A new survey conducted by the Mobile Marketing Association suggests very-high rates of user response to advertising based on location information.
"Nearly half of those who noticed any ads while using location-based services took at least some action," MMA says. That compares to 37 percent of text message advertising and almost twice the rate of Web browser ads (28 percent).
Ten percent of the cell phone owners surveyed use mobile location services at least once a week, while 63 percent of Apple iPhone owners use location services at least once a week.
Respondents said they use these services most frequently to “locate nearby points of interest, shops or services.”
Apple and Android are at the top of developer interest as development platforms, an Appcelerator poll of 1,028 developers suggests.
In fact, developer interest largely is a two-horse race between Apple and Google. The "true game changing news" is Android, Appcelerator says. In fact, sentiment has swung fairly quickly towards Android as the clear "second choice" for developers, after Apple.
In January 2010, 86 percent of developers were interested in iPhone and 68 percent were interested in Android, an 18 point spread. That spread has closed to just six points now (iPhone 88 percent, Android 82 percent).
About 80 percent of developers say they are interested in developing for the iPad.
Developers indicated they were most interested in developing eBooks, entertainment/media applications, business applications, medical applications, and education applications.
Service provider product managers essentially have lost control of their products, says Al Brisard, Vertek VP. Instead, product managers essentially have been reduced to setting service definitions and pricing. Operations and finance pretty much control the rest. As often is the case, that isn't necessarily the best way to match features with end user demand.
If you want to know why service providers sometimes cannot create compelling new products, much less get them to market quickly, perhaps this is one reason why.
Despite the hype about mobile apps, it remains difficult to "monetize" them, for several reasons. Most apps sell for low prices, so a developer needs huge volume. But volume means getting noticed, and simply creating an app and listing in on an app store does not guarantee attention.
That increasingly means a successful app not only has to provide value, but has to be promoted. And that means all the traditional thinking about traditional marketing still holds. Developers have to take affirmative steps to promote their apps; they won't sell themselves.
"The App Store is not a marketing vehicle; it is a distribution vehicle," said Raven Zachary, president of digital creative firm Small Society.
Of course, not all apps are sold. Some are themselves marketing vehicles. But an iPhone app can cost $50,000 or more for an agency to develop. So even the marketing vehicle must be marketed.
Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile have almost 260 million wireless subscribers. The U.S. population is 305 million people and some of those are too young to need or use a phone. Others don’t want one.
During the last quarter, Verizon added only 423,000 new contract subscribers and AT&T only 512,000 customers, rates that are lower than has been the case in past quarters.
So what does that mean? What it always means: providers will have to create new products to sell to a base of existing customers, rather than selling more of the existing product to new customers. In the cable and telecom business, that has meant both getting into new lines of business as well as "bundling."
For wireless providers, the new product is wireless broadband, immediately in the form of more smartphone data plans, but over time more use of wireless to support sensor networks of various types.
But there are wider policy implications as well. U.S. regulators sometimes behave as though nothing they do will seriously impede the ability of U.S. service providers to continue to invest and innovate. But both the wireline and wireless segments of the communications business face huge challenges. Existing growth models are exhausted and competition is growing.
Instead of behaving in ways that essentially are punitive, perhaps regulators should ask what they can do to allow the fastest-possible transition to new business models as the old models continue to waste away.
Telecom is not a growth industry; that should be obvious to all observers. The big challenge is to foster a transition to a sustainable model that will support continued investment in state-of-the-art facilities. Telecom, to put it bluntly, is not an industry that needs to be punished; it needs to be fostered.
Palm Runs Out Of Options As HTC Reviews, Declines To Buy The Company: "According to a report based on a source from an Asia-based Reuters correspondent, smartphone maker HTC has decided not to bid for Palm after looking at the company’s numbers. The source, which reportedly has direct knowledge of the talks, said there “weren’t enough synergies to take the deal forward”.
That leaves Palm, which has been struggling to boost sales of its new range of smartphones, running out of options fast."
What is described as the world's first augmented reality flash mob will happen at Dam Square in Amsterdam April 24 at 2 p.m. Attendees using Android and iPhone handsets will see three-dimensional statues using the Layar application.
Sander Veenhof is an organizer of the event, and TAB Worldmedia helped produce the content. "You can actually walk around them to look at them from all angles by just using your phone and the Layar browser," says Veenhof.
To prepare, download and install the Layar Augmented Reality browser and look for the layar using “ARflashmob” under the local tab.
Ringio will launch a new cloud-based "rich calling" service for small and mid-sized businesses that might be mistaken for a hosted PBX sort of service but actually is more a hosted customer relationship management solution.
Ringio’s service allows users to map existing phone numbers to the CRM functions, which are available either on a desktop client or on Android-based smart phones.
The service is designed to be easy to set up and use, and requires no changes to existing hardware or software.
“We define ‘rich calling’ as bringing a telephone call and relevant information about the caller together at the same time to enrich communication and information sharing, says Ringio co-founder and Chairman Michael Zirngibl.
One example is that if an existing customer calls, notes about prior interactions with that customer are displayed, allowing any call agent to "pick up where the last agent left off" in a more-seamless way.
Ringio also features "presence" features so if a call has to be transferred, the call agent can be sure the other party is available to speak.
Ringio is launching the service’s own integrated call-control and screen-pop client for the PC, Mac desktop or Linux. Ringio also automatically retrieves and synchronizes records built using Google’s Contacts database, and plans are under way to integrate Ringio with Salesforce.com by later this summer.
The service will be provided directly to business customers through www.ringio.com. Pricing starts at $99 per month for four users, with additional users at $25 per month. Ringio is considering distribution partnerships and invites inquiry via partners@ringio.com.
Ringio’s intelligent call-routing functionality is being provided by Voxeo, a longtime platform host with an extensive history in IVR and convergent communications.
Zirngibl says it takes as little as10 minutes to set up for the first time.
"Take your child to work?" Heck! Take your kangaroo to work! This little guy wouldn't necessarily be dangerous. A full-grown red kangaroo, however, in the wild, has quite a kick. Enough to eviscerate an unlikely human facing a mad red....don't mess with me kangaroo, mate...
The Phoenix Center says claims by proponents of increased Internet regulation are quite wrong in claiming that firms such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint-Nextel, Qwest, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable are making "record profits," "substantial profits" or "soaring profits" that justify further regulation.
