Lots of Enterprise Experimentation With Social Media

While 95 percent of companies surveyed by Econsultancy have added social media to their marketing mix, 45 percent have either only “experimented” or not done anything in social media. 

Aspen Institute Fellow Recommends Big Changes In USF, Intercarrier Compensation, Use of Satellite Broadband

Blair Levin, Aspen Institute Fellow, says $10 billion, spent over 10 years, is enough to provide a minimum 4 Mbps downstream service for Americans in rural and isolated areas.

He proposes that the money be gotten by revamping the Universal Service Fund, including reducing or freezing funds currently allocated under the Interstate Access Support and Interstate Common Line Support funds, steps that would have immediate impact on many rural telcos and rural mobile providers.

Levin points out that there are about seven million housing units (about five percent of the total) without access to the 4 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream services the Federal Communications Commission now believes is a minimum.

The FCC has estimated the cost to provide such service with wired broadband at $32.4 billion, with a revenue projection of only $8.9 billion, leaving a $23.5 billion gap.

But Levin maintains that the costs are so high because of costs to build wired infrastructure to just 250,000 homes. Reaching those 250,000 homes would cost about $13.4 billion. Levin does not appear to believe that is a wise investment. So he suggests using satellite to reach the most-isolated, high-cost homes, instead. That would free up enough money to build out facilities to the roughly 6.75 million other rural homes.

In 2010, the federal fund (USF) is projected to make total outlays of $8.7 billion, but not specifically to support broadband access.

Some $4.6 billion is set aside for deployment of networks to high-cost areas, where population density or other factors would cause the price of services to consumers to be at a level that would not reasonably compare to urban areas (this is in addition to the 21 states that have similar high-cost funds that distribute a total of over $1.5 billion).

About $1.2 billion is allocated to provide discounts to make basic telephone service available
and affordable to low-income consumers (in addition, 33 states have similar programs).

Another $2.7 billion is reserved for subsidizing telecommunications services, Internet access and
internal connections to enable schools and libraries to connect to the Internet (in addition, nine states have similar programs).

Making better use of existing funding should be the first priority in any reform effort, Levin says. The universal service contribution factor—an assessment on interstate and international charges that usually appears as a surcharge on consumers’ phone bills—is already at about 15 percent (having risen dramatically in the last decade), he notes.

Further increases would create both political and policy problems, he suggests.

"More ambitious goals in terms of network speeds, at this time, would cause such an increase in the assessment on the current system that it could backfire in terms of driving America’s use of broadband," Levin argues. "For example, the FCC calculates that going from 4 Mbps to 6 Mbps would increase the investment gap by more than 100 percent."

The rational approach would be to avoid building fixed-line networks to serve a quarter million homes, at a cost of $13.4 billion, using satellite broadband. That would free up nearly all of the available funds to build fixed-line networks for 6.75 million rural households.

There are a number of problems with the current Universal Service Fund, Levin suggests. "Among these are that the fund is targeted to support analog voice requirements, rather than data networks; that the fund does not target unserved areas but rather funds particular kinds of companies; that the fund provides incentives for inefficient build outs; that there is no accountability for actually using the funds for their intended purposes; and that the support programs are not coordinated to
leverage the funds to maximize broader policy objectives," says Levin.

Though rural telcos might not like the idea, there are a number of current programs within the Universal Service Fund that need to be changed.

About $4 billion could be redireted to broadband support, over 10 years, by reductions in USF payments to wireless providers.

Interstate Access Support (IAS) payments could be reoriented to broadband, adding approximately $4 billion over 10 years.

Freezing Interstate Common Line Support (ICLS) would limit the growth of the existing high-cost fund and result in savings of about $1.8 billion over 10 years. Those funds also could be redirected to broadband support.

To accomplish this, the FCC would have to require that rate-of-return carriers move to incentive regulation.

Phasing out remaining legacy high-cost support for competitive carriers (wireless, primarily) would yield up to an additional $5.8 billion over the coming decade.

Together these actions would result in between $15 and 16 billion in savings from the existing high-cost program that could be used to support broadband facilities construction.

As logical as the changes might be, there will be resistance from any number of firms that currently rely on the current mechanisms for significant portions of their current revenue, including but not limited to, rural telcos.

Video Streaming Now Drives Global Bandwidth Demand

As you would expect, video streaming now is the fastest-growing source of mobile broadband bandwidth demand, Allot Communications reports.

Voice sessions created using the Internet now represent the second-fastest-growing source of bandwidth demand.

That isn't to say those apps consume much bandwidth, but rather than use of the application is growing fast.

Video Now Single-Largest Bandwidth Driver, Says Allot Communications

Video now constitutes about 35 percent of total global mobile device and network bandwidth, according to Allot Communications.

Web browsing consumes about 29 percent of bandwidth while file downloads represent about 16 percent of demand.

Peer-to-peer apps, which include video and file downloads, represents about 15 percent of mobile bandwidth demand.

