Kacific Eyes 2016 Commercial Launch, Signs 7 Deals

Although the core of its intended market are islands of the South Pacific, Kacific Broadband already has signed a contract with Indonesian satellite provider BigNet. The US$78 million long-term agreement with Kacific Broadband Satellites entails capacity covering all of Indonesia, with a particular emphasis on providing good quality, affordable Internet to rapidly developing areas in Eastern Indonesia, Kacific Broadband says.

Secondary cities and villages are the target, especially schools, government buildings, enterprises and community Internet access points.  

The deal is the seventh, and largest, signed so far by Kacific Broadband Satellites. Teletok, the local telecommunications company of Tokelau and sole service provider, is another customer.

Tokelau, composed of three small atolls situated north of Samoa, is a Polynesian territory of New Zealand with a population of 1,400.

Kacific’s target audience is a familiar market: up to 50 million communications users on remote Pacific islands typically unserved by undersea cable access. That also includes 13 million people who live on outer islands.

Also, as is the case for many countries of the Caribbean, there are huge spikes in demand caused by tourist visitors numbering about two million a year.

Also, 40 million people live in locations surrounding the Pacific Ocean, such as Eastern Indonesia, where there also is little Internet connectivity.

Demand models show that more than a million latent Internet users live in the extended Pacific islands, where there are high levels of education. Over a million latent Internet users could be added if the region was supplied with levels of connectivity equivalent to those found in developing parts of Asia, Africa or Central America.

http://kacific.com/pacific-market/

Kacific will use the latest generation Ka-band high throughput satellites and spot beams, delivering Internet access at speeds up to 50 Mbps to any single location or user.

The business plan calls for Kacific to supply wholesale capacity, enterprise and consumer services, with the launch of the first satellite in the fourth quarter of 2016 and commercial service early in 2017, with full capacity reached in 2020.

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Microsoft Preps Global Wi-Fi Hotspot Access Service

Microsoft appears to be readying a new business-focused global Wi-Fi hotspot service representing perhaps 10 million hotspots in 130 countries across the globe.

Speculation is that the new service will build on the existing Skype Wi-Fi service, which federates Boingo, Xfinity Wi-Fi, and Gowex hotspots in the United States and access points from BT and The Cloud in the United Kingdom.

Customers using Skype as part of  the Microsoft Work and Play Bundle, which costs $149 (£98) a year, will be able to access Microsoft Wi-Fi.

It isn't entirely clear whether they'll have to pay extra for the privilege with Skype credit, or other means.

People who bought a Surface 2 tablet with a Skype Wi-Fi Bundle will also get Microsoft Wi-Fi, as will employees of organizations with Office 365 for enterprise.

JP Morgan Chase, Coca-Cola, Eliminate Voice Mail: Employees Don't Need it Anymore

JP Morgan Chase and Company believes employees don’t need voice mail anymore, so JP Morgan Chase is simply eliminating that capability for consumer bank employees as part of a push by the biggest U.S. lender to trim $2 billion in annual expenses.

“We realized that hardly anyone uses voice mail anymore because we’re all carrying something in our pockets that’s going to get texts or e-mail or a phone call,” Gordon Smith, head of JPMorgan’s consumer and community bank, said.

The firm has 135,908 workers in its retail division and voice mail services cost $10 a month per line, Employees such as branch managers who deal directly with clients will keep the service.

Firms including Coca-Cola Co. also have cut voice mail services.

Developments such as these might suggest one reason why enterprise unified communications services and products face sluggish to declining sales. In a way that might have seemed crazy two decades ago, many enterprises might find a great number of thieir employees do not really need “unified” communications so they can stay in touch.

Texting, for example, is viewed as a full substitute.

Most employees at Coca-Cola’s Atlanta headquarters and its technology plaza nearby no longer have access to voice mail on their office phones.

Reportedly, only about six percent of employees opted to keep the feature.

The logic is that if a message is important the caller will email, text or call you back.

Something that was once seen as valuable and indispensable is now seen as inefficient, in some cases worthless as a form of messaging.