Quite to the contrary, those firms are earning at lower rates than the average Standard & Poors 500 firms does, and have done so for the last five years.
The Phoenix Center found that the profitability of the larger broadband access service providers is generally equal to, or below average, for firms in the S&P 500. It would be more accurate to say that profits are "'typical," not "soaring or 'substantial.'
Conversely, content firms like Google and EBay are substantially more profitable than the access providers are, implying that access providers are not benefiting as much as others in the Internet ecosystem from the surge in broadband adoption and use.
Across all measures of profitability, Google and Ebay are two-to-four times more profitable than the better performing broadband providers.
In fact, the Phoenix Center found that both Wal-Mart and Colgate-Palmolive have much higher profits than the large access providers.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has issued a challenge to the industry for data-driven analysis," according to study co-author and Phoenix Center President Lawrence J. Spiwak. "Accordingly, parties calling for regulation need to present more than just hyperbole about 'soaring' profits -- they need to present facts."
"The evidence shows that BSP profitability is fairly typical of American industry, if not a little low" said study co-author and Phoenix Center Chief Economist George S. Ford, PhD. "Based on available evidence, regulatory intervention based on substantial profitability by large BSPs has no basis in fact."
Communications policymakers in nations where the government does not directly own and control key national carriers in their markets always must balance their preferred regulatory outcomes with the possible responses private firms will make to those initiatives.
Put simply, too much regulatory pressure will lead to reduced investment and innovation, not more. The other issue is that every government considers its national communications infrastructure to be a matter of national interest.
That being the case, most governments will not willingly weaken their own carriers.
So take a look at how AT&T and Verizon equities have fared over the last year or so, compared to the Standard & Poors 500 index. Not so pretty.
What that tells you is that investors believe neither company has much in the way of "growth" ahead of it. In fact, many would argue both companies will increasingly be challenged, in coming years, to stay where they are, given major changes in the underlying business models each company faces.
That suggests policymakers should be cautious about making incorrect assumptions about the underlying financial prospects for the firms that arguably are most important to the national communications infrastructure.
It is not as though either firm were Apple, creating whole new industries and muscling its way into other substantial industries with some regularity. Quite to the contrary, innovation and revenue upside nearly universally are now seen as attributes of the application and handset parts of the communication value chain, not the "access" providers as such.
To be blunt, there may be times when regulatory restraint is the right policy. But there also are times when an industry with national economic and security implications faces enough fundamental challenges that "protection or promotion" is the right policy framework.
It is not the job of other ecosystem participants to worry about the financial health of other segments. But it always is the job of national policymakers to do so, when the issue is the health of the underlying national communications infrastructure.
First-quarter 2010 results posted by AT&T suggest the outlines of the problem. Simply, wireless now is the driver of revenue growth.
But wireless is saturating, forcing mobile providers to find new revenue sources. Also, mobile voice, which has been the segment mainstay, increasingly will come under pressure as landline voice has proven to be a product in a declining lifecycle.
The point is that the appropriate regulatory framework for a fast-growing, vibrant industry is different than for an industry that is fundamentally challenged. That is not to suggest industry executives are unaware of the problems, or that they have failed to show agility in the past; they have.
The point is simply that it might be a grave mistake to assume carriers can bear any burden where it comes to regulations that choke off their ability to create new services and revenues. The financial markets already are signaling their views how the industry is situated.
Marketing spending among high-tech and telecom providers is picking up in 2010, according to Gartner. The survey found that 44 percent of survey respondents say their 2010 marketing budgets will be flat compared with 2009, 41 percent will increase and 15 percent are likely to decrease.
In 2009 when more than half of respondents reported their budgets would decrease, compared to 2008. None of that is too surprising.
The perhaps more important conclusion Gartner draws from the results is the possbility that there is a "new normal" in which companies might adopt "steady state" spending habits that never return to their pre-recession levels. That would not be an unusual thought, either.
At least some observers say the increased ability to target messages using lower-cost media might simply mean that marketers can achieve their objects at less cost than previously was the case.
"Marketing has to continue to look at becoming more efficient and cost-effective," said Laura McLellan, research vice president at Gartner. "For some, this means adopting lower-cost alternatives; for others, outsourcing what was once done in-house; for all, it means revisiting how they plan to support the growth of their companies through traditional and new channels, while keeping the core brands strong."
Thirty percent of these companies expect to increase budgets by between one and 15 percent, while 13 percent of respondents are planning budget increases of between 16 and 30 percent or more.
Even though the ratio of in-house to external spending is planned to be about 1:3 in 2010, fixed and recurring costs are expected to consume the largest portion (23 percent) of the 2010 marketing budget, according to the majority of respondents. That will be followed by sales channel marketing and programs at 17 percent, and 15 percent of respondents identified positioning and external marketing communications.
It's easy to get caught up in the hype about "location-based services." It's easy to dismiss the notion as well. But Best Buy thinks it can use the location information that increasingly is part of the mobile experience to bolster its sales, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Berst Buy is using Shopkick to create mobile appliucations for iPhone and Android smartphones that detect when shoppers are in or near stores and offers rewards targeted to them.
Shopkick's apps might also use mobile cameras to enable user scanning of bar codes on items to offer product information, coupons or other marketing offers.
None of that is too extremely cutting edge. Loopt provides special offers and coupons from retailers nearby. FourSquare Labs turns physical locaition into a game, where users "check in" at locations.
The goal of the Shopkick app—which is to launch this summer—is "not just to drive foot traffic, but to turn offline stores into interactive worlds" that are more entertaining to shoppers, adds Cyriac Roeding, the CEO and co-founder of Shopkick.
Shopkick expects to be paid for its performance, such as driving additional sales and bringing in new customers.
CauseWorld has also been testing users' interest in less altruistic motivations. In early April, Causeworld offered users 10% off Best Buy purchases in exchange for checking in. Mr. Roeding said a high single-digit percentage of those who checked in at Best Buy during the testalso used the coupon to make a purchase.
To go mainstream, all of these applications may still have to overcome privacy concerns about allowing one's smartphone—and big companies—to keep track of your location.
Right now, we seem to be at the "gee whiz" point with augmented reality: you are likely to see a demonstration and say "wow," but not grasp precisely how augmented reality contributes to a business model or incremental revenue stream.
We will have gotten there when we aren't saying "wow" or wondering what the killer app is.
Nick Thomas, Forrester Research analyst, suggests content business models might emerge in ways
that are similar to what happened in the "exhibition" part of the movie business.
