Monetizing Broadband: Something has to Give

Inevitably, Verizon Communications Chief Technology Officer Richard Lynch would get attention in mentioning that the broadband industry “will see a pricing paradigm shift” because Internet service providers “cannot continue to grow the Internet without passing the cost on to someone.”

Lynch's remarks would come as no surprise to anybody who follows revenue-per-bit trends in the broadband access business. It has been clear for some time that, as access bandwidth increases, revenue is not keeping pace.

Service providers have some room to deal with the widening gap, by adding new revenue-producing services and applications, managing cost and so forth. But there is not unlimited room to juggle cost elements.

At some point, higher bandwidth, which customers want to buy and service providers want to sell, will require investments with a more-linear payback mechanisms.

That likely means new ways of pricing bandwidth consumption. That probably doesn't mean a shift to fully-metered usage, as consumers do not like it, and such an approach undoubtedly would depress consumption and therefore stifle new applications and services.

But there are lots of other, more-palatable alternatives, namely "buckets" of usage analogous to the ways people now buy voice services or text messaging. Bigger buckets will cost more money; smaller buckets will cost less.

And if network neutrality rules are not onerous, service providers might be able to create service tiers with quality of service mechanisms, much as business customers are able to buy, though basic "best effort" plans likely would coexist.

“We are going to reach a point where we will sell packages of bytes,” Lynch says. Those packages might also offer differentiated quality of service.

Consumption at "off peak" hours might be offered at prices lower than equivalent consumption at peak hours, for example. Whether optional packages could be offered that allow end users to prioritize some applications, as businesses do, will not be clear until after new network neutrality rules are clarified. And that is going to take some time.

Video Business Model Disruption Inevitable, But Not Imminent

What will media companies look like in a couple of years? Pretty much what they look like today. But what will they look like in 10 to 15 years? Very different.

There are clear reasons why the couple of years will look an awful lot like this year,  while a decade from now the whole media business could be structured in very different ways.

First, new IP technology and broadband is in place that will drive a long cycle of innovation for challengers and economic destruction for incumbents. That almost assures vast change over a longer time frame. But the emphasis here has to be on "long" cycles.

Changes in the media can take quite a long time to mature. Gordon Crawford, The Capital Group managing director, notes that in 1972 the existing media business was quite attractive, financially. But that changed after 1995, the year of the Netscape initial public offering, which ushered in the age of Internet-based media.

Only now, 14 years later, is the impact starting to really affect the print segment of the business. And most of the video impact has yet to arrive.

Still, Crawford thinks change is inevitable. "If you go out enough years, bandwidth will be there," he says. "Storage will cost nothing and rights issues will be resolved."

"People will have access to whatever they want, whenever they want it, on any device," says Crawford.  "That is where we are going."

But one has to remember that large-scale and fundamental technological changes seem to have less impact when the trends are just beginning, but reach some inflection point, beyond which vast change happens relatively quickly. That should not be too different for the video business.

There will be less change that you expect early on, and greater change later, in other words.

There are some possible outcomes, though. If regulators were, for example, to impose an "a la carte" pricing regime on video providers, 250 of 400 cable channels will disappear overnight," says Crawford.

Peter Chernin, former News Corp. president, also agrees that fundamental change is coming. "Non-consumer-friendly business models cannot be supported anymore," he says.

"The single biggest question facing the industry is the ability of niche cable channels to survive," says Chernin. "About 60 to70 percent of media profits of big conglomerates come from there."

But people only want to watch 10 to 15 channels. "Is that sustainable?" Chernin muses.

And while most people think Hollywood ultimately will change its "release windows," that might not have as much effect on what consumers decide to rent or buy as one might think. But there could be big changes in distribution.

Chernin thinks the days of people buying DVDs are numbered because of streaming. "The DVD business is declining 15 to 20 percent a year," he says. If networks are ubiquitous, can you convince people to own content for $15 when they can stream it for lots less?

Some "70 percent of DVD purchases are for new releases," Chernin notes. Even if the delivery format changes, that is likely to remain the buying pattern.

"It’s just a matter of time" before cable networks are faced with "digital destruction," Chernin says.

There are obvious implications for satellite, cable and telco multi-channel video providers, of course. The good news is that distributors have some time to get ready for the transition. Being "too early" is about as bad for business as "being too late."

