Consumers, App Providers and Service Providers All Lose from Net Neutrality, Stratecast Argues

Some network neutrality proponents say users will benefit if all forms of packet priority are prohibited. In this view, more innovation and value will be produced if no applications can be given  favored use of the access pipe.

That would include streaming video, voice or any other real-time service.

Analysts at Stratecast do not believe the argument. Their analysis suggests application providers themselves, as well as end users and service providers, will be harmed if such policies are adopted.
In truth, nobody knows what might happen if all ability to prioritize bits were prohibited. The key thing, says Stratecast, is that there would be so much uncertainty that service providers would likely behave as though the downside were quite large in magnitude.

Higher prices for end users, less movement towards higher-speed access and ultimately even application experience degradation would occur, long term. The main reasons are the higher costs to "over-provision" physical networks, lower returns for such investment and less robust development of new services and revenue streams, Stratecast argues.

read the full position paper here

Ancotel Buys LIDARC to Boost Trans-Atlantic Business

Frankfurt-based ancotel GmbH, operators of the largest and most important telecommunications and data network hub in Europe,  has acquired the Long Island Data and Recovery Center, a Long Island-based collocation and interconnection facility located at 1025 Old Country Road (‘1025 OCR’), Westbury, NY.

This acquisition marks ancotel’s first foray into the United States’ data center and colocation market.  The company will leverage the asset to compete for trans-Atlantic traffic

Long Island serves as a key landing point for submarine cables that connect North America to Europe.

Allied Fiber Talks about Need for More Dark Fiber

If you have the time, this audio of Hunter Newby, Allied Fiber CEO, lays out the argument for why additional dark fiber capacity is needed in the U.S. market.

You might think there is plenty of fiber in the ground, and there is. The problem is that much of it is on routes, and in cables, that do not provide as much resiliency as you would think. Many fibers are in the same cable, and many cables are laid along the same rights of way.

In addition, it is tougher than you might think to buy dark fiber, as opposed to lit services, on diverse routes.

listen to the interview

Half of Internet Users Watch Online Video

About 50 percent of all online uses now report they watch online video at least weekly, up from 43 percent  in 2009, according to Frank N. Magid Associates.

About 85 percent of males 18-24 watch online video weekly or more and 67 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 34. That should grow about five percent more over the next year. Short form content continues to represent about 80 percent of content viewed.

About 76 percent of online video consumers report they watch professionally produced clips on a regular basis.

About 38 percent say they are interested in watching PC-delivered content on a TV screen.

link

Zayo Group Buys American Fiber Systems

Zayo Group, based in Colorado, is acquiring Rochester, N.Y. based American Fiber Systems.

Terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed, but a knowledgeable source said AFS fetched between $185 million and $190 million.

Founded in 2000 by David Rusin, a former president of Frontier Communications Inc., the privately held AFS provides dark and lit fiber to businesses.

Zayo Group has grown fast by acquisition, and now operates fiber networks in 23 states, serving 141 markets, including 55 metropolitan markets in the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, Minnesota and Iowa.

Along the way, it has opportunistically gotten into the business voice business, collocation and enterprise communications. There's sometimes a fine line between filling out an adjacency and losing focus, but Zayo has proven to be adept, both at managing its acquisition activities, and taking advantage of business adjacencies.

Though as a general rule consolidation is occurring virtually everywhere in the U.S. communications business, there has been a noticeable pickup in regional fiber network mergers recently.

KDL Inc., of Evansville, Ind., a provider of fiber networks in 26 states; Houston-based Alpheus Communications (News - Alert), which builds and manages the fiber backbone that links major cities in Texas; and Fibertech Networks LLC, which leases fiber networks to banks, colleges and hospitals in the eastern U.S., have hired investment bankers and hope to sell themselves, the Wall Street Journal reports.

American Fiber Systems reaches deal for sale to Zayo Group | Rochester Business Journal New York business news and information

Hulu Plus Not a Danger to Netflix

Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth does not believe Hulu's new subscription service "Plus" will harm Netflix subscriber growth, though it is the "first credible competitive subscription offering," especially for viewers who watch serials and other popular TV fare.

Netflix still is heavy on movie content.

link

Small Business Hiring up 4% for the Year, Pay is Down

Small business hiring continued to increase slightly in June ( 0.2 percent over May) while the average paycheck took a larger month-over-month dip (-0.6 percent over May) than we’ve seen since pay leveled off in March. That brings us to a year-to-date increase in small business hiring of 3.9 percent and a year-to-date pay decrease of -0.4 percent, says SurePayroll.

June 2010 Small Business Scorecard | SurePayroll

Is Bit Prioritization Necessary?

Network neutrality proponents, especially those supporting the "strong" forms such as an outright ban on any bit priorities, believe that next generation networks will have ample bandwidth to support all real-time services without the need for prioritizing mechanisms.