The "popcorn" analogy speaks to the way theater owners make money. Films don’t generally make
much profit for cinema owners. In fact, the revenue model for movie theaters actually is concessions.
Taking a look at media business models that are starting to be challenged in fundamental ways,
Thomas suggests the "popcorn" analogy is fruitful. In other words, content-based companies might
need to look at new revenue streams created around content, if little money or profit can be made from the content itself.
The observation is correct, but complicated. Theater owners make money from popcorn because
they actually cannot make money from selling content, though other entities within the value chain actually can make money directly from creation and selling of content.
You might suggest that in the future, theatrical exhibition might become a vertically-integrated part of a more-unified content distribution business. In fact, that is precisely the situation that once held, but regulators decided that arrangement put too much power into the hands of the studios, so structural separation was mandated.
The point is that under the current regulatory environment, movie studios largely cannot sell popcorn as they are legally barred from being in the theatrical distribution business. Movie theaters are allowed to be in the "sell overseas" business, the pay-per-view, the DVD or on-demand viewing businesses.
Not all options are available for participants in the value chain to make money from the content ecosystem. Licensing, for example, has been a key wrap-around for some content companies who can license the creation of toys, clothing and other products based on cartoon,movie or TV characters, for example.
Performance (live concerts) have become a key driver of revenue in the music business, where at one point it was the selling of records that was the key revenue source.
There is no question but that, under all circumstances, ancillary revenue streams are good for content or copyright owners. The issue is how much potential revenue such ancillary revenue sources might be, and how big they will be.
For U.S. content companies, syndication for TV broadcast, cable TV exhibition, pay per view, international exposition, precorded media and now on-demand have extended the original theatrical exhibition model.
The point is that such ancillary revenue streams have grown over time, but it now appears some of those venues face shrinkage. The whole idea now is what new ancillary revenue streams can be created if demand or profit margins in several of the channels seems to be weakening. "Popcorn" is the right strategic way of thinking about the problem. It will be much tougher to envision, tactically.
About 57 percent of advertisers surveyed by Advertiser Perceptions say they are shifting spending from television to online vide sites, said Randy Cohen, Advertiser Perceptions president.
The study suggets that 70 percent of big ad spenders, those budgeting $10 million or more, were likely to move money from TV to online video.
Whether any political fallout was a factor, 70% of marketers more commonly preferred to target based on demographics, vs. 59% who more commonly used behavioral metrics.
Not every cable operator thinks over-the-top video is a worse business model than providing cable TV. In fact, some believe providing what might be wholesale services to third parties might actually provide better profit margins than cable TV now does.
"Our video margins are going down year after year," said Colleen Abdullah, the CEO of WideOpenWest Holdings.
Wave Broadband COO Steve Friedman also agreed that the profits from an over-the-top model might be better than the current cable TV business, especially if the new model simply substituted a bandwidth usage model for the current monthly subscription model.
While the dumb pipe model may in fact be better for small operators, that probably is not the case for larger providers.
Probably the worst of all possible outcomes is over-the-top competition from firms such as Comcast, where Comcast sells the video content directly to broadband users, and the local cable modem provider is not able to charge for the additional bandwidth consumed. That is one reason why the dumb pipe model would not work unless some form of consumption-based charging were adopted.
"Over-the-top video will eventually emerge as a challenge to the current model of large, expensive bundles of programming," said Blair Levin, the executive director of the FCC's Omnibus Broadband Initiative. Levin thinks such a move is "inevitable."
The basic tradeoff is that cable operators would essentially trade current linear video subscription revenue for higher broadband access revenues. That essentially was the business decision Qwest Communications made years ago, when it concluded it was better off outsourcing linear entertainment to DirecTV, and building its optical access infrastructure in a way that ultimately is conducive for over-the-top or on-demand video.
"The final inevitability is mobile broadband," said Levin. "We know it's coming. We know it's going to be very, very big."
"In 1994, you could envision as inevitable the Internet replacing existing platforms for communications and entertainment," Levin said. "And based on numerous metrics, that transformation is well underway."
Levin also warned that consumer anger over the cost of cable TV now reminds him of similar sentiment leading up to the 1992 cable act, and that there will likely be "some kind of response, either from the market or from the government," to address those concerns.
Any such move would further limit the upside from linear video and likely propel more movement towards an over-the-top approach.
Jonathan Rosenberg, Skype chief technology strategist, says high-definition call quality can increase the length of a voice call 45 percent. That, in turn, could theoretically lead to higher revenues for application or service providers whose services are sold "by the minute." Call duration might have no revenue implications at all if the endpoints are talking on a "no incremental cost" basis, though.
Skype's studies suggest, as you would expect, that audio quality is higher on a high-definition call. The Skype survey suggests there is a correlation between call audio quality and call duration.
With the lowest quality, approximating mobile call quality, the average call lasted about 21.5 minutes. At the highest quality it went about 31 minutes.
It's difficult to say whether the relationship is correlational or causal, though. One variable might be that users on the highest-quality codecs are predisposed to use Skype for conferencing sessions, which would have call duration parameters quite different from a casual voice conversation between two people, for example.
No, all mobile or Web advertising does not "suck," as Apple CEO Steve Jobs says. But Jobs probably is right about rich media being an easier way to make ads engaging. Good creative helps, too, as shown by this Google spot for Chrome.
It's easy to lament the relative "ineffectiveness" of banner advertising, or for Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, to argue that mobile and online advertising "sucks."
Online banner ads have click through rates of perhaps 0.03 percent, even when lots of people are exposed, some would argue.
Though improving, it remains difficult to match an actual user's present interests, location and spending intentions with a relevant and compelling message, most of the time. So targeting will help.
But even targeting won't entirely fix the problem. Some say rich media is part of the answer, and that makes intuitive sense, as it is easier to create an emotional bond or reaction using rich media, compared to most other forms of messaging.
Rich media banners, on the other hand, might get a three-percent to 10-percent "roll over" rate. If the creative is good enough, users actually will spend time playing around with the content. That can be a game-like experience, video or even compelling content that doesn't use video.
But really-interesting rich media takes time and money to create. And that is going to be the biggest problem. Most campaigns will not support the creation of truly-compelling creative. Think of the ads developed for the Super Bowl and you'll get the problem. If it were financially possible to create that sort of content routinely, marketers clearly would.