Just a third of workers listen to voice mails from business contacts, eVoice, a virtual phone service provider, found in a 2013 survey.

About the same share of respondents listen to voice messages from a spouse or significant other.

Google Project Loon Plans to Operate in U.S. Market

Google’s Project Loon, primarily seen as a new way to bring Internet access to billions of unconnected consumers, will be deployed in U.S. markets as well, according to Google Project Loon project lead Mike Cassidy.

“Even in my house, I don’t have a cell signal,” he said. “We’re going to come to the United States, too.”

As currently envisioned, Project Loon balloons will communicate with terrestrial Long Term Evolution mobile towers, but also be able to communicate with adjacent balloons as well, extending the range any single balloon can operate from any single base station.

The communication challenges pale in comparison to the tracking challenges. Indeed, it would not be inaccurate to say the fundamental challenge for any mesh network of moving radio platforms is to “track” the moving targets.

The perhaps surprising intention is to deploy balloons across the northern hemisphere, not just the southern hemisphere where billions of potential Internet users live.

PBX Sales Drop as Cloud Communications Grows

Some trends, even when they take a longish time to become clear, are perhaps predictable.

With the growth of cloud-based voice systems--consumer and enterprise--it was inevitable that the legacy ways of doing things would stall, then decline.

That is as true for enterprise voice as it is for consumer voice.

As businesses continue to hold off new phone system purchases, global enterprise PBX revenue fell six percent in the first quarter of 2015 from a year ago, according to the IHS Infonetics Enterprise Unified Communications and Voice Equipment report.

“The enterprise PBX market remains challenging, with revenue down yet again in the first quarter of 2015,” said Pure IP PBX was the one segment to post year-over-year growth due to strength in Asia Pacific,” said Diane Myers, research director for VoIP, UC and IMS at IHS.

“Things have started to slow on the unified communications (UC) front as well, which we attribute to movement to the cloud as businesses look for ease of management and flexibility,” Myers said.

The worldwide PBX market (TDM, hybrid and pure IP) totaled $1.6 billion in the first quarter of 2015, Myers said. PBX line shipments were up three percent, year over year.

Sales of unified communications (UC) applications dropped five percent, year over year.

India Net Neutrality Moves One Step Closer to Law

The network neutrality process has moved one step closer to becoming policy, as

a six-member telecom panel has submitted its report on net neutrality to the communications and information technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

What is not clear yet is how far the policies will go in the direction of mandating absolute “best effort only” access that does not allow for any packet prioritization.

Most observers do not have any objection to some elements, such as no blocking of lawful applications, and no invidious throttling of lawful apps (such as favoring delivery of packets from apps an ISP owns, or in which an ISP has a direct financial interest).

More contentious are related issues such as whether some forms of “quality of service” based on packet prioritization should ever be permitted.

The debate matters because observers and participants see threats to the openness of the Intenet, or the ability to rapidly expand Internet access or create new services using any QoS mechanisms.

Sponsored data, where consumers can use apps without incurring data charges, provide one clear example of how the rules will affect both access and usage.

Supporters of “zero rating” argue that allowing consumers to use apps without a data plan, or incurring data charges, rapidly increases sampling and contnued use of Internet apps.

Opponents say any such progams give an unfair advantage to the apps provided in such a manner.

On the other hand, even some who might otherwise support the ban on zero rating or sponsored apps might agree that some zero rating or sponsored data usage should be allowed.

Some might argue that e-governance or other apps with high social value could be allowed priority access, zero rating or sponsored data usage.

Some might argue that ad-supported access should be allowed, even if that is functionally equivalent to zero rating. It won’t be easy to simultaneously offer low-cost or free access and maintain aggressive net neutrality policies that bar such approaches.

Customer Satisfaction Falls, Across the Board, for Communications Services

There are some troubling signs about customer satisfaction with virtually every communications service in the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index survey.

Customer satisfaction scores for subscription TV, Internet, mobile and fixed line telephone service, plus computer software, collectively dipped 3.4 percent to an ACSI score of 68.8 on a 0 to 100 scale, the lowest level in seven years.