Smart phones for Play, More than Work

Though businesses only buy smart phones for their perceived productivity advantages, a new Compete survey sugggests people mostly use their smart phones for entertainment and other personal applications.

That is to say, entertainment, games, music, social networking and weather are the most popular across smart phone platforms.

More than anything else, the Compete survey results illustate the changing value proposition, application focus and business models possible in the wireless space. Communication remains fundamental. Email, microblog posts, instant and text messaging are communication formats, first and foremost.

But mobiles also are becoming entertainment devices. The survey shows that smart phone owners prefer personal and social apps to business applications.

That was not true early on, when a "smart phone" was nearly synonymous with "BlackBerry," and was bought on behalf of business users. While business users remain a key segment of the market, consumer users gradually are becoming the majority of the market.

The survey suggests that iPhone owners, more so than other smartphone users, were more likely to spend money on apps., while 83 percent of all smartphone users preferred apps $5 or below. Whether that is because first movers are different than mainstream users, or because the Apple user experience is so much easier, is hard to determine with precision at this point.

About 73 percent of Blackberry owners have downloaded five or fewer applications; in contrast, 72 percent of iPhone owners have downloaded 10 or more applications. Clearly, iPhone owners have been more receptive to customizing their devices.

Facebook is hot among iPhone owners. About 71 percent of iPhone users report accessing Facebook from their mobile device, and 37 percent listed Facebook as one of their top three most used apps. About 18 percent claim it's their favorite app.

Despite Twitter's ever-increasing mobile popularity, 85 percent of smart phone owners still prefer to access the site from the computer.

While 26 percent of iPhone users tweet from their device, only 15 percent of Palm owners and 10 percent of Blackberry users report accessing Twitter on the go.

Of the smart phone owners who do access Twitter via their phones, 41 percent use the application to keep track of what their friends are doing, 32 percent use the service to keep up with current events and 19 percent tweet from their handset to build a fan base or promote their company.

Facebook is the most heavily trafficked social networking site among smartphone owners, says the report, and iPhone users are twice as likely to use the mobile Facebook app as their Palm counterparts. In fact, iPhone owners are the most active mobile social networkers, with the highest percentage of respondents reporting mobile use of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and from their mobile devices.

Prepaid Mobile Declining in Western Europe

In Western Europe, the prepaid share of total mobile connections varies significantly by country, but on average it was 57 percent at the end of 2008. Yankee Group is forecasting that figure to decline to 47 percent by 2013. In developing markets, prepaid dominates. For example, in Latin America prepaid accounts for 84 percent of mobile connections today. Yankee Group is predicting this percentage will remain flat during the next five years.

AT&T Google Voice Complaint Partly About Traffic Pumping

In asking the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Google's refusal to terminate some calls placed to high-cost rural areas, AT&T is not simply sparring with Google over network neutrality, but rather pointing up a pricing anomaly that distorts behavior and reduces carrier profits.

while suggesting current regulatory rules do not fairly treat competitors in the market, and arguing for narrowing the regulatory differences between VoIP and other carriers and between access, application and content providers, AT&T also is highlighting what it and other carriers say is a pricing distortion in the termination rate regime that directly underpins the businesses of free conference calling services.

At immediate issue here is Google's refusal to terminate some calls in high-cost rural areas. Many of you are familiar with free conference calling services that use area codes in rural areas. You might have wondered what the business model is. Simply, it costs carriers enough money to terminate calls in those rural areas that conferencing services can afford to give away the service and make their money on the termination fees.

Over the last couple of years other skirmishes have been fought about high termination rates in some rural areas of Iowa and some other areas.

Services such as Free Call Planet, freeconferencecall.com and others teamed with Iowa telcos to set up inexpensive or free calling services that generate profits for the providers primarily by collecting millions in access fees.

The local telcos provide the Iowa telephone numbers and voice gateways for the services, bill long-distance companies to terminate calls and then pay“marketing fees” to the conference calling services.

AT&T said in 2007 that the arrangements were costing it $250 million a year. AT&T, Verizon, Qwest and Sprint Nextel have opposed the "traffic-pumping" schemes, and the Federal Communications Commission did move to limit the practice.

Rural phone companies are allowed to charge about 2 cents to 8 cents a minute to connect long-distance and wireless calls to their networks. The fees, up to 100 times higher than rates charged by large local phone companies, are intended to offset the rural companies' high costs and low call volumes.