There is another angle as well. Much advertising works, even when largely falling on "deaf ears" and "inattentive eyes." Sure, there's lots of waste. But enough eyes and ears are reached, even with simple messages, to justify the marketing expense. Targeted is better, but even minimal targeting, with everyday, run of mill creative, will produce results sufficient to justify the investment.
Not every movie ever produced is a "hit." In fact, most are either flops or modest successes. That will hold for most advertising as well.
You can draw whatever conclusions you want about this chart showing a wave of option adjustable rate mortgages coming up for resets already and peaking next year, not to mention another wave of sub-prime mortgages that is building and will peak at just about the same time as the option ARMs have to be reset.
I'm not suggesting anything, one way or the other, about the potential for a double-dip recession or anything of that sort.
It does suggest that any company making a business out of services and products sold to consumers probably should assume the post-recession economy we now are in will be difficult.
About 55 percent of users interviewed by the Yankee Group say they frequently surf the Web while watching TV. Slightly fewer say they use email while watching TV.
And if a new product category develops for devices such as Apple's iPad, that is the use case: people who want a convenient way to use the Web and email while watching TV, using the Wi-Fi connection in their homes.
That isn't to say some people might be able to use a tablet to replace a PC when out of the home, but that might be a subset of the tablet user audience.
Everyone would agree that 2009 was not the best of years for advertising spending. But spending might not reach 2008 levels until 2012 or 2013.
Advertising might not reach pre-recession levels until mid-decade. There is at least some thinking advertising might not even reach pre-recession levels during the current decade.
Mobile advertising, Apple and Google expect, will grow fastest, from a low base. But online Web advertising still will be two orders of magnitude bigger than mobile advertising by 2014, Yankee Group predicts.
Despite the general trend that Americans consume a bit more media every year, that was not the case in 2009, when U.S. media consumption actually fell about 17 percent in 2009, or about two hours a day, a huge drop.
The conventional wisdom is that media use should increase during a recession, as consumers shift more entertainment to the home, and substitute some amount of entertainment spending for travel, for example. But that doesn't seem to be the case, according to a new study by the Yankee Group.
The big exception was mobile media, which grew 39 percent in 2009.
"We believe the underlying reason is the economy," says Carl Howe,Yankee Group analyst. "It’s hard to spend all evening on the Internet or watching TV when you’re worried about making mortgage payments or trying to find a job."
Online activities decreased by 40 minutes, but TV and video viewing lost a full hour. Web browsing, email and social networking decreased 17 percent from their 2008 figure of 4.9 hours, but TV viewing declined by nearly a third, from 4.3 to 3.3 hours per day.
Music and reading declined the most. "The music, newspaper and magazine industries are all struggling for a reason," says Howe. "Consumers are spending less time with their media."
Listening to the radio and music fell half an hour to just 1.4 hours a day. Reading magazines and newspapers fared even worse; those activities combined total only 25 minutes a day, down from 40 minutes in 2008, says Howe.
Mobile is the only category that experienced growth. Consumers spent 40 minutes per day talking on mobile phones, up 12 percent from 2008. Mobile Internet use grew 36 percent to 11 minutes a day, and texting grew 55 percent to 27 minutes a day.
The Yankee Group findings contradict some other studies which indicate that TV watching was up in 2009. One of the differences is that Yankee Group includes both "at work" and "at home" consumption, while Nielsen only measures "at home" consumption.
But anyway one looks at the matter, consumers spend nearly half of every 24-hour day with media.
Respondents report they spend an average of 712 minutes, or 11.9 hours each day, with various types of media, with the greatest amount of time spent online, using Web browsing, email, instant messaging and social networking for an average of 4 hours and 13 minutes each day.
TV and video represents three hours and 17 minutes watching TV, pre-recorded programs on their DVRs, and DVDs and videos. TV watching takes up just over 2 hours and 19 minutes per day, on average.
Consumers report they spend an average of one hour and 26 minutes each day listening to the radio, CDs or MP3s, while all mobile phone activities consume one hour and 18 minutes on average.
Gaming time now exceeds reading. Consumers report spending an average of 36 minutes each day playing video games, but only 24 minutes reading newspapers or magazines.
Consumers routinely multitask while watching TV. "Two thirds of our respondents say they talk on the phone regularly while watching TV," says Howe. "More than half surf the Web or write email as well."
That is one reason why Apple and some observers believe the iPad will create a new niche in the market. People already have the habit of using the Internet while watching TV, so a more convenient device for doing so should be able to get traction, tablet supporters believe.
Interactive activities engage consumers in ways TV doesn’t. The top four activities on this list are all what the media industry calls “lean forward” tasks; that is, they engage the consumer interactively. Consumers naturally give cognitive priority to these “lean forward” activities over “lean back” ones like watching TV. What does that mean? It means that when consumers multitask, TV advertising takes a back seat to more interactive forms of engagement.
This video provides an excellent example of the old adage that having shared objectives does not mean policy proponents agree about the methods which will lead to achievement of the goals. Still, it is nice to see former Federal Communications Commission chairmen who pursued quite-different policies re-emphasize the importance of the end point.
YouTube now consumes about 10 percent of business network bandwidth, while Facebook represents 4.5 percent of all consumed bandwidth, a new study by Network Box finds.
Windows updates represent about 3.3 per cent of all bandwidth used, Yimg (Yahoo!'s image server) 2.7 per cent of all bandwidth used and Google – 2.5 per cent of all bandwidth used.
When looking at traffic, rather than bandwidth consumption, Facebook is the top site visited on business networks. Network Box's analysis of 13 billion universal resource locators used by businesses in the first quarter of 2010 shows that 6.8 per cent of all business internet traffic goes to Facebook, an increase of one per cent since the last quarter of 2009.
Google vists represent 3.4 per cent of all traffic, Yimg (Yahoo!'s image server) 2.8 per cent of all traffic, Yahoo 2.4 per cent of all traffic and Doubleclick about1.7 per cent of all traffic.
The company also found that, of 250 IT managers surveyed about their biggest security concerns over the coming year, the top concern was "employees using applications on social networks" while at work, with 43 per cent of respondents saying this is a major concern.
"The figures show that IT managers are right to be concerned about the amount of social network use at work," says Simon Heron, Network Box internet security analyst says.
Such measurements always are a bit imprecise, not in terms of URLs visited or bandwidth consumed, but in terms of business or personal use. Business users increasingly are using YouTube business videos for work, while some Facebook use undoubtedly also reflects business purposes.
