Verizon Wireless has Enough Spectrum for 4 to 5 Years

Verizon Communications CFO Fran Shammo says that Verizon Wireless now has enough spectrum to handle its capacity needs for the next four to five years. Granted, Verizon and other carriers have a vested interest in convincing regulators that they will need more spectrum to handle increasing demand, but there also is a reason most people assume the general claim is correct.

If one assumes demand is growing perhaps 40 percent a year, and even assuming more intense coding, cell division, more efficient signaling and Wi-Fi offload are among the other tools service provider have, more bandwidth will be needed.

The issue, one might argue, is that some of those techniques could be much more expensive than simply deploying more spectrum. And those additional costs will be passed along to consumers.

At a global level, Analysys Mason predicts that mobile data will grow at a 41 percent compound annual growth rate. That would be quite a slower rate than had been the case in 2011, for example, when growth was about 90 percent, on average, in the U.S. market.

According to a 2011 Nielsen monthly analysis of mobile phone bills for 65,000 lines, smart phone owners, especially those with iPhones and Android devices, were consuming about 435 megabytes in the first quarter of 2011, up from about 230 Mbytes in the first quarter of 2010.

Data usage for the top 10 percent of smartphone users was up 109 percent, as you would expect. The top one percent of users increased their usage by 155 percent from 1.8 GBytes in the first quarter of 2010 to over 4.6 GBytes in the first quarter of 2011, Nielsen said.

EU Wants Business, Government Users to Buy €45 billion Worth of Cloud Computing by 2020

Governments and industry should buy €45 billion worth of cloud computing services by 2020 as part of an EU strategy to generate an estimated €900 billion in gross domestic product and an additional 3.8 million jobs by the end of the decade, a new report European Commission report will advocate.

The European Commission's cloud computing strategy document is set to be released in late September by Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes, 

OTT App Providers, Telcos and Cable "Think Different" About "Out of Region" Sales

It is no secret that app providers and telecom, mobile, satellite and cable service providers "think different" about their respective "customer" bases and prospects. All access providers necessarily must work within frameworks set by regulators on a country by country, state by state or locality by locality basis. 

There are franchises, certificates, spectrum or other regulatory requirements for being in business. That necessarily leads access provider executives to instinctively and logically think about services they can sell to people and businesses within their authorized areas of lawful service. 

App providers, in contrast, do not have to "ask for permission" to be in business. In fact, an app provider wants the widest possible audience or customer base for their apps, irrespective of geography. Whether an app provider sells "packaged" software or cloud-based software, the typical goal is to sell "everywhere," as much as practical. 

Telefónica is among tier one service providers exploring an out of region strategy based on apps, though it primarily remains a geography-based business. 

But the main reason service providers do not like over the top services and applications is that they generally represent direct competition for key products service providers sell.

But that is one key to how things will change in the future. If a major reason over the top apps and services are disliked is that they pose a threat to revenue, then a major reason for adopting an over the top approach is if doing so can create new revenue opportunities. 

That is not to say the task is easy. But many service providers have been "going out of territory" for quite some time, expanding into new geographies in a variety of ways, generally using both a licensed approach. What will happen in the future is more out of territory expansion using non-licensed, over the top approaches.

In fact, partnership between operators and OTT players are the way Long Term Evolution suppliers can prosper, according to Gulzar Azad, Head of Access for Google India  Google India.

In some ways, you would expect a major app supplier to say that. Access providers need to start thinking in terms of delivering services, not data plans, Azad suggests. 

Where service providers traditionally think in terms of offering services to their own subscribers inside their own geographical market,  “what they could be doing is offering services that anyone can sign up for, because that’s where all this is going,” Azad says. 

The challenge, of course, is that this approach benefits a third party app provider more directly than an access provider. 

Still, the conceptual and practical leap will be explored, and sometimes embraced, by a wider range of service providers, eventually. Think of it as a shift of focus from “selling services to current customers, where we have network” to “selling services to non-customers who are out of territory.” The addressable market for the former is far smaller than the addressable market for the latter.

80% of U.S. Smart Phone Owners Used Device to Get Retail Content in July 2012

According to comScore, 80 percent of U.S. smart phone owners--some 85.9 million people–used their smart phones to view retail content on their devices in July 2012. 