But that's where the arbitrage opportunity arises. Specialty calling services teamed with some rural phone companies to offer free conference calling, adult chat and other services, splitting the call-connection revenues with the rural carriers.

The FCC did move to suspend the rural companies' rates. But new providers have set up shop.

About 160 million minutes of calls by AT&T customers were routed to rural CLEC networks in March, 2008, surpassing the peak level of calls to rural incumbents, about153 million minutes, in January 2007, AT&T says. Sprint told the FCC that its bill from 11 competitive carriers soared 5,000 percent in 21 months.

Recently, even other rural telephone companies have decided they'd better side with the large tier one providers as well, as the practice might damage the wider rural termination regime.

Google tariff specialists know that, and apparently want to avoid those costs by restricting termination to such numbers, as the tier one carriers themselves did until forbidden to do so.

So aside from the other clear issues about treating like entities in similar fashion, there is the outstanding issue of high termination rates in some jurisdictions.

Twitter Usage Remains a Bit Mysterious

Sometimes numbers can be deceiving. Hitwise data, for example, suggests that Twitter traffic hit a peak in April, and then dropped, peaking again in July before dropping to levels below that of the April peak. In other words, traffic has dropped since April.

But one has to make adjustments. A majority of Twitter users use a third-party client to access Twitter. In fact, only about 20 to 30 percent of people go through the Twitter Web site. So the direct Twitter data does not show the full impact of Twitter usage.

The Hitwise data also suggests the same effect, showing the number of new users--new, not total--coming to Twitter from its top traffic sources, such as Facebook, Google, and MySpace, also has fallen consistently across the board from April to September 2009.

But those statistics only point to a slowing rate of growth, and that always happens to any application or service which starts from a low base, no matter how popular.

The Twitter Web site does attract about 54 million visitors a month, and that does not count the 70 to 80 percent of users who use the application from a third party portal of some sort.

A slowing rate of growth likely is nothing to worry about. Other studies have shown a high abandonment rate for new users, though.

In March 2009, for example, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, says David Martin, Nielsen Online VP.

That means Twitter’s audience retention rate, the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is about 40 percent.

To put that in perspective, it is roughly the equivalent of turning over 100 percent of the user base every three months. Such a churn rate is unsustainable. One suspects the churn rate also will drop over time. People either like it, or they don't. But whether they like it or not, even resisters will use the app if their friends, family and associates do. Ultimately, that is going to make a difference.

Back to the Future for Internet Apps?

Time spent on social network and blogging sites accounted for 17 percent of all time spent on the Internet in August 2009, nearly triple the percentage of time spent in 2008, says The Nielsen Company.

“This growth suggests a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used,” said Jon Gibs, vice president, media and agency insights, Nielsen’s online division. “While video and text content remain central to the Web experience, the desire of online consumers to connect, communicate and share is increasingly driving the medium’s growth.”

In some ways that is a "back to the future" move, as it was email that drove the dial-up Internet access business. After waves of growth driven by online commerce and then entertainment, it appears communication might again be moving to the forefront.

70% of Mobile Users Planned Mobile Spending Cuts. Have They?

An October 2008 survey by Getjar suggests users were planning significant changes in mobile consumption in response to the recession. It still isn't completely clear whether people actually followed through with action, what adjustments they might have made, or how how much less they might have spent.

About 70 percent of mobile phone users who partcipated in the survey suggested they planned to reduce the amount they spend on phone usage. So far, the revenue impact remains hard to quantify, though.

Water is the Issue in West, Solar No Exception

A National Park Service official has warned the Bureau of Land Management that approving dozens of solar power plants in southern Nevada could dramatically impact water supplies across the arid region, the New York Times reports.

An estimated 63 large-scale solar projects are proposed for BLM lands in the region, and the plants are expected to use a large amount of groundwater to cool and wash solar panels, according to the Feb. 5 memorandum sent by Jon Jarvis, director of the Park Service's Pacific West Region, to BLM's associate state director in Nevada.

Jarvis also wrote that the Park Service is concerned that the projects could produce air and light pollution, generate noise and destroy wildlife habitat near three NPS properties: the Devils Hole section of Death Valley National Park, the Lake Mead National Recreation Area and the Mojave National Preserve.

