53% of Mobile Customers Use Data

About 53 percent of mobile users now use mobile data services or applications of one sort or another, Validas reports. That is up from 42 percent in 2009. The typical user consumes 145 Mbytes a month, compared to  96.8 MBytes in 2009. The typical smartphone user consumes 415 Mbytes, up from 139 Mbytes in 2009.

Mobile PC broadband users consume 1.5 Mbytes a month, up from about 1.4 Mbytes in 2009.

Feature phone users consume about 68 Mbytes a month, up from 46 Mbytes.

Verizon Wireless posted the largest percentage increase in mean data usage per user from 48 MBytes to 147 MBytes.

T-Mobile users consume 121 Mbytes, typically. Sprint users consume about 133 Mbytes, primarily because more Sprint customers now consume 50 Mbytes or less each month.

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0.3% of BitTorrent Files are Legal

The large majority of content found on BitTorrent is illegal, a new study out of the University of Ballarat in Australia has confirmed.

Researchers from the university's Internet Commerce Security Laboratory scraped torrents from 23 trackers and looked up the content to determine whether the file was confirmed to be copyrighted.

They found that 89 percent of the files they sampled were confirmed to be illegally shared, and most of the remaining ambiguous 11 percent was likely to be infringing.

Only 0.3% of files on BitTorrent confirmed to be legal

AT&T Credit Rating at Risk

S&P may lower AT&T’s credit rating, on the heels of Sprint-Nextel posting a widening loss.

“AT&T Inc. may not be able to achieve financial metrics fully supportive of the current rating within a reasonable time frame,” S&P said.

That might not mean much to most people, nor is it a user's responsibility to worry about the service provider's problems. But the potential downgrade is important because it illustrates the pressures the largest U.S. communication carriers now face. A lower credit rating means higher borrowing costs, and therefore less money available to fund network upgrades.

The potential move also illustrates a situation that gets too little attention from policymakers, who tend to act as though America's largest providers of communications services are "too big to fail."

In fact, any careful analysis would suggest there is huge risk in the communications business, and that the objective now is to avoid negative growth. Most of the revenue growth the biggest carriers now get simply replaces revenue being steadily lost from legacy lines of business. They are hardly "too big to fail."

AT&T’s ‘A’ corporate credit rating and the ‘A-1′ short-term and commercial paper ratings were put on CreditWatch with negative implications. “We expect that a potential downgrade of the corporate credit rating, if any, would be limited to one notch,” S&P noted.

AT&T Gets Slammed By S&P, ‘A’ Corporate Credit Rating In Doubt

More Women Than Men Use Social Networking

Globally, women demonstrate higher levels of engagement with social networking sites than men, new comScore survey finds.

Although women account for 47.9 percent of total unique visitors to the social networking category, they consume 57 percent of pages and account for nearly 57 percent of total minutes spent on these sites.

Women spend significantly more time on social networking sites than men, with women averaging 5.5 hours per month compared to men’s 4 hours, demonstrating the strong engagement that women across the globe share with social sites.

Social Networking Sites Reach a Higher Percentage of Women than Men Worldwide

Mobile Category Will Dominate Consumer Electronics Growth in 2011

Mobile computers will provide the consumer electronics industry's primary revenue growth in 2011, according to the Consumer Electronics Industry.

CEA projects that mobile computing, which includes laptops, netbooks and tablet computers, will reach more than $26 billion in shipment revenues by 2011, and "most" of that segment's growth will be driven by tablet PCs.

Wireless handsets, which have driven growth in recent years, also will represent about $26 billion worth of revenue, says CEA. Together, mobile PCs and phones will represent about 53 percent of total consumer electronics industry revenue.

CEA Says Mobile PCs, Mobile Phones Will be 53% of Consumer Electronics Revenues

Is Multichannel Video Business in Danger?

Smaller providers in the communications and cable TV business never have had a terribly easy time coping with the emerging shift to broadband-based services. Scale is an issue, and smaller providers, by definition, do not have scale.

Small telcos often cannot take advantage of wireless or video in the same way that Verizon and AT&T can. Small cable companies often cannot take advantage of either wireless or video scale economies.