Amazon Sites led as the top retailer with an audience of 49.6 million visitors, while multi-channel retailers including Apple (17.7 million visitors), Wal-Mart (16.3 million visitors), Target (10 million visitors) and Best Buy (7.2 million visitors) also attracted significant mobile audiences as well.

Across both smart phones and desktop computers, males and females represented nearly equal proportions of retail category visitors. However, females accounted for a higher share of time spent on retail destinations at 53.4 percent of minutes on desktop computers and an even greater share of retail minutes on smart phones at 56.1 percent, comScore says.

Smart phone shoppers were also more likely to be younger than their desktop counterparts with 70.7 percent of smart phone retail visitors under the age of 45 compared to 61.1 percent of desktop users. 

Engagement among these audiences showed even greater disparity with visitors under the age of 45 accounting for nearly 3 in every 4 minutes spent on retail content via smart phones, compared to 61.6 percent of retail minutes on desktop computers.

Smart phone retail audiences were more likely to reside in higher income households compared to desktop computer users, likely as a result of smartphone ownership skewing towards higher income segments compared to an average consumer. 

Among smart phone audiences accessing retail destinations, nearly 1 in every 3 had a household income of $100k or greater, with this income segment driving a comparable 31.2 percent of minutes spent on retail sites and apps.

Selected Retail Properties by Unique Smartphone Visitors(000) (Mobile Browser and App Audience Combined) July 2012 Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Age 18+ on iOS, Android and RIM Platforms Source: comScore Mobile Metrix 2.0
	All Smartphones
	Total Unique Visitors (000)	% Reach
Retail Category	85,905	80.6%
Amazon Sites	49,636	46.6%
eBay	32,583	30.6%
Apple	17,684	16.6%
Wal-Mart	16,295	15.3%
Target	10,041	9.4%
Best Buy	7,177	6.7%
Ticketmaster	5,699	5.3%
CVS	4,468	4.2%
The Home Depot	4,353	4.1%
Blockbuster	4,017	3.8%
Barnes & Noble	3,804	3.6%
Walgreen	3,707	3.5%
Limited Brands	3,261	3.1%
Lowes	3,246	3.0%
Etsy	3,160	3.0%

Why Groupon is in the Mobile Payments Business

At first blush, it is puzzling that Groupon, a mobile and online advertising company, now is in the mobile payments business. 

But there are logical reasons, both tactical and strategic, for doing so, one might argue. For starters, the particular part of the mobile advertising business Groupon is in is facing dramatic reductions in average revenue per ad, and some concern about consumer disengagement. 

That isn't to say the business has no legs. Local advertising and media research firm BIA/Kelsey projects that U.S. consumer spending on online deals will reach $3.6 billion in 2012, doubling last year's figure of $1.8 billion. By 2016, spending is forecast to hit $5.5 billion, though year-on-year growth rates will slow to single digits.

BIA/Kelsey forecasts that, going forward, online deals will become an anchor for a platform of non-advertising small-business services. These services include instant mobile deals, loyalty products, promotions, reputation management, transaction processing and e-commerce.

But neither is the business growing so fast it can support all the new competitors in the field.

So Groupon is betting that a significant share of retail transactions will be made using mobile payments. So as its original business grows, Groupon can diversify and grow its own revenue streams by becoming a transaction processor.

That helps Groupon grow its revenue much faster, right now, while its mobile and online advertising business segment grows. 

OS Strategy Changes In The Post-PC World

In the older PC business, it made good sense for operating system providers such as Microsoft to avoid competing with its customers. 

So Microsoft did not build its own branded devices. That began to change with the first non-PC computing devices, such as MP3 players and game consoles. 

Some were therefore surprised when Google built its own Nexus smart phone, and then acquired Motorola, thereby becoming a device supplier in its own right. Some were surprised when both Microsoft and Google decided to build and sell their own tablets. 

So what ever happened to the "avoid channel conflict" model? Some would argue that Microsoft and Google want to encourage innovation, and avoid the hardware commoditization process seen in the PC business, where suppliers mostly tried to compete by driving prices lower, rather than by adding value. 

So one way of looking at the changed strategy is that both Microsoft and Google want their respective ecosystem partners to focus more on innovation than price cutting. 

"The message to their device manufacturers is abundantly clear: If you’re not building devices that surpass what we can do ourselves, you’re not adding value," says Tony Costa, Gartner analyst. 

That appears to be another difference between the ways OS suppliers conducted business during the PC era, compared to what they are doing in the post-PC era. 