“The problem with mobile broadband so far has been most of the revenue it has generated has gone to over-the-top Internet content services, not to the operators,” says Pat McCarthy, Telcordia VP. “That’s what they are trying to change.”
And that is the heart of the matter as far as wrangling over network neutrality. Over time, consumers will have many options for buying customized wireless broadband plans, McCarthy says. And nearly everyone believes that will mean very-heavy users will have to pay more, in some way.
The key notion is that retail price will be related, in some way, to the cost of the services consumed. That doesn't necessarily mean billing by the byte, but probably a range of options for basic access that are similar to wireless voice plans, where users buy buckets of minutes or text messages a various prices, or unlimited use for higher prices.
Some have suggested pricing based on the value of services and applications and most providers tend to believe there should be the ability to buy optional services that maintain quality of service when the network is congested.
Standard users might get messages during peak congestion periods--perhaps rush hour or at a major sports or concert venue--that the network is congested, with their services shaped in some way. Premium users might get priority access and all users might be offered a temporary "power boost," for an additional fee, during the period of congestion.
About 77 percent of 200 senior marketing executives believe that developing a video strategy for the iPad is important to their businesses' success, says KIT Digital, which took the non-scientific study during a webinar on the iPad.
The survey also asked attendees if their businesses currently have a mobile solution for other devices. About 38 percent of respondents say they do, while 43 percent say they are currently working on developing a mobile solution.
Overall, however, 62 percent of respondents do not currently have a mobile video solution.
When asked if they were prepared to take advantage of the iPad's video capabilities, 21 percent of businesses responded that they are, while 48 percent) responded that it is an area "currently being worked on."
After studying Twitter and Facebook as business marketing vehicles, Irbtrax says "Twitter performed better in the general business to business marketing category due to its viral marketing benefits."
But Facebook performed better in the business to business marketing category for select companies that are 'personalities'. In other words, "hot" products or services with high user inmvolvement can use Facebook in ways that other firms cannot. That also means Facebook likely is better for consumer products.
The study concluded that it is not even necessary to have a large group of Twitter followers to benefit from Twitter's viral marketing advantages. Twitter also might be better for real-time promotions, events, special offers or location-based offers, the study suggests.
The study concludes that both work, and that it is best to create a presence on both. But extrapolating from the findings, one might argue that a business-to-business campaign is better suited to Twitter, while consumer products might fare better on Facebook. That especialy would be true for products without a high degree of personal and emotional involvement.
Forbes continues to have a higher-than-average interest in technology and its impact on work and life, compared to some other major business news media, and in a series of related essays Forbes takes a look at where we will be in 2020, in terms of jobs, health, working and so forth.
One of the points made in one of the essays is that because of Moore's Law, we will by 2020 have 32 times more compute power available to apply to all of those tasks, and that not all the effects will be positive. Those of you who believe manufacturing (I admit I do) remains an important part of any advanced economy will be discouraged by the likely implications. read the essays here
Those of you who are parents might likewise be chastened by some findings of a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report on "Generation M2," which takes a look at the role of media in the lives of youth and children.
The study shows, as I suspect most parents suspect, that reading and good grades tend to go together. About 72 percent of "heavy" readers report getting good grades, while 60 percent of the light readers say so. Read the study
There also is a direct--and inverse--relationship between "time spent with media" and "good grades," as many of you likely also suspect is the case. Children who are heavy media users get lower grades; children who are light media users get higher grades. About 47 percent of "heavy media users" say they get "fair to poor" grades, compared to 23 percent of "light users." And that remains the case when controlling for age, gender, race, parent education, or whether a child is in a one-parent or two-parent household, Kaiser says.
Conversely, 66 percent of "light users" report getting good grades. It isn't clear whether the relationship between grades and heavy media consumption is causal or only a correlation, though. Still, the findings likely correspond to what many parents would conclude.
"There is a proposal afoot developed by Sen. John Kerry that could undermine free speech on the Internet," says technology analyst and commentator John Dvorak. The proposal is to regulate broadband access as a regulated common carrier service, like telephone service.
You can ask yourself whether you think such a change would lead to more, or less, innovation; more or less investment; more or less choice. You can ask whether a 1934 method of regulating a stodgy monopoly service is appropriate in the 21st century for Internet services.
You can ask yourself whether having more choices, rather than less, is the likely outcome of such a move. You may ask yourself whether application priorities routinely available on private networks used by businesses, or application acceleration, as practiced by hundreds to thousands of content providers already, is a good thing or a bad thing to be forbidden.
So here comes the great idea from John Kerry: reclassifying broadband services as "telecommunications services" rather than "information services."
"This is the worst possible outcome as the FCC will eventually regulate the Internet like it does all the entities under its jurisdiction," says Dvorak.
"Why would we want the FCC to regulate the Internet?" Dvorak asks. "It's a terrible idea."
By redefining information services to telecommunications services, the Internet as we know it will be neutered as the FCC begins to crack down on foul language, porn, and whatever else it sees fit to proscribe, he argues.
"No matter the net neutrality outcome, it has nothing to do with increasing broadband penetration and speeds," he says. "It's a total scam invented to censor the Internet once and for all.
"I'm surprised people, no matter how idealistic, cannot see through it," he says.
"Should the FCC have sway over the Internet?" a Washington Post Co. editorial asks.
For the past eight years, the FCC has rightly taken a light regulatory approach to the Internet, though it believed it had authority to do more. Now that the agency has lost in court, some advocates in the technology industries are urging the agency to invoke a different section of law and subject ISPs to more aggressive regulation, until now reserved for telephone companies and other "common carriers."
Such a move could allow the FCC to dictate, among other things, rates that ISPs charge consumers. This level of interference would require the FCC to engage in a legal sleight of hand that would amount to a naked power grab. It is also unnecessary: There have been very few instances where ISPs have been accused of wrongdoing -- namely, unfair manipulation of online traffic -- and those rare instances have been cleared up voluntarily once consumers pressed the companies. FCC interference could damage innovation in what has been a vibrant and rapidly evolving marketplace.
Some oversight of ISPs would serve the public interest as long as it recognizes the interests of companies to run businesses in which they have invested billions of dollars. Transparency and predictability are essential to encourage established companies and start-ups to continue to invest in technologies dependent on the Internet. ISPs, for example, should be required to disclose information about how they manage their networks to ensure that these decisions are legitimate and not meant to interfere with applications that compete with the ISPs' offerings.