Some segments fared worse than others. Customer satisfaction with subscription TV service dropped to 63, the absolute worst score among 43 industries covered by the Index.

But Internet access service, which one might think would fare better, had the same score of 63, at the bottom of the index, across industries.

ACSI says the decline results from poor customer service and higher prices. The price issue is a bit of a paradox. For the most part, ISPs have been boosting speeds, while holding prices roughly steady, while adding higher-performance tiers, sold at higher prices.

So “prices” are going up, in some cases, but for services with much-higher performance.

Customer service might be another matter.

“There was a time when pay TV could get away with discontented users without being penalized by revenue losses from defecting customers, but those days are over,” says Claes Fornell, ACSI Chairman and founder.

The ACSI reports huge drops in customer satisfaction for Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

Already one of the lowest-scoring companies in the ACSI, Comcast shed 10 percent to a customer satisfaction score of 54.

Meanwhile, Time Warner Cable earns the distinction as least-satisfying company in the Index after falling 9 percent to 51.

Joining Time Warner Cable in the basement is ACSI newcomer Mediacom Communications (51), which serves smaller markets in the Midwest and South.

With a four percent gain to an ACSI score of 71, Verizon’s FiOS service had the best customer satisfaction score. DIrecTV dipped one percent to 68, while AT&T’s U-verse was unchanged, with a score of 69.

The perception problem for ISPs might be attributed to lack of choice. Some 61 percent of U.S. households have just one or no “high-speed” Internet providers, ACSI maintains.

Since most households have service from two fixed networks and two satellite providers, the issue is the perception of “high speed.” Consumers might no longer generally consider speeds below 25 Mbps to be “high speed.”

Customer satisfaction with ISPs remains unchanged at an ACSI score of 63.

But ACSI says customers are frustrated with “unreliable service, slow broadband Internet speeds and rising subscription prices,” as well as service contracts.

As always, some providers did better than average. AT&T U-verse gained six percent to an ACSI score of 69, while Verizon scored a 68.

Time Warner Cable gained seven percent to 58. Cablevision Systems and Frontier Communications scored a 61.

CenturyLink dropped eight percent, while Cox Communications lost nine percent to score 58.

Comcast’s Internet access service was worst at 56.

Customer satisfaction with mobile service also declined 2.8 percent to 70. TracFone Wireless achieved a score of 77. Verizon Wireless dropped five percent to 71. Both T-Mobile and AT&T improved to 70, while Sprint fell four percent to 65.

Fixed Line Customer Satisfaction Drops, After Years of "Higher" Ratings

In recent years, consumer satisfaction with fixed network phone service has generally been higher than for Internet access or subscription TV service, though consumer telecom, mobile and video entertainment services typically rank at the bottom of cross-industry rankings.

In 2013, for example, customer satisfaction with fixed telephone service was higher than for mobile service, Internet access or video entertainment. But that seems to be changing, which could indicate that the remaining customer base for fixed line voice now values the product much less than once was the case.

The thinking has been that since so many customers had abandoned all use of fixed line service, the remaining customers were a self-selected group of people for whom the value of fixed line service was relatively high.

But in the latest survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, customer satisfaction with fixed network telephone service fell 5.5 percent to 69. In 2013, the score had been 74. In terms of ACSI rankings, that is a big drop.

As sometimes is the case, specialized and smaller providers score better than larger providers.

Despite slipping three percent to 76, the average ACSI score of smaller local and long distance providers is much better than that of large providers, the ACSI says.

Vonage and Bright House Networks are near the top of the category (both 73). CenturyLink dipped one percent to 70, while Verizon declined seven percent to 68.

Cox Communications dropped three percent to tie Verizon’s score. Cablevision Systems scored a 67.

AT&T’s landline service dipped the most, down 10 percent to 65. Comcast slipped four percent to 64 while Time Warner Cable declined three percent to 63.

To be sure, customer satisfaction scores for subscription TV, Internet, mobile and fixed line telephone service, plus computer software, collectively dipped 3.4 percent to an ACSI score of 68.8 on a 0 to 100 scale, the lowest level in seven years.