"Pay Music" Analogy to "Pay TV" Wrong?

The natural analogy for streaming music services, or Sirius XM, for that matter, is that streaming music or Sirius XM is to radio as cable TV is to TV. By that analogy, consumers will prefer the new programming choices the new services offer, in comparison to broadcast radio. But some question whether the analogy is apt. 

“There is a natural ceiling of adoption of the people who are willing to pay $9.99 a month for music they don’t own," says industry analyst Mark Mulligan. 

And that might be a key difference. People never experienced TV as something they owned. TV always was "streamed" or "broadcast." Radio, on the other hand, was a one way people consumed music, the other key mode being packaged prerecorded media (records, then tapes, then CDs, then MP3s). 

Though there was a period in the 1980s and 1990s when it seemed people had significant desire to "own" copies of favorite movies as they were used to owning copies of their favorite songs, that habit has not proven to be a sustained major trend, as sales of DVDs are declining, while sales of Blu-ray discs are not growing fast enough to replace lost DVD sales. 

To be sure, the DVD rental business, and the newer streaming delivery of movie or TV content, is succeeding in a way that the earlier "pay per view" business did not achieve. 

In other words, for historical reasons, people might view the logical consumption modes for TV and music in different ways. To be sure, many skeptics once believed that people would not pay for TV, either. Those skeptics were proved wrong. 

Perhaps the same consumer reluctance will be overcome, and streaming music services will indeed become the "equivalent to cable TV for the radio business." 

"It’s a niche proposition," says Mulligan. "The majority of mass-market consumers are still not interested in that pricepoint.”

Enterprise Videoconferencing Falls for 2nd Consecutive Quarter

For the second consecutive quarter, the global enterprise video conferencing and telepresence market was down, according to Infonetics Research.  Revenue fell six percent to $644 million in the second quarter of 2012, Infonetics reports.

“Economic woes in Europe, declines in public sector spending, and a shift toward lower-priced video conferencing products drove sales of video conferencing and telepresence equipment lower from the year-ago quarter” says Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise networks and video at Infonetics Research.

DirecTV Weighs Brazil Telco Buy

DirecTV is one of several companies seeking information to evaluate a bid for Vivendi SA ’s Brazilian phone unit GVT, Bloomberg reports.

DirecTV, the largest U.S. satellite-television provider, is counting on surging demand for video entertainment and Internet service in Latin America as growth subsides in its original U.S. market.

The move would be one more step by DirecTV towards more active involvement in the "triple play" business, which traditionally has favored cable and telco firms able to provide such services. Up to this point, DirecTV has been a provider of TV and broadband access, but the firm has not had an elegant way to provide voice services. 

AT&T "Welcomes" Idea of Spectrum Caps?

You wouldn’t normally expect any market leader to support possible new regulatory action that might actually limit the amount of spectrum, or the types of spectrum, any mobile service provider can own.

But the unexpected AT&T view of the Federal Communications Commission’s intention to review both spectrum holding limits and spectrum quality considerations--essentially “welcoming” such a review could point to an AT&T belief that uncertainty is a bigger problem than spectrum limits.

Also, AT&T could be betting that other competitors will suffer more than it will if new limits on spectrum ownership were to emerge.

Or, some might argue, AT&T simply has decided that confrontation with the FCC has limited utility, at least in this case, the reason being that AT&T itself has a number of important spectrum purchases lined up for FCC approval.

AT&T is attempting to buy about $2.6 billion worth of spectrum to catch up with Verizon Wireless. AT&T has proposed at least 24 deals in the past four months for the rights to spectrum.

Verizon already has won U.S. approval to buy airwave rights from Comcast Corp. and three other cable companies for $3.9 billion.
Many AT&T users might agree that AT&T needs more spectrum, just as Sprint customers using that firm’s 4G network (WiMAX) might complain that performance is slower than it used to be.

AT&T’s plans would boost its most important spectrum holdings by 62 percent in the biggest 100 U.S. markets, according to John Hodulik, a UBS AG analyst.

There’s no question bandwidth demand is growing. The issue is really “how fast?” and “what can be done” to better use existing spectrum resources.

Still, under normal circumstances, one would expect a market leader to oppose the notion that there should be caps on the amount of spectrum any single provider can own. What therefore needs “explanation” is why AT&T would essentially say it welcomes the possibility of such caps.

