81% of App Store Downloads are "Free"

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimates that 81 percent of downloads from Apple's App Store are free.

His analysis of the Top 50 paid apps reveals that their average selling price is $1.49. Munster estimates that on average, Apple receives $0.29 for every app that's downloaded from its store.

Munster calculates that this means $428 million for Apple based on its 70-30 revenue-share split. Munster estimates that the App Store is generating more than 16.6 million app downloads a day, compared to 8.9 million song downloads from the iTunes Store.

81% of App Store downloads are free, claims analyst | Mobile Entertainment News

GetJar Raises $11 Million

Fast-growing mobile app store GetJar, which says it has had more than one billion apps downloaded from its store to date, making it second in size only to Apple’s app store, has raised $11 million in a second round of funding.

GetJar’s app store includes about 70,000 apps for all of the major mobile operating systems, including Apple’s, although CEO Ilja Laurs tells us that most of the company’s growth is coming from “open” platforms where there is less of an “established and convenient place” to get apps.

He says the company, which he calls the “Wal-Mart for mobile apps,” will invest much of the new cash in building up its presence on the Android platform.

GetJar, The ‘Wal-Mart For Mobile Apps,’ Raises $11 Million | paidContent

Only Issue: Will Apple Sell 1 Million iPhone 4 Devices Today?

The only issue is whether Apple will sell one million iPhone 4 devices today. A couple of obvious questions suggst themselves. Since all the early-adopter technophiles and even early majority users made their decisions long ago, Apple's sales now must come from the "typical" consumer.

Smartphone sales have been climbing for the past couple of years, so the issue is how much of the growth Apple is able to grab. The harder-to-answer question is whether Facetime, the videoconferencing app, which encourage families with widely-scattered members to get the device just for that feature.

Carrier Ethernet Displaces