That might seem an odd result, given the greater choice, and better prices, enabled by Google Fiber, third party ISPs, mobile service providers and other suppliers generally adding retail packages with higher value (faster speeds, bigger usage buckets) and lower price.

One might argue that fierce competition actually is reducing consumer satisfaction. That could happen for any number of reasons. Perhaps existing customers see new advertised offers and evaluate their existing services less favorably.

Customers might be more confused, wondering whether they now have the “best deal” or “best plan” or “best provider” for the combination of value, features and price.

In the case of fixed line voice, where satisfaction had been--at least for a communications service--relatively high, the lower satisfaction could indicate that even the remaining customers now are having greater questions about the value of the service.

In other cases, consumers might be irritated by the need to buy a triple play service, when all they really want is a double play (Internet access and video), to get the best price.

Overall, the dropping satisfaction scores now extend across every segment of the communications business.

Independent Telcos Buy SDN-based Cloud Services Provider

A consortium of 32 independent telcos that own  BLM Acquisition Corp. has acquired cloud service provider Codero, a cloud hosting company.

The deal gives the regionals a cloud hosting capability, while Cordero gets “out of market” distribution channels and access to investment it needs to expand.

One practical angle: the owners are scattered over a wide area, but Cordero’s backbone uses software defined network architecture, with the practical implication that end user sites require very little hardware investment, allowing service providers  to log in to a portal and configure bare-metal servers, cloud resources and virtual networks on demand.

Codero has 4,000 customers of all sizes, from small to enterprise.

Codero customers will have enhanced connectivity options and Codero will gain access to what it calls one of the largest combined fiber networks in the United States.

The acquisition makes Codero a major cloud play in the cities that aren’t core markets and in smaller and rural towns. That isn’t necessarily unusual. But what is noteworthy is that use of SDN makes service delivery much more manageable, and cheaper.

French Mobile and Fixed Price Declines Moderate in 2014

French retail mobile and fixed telecom prices are decreased at a slower rate in 2014, compared to 2013, according to French regulator ARCEP.

Revenue earned by operators totalled €36.8 billion, a 3.4 percent decrease over the previous year, following a drop of 7.3 percent in 2013.

ARCEP says the moderating declines were driven by a more-moderate decline in fixed telephone service revenues as well as  and also by a similar trend in mobile pricing in the residential market segment in 2014.

The price of fixed services decreased by an average of one percent in 2014. In 2013, prices actually grew by 2.6 percent. Fixed network prices have been roughly flat since 2012, ARCEP notes.  

Retail high speed access prices decreased by 2.7 percent in 2014, following a  2.7 percent increase in 2013.

Overall, prices for faster access services between 2012 and 2014 were flat, down about 0.2 percent.

Though arguing that mobile service prices remained relatively stable over the course of 2014, ARCEP also says that post-paid contract prices (flat rate plans, which account for 85 percent of the market in terms of volume) decreased by 13.5 percent, compared to a drop of 25.6 percent in 2013.

Prepaid card prices increase since 2011 and were up 7.5 percent in 2014, on average.

Memory and Voice Costs Declined 3 Orders of Magnitude Since 1993?

The retail cost of memory, like the retail cost of texting, calling or messaging, is a fundamental reality for nearly any business or industry where product creation distribution and consumption has significant "information" content. 

The price of a product (a gigabyte of storage) falls from $9,327 to $2.48, a decline of three orders of magnitude over two decades. 

Nothing that dramatic has occurred for most carrier-provided voice calls. From 1965 to 1985, for example, U.S. originated international call prices dropped by about half, or about one order of magnitude ($10 for a three-minute call to $5 for a three-minute call). 

Between 1993 and 2013, the cost of a mobile-initiated voice call in the U.S. market dropped about one order of magnitude. 

Of course, it is hard to compare carrier voice with the cost of Skype-to-Skype calls or instant messaging services, which might have "zero incremental cost." 

But it would not be hard to attribute a three ordes of magnitude effective price decline, if one used an attributed cost model, where some percentage of the cost of Internet access was used as the indicator of incremental cost of usage. 