Congress should step in to strike the appropriate balance. Enacting laws would take some time, but the process would allow for robust debate. In the meantime, any questionable steps by ISPs will be flagged by unhappy consumers or Internet watchdog groups. If ISPs change course and begin to threaten the openness of the online world, Congress could and probably would redouble its efforts.
By Thomas W. Hazlett, published in the Financial Times
A federal appeals court has bopped the Federal Communications Commission yet again. In Comcast v. FCC – the “network neutrality” case – the agency was found to be making up the law as it went. In sanctioning the cable operator for broadband network management it found dubious, the Bush-era FCC exceeded its charter. Cable modem services and digital subscriber line (DSL) connections provided by phone carriers compete – officially – as unregulated “information services.”
Congress could now mandate broadband regulation. This could have happened four years ago, when the Democrats took majority control and announced that they would impose network sharing mandates. That has not happened, and – with unemployment running at above 9 per cent – is not likely now. Net neutrality is seen, bluntly, as a jobs killer. That’s one take Congress has actually gotten right.
Alternatively, the FCC could flip its own rules, going back to a DSL regime discarded in 2005. But it would have to go further, extending “open access” to cable broadband, something is has always rejected. In 1999, when AOL and phone carrier GTE lobbied hard for cable regulation, Clinton-appointed regulators stood firm. “We don’t have a monopoly, we don’t have a duopoly,” stated FCC Chair Bill Kennard, “we have a no-opoly.” Forget regulation, encourage investment, get amazing new stuff.
But “open access” rules for DSL remained. These permitted phone company rivals to lease capacity at rates determined by regulators. It was not until February 2003 that the major requirements were ended. In August 2005, remaining rules were scrapped. A test was created. Deregulation would further investment and deployment, or quash competition and slow broadband growth. FCC member Michael Copps predicted the latter. He challenged the Commission to see if the policy would “yield the results” anticipated. “I’ll be keeping tabs,” he warned.
Yet, the market’s verdict is in – and the proponents of regulation have ignored them. Obama economic adviser Susan Crawford, arguing in the New York Times for broadband re-regulation, said that ending government DSL mandates was “a radical move… [that] produced a wave of mergers,” raising prices and lowering quality.
It is simply untrue. Mergers, governed by the FCC and antitrust agencies, have had no material impact on broadband rivalry. And the rate of broadband adoption significantly increased following deregulation. This pattern continued a trend.
Cable, unregulated, led DSL in subscribers by nearly two-to-one through 2002. Then, with DSL deregulated, phone carriers narrowed the gap, adding more customers, quarter-to-quarter, than cable operators by 2006. The spurt in DSL growth relative to cable modem usage takes place at precisely the time the former was shedding “open access” mandates, and cannot be explained by overall changes in technology. In short, DSL subscribership was up 65 per cent by year-end 2006 compared to the predicated (pre-2003) trend under regulation.
The story in ultra-high-speed fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) services is similar. There was virtually no deployment until the Commission, in late 2004, declared that fiber networks would not be subject to access regulation. That move, according to industry analysts, unleashed investment. FTTH is now offered to over 15m homes, and networks are capable of supplying 100 MBPS downloads, on a par with services delivered anywhere.
Not only has access regulation been shown to retard advanced networks, the Internet is loaded with “non-neutral” business deals where Internet Service Providers (ISPs) give preference to favored firms or applications. These negotiated contracts rationalize resource use, and drive incentives for innovation.
Data flows, unregulated, across large backbone networks that pay no fees to exchange their traffic, but collect billions from smaller networks that must fork out to inter-connect. This pay-to-play structure pushes networks to invest, grow, and cooperate.
Cable TV systems reserve broadband capacity for their own branded “digital phone” services. This special “fast lane” provides a premium service not available to independent VoIP applications. It has also transformed the competitive landscape, helping to forge fixed line competition for over 100m US households -- what the 1996 Telecommunications Act tried failed to do via network sharing mandates (tossed out by a federal court in 2004).
And the corporate history of Google offers a landmark date: on Feb. 1, 2002, the company’s search engine popped up as the default choice on 33m AOL subscribers’ home page. The coveted spot was purchased; the young firm mortgage its future to outbid search engine rivals. An application provider paying the country’s largest ISP for preferred access to its customers. That may not be a violation of net neutrality. But if not, many lawyers will be very busy explaining why.
Today’s FCC Chair, Julius Genachowski, has made a pledge: the Commission’s “processes should be open, participatory, fact-based, and analytically rigorous.” That would be a refreshing approach. In addressing new regulations for broadband, let’s first see how these markets actually work, and how well the last batch of network sharing mandates performed.
As it turns out, some think the "very best" Android devices available on any U.S. mobile carrier are made by just one company: HTC. The firm seems to be betting its future on Android, and from the looks of things, is doing a heck of a job rolling out top of the line Android devices for every leading U.S. carrier.
For T-Mobile customers the most future-proof choice is a Nexus One. For Sprint 4G customers, it is the HTC Evo. At AT&T the top device is the Nexus One. Verizon customers should get the HTC "Incredible," at least when it goes on sale on April 29, 2010.
The biggest companies in major markets generally tend to favor heavy-handed regulation, says a Canadian IT consultant. That's why Google, among others, has spent tens of millions pushing for “net neutrality” regulations in the United States, he argues. That's an unusual twist on the debate.
"Just go ahead and net neutrality on your own network and for your own users. Day one you’re going to find that net neutrality requires you to give incoming porn packets exactly the same forwarding priority on your network as text messages to sales or voice traffic for the CEO’s office - and as soon as you decide to block one set while giving the other a priority boost, you’ll have both demonstrated the fundamentally Orwellian nature of the whole net neutrality sales pitch and turned yourself into one of its opponents."
I admit I do not use Google Docs as much as I used to, only because so much of what I write is uploaded directly to a Web site, or in some cases sent as an email message. That's wasn't the case several years ago, when the primary form of document I was required to create was a "Word" document.
I still sometimes need to do a bit of modeling, create a presentation or create a document, so it isn't as if an office productivity suite does not get used, they simply get used less, as most of my daily routine involves creating Web-compatible content.
The exception seems to be that I frequently must capture a graphic or chart of some sort from a .pdf file or Web page and reformat it as a picture for insertion into a post. In that case I find myself using the presentation software simply to launder an image into a .jpg file. That wasn't why presentation suites were created, but that is how I generally will be found using a presentation program, day in and out.
