Comparing Mobile Wallet Providers

Nice chart by GigaOm's Ryan Kim. 

“Mobiles” are Mostly Used “Untethered”

About 68 percent of consumer mobile phone use occurs in the home, a study sponsored by AOL and BBDO has found. That, as much as anything, shows the growing importance of “untethered” access for mobile devices.

The study, conducted by research firm InsightsNow, shows that a focus on “mobile” devices actually requires understanding the role of untethered access, which in fact might already represent as much as half of all mobile operations on a smart phone.

The study segmented into seven distinct "mobile motivations" that encompass most mobile use:
a. Accomplish - managing activities and lifestyle to gain a sense of accomplishment
b. Socialize- active interaction with other people
c. Prepare - active planning in order to be prepared for upcoming activities
d.Me Time - seeking relaxation and entertainment in order to indulge oneself or pass the time
e. Discover - seeking news and information
f. Shop - focusing on finding a product or service
g.Express Myself  -participating in passions and interests

“Me Time” is by far the biggest pasttime, accounting for almost half (46 percent) of all smart phone app and website activities, averaging 864 minutes per month per user, About 70 percent of those activities are “lean-back” experiences.

4G Retail Prices 20% Higher Than 3G: Can That Last?

​Compared to 3G data pricing, 4G is around 20 percent higher than 3G for the equivalent data plan, according to ABI Research.  Whether that will remain the case longer term is more debatable, ABI Research says.

“In South Korea, SK Telecom has cut its 4G pricing to remain competitive," ABI Research notes.

Their ‘LTE 62 Plan’ for smartphones used to be priced US$55.04 for 3 GB of data, but the monthly download quota has now been increased to 5 GB. 

ABI Research has seen similar 4G mobile data quota and/or pricing revisions in Norway, Hong Kong, and the US,” said Jake Saunders, VP for forecasting at ABI Research.

According to ABI Research’s cross-country comparison of mobile data pricing, the world’s cheapest 4G data plan is currently on offer by CSL Hong Kong, which launched its 4G service in November 2011. 

For 3G mobile data, the lowest tariff can be found in Singapore. Singapore’s M1 offers a 4 GB data plan for US$9.62.

France Telecom Promises Higher LTE Prices

France Telecom CEO Stephane Richard says the coming Long Term Evolution 4G network will be priced at a premium to the 3G network. That isn’t terribly surprising. The established pricing model for fixed or mobile broadband access is that faster networks cost more than slower networks.

And since there is a relatively linear relationship between network speed and data consumption, as a rule, there will be a tendency for usage-based plans to cost more when customers are on faster networks.

Beyond that, service providers always have used “new features” or “new capabilities” as a rationale for higher retail prices. Aside from the fact that LTE is more bandwidth efficient, an advantage for carriers, LTE does feature lower latency, for example, an advantage for end users.

Also, as a practical matter, expensive networks, with high fixed costs, facing significant loss of current revenue, necessarily will look to price increases. Consumers of electricity and water services, for example, sometimes are exhorted to “reduce” use as a “green” effort, or to conserve resources. But if too many electricity or water customers really do so, then revenue for the suppliers drops, and they raise their prices.

So, in a real sense, the growing competition in the market, not just evolving product demand, also would force suppliers to make up revenue losses, somehow.

Executives of European carriers including Vodafone and Spain’s Telefonica say European regulators need to ease restrictions on consolidation to free up resources for investments into faster networks.

“There are hundreds of telecom operators in Europe while there are three or four in major markets like the U.S. and China,” said Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, Telefonica’s COO.

For all of those reasons, higher mobile broadband pricing is coming, as mobile service providers build 4G LTE networks.

Clearwire May Delay LTE Network Build

Clearwire says it is evaluating its Long Term Evolution 4G network plans, to align spending with expected revenue, and "may elect to delay a portion of our deployment schedule accordingly."