VoIP and instant messaging account for about three percent of bandwidth demand.

None of those metrics represent revenue contributions, though.

4G Americas: Sign of the Times

3G Americas, a wireless industry trade association originally created to foster adoption of third-generation mobile networks, is changing its name change to "4G Americas."

Of course, there is a difference. It doesn't really appear there is much of a need to convince mobile operators to adopt 4G. So the organization frankly needs to find some new mission.

So the name change also brings a mission change. Where it once focused on the air interface, it now will attempt to focus more on regulatory issues, devices, applications and vertical market deployments.

Net neutrality compromise?

Congressman Henry Waxman's net neutrality proposal won't please everyone. It is doubtful any proposal can do that. But its a serious effort to achieve a fair and workable compromise.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/waxmans-net-neutrality-compromise-solution-or-last-gasp.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Pinger Makes Your iTouch Work Like an iPhone

Pinger might be the first voice and text provider to make a sustainable business out of ad-supported communications.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/08/09/an-app-that-makes-your-itouch-work-like-an-iphone.aspx

Sony, Warner, Disney Discussing $30 Post-Theatrical Offer with Cable Operators

Sony Pictures, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co. are in talks with the largest U.S. cable TV operators to offer films on an on-demand basis for as much as $30 per showing soon after they run in theaters, Bloomberg reports.

The talks with In Demand, a partnership of Cox Communications Inc., Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable are the latest example of experimentation with release windows and price points.

Disney also is discussing streaming films on Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox console and Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3, Bloomberg says.

The new release window presumably would occur before the films go to DVD release, pay per view and other on-demand venues.

Sony, Warner, Disney Planning $30 Home Film-Viewing Option

To Build a Mobile Network, You Need Access to Rooftops

Wireless operators frequently cannot build their networks as fast as they would like because they cannot always get rooftop access rights as fast as they would like, or at prices they believe are reasonable. Here Sprint talks about rooftops in New York city.

RIM's New Tablet

Research in Motion's new tablet device.

Digital Advertising Grows, To Nobody's Surprise

It would come as no shock to anybody that the amount of digital advertising and digital media is growing at least in linear fashion, just about every year.

Nor would it shock anybody that digital growth rates far surpass that of traditional venues.

Here's the latest forecast from BIA/Kelsey.

Smartphone Adoption Patterns Differ Globally

Smartphone adoption patterns globally are different from patterns seen in the United States. Symbian, to use one notable example, is relatively widely used elsewhere, but sparsely in the U.S. market.


Apple's market share in the U.S. market is far higher than it is globally, for example. 

Mobile Content Delivery Networks Might Be Affected by Net Neutrality

Content delivery networks routinely are used to improve end user experience for all sorts of applications. The same sort of logic would indicate that the same sorts of techniques will be used by mobile applications as well.

But network neutrality rules could affect the pace and scale of such application performance enhancement, indirectly if not directly.

Today, it is the application provider that makes the decision to use a CDN. Network neutrality rules that forbid quality of service features would not change that, but would prevent access providers from creating such levels of service.

One example would be a service provider capability that applies expedited or assured delivery for any video stream, or featured video streams. Much the same functionality could be provided for other types of traffic, including voice, conferencing or enterprise data interactions, for example, depending on how any possible rules are crafted.

Up to this point such enhancements have not been terribly necessary. But the amount of real-time traffic is growing.

According to the Yankee Group, fewer than 600 million smartphones will be in use in 2010, but that number will more than double in 2014 to nearly 1.4 billion.

One key difference between smartphone usage patterns and more-traditional devices is the increased amount of video traffic consumed by smartphone users.

Yankee Group :: Research Report

AOL Thinks It Can Fix "Banner Effectiveness" Problem

AOL thinks it can "solve the problems associated with use of banner advertising, including clutter and end user inattention.

The basic premise of Project Devil is that “advertising is content.” The problem with banners is that they force the consumer to cancel what they were doing and look for a marketer’s message across the web. So AOL wants to move banners "into" the context of the web page and application the user already is engaged with at the moment.



link

Global Social Media Trends: Surprise or Not?

If you have been following user behavior in the social media space, you intuitively know that some people are more active than others.

Some people post, blog or comment quite a lot, while others mostly read.

Forrester Research breaks users into a number of categories based on their behaviors. You might, or might not, be surprised that the number of active content creators has not grown as much as the ranks of "readers."

The latest Forrester Research surveys indicate that the number of active content creators has basically stabilitzed, while the number of readers grows.

Whether that is a surprise or not might depend on what you originally thought might happen.

At a rough level, the difference might be something like the difference between newspaper readers and writers. If you were expecting that most people would suddenly start "writing" as social media became established, you'd take one view of the new data.

If you assumed that would not actually happen, and that lots of people derive value mostly from reading, rather than writing, you'd have another view.

The latest Forrester Research data tends to indicate that not everybody actually wants to "write."

The Latest Global Social Media Trends