Users of enterprise networks might react in shock to such notions, as shared networks often encounter latency and bandwidth constraints that are overcome precisely by policy control. And despite increasing bandwidth on mobile networks, users and network service operators already know that congestion is a major problem.

And the evidence does not seem to support the notion that applications are not affected by congestion, or that use of two or more applications does not create externalities that impair real-time application performance.

"I measured my jitter while using Netflix (Jitter occurs when an application monopolizes a router’s transmit queue and demands that hundreds of its own packets are serviced before any other application gets a single packet transmitted) and found an average jitter of 44 milliseconds and a worse case that exceeds 1000 ms," says Ou.

http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/06/how-video-streaming-can-ruin-voip-and-gaming/

The Death of Another Bogus Anti-Net Neutrality Argument: Gaming Works on Neutral Networks Too | Public Knowledge

HTC Evo Update System Working Again

Sprint and HTC had to suspend the over-the-air update for the Evo 4G earlier today, but whatever the problem was, it is now fixed, and users can download the patches and upgrade. Apparently something about the upgrade was "bricking" user devices.

I escaped the problem downloading and installing the update, which is among other things, supposed to improve signal reception, access speed and battery life.

I'm not so sure I notice any particular signal reception or speed differences, but the battery life improvement seems to be there.

HTC Evo OTA back in action | Android Central

Verizon Wireless Says it Will "Rule the Air"

watch the video on Verizon Wireless site

U.S. Fixed-Line Voice Lines Rose for First Time Since 2000 in 2008

Perhaps the most-significant finding contained in the latest Federal Communications Commission data on voice lines is that total voice lines in service actually grew in 2008, reversing a declining trend since 2000.

We will have to wait for 2009 data to see whether this is a new trend or an anomoly. Still, the news is that, for the first time since 2000, total fixed voice lines in service have grown, rather than contracted.

That doesn't mean the trend has reversed for incumbent telcos, though. All of the gain came from non-traditional suppliers, either cable companies or competitive local exchange carriers. But it seems clear cable companies were the clear winners.

The big jump between June 2008 and December 2008 were accounts provided over coaxial cable lines used by cable firms. Between June and December, coaxial cable VoIP accounts increased from slightly less than 10 million to 20 million.

At year-end 2008, there were 141 million end-user switched access lines in service and 21 million
VoIP subscriptions in the United States, or about 162 million wireline retail local telephone service connections in total.

Of these, 97 million were residential connections and 65 million were business connections.

By technology and customer type, the 162 million wireline retail local telephone service connections were: 48 percent residential switched access lines, 39 percent business switched access lines, 12 percent residential VoIP subscriptions, and one percent business VoIP subscriptions.

link

Singaporeans Still Like Newspapers

If you're an advertiser who wants to reach the digital Singaporean consumer, you might well have to use a newspaper, says PricewaterhouseCoopers, which says advertisers spend almost 10 times as much on print media like newspapers as they do on Internet advertising in that market.

PricewaterhouseCoopers also expects growth in the amount spent on print ads to be vastly greater than the growth in digital over the next five years.

By 2014, print would still capture 49 per cent of advertisers' dollars and television 28 per cent, while Internet advertising would rise from 4 per cent to just 6 per cent of total spending.

TODAYonline | Singapore | All wired up - but Singaporeans still prefer a traditional newspaper

Jeff Bezos Says iPad is a Different Product Category

One of the big questions about tablet devices such as Apple's iPad is whether it represents a new product category, as was the iPod, or whether it is the first product representing a new segment of the PC market. The answer matters greatly for hardware designers and marketers of PCs and e-book readers.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, clearly believes tablets are a new product category, separate from e-book readers and traditional PCs. That matters because, if correct, people are going to do different things with tablets than they do with other types of devices.

Apple might, or might not, agree. It appears the iPad already taken about 22 percent of the U.S. ebook content market, with downloads of five million books in the first 65 days of the iBooks store's existence.

" I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices," says Bezos. "It’s really a different product category."

Jeff Bezos On The iPad: “It’s Really A Different Product Category”

Consumers Like Map Apps on Mobiles

About 14 percent of mobile subscribers visited a mapping site on their smartphone or mobile device in April 2010, according to comScore. That represents more than 33 million consumers logging on to the mobile web for mapping information.

Smartphone map access increased by more than 175 percent year over year, according to comScore.

Nearly nine million users accessed mobile maps via a smartphone browser, a 93 percent increase year over year, while about 13 million used a mobile app. Most of those users (87 percent) do so from their cars, with 17 percent of exercisers (while walking, jogging, biking) also connecting to maps from their smartphones. Nearly 17 percent of public transit users also used mobile maps.

comScore: Consumers now mapping smartphones - Mobile Marketing - BizReport

What are Advertisers Planning for iAd?

Campbell Soup is preparing at least one game for its iAd campaign. It's testing an idea to allow users to physically "shake" the salt out of different soups and see the results.

Mobile: A Look at Who's Getting What on Apple's IAds - Advertising Age - Digital