In one sense, that is not helpful to Clearwire  at a time when other mobile service providers are building their LTE networks as fast as they can. On the other hand, helpful or not, Clearwire cannot afford to spend more capital than it has access to, even if it would prefer to build faster. 

Clearwire has said it will begin building the LTE network early in 2013 and have 5,000 LTE sites up by middle of 2013.

Clearwire had $1.2 billion in cash at the end of the second quarter and, based on its needs, had enough cash for "at least" the next 12 months. The company, which holds a large chunk of wireless airwave licenses, also has said it could sell assets to raise cash.

As a practical matter, Clearwire might ultimately wind up functioning as a "spot supplier" of additional LTE capacity in markets with heavy usage, rather than as a complete national network using only its own facilities. 

That would not be an unusual pattern in the industry, where virtually no networks have network everywhere. Such a plan also would better match the capital Clearwire seems to have available.  

Combined T-Mobile USA, MetroPCS Spectrum Holdings

This map of combined spectrum holdings of a merged T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS suggests that in a few markets--Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, Detroit, Atlanta and Miami--the new company will have more than 70 MHz of capacity.

The impact elsewhere will be helpful, but less startling. MetroPCS has very good coverage in 14 city networks, including New York, San Francisco, and much of Florida,


Here's how AT&T once described its spectrum position, compared to other carriers, on a national basis (there are many local variations). The older AT&T chart does show why the merger is a big deal. Look at where T-Mobile USA stands, by itself. The MetroPCS spectrum, in some areas, is much larger. 

Roaming Revenue $80 Billion in 2017

Not all revenue earned in the global communications business, either fixed or mobile, comes from retail end users. Some portion of revenues comes from business partners, especially other service providers. In the global mobile business, roaming revenue paid by one carrier to another averages about eight percent of total revenue.

A new report from Juniper Research values mobile roaming revenues at more than $80 billion by 2017, compared to over $46 billion in 2012. Those revenues are driven by increasing data usage, but lower per-unit revenues.

Historically, roaming revenues have been earned by out of region mobile service providers who allow another network’s users access to the local network when those users are out of region. The new change is that customer access to out of region data networks, either mobile or Wi-Fi, is generating roaming revenue for the out of region suppliers.

T-Mobile USA to Become a Bigger "Number 4" Mobile Provider

The boards of Deutsche Telekom and MetroPCS Communications have approved a deal to merge MetroPCS with the German operator's U.S. subsidiary, T-Mobile USA, WSJ.com reports.

The deal would not change T-Mobile USA's installed base, compared to AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, but would narrow the gap with Sprint. The new entity would have about 42 million customers, up from 33 million.

Somewhat oddly, there have not been an immediate raft of objections that such a merger will be problematic becasue T-Mobile USA uses the GSM air interface, and MetroPCS uses CDMA.

In the past, every time rumors have arisen about Sprint buying T-Mobile USA, or merging the two companies, there have been immediate objections that the task of integrating the two companies would be technologically complex.

In the future, of course, all the U.S. mobile service providers will be using Long Term Evolution, so incompatible air interfaces will be a lesser problem over time, and then at some point, not much of a problem at all.

As a long term matter, many observers would say a stable mobile market in the United States would feature no more than three leading providers. That, if correct, suggests further consolidation will happen, even if the U.S. Justice Department already believes the market is too concentrated.

Carrier, Not Just Enterprise Hardware Changes with Cloud

Enterprise hardware platforms change with a switch to cloud computing, namely removing the need to tie applications and functions to discrete bits of dedicated hardware. In a cloud computing scenario, all those applications are computing "instances" run on virtual machines.

Metaswitch Networks Chief Technology Officer Martin Taylor says that means about a 30-percent performance hit, compared with running an app on a dedicated piece of hardware.  But the cost of computing drops every 18 months, so that isn't much of a financial issue. You just throw more processors at the problem.

Of course, technology changes often underpin potential changes of business model or operations. In a cloud environment, users extrapolate apps and execution of processes from physical devices and, potentially, locations.