"In cases where plans of development have been submitted, the vast majority of these projects propose to use utility-scale, concentrating solar power technologies" that "can be expected to consume larger amounts of water" for cooling than other technologies, Jarvis wrote.

"In arid settings, the increased water demand from concentrating solar energy systems employing water-cooled technology could strain limited water resources already under development pressure from urbanization, irrigation expansion, commercial interests and mining," he wrote.

As such, the proposed solar plants "potentially face several water-rights related obstacles in obtaining the necessary water for their projects."

There always are trade offs in real life. Water-cooled solar farms are no exception.

Net Neutrality: Do You Want Random or Planned Blocking?

Strong forms of "network neutrality" that allow no prioritizing of Internet traffic pose clear issues for real-time services such as video and voice, at times of peak load. Since all real-time services are highly susceptible to congestion, peak hours may not be optimal times to use them. The problem is that "peak hours" are when users most want those services available.

So the issue is simply whether users prefer random disruptions of quality, or planned disruptions of the quality of some applications, in order to provider optimal performance for real-time services. Since no federal rules are going to abolish peak consumption hours, the only practical issue is what methods are used to limit network access at times of peak congestion.

One can specify that no packets are blocked or intentionally slowed. But that only shifts the congestion control mechanism. Users will find their voice and video sessions don't work that well, and will restrict their use of those services at times of peak congestion.

The other approach is to prioritize applications so the burden of congestion is shifted to lower-priority communications or applications; to users with demonstated "very-high usage" profiles; users who already have exceeded fair usage caps or users at congested cell towers.

Some service quality degradation, at peak hours, will happen. The only issue is how the congestion issues are distirbuted.

One might argue that congestion effects also could be distributed based on whether users have opted to buy "best effort" usage plans or "assured access" plans. But higher-quality, assured access is not possible when packets cannot be prioritized.

Congestion issues, despite network upgrades, always will be a fact of life for networks. The only practical issue is how network degradation is handled. It can be random, or it can be planned. How any new network neutrality rules are framed will determine whether planned mechanisms are allowable.

AT&T Launches Picture, Video Communication for iPhone Today

Apple iPhone users likely will be putting strain on the AT&T wireless network today, Sept. 25, 2009,. as multimedia messaging service, which allows iPhone users to send and receive pictures and video, is made available for the first time.

But the issue is going to grow in significance. Pyramid Research estimates mobile video usage will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 28 percent over the next five years. By 2014, more than 500 million users worldwide will subscribe to mobile video services, equal to 8.5 percent of all mobile subscription services.

That might not seem like much, but video requires about one to two orders of magnitude more bandwidth than voice (10 to 100 times).

YouTube says mobile uploads over the last six months have grown 1700 percent. and users have grown 70 percent.

MVNO Business to Grow Outside North America, Europe

The mobile virtual network operator business is headed for growth, and most will come from regions other than North America and Western Europe, says TeleGeography.

Globally, growth in wireless subscribers has been driven predominantly by explosive growth in a small number of developing countries, such as China, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam and Pakistan. These are countries in which MVNOs are either prohibited or at a nascent stage of development, so the ultimate impact on the MVNO market is not yet clear.

In 2003 MVNOs accounted for seven percent of subscribers in Western Europe and North America. At the end of June 2009 wireless subscribers had grown by almost 60 percent in these two regions to reach 800 million, and MVNOs’ share had increased to over nine percent.

In contrast, from 2003 to mid-2009 the number of wireless subscribers in regions other than Western Europe and North America more than quadrupled to reach some 3.5 billion. However, MVNOs have yet to make much impact in these higher growth markets: outside of Western Europe and North America, their share of the market remains less than 0.5 percent.

So while MVNOs have been growing strongly in Western Europe and North America, those two regions account for an ever-smaller portion of the world’s wireless subscriber base – it slipped from almost 40 percent to less than 20 percent. That suggests that future MVNO subscriber growth necessarily will come from other regions.

In 2003, Western Europe and North America accounted for well over 90 percent of all MVNO subscribers and, despite some growth elsewhere, these two regions still account for over 80 percent of the total.

TeleGeography’s latest research predicts that MVNO growth will gain momentum all around the world over the coming five years, as MVNOs are legalized in new countries where they are not allowed at present.