For many smaller telcos, hanging onto the voice business is a key challenge. Now some might argue the same is true for small cable operators and their video businesses.

"What's dead this year is video," said Needham & Co. analyst Laura Martin. "The programmers are destroying the video business" by shifting to online and mobile distribution channels, she argues.

Consumers are gravitating to Internet and mobile applications, she argues, so operators should focus on mobile services, commercial services and the data access business.

"Take the cash flow, if there is any after the programmers get done with you, and what you need to do is protect the future," she said.

Clearly, Martin sees online video as a direct threat to the multichannel video business. It might be shocking to hear an analyst recommend that a cable company get beyond video, as it once was a shock to hear analysts suggesting telcos had to get beyond voice. But the logic is hard to argue with, as tough as the advice will be to heed.

‘Video Is Dead', Analyst Laura Martin Declares

A Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Mobile

Five years ago, the Motorola Razr was the "hot device." The BlackBerry was carried mostly by business users. While smartphones existed, the devices were really more like PDAs with a phone built-in rather than mobile computing devices as we know them today.

There were mobile phone apps, but the app store concept as we know it now was still years away. And while many mobile phones had the ability to access the web, the experience was slow and painful.

A Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Mobile

Not Your Imagination: The World is Younger

It isn't your imagination: more people are younger these days, and they all use mobile phones. Nearly half of the world's population is under the age of 25 and over 85 percent live in developing countries, according to the World Population Foundation.

Globally, a majority of people in the 15- to 25-year segment have a mobile device of some sort.

Why Mobile Technology Is Still Going to Save the World

Blockbuster Express Plans 10,000 U.S. Locations by End of 2010

Blockbuster Express, the self-service movie rental service, is supposed to be available at 10,000 U.S. locations in 2010. The service competes with Redbox.

Unemployment Above 9% Until 2012

The White House’s annual Mid-Session Budget Review assumes unemployment will not fall below nine percent until 2012. In other words, the White House believes we will continue to be in a virtual "jobless recovery."  In fact, the White House expects unemployment to remain at seven percent until the start of 2014.


The unemployment rate is projected to aver­age 9.7 percent in 2010. This is the average level of unemployment that has prevailed dur­ing the first six months of the year. Despite the growth in output, unemployment is projected to decline slowly because, as labor market condi­tions improve, discouraged workers rejoin the labor force, adding temporarily to unemploy­ment, while part-time workers increase their hours of work.

Even with continued healthy growth in 2011 and beyond, the unemployment rate is projected to fall, but it is not projected to fall below six percent until 2015. Traditionally, an unemployment rate around four percent has been considered a sign of "full employment" conditions.

That is going to put pressure on every business selling products and services to consumers or business customers, and will increase pressure on firms to grow by acquisition, as internal customer growth and average revenue per user will be tough to come by.

read the full report here

Apple Claims Droid X Suffers From Signal Fade When Held

Apple claims the new Droid X also suffers from signal attenuation when held in the hand.

watch the video

State of Social Gaming Business

Tim Chang, principal at Norwest Venture Partners,talks about the social game market, reviewing 2009 and 2010 trends. 

Verizon Wireless Gains Outpace AT&T

Despite the undeniable success the Apple iPhone has been for AT&T, Verizon might be finding ways to compete even without ability to sell the popular device. In the second quarter of 2010, Verizon Wireless added a net 665,000 contract customers, boosted from the increased demand for its line of Droid smartphones, which run on Google Inc.'s Android software.

AT&T added a net 496,000 contract customers in the same quarter. The impact of iPhone 4 sales will not be reflected in AT&T's performance until the third quarter, though, as sales started at the tail end of the second quarter. That should help AT&T post strong net adds numbers in a quarter that typically is one of the weaker quarters of the year for net adds.

Verizon Wireless Gains Outpace AT&T

iPhone 4 Spoof

Darth Vader Complains About His iPhone 4

Wireless Again Drives AT&T Results

AT&T's financial results for the second quarter of 2010 were driven by its wireless segment. The company says it added 1.6 million total wireless subscribers and a "record" 3.2 million iPhones.

