.

Only 13 percent of 55 to 64 year-olds were social networkers, and only four percent of those ages 65 and older used social networking.

About 75 percent of Internet users ages 15 to 24 use social networking sites, ExactTarget finds.

The implications are most significant for marketers who rely on word of mouth. According to the JWT BOOM/ThirdAge study, more than 75 percent of 40-and-over users received promotional e-mails about products and services and then clicked through to the site being promoted.

More than 55 percent of 40-or-older users purchased a product or service promoted in an e-mail.

Some 93 percent of respondents read an article about a Web site in print and later visited the site.
About 83 percent visited a Web site after seeing an advertisement for the site in a newspaper or print magazine.

Why don't consumers 40 and older use social networking sites? Respondents say their main concerns are privacy, time and just not seeing the point.

It might be hard to find a serious observer who would argue social networking will not climb among the 40 or older demographics, though. Other innovations such as iPods, the Internet, text and instant messaging were adopted more slowly by older users than by younger users. Social networking won't be any different.

14 Million iPhone Sales in 2008?

Analysts at RBC Capital think a stunning 14 million--not just 10 million--new Apple iPhone units will be sold in 2008.

If so, it will be clear why higher-bandwidth mobile networks are needed. What isn't so clear yet is the precise impact all those new devices might have on access bandwidth.

RBC estimates that 70 percent of those 14 million units will be sold to first-time iPhone buyers. In all likelihood, that means 9.8 million new users who will disrupt traditional usage patterns.

But AT&T executives say they are confident they understand the dimensions of new demand, based on the 2G iPhone users they already are supporting. If not, they'll have time to adjust, says Ralph De La Vega, AT&T Wireless CEO.

1Q: 1.7 Million IP or Hybrid PBX Licenses Sold

About 1.7 million IP or hybrid PBX licenses were sold in North America in the first quarter of 2008, according to researchers at iLocus. That implies sales of 1.5 million licenses in the U.S. market.

Who Blogs?

A Deloitte & Touche study of blog usage by age found a direct relationship between the two. The younger the user, the more likely he or she was to read or keep a blog on a weekly basis, according to Deloitte.

For example, 55 percent of Millennials (ages 13 to 24) surveyed read a blog, and the percentages decline for every age cohort in the study until reaching just 16 percent among matures (ages 61 to 75).

Similarly, 35 percent of millennials keep a blog, whereas only one percent of matures do. The age groups in between—Generation X (ages 25 to 41) and baby boomers (ages 42 to 60)—fall between those extremes.

U.S. Smart Phone Sales Double

The worldwide smart phone market grew more than 29 percent and the North American smart phone market doubled in the first quarter of 2008 compared to a year ago, according to Gartner analysts.

Apple is the third largest vendor of smart phones, selling 1.7 million units worldwide to grab a 5.3 percent share of the market, Gartner says. In the U.S. market, though, Apple already is the second-largest vendor, with 20 percent of the market.

Globally, users bought 32.2 million smart phones in the first quarter 2008, an increase of 29.3 percent compared to the first quarter of 2007. In North America, unit sales more than doubled to 7.3 million.

AT&T Might Consider Usage-Based Access Pricing

AT&T might consider a usage-based approach to pricing broadband access, a solution to the problem of supporting very-heavy bandwidth users without resorting to blocking or traffic shaping, says CTO John Donovan. He says "one percent of the company's customers account for 20 percent of the network usage; the top five percent account for 40 percent of the usage."

In other remarks, Donovan says "traffic on our backbone is growing 60 percent per year."

"I don't view any of our customers, under any circumstances, as pirates -- I view them as users," Donovan said. "A heavy user is not a bad customer."

And users aren't dumb. If they have incentives to use P2P at off-peak hours, they will. BitTorrent use on the AT&T network peaks around 4 a.m., when other traffic is at an ebb, he says.

Peer to peer traffic represents about 20 percent of total network traffic, he adds.

You Can Say That Again!

Instead of being tied to their wired network infrastructures, most enterprise users are becoming untethered, with apps accessible from smartphones and laptopsn say analysts at the Burton Group.  This has huge implications for enterprise network infrastructures, how applications are built/deployed, and security, they say.