Will Net Neutrality Lead to Higher Prices?

One can make some reasonable guesses about likely outcomes as the Federal Communications Commission weighs new network neutrality rules.

If new proposed rules disallow traffic shaping measures such as slowing peer-to-peer or other traffic at times of peak congestion, the problem of alleviating peak-hour congestion will still have to be dealt with.

If the goal is to manage peak traffic load, and service providers cannot shape traffic by slowing some protocols, or slowing all traffic for users who have exceeded their usage caps, then other available mechanisms will be used.

And price is one of the most-likely tools.

Customers might not like it, but it always is possible to discourage usage by raising prices. And it always is possible to boost usage by lowering prices. And it is wireless plans where the price hikes--or user policing of usage--will be most felt.

If usage caps are tightened, consumers will have the option of spending more, or using less.

That doesn't mean "unlimited" service packages will disappear. Some customers will want to buy them. But the price of such packages likely is going to rise. For similar reasons, usage-based charging is likely to increase for most other plans as well. That will encourage users to monitor their usage and make choices that will alleviate peak hour strain on networks.

As a practical matter, wired network operators already refrain from blocking access to lawful applications, and traffic shaping rules already are tweaked so the policies do not constitute "blocking" or "slowing" of lawful traffic.

But wireline operators have more access bandwidth than wireless providers do. So Oppenheimer financial analyst Tim Horan suggests that wireless usage caps will become more stringent.

Among other possible strategies is structuring pricing to encourage more usage off-peak, as is the case for voice plans.

Application blocking is less an issue than most assume on wired networks, and is a relatively minor irritant for most wireless users, but a significnat irritant for some users on wireless networks.

The real trick is how service providers will handle peak hour loading under new conditions where traffic priorities cannot be applied, as typically is the case for many private enterprise networks.

One other observation also is in order. As was the case the last time a major change in communications regulation was made, with the Telecom Act of 1996, there will be a period of legal wrangling to test and flesh out the rules.

Though most within the communications business would vastly prefer more predictability of business environment, that is not what they are likely to get.

Broadband Stimulus Bridge to Nowhere?

Since applicants have asked for $28 billion, when the broadband stimulus funds available in the funding round total around $4.3 billion, one already can predict that there will be more entities unhappy than happy about the final awards. Especially unhappy are rural telecom providers who cannot apply because of the definitions used to describe "remote" locations.

For that same reason, it might not be rational to look at where proposals are from, on a state-by-state basis, except for purposes of assuring that some funds are disbursed in every state. Nor will it make sense to evaluate proposals based on ubiquity of platform.

Mobile or satellite networks might have wide footprints. But there still are places where broadband buying lags the national average.

It likely makes more sense to look at proposals at the county level or community level. Even the satellite proposals are specifically targeting a limited number of jurisdications and areas where broadband penetration is low.

Some proposals will be better than others. But most of the proposals seem to ask for relatively small amounts of money. That likely is a good sign, as few small organizations can manage a sudden infusion of money and work very efficiently.

Some proposals do seem weak on the "cost-benefit" front. But that's why the evaluation process is so important. Reviewers are supposed to sort better proposals from weaker ones. Reviewers likely also know their decisions will come under very-close scrutiny. One therefore can hope for a rational outcome.

Publishers Moving to Mobile Distribution

Nearly 52 percent of print executives surveyed by the Audit Bureau of Circulations are distributing or formatting content for viewing on a mobile device. Newspapers are leading the charge, with almost 58 percent already formatting their Web sites for mobile devices. Business and consumer magazines are following closely behind with 45 and 42 percent, respectively.

The changes are driven by a believe that users will be getting more content from mobiles in coming years. More than 80 percent of respondents believe people will rely more heavily on mobile

devices as a primary information source in the next three years, the study finds.

Nearly 70 percent of respondents say that mobile is receiving more attention at their publication this

year than last. Of companies that track mobile impact, 45 percent report that mobility has boosted Web site traffic by up to 10 percent.

Half believe mobile traffic to their Web sites will increase by five to 25 percent in the next two years.

Among senior executive respondents, 56 percent said their publication has plans to develop

a smartphone application in the next 24 months, in addition to the 17 percent of respondents who already have an app in production.

Nearly a third of respondents believe that mobile will have a significant impact on their publication’s revenue in just three years.