Many, after all, would argue that control of spectrum is essential for market control. If new competitors cannot get spectrum, they can’t be in the business. On the other hand, such limits are commonplace. U.S. cable operators work under the assumption that no single provider will ever be allowed to gain control of more than 30 percent of U.S. video entertainment customers.

So how does Comcast grow? Comcast sells many other services to a finite number of customers, and then gets into another business, namely programming.

Whether AT&T’s thinking is “merely” tactical (do nothing to impair approval of its immediate spectrum buys) or more long term (sooner or later we will face spectrum caps, but those caps also will affect its major competitors, and there are other sources of business advantage), the apparent lack of resistance to the notion of spectrum caps is unusual.

John Legere Named as CEO of T-Mobile USA

Deutsche Telekom has named John Legere, a 32-year veteran of the U.S. and global telecommunications and technology industries, Chief Executive Officer of its T-Mobile USA business unit, effective September 22, 2012, 

Some might find the T-Mobile choice a bit puzzling, given Legere's prior stewardship of Global Crossing. Some might have expected an executive with deeper experience in mobility, for example. 

Others might note that Legere has experience with enterprise and computing device aspects of the business. Some might point to experience with mergers and acquisitions, in a business rife with competition, as well. 

If you share the opinion that the top end of the U.S. mobile business simply has too many competitors, then both T-Mobile USA and Sprint must be counted as among firms that "must" merge or sell, ultimately. 

Watch video here.

Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo, Others Form Internet Association

Amazon.com, AOL, eBay, Expedia, Facebook, Google, IAC, LinkedIn, Monster Worldwide, Rackspace, salesforce.com, TripAdvisor, Yahoo and Zynga have formed The Internet Association, a trade association representing the interests of the application providers.

The organization says it is "dedicated to strengthening and protecting a free and innovative Internet," along with its decentralized architecture. 

Australian National Broadband Plan Doesn't Have Much Room for Error

The latest update of the Australian National Broadband Plan might suggest the financial risks fiber to the home networks represent, even in a scenario where there is a monopoly national wholesale network that sells capacity to all the country’s retail service providers. The plan now envisions a seven percent internal rate of return. 

In other words, it is worth doing, if the underlying assumptions are correct, and IRR winds up being a positive integer, not a negative number. In principle, one might ask whether the opportunity cost is too high (would a higher return be possible from an alternative investment), but that is another issue. 

The obvious danger would arise if the underlying assumptions are mistaken, such as costs being underestimated, or revenue overestimated, and by what magnitude. 

The NBN will build a single national wholesale fiber to the home network between now and 2020, allowing all retail service providers to buy wholesale broadband and voice services.

The latest version of the business plan does suggest that the actual direct financial return from a fiber to home access network, built on a continental scale, is relatively small, at about a seven percent internal rate of return, despite its societal and economic importance.

A reasonable observer might simply note that there is little room for error where it comes to the base assumptions. Lower takes rates, lower average revenue per user or unexpectedly higher operating costs are some of the dangers embodied in the three decade assumptions.

“Pipe” Services Will “Always” Drive Most Service Provider Revenue

Communications service providers dislike the phrase “dumb pipe” for obvious reasons, since it implies–often falsely–that a telecom supplier is “just” a provider of low-value, commodity access services. The notion is partly accurate, but has nothing to do with profit margin on “dumb pipe” services. 

What, after all, is “best effort” Internet access but a “dumb pipe” service? The access is one thing, while nearly all the content and services are provided by third party suppliers. But profit margins on U.S. high-speed access are in the 40-percent range, hardly a low-margin, commodity service.

There are potential issues in the future, if prices and consumption are not better aligned, but service providers already are moving on that front.

Nor are service providers "just" providers of "dumb pipe" access; they also make most of their money on "services" or "applications" delivered over those pipes. In the best example, they use the network and the access to create "voice" service or video entertainment services or messaging. 

And that always will remain the key way to create yet other applications and services that use the network, and access to the network. 

New Wave of Internet Arbitrage Coming?

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) plans to hold a treaty conference, the World Conference on International Telecommunications, in December 2012, which will revise a 1988 treaty, the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR). At stake are the ways communication network owners compensate each other for terminating international voice calls through the payment of settlements.