But there is another point about new developments to Google Docs. Lots of people are required to create documents in a word processor, read or create spreadsheets and presentations on a regular basis. And, up to this point, with some salient exceptions, that has meant using Microsoft's "Office" suite.
Google Docs has been useful for students and some enterprises, but has not matched Office feature for feature and with equal and transparent functionality. Most of us still find the default format for any shared bit of work is "Word" for documents and "PowerPoint" for presentations and "Excel" for spreadsheets.
But any attacking company will start low and then gradually begin to enhance the utility of a competitive offering, and that is what Google is doing with Docs.
These days most innovation happening in applications, features and devices is happening in the wireless realm or in the world of over-the-top applications. That can be discomforting for some.
I recently moderated a panel of application developers and enablers recently and asked where they panelists believed there were opportunities to work with "service providers" such as telcos and cable companies. There was an initial awkward silence, then some mutterings even I cannot remember. But I think that tells the story: over-the-top application providers largely assume the existence of broadband; broadband is not a required "partner" in the delivery.
People in the telecom or cable or satellite business hate the term "dumb pipe," but it resonates because it sums up the essential nature of today's application environment, captured by the term "loosely coupled."
And matters might change even more. The Wi-Fi-only version of the iPad does not require any sort of relationship with a wireless access services provider. In fact, if, as some believe, devices such as the iPad wind up being devices picked up and used casually, when people are sitting on a couch in their homes, and not primarily as a substitute for a netbook or notebook PC, there might never been a need for such relationships. People will simply use their at-home Wi-Fi connections.
Still, it is hard to ignore the fact that most innovation these days is happening in the mobile space.
You might not think a market that declines 13 percent year over year, and declines a whopping 35 percent, year over year, is a "growth" market. But that undoubtedly is the case. U.S. mobile gaming activity declined 13 percent between February 2009 and February 2010, posting a sharper drop of 35 percent among owners of feature phones, according to comScore. So why the optimism?
As it turns out, mobile gaming by smartphone owners increased 60 percent over that same period.
“Although the number of mobile gamers has declined in the past year, there is reason for significant optimism about the future of this market,” says Mark Donovan, comScore SVP. “As the market transitions from feature phones to smartphones, the dynamics of gameplay are also shifting towards a higher-quality experience," and that seems to be why smartphone gaming is up so much.
The inevitable ascent of the mobile gaming market depends not only on smartphone subscribers’ higher propensity to play games on their mobile devices, but also their heavier gaming activity across nearly every dimension, comScore says.
Smartphone subscribers (47.1 percent) are three times more likely than feature phone subscribers (15.7) to play games on their device at least once a month, comScore says.
They are more than five times as likely to play games almost every day and far surpass their feature phone counterparts across various methods of game play.
Smartphone subscribers also install significantly more games on their devices with 27.3 percent having installed at least one game compared to just 5.6 percent of feature phone subscribers.
A third of smartphone subscribers with games have more than five games installed on their phones, while less than one percent of feature phone subscribers have that many games installed.
“Smartphones offer a more accessible and compelling mobile gaming experience that is enabling adoption of this behavior, even among consumers who have not traditionally been gamers,” says Donovan.
And of course we haven't yet seen the impact of devices such as the iPad, which offer bigger screens and therefore potentially better gaming experiences.
Smartphone subscribers are more likely to play mobile games than feature phone subscribers across every gaming genre. The genre with the highest penetration among smartphone subscribers is arcade puzzle games at 12.9 percent, followed by card games (11.9 percent), word/number games (11.4 percent) and casino games (7.6 percent).
Though acquisition of more mobile spectrum is a key strategic imperative for leading U.S. mobile operators, it is not clear how much capacity and flexibility Verizon Communications and AT&T have within their credit ratings to absorb future spectrum purchases, say analysts at Fitch Ratings.
That is a significant opinion. Despite the apparent belief in some quarters that the largest U.S. telecom providers are so well positioned they can handle any shock to their financial models, Fitch Ratings does not believe that is the case.
In fact, a number of factors, including the cost of acquiring new spectrum, ability to monetize broadband services more effectively and competition from application-based wireless services all pose "longer-term threats to telecom operators' balance sheets and cash flows," Fitch Ratings say.
Fitch believes Verizon Wireless and AT&T Wireless, because of their scale, market power, and financial strength, will be in a better position to cope with these challenges than many lower-margin contestants, should the market environment shift. But increased reliance on wireless communications is an issue for many other contestants as well.
A key issue for cable companies is whether their wholesale arrangement with Clearwire can bundle competitive offerings that can successfully offset the significant threat from next generation broadband wireless networks as the telecom industry transitions more and more traffic longer-term to wireless, Fitch analysts say.
The Federal Communication Commission's "National Broadband Plan" aims to release 70 megaHertz of spectrum available for auction in the 2011 time frame.
Depending on the timing of the auction, the final amount of spectrum available, and the aggressiveness of the bidding, it’s not clear how much capacity and flexibility Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. have within their credit ratings to absorb future spectrum purchases.
The good news is that, by the end of 2010, leverage is expected to decline for Verizon and AT&T due to strong free cash generation and management commitment to debt reduction. Both companies’ leverage has been at the high end of Fitch’s expectations due to past acquisitions and spectrum purchases.
Other well-capitalized, smaller operators or new entrants with strong balance sheets and good
free cash flow prospects should be in a favorable position to acquire additional spectrum.
New entrants or smaller companies without good operational cash flow characteristics or
strong balance sheets would likely have a difficult time funding any commitments for
spectrum purchases or buildout requirements.
That suggests the coming spectrum auctions will reshape the competitive environment in significant ways, favoring the well-capitalized contestants and weakening the financially weaker firms.
The transition to 4G networks also would seem to provide an opportunity for operators to
implement a new pricing model for data services. But it is not clear the opportunity is all "upside."
Clearwire, for example, already offers unlimited mobile data usage for $40 per month. Clearwire does not currently cap subscribers’ data usage, where most cellular operators limit monthly data
usage at 5 gigabytes. Since AT&T and Verizon offer capped plans costing $60 a month, Clearwire is using its 4G spectrum to disrupt current levels of pricing.
The company’s management has indicated that Clearwire’s mobile WiMAX subscribers already average approximately 7 GBytes of data usage per month.