 

Asia Pacific Mobile Devices Will Consume 2.2 GB per Device by 2019

In the Asia Pacific region, mobile data traffic will grow 10-fold from 2014 to 2019, a compound annual growth rate of 58 percent, according to the Cisco Mobile Visual Networking Index.

In 2014 there were 2.2 billion mobile users in 2014, representing 56 percent of Asia Pacific's population.

By 2019 there will be 2.8 billion mobile users representing 69 percent of Asia Pacific's population.

In Asia Pacific, mobile data traffic will reach an annual run rate of 114 Exabytes by 2019, up from 11.7 Exabytes in 2014, growing three times faster than Asia Pacific fixed IP traffic from 2014 to 2019.

In Asia Pacific, mobile data traffic will account for 17 percent of Asia Pacific fixed and mobile data traffic by 2019, up from four percent in 2014, while 53 percent of mobile connections will be “smart” connections by 2019, up from 24 percent in 2014.

In Asia Pacific, mobile traffic per mobile-connected end-user device will reach 2.2 GB per month by 2019, up from 273 megabytes per month in 2014, a compound annual growth rate of 51 percent.

Trends are similar in many countries. In Indonesia, there were 155.1 million mobile users in 2014, representing 61 percent of Indonesia's population. By 2019 73 percent of Indonesia’s population, some 195.3 million people will be using mobile devices, according to the Cisco Mobile Visual Networking Index.

Perhaps significantly, mobile data traffic will grow an order of magnitude (10 times)  from 2014 to 2019, a compound annual growth rate of 59 percent.

Mobile data traffic will account for 41 percent of Indonesian data traffic by 2019, up from 17 percent  in 2014.

By 2019, 46 percent of mobile connections will be “smart,” up from 14 percent in 2014.

In Indonesia, mobile traffic per mobile-connected end-user device will reach 1.7 GB per month by 2019, up from 185 megabytes per month in 2014, a CAGR of 55 percent.

Mobile Data Traffic Will Grow 10X from 2014 to 2019

In Indonesia, there were 155.1 million mobile users in 2014, representing 61 percent of Indonesia's population. By 2019 73 percent of Indonesia’s population, some 195.3 million people will be using mobile devices, according to the Cisco Mobile Visual Networking Index.

Perhaps significantly, mobile data traffic will grow an order of magnitude (10 times)  from 2014 to 2019, a compound annual growth rate of 59 percent.

Mobile data traffic will account for 41 percent of Indonesian data traffic by 2019, up from 17 percent  in 2014.

By 2019, 46 percent of mobile connections will be “smart,” up from 14 percent in 2014.

In Indonesia, mobile traffic per mobile-connected end-user device will reach 1.7 GB per month by 2019, up from 185 megabytes per month in 2014, a CAGR of 55 percent.

Will Google Project Loon Launch Internet Access Service in 2016?

Mesh networks might be a significant new factor in the Internet access business across much of the Global South.

By linking it “Project Loon” balloons together in a mesh network, where ground signals can be relayed directly between balloons, Google can now provide coverage for an entire region such as  West Africa using only about eight ground stations, according to Bloomberg.

In the past, Project Loon balloons used for delivering Internet access had to have a direct link to a mobile cell tower on the ground. Given Project Loon’s objective of providing service to “hard to reach areas” where such towers are in short supply, that was a constraint.

Now traffic can be relayed from balloon to balloon, allowing any single balloon to remain connected with any single cell tower 400 kilometers to 800 kilometers distant.

Other new contestants in the Internet access and transport business, including LeoSat, plan to use a mesh network as well, and for similar reasons, allowing a single uplink and downlink for traffic, no matter how far it has to travel across the face of the earth.

The new mesh configuration solves an existing problem, namely the fact that single balloons, communicating with single base stations, can provide only intermittent service.

Project Loon is conducting trials in Australia, Chile, New Zealand, Brazil, and other countries,

But it is conceivable Project Loon will be able to provide commercial service by the end of 2016, in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

The other noteworthy angle is that use of cell towers makes some mobile service providers potential partners for Project Loon, in either a wholesale or retail capacity.