But there are wider implications. The ITU proposes to change the way the Internet is governed, in ways that will harm the Internet by raising the cost and complexity of exchanging traffic, Analysys Mason researchers argue. Basically, the ITU wants to create a new Internet traffic “settlements regime” modeled on voice precedents that will be difficult to administer and raise overhead costs.

But there could be other significant effects. First, operators might be induced to maintain their customers‘ websites abroad. One of the significant benefits of establishing an internet exchange point is to make it attractive for domestic websites to be hosted at home, in order to increase their performance and lower costs, Analysys Mason notes.

However, given that foreign websites will generate a source of incoming settlements, the incentive to keep them abroad would increase.

At the same time, foreign operators, in order to compensate for the settlements, would likely raise the price of hosting websites serving countries with high settlement rates, which might lead websites to develop less content targeted at a particular country in order to limit their costs.

While this could be seen to increase the incentives to locate content in the target country in order to avoid settlements, that is often not efficient, particularly for small or undeveloped markets from which access to a regional server may be sufficient, Analysys Mason argues.

In addition, it is likely that infrastructure investment decisions would be affected, as providers would be reluctant to invest in providing infrastructure to a particular country to which it is expensive to deliver traffic. In other words, there will be financial reasons not to build more undersea links to certain countries, for example.

Also, huge volumes of Internet traffic could be artificially generated in order to arbitrage a rate-regulated model, to generate inbound payments, alter traffic balances, or otherwise unfairly leverage any accounting rate regime that may be applied to the Internet.

Entities that believe they would be net recipients of settlements, based on current projections of traffic flows, might find themselves net payers as a result of the manipulation of traffic flows by other players.

In summary, aside from the intrinsic difficulties of successfully imposing regulations on international flows of Internet traffic, there could be unintended consequences that would harm the internet if such a system were imposed.

If history, human nature and self interest  is any guide, some service providers to try and lower settlement payments, while others will attempt to grow their share of settlement payments.

Consider the flows of traffic. The notion of settlements is that a carrier that terminates traffic incurs costs to deliver that traffic. So a sending carrier pays the terminating carrier. In many cases, the traffic flows should largely balance each other, so the net payments are relatively small in magnitude.

But there are scenarios where traffic is unbalanced, and that causes problems. In the voice settlement regime, carriers that accept more traffic than they send wind up paying money. Carriers that send more traffic than they receive make money.

Some of you will remember, or even be able to point to, instances where revenue arbitrage was possible precisely because of such asymmetrical traffic flows. Server farms and “free conference calling services” in the United States provide examples.

In the proposed ITU framework, it is server farm traffic that could be troubling for some carriers.

Multimedia content, for example, might represent as much as 98 percent of Internet traffic. Right now, where those servers are located does not have implications for inter-carrier settlements.

For cost reasons, many of those servers are located in Africa. In 1999, 70 percent of international Internet bandwidth originating in Africa went to the United States. In  2011, less than five percent goes to the United States.  

These days, content is stored at African server farms, for distribution largely to Africa, Analysys Mason notes. In some ways, that is helpful to African consumers, for quality and cost reasons. In other ways, high cross-border charges are unhelpful.

While it is true that IXPs are emerging to facilitate local exchange of traffic in Africa, the cost of cross-border connectivity between many African countries is still quite high, and this is hindering the emergence of regional IXPs to help exchange traffic and distribute content.

The bandwidth from Latin America presents the same broad picture. Between 1999 and 2011, the percentage of bandwidth going to the United States fell from just under 90 percent to 85 percent, replaced by more intra-regional traffic.

The main similarities between Africa and Latin America are that over 80 percent of their Internet bandwidth is connected to another region (Europe and the US respectively). At the same time, little bandwidth goes between countries within the region. Intra-Latin American traffic is 15 percent of total, while intra-African traffic is two percent.

The amount of cost-increasing overhead under any new settlement regime could be significant.
A recent study by the Packet-Clearing House analyzed 142,210 peering agreements representing 86 percent of global Internet carriers and 96 countries.

Only 698 of the peering agreements were based on written contracts, representing just 0.49 percent of all the contracts.

In other words, the vast majority of current international and domestic peering agreements are not just commercially negotiated, but are not even formalized in writing. If Internet settlements mirror voice practices, overall costs will rise, even if traffic flows can be accurately captured most of the time, and some say that will be very difficult.

Analysys Mason argues market-based mechanisms work, and are a better alternative to creating a new settlement regime modeled on voice principles.