Given the current indication by operators that Internet video will be a key driver of traffic on 4G networks, operators will need to create larger “data bucket” plans with tiered pricing, as the current 5 GB 3G plans currently offered for aircards and netbooks would not be sufficiently large enough to handle subscriber demands from streaming video.
What will Apple do to upend Google's dominance in search advertising, as advertising emerges as a major revenue stream in the mobility business? For starters, it will leverage its strength in devices and strong consumer market share. That will be the least of Apple's concerns.
Apple will leverage iTunes as the distribution portal and media manager, something it also will not have a problem with.
Apple will try to leverage the "closed" or "integrated" way it approaches device operation and design, which sacrifices "openness" for assured application operation. And it will block third party applications and ad networks from access to advertising analytics that are the heart of all efforts to personalize advertising for mobile apps.
But there are challenges. Apple has to hope that the Android ecosystem will not flourish. A functional definition might be that Apple gets as much as 50 percent market share for smartphones, while Android fails to approach those levels. It is too early to predict whether this could happen.
There is a bit of execution risk as Apple tries to stake out a "premium" position for its own ad network, compared to others.
Of course, all of this assumes mobile marketing gets critical mass, but most observers think that is only a matter of time.
It would take a brave prognosticator indeed to argue that Apple does not have an excellent shot at upending Google in the emerging mobile marketing business. But there currently is only a small group of large firms in the mobile advertising space, though there are lots of emerging firms trying to muscle their way into the emerging business.
"There's AdMob (Google), Apple and us," says Paran Johar, Jumptap CMO. "That's pretty much it." The Federal Trade Commission might be preparing a challenge to Google's purchase of AdMob. Some of us might be so sure that is necessary. Apple is the company to watch, it might appear.
The Google Chrome operating system apparently will be designed to support output to printers without the use of onboard printer drivers, says Mike Jazayeri, Google Chromium group product manager.
"Since in Google Chrome OS all applications are Web apps, we wanted to design a printing experience that would enable web apps to give users the full printing capabilities that native apps have today," says Jazayen.
Google Cloud Print is a service that enables any application (Web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer, he says.
Rather than rely on the local operating system or drivers to print, apps can use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs. Google Cloud Print will then be responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app.
The Verizon Wireless fourth-generation Long Term Evolution network will boost typical downlink speeds to 5 Mbps to 12 Mbps, and uplink speeds to the 2 Mbps to 5 Mbps range, but latency performance also will improve by a factor of about four, making the LTE network a much-better platform for multiplayer games and interactive multimedia applications.
Video applications such as video sharing, surveillance, conferencing and streaming in higher definition will benefit from the new network's capabilities.
The LTE air interface also reduces signal interference that historically has degraded end user experience and reduces power requirements, leading to longer handset battery life. Because of the 700-MHz frequencies used to support LTE, in-building signal strength will be higher than currently is possible with 3G network signals.
Verizon Wireless will be the first mobile service provider and among the first in the world to launch a fourth-generation Long Term Evolution network, starting with 25 to 30 markets in 2010, covering approximately 100 million people; and extending to cover Verizon's current 3G footprint in 2013.
Should the internet treat all data equally, regardless of whether it is part of a multi-gigabyte video file or a short email? Gareth Morgan asks the question in an article at New Scientist.com, after interviewing Johan Pouwelse, a peer-to-peer researcher at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
Though many will reflexively object, Morgan says one way to deal with demands placed on the network by very-active users is to bill for consumption of bandwidth, not for access at certain speeds. That charging principle would allow people to alter their own behavior, rather than imposing fixed limits to use.
Nearly two years ago, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) censured network operator Comcast for trying to impose restrictions on "bandwidth hogs" who use BitTorrent and other file-sharing software. These systems eat up huge amounts of data capacity, and so can degrade the service to other customers, he says.
But the key problem remains unresolved: when large numbers of customers want to access the internet simultaneously, how can traffic be managed in a way that prevents those who are transferring huge multimedia files clogging up the network?
Pouwelse suggests that a different kind of charging tariff could help. Instead of charging customers on the basis of download speeds, network operators should charge users and content providers according to how much data they download or upload. "They could do that without interfering with traffic, in an entirely net neutral way," he says.
This proposal would be opposed by internet giants such as Google and Facebook, who generate large volumes of web traffic and so could face higher charges. But with high-speed broadband stimulating an ever-growing appetite for bandwidth, some way must be found to fairly share out the internet's limited resources.
Augmented reality adds a layer of information to images viewed by a smartphone camera. So it was only a matter of time before some people figured out that if an iPhone can be mounted properly on the dashboard of a car, the right AR software can be used to enhance the normal GPS navigation functions the native GPS feature of the phone would provide.
As an aside, I notice that Microsoft-powered smartphones now offer a navigation service, but it requires a monthly recurring fee. Since that feature can be used for no incremental cost on an Android phone, I don't see that remaining a viable long-term competitive alternative.
People in competing firms often gnash their teeth when Google disrupts an existing business by giving away something valuable "for free." And that is what Google is doing by giving away turn-by-turn navigation services without requiring users to buy a monthly recurring subscription. Garmin obviously cannot be happy about that.
On the other hand, Google apparently had to spend quite some time and money creating richer data for its service, primarily because creation of a turn-by-turn navigation feature apparently cannot be created simply by importing satellite data, but also requires actual recording of the positions of vehicles as they drive around.
It's not as though Google is simply licensing software or database services from a third party; it had to create new data to enable the feature.
Lots of AR applications add metadata of questionable value. But features related to travel and transportation seem to be exceptions. It often is quite useful to be able to ascertain where the nearest subway station is, or whether the road sign you just read actually goes to the place you want to go, even though that information was not on the road sign.
Former FCC chairmen Reed Hundt (D) and Michael Powell (R) say that, contrary to much speculation, the Federal Communications Commission continues to have the authority it requires to set in motion the "National Broadband Plan."
Both Powell and Hundt agreed that the FCC still has jurisdiction on the Broadband Plan and net neutrality and that there isn’t “Armageddon” because of the DC Circuit ruling on the Comcast complaint.
Powell pointed out that Title II reclassification would have a “destabilizing nature” to the industry because it would change decades-long policy and that it would frustrate investments made under the current regulatory environment (for example the $23 billion investment Verizon made on their “FiOS” service).
The argument that the FCC now "lacks jurisdiction," though incorrect, is being used to advance the notion of wider and more-disruptive changes in the basic regulatory framework governing broadband access services.