Computing and app delivery itself becomes an "over the top" process. And that could have lots of implications for business models. Notably, communications access providers traditionally have operated on a territorial basis. Cloud computing makes that unnecessary, or simply a business model choice.

Did British Telecom Inflate Rural Broadband Costs to Win Higher Subsidies?

The U.K. government is going to subsidize the national broadband network in rural areas by giving £1billion to BT to connect about 12 million households in the countryside. Half of the money is coming from the U.K. government, and half from local taxes.

However according to a leaked document purportedly from a briefing for officials at the Culture, Media and Sport department, one expert at least charges that BT is overcharging, using a mark up of up to 80 percent.

BT denies the charge, of course.

18% to 25% of U.S. Adults Now Own Tablets

Over the last year, tablet ownership has steadily increased from 11 percent of U.S. adults in July of 2011 to 18 percent in January of 2012, according to the Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Currently, 22 percent own a tablet and another three percent regularly use a tablet owned by someone else in the home. A separate survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found 25 percent of all U.S. adults have a tablet computer.


The growth in tablet adoption is likely related to the advent of the lower-priced tablets in late 2011, Pew researchers believe. Overall, 68 percent of respondents got their tablet in the last year.

About 52 percent of tablet owners report owning an iPad, compared with 81 percent in the survey a year ago.

Android-based devices make up the bulk of the remaining tablet ownership, 48 percent overall, dominated largely by the Kindle Fire.

Some 21 percent own a Kindle Fire, eight percent own the Samsung Galaxy,

GoDaddy Exits SMB Cloud Computing Business

Web-hosting firm GoDaddy has been marketing cloud computing services to small and mid-sized businesses for a year or so, but has concluded that not enough SMBs are interested in the offer, at least the way GoDaddy had been offering the services.

As with other apparent market failures, it isn't always easy to conclude that "something cannot be done" because one particular supplier cannot do it. GoDaddy appears to have been offering simple data storage services. 

Some would say that will not work with SMB customers, who really need software as a service offers, not simple cloud storage. 

Service Provider Access Networks Will be Distributed Denial of Service Victims

Metaswitch Networks CEO John Lazar warns that service provider IP networks increasingly will be the target of distributed denial of service attacks. It looks like they already are such victims.

Millions of Internet users in Brazil have fallen victim to a sustained attack that exploited vulnerabilities in DSL modems, forcing people visiting sites such as Google or Facebook to reach imposter sites that installed malicious software and stole online banking credentials, a security researcher said.

U.K. to Hold 4G Spectrum Auction Sooner than Expected

Ofcom, the U.K., communications regulator, seems to have persuaded TV broadcasters, Digital UK and the transmission company Arqiva to release 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz spectrum for auction sooner than had originally been expected.

This agreements mean that the 4G auction process is on track to begin at the end of 2012, potentially enabling the licensing process for 4G services across the United Kingdom to begin during the first half of 2013, Ofcom says.

In August 2012 Ofcom gave approval to an application by Everything Everywhere (now EE) to use some of its existing spectrum to offer a 4G service. This is expected to launch this year.

Ofcom plans to start the auction process to release spectrum at the end of the year, with bidding starting early in 2013.

1983 Steve Jobs Predictions about Computing

It's pretty amazing.


He predicted that people will be spending more time interacting with personal computers than with cars. Remember he said this at a time when few people owned a computer. 

He talked about the personal computer being a new medium of communication, before extensive networking and and at a time when 300 baud modems were state of the art.

Jobs talks about early e-mail systems, and how, at some point, portable computers with radio links would allow people to walk around anywhere and pick up their e-mail. 

He says Apple’s strategy is to “put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you that you can learn how to use in 20 minutes."

He thought that the software industry needed something like a radio station so that people could sample software before they buy it. 

He believed that software distribution through traditional brick-and-mortar was archaic since software is digital and can be transferred electronically through phone lines. He foresees paying for software in an automated fashion over the phone lines with credit cards.