Customer churn meanwhile has dropped to 1.01 percent for postpaid customers;

1.29 percent churn overall.

AT&T saw a 10.3 percent increase in wireless service revenues, with postpaid subscriber average monthly revenues per subscriber up 3.4 percent.

AT&T also saw 27.2 percent growth in wireless data revenues, year over year.

If there is anything to watch, it is that AT&T is activating fewer new iPhone customers that are new to AT&T. The company is getting a lower mix of iPhone subscribers from rival carriers than it has in the past.

During the second quarter, about 27 percent of its iPhone activations were customers new to AT&T. In the latter quarters of 2009, about 40 percent of iPhone activations were of devices used by customers new to AT&T.

This suggests either that the potential universe of users who want an iPhone is shrinking, either because other reasonably comparable models are available from other carriers, because interest in Android devices is growing, or because smartphone demand overall is shifting in some way to lower-priced devices.

The iPhone exclusive has been a smash hit for AT&T, without any doubt. The danger is the obvious risk that reliance on any single product or customer always has for any firm. When revenue is driven by a single customer, or a few customers, or a single product, a shift in demand can lead to rapid distress.

AT&T Delivers Double-Digit Earnings Growth in Second Quarter, Raises Full-Year Outlook

Jajah Founder’s Next Project Is Mobile Payments

Daniel Mattes, Jajah founder, appears to be targeting online payments for his new company Jumio. It appears Jumio is focused specifically on mobile payments, both between individuals and businesses, with an emphasis on removing fraud and ensuring trust.

Jumio: Jajah Founder’s Next Project Is Mobile Payments

Amazon Kindle At "Tipping Point"?

"We've reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle," Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos says. "The growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189."

"In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format," Bezos says. "Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books."

Amazon Media Room

Verizon Wireless 4G Caps "Unfair"?

Verizon Wireless boss Lowell McAdam reportedly said at a Barclays Capital conference that Verizon Wireless likely will move away from unlimited plans on the 4G Long Term Evolution network, instead charging for 'buckets' of megabytes.

That is one more sign of the direction the entire industry will take. Some observers think this is somehow unfair. They sometimes base this belief on the lower "cost per megabit per second" or "cost per transferred megabyte" of a 4G network, compared to a 3G network.

It is no more inherently unfair than a company lowering its headcount, wage rates, reducing advertising or any other steps it may take to keep costs in line with anticipated revenues.

The fundamental trend in the communications business is that the "retail price" of bandwidth keeps dropping. When that happens, providers must sell more units to maintain flat revenue. In a business that also has major declining lines of business, any entity must, over time, reduce its costs in line with the revenue drops in those lines of business as well.

The net effect is a need for greater efficiency, and the lower cost per bit of a 4G network is part of that effort, as much as it is a hedge against constantly-growing bandwidth demand.

Moore's Law adequately captures the typical pace of semiconductor density change. But most of the rest of the natural world cannot improve its performance metrics at that pace. Not batteries, not construction, transportation, manufacturing or marketing cost. Greater efficiency in the transmission network is simply part of preparing for a future where bandwidth costs, per unit, will keep squeezing.

Verizon looking at non-unlimited plans for 4G data

New MIT Study Finds Broadband Speeds Much Faster than FCC Reported | Broadband for America

A new MIT study says that previous estimates of U.S. broadband speed may have underestimated just how fast our national networks really are. In March, the FCC said that the broadband network was only half as fast as advertised.

However, the MIT study found that those measurements didn’t fully measure the speed of the “access network,” which Internet service providers (ISPs) control. For example, using the best method, Ookla/Speedtest, current typical speeds are 7.7 Mbps, not 3.8 Mbps.

According to the study, a simple figure for broadband speed isn’t sufficient to understand the quality of the nation’s digital infrastructure, and it’s just as affected by a user’s computer and the location of servers being accessed as it is by the ISP.

That's a bit akin to attributing all of an iPhone's dropped call performance to AT&T, and attributing zero to the iPhone's design, to the extent that the device itself can cause dropped calls.

New MIT Study Finds Broadband Speeds Much Faster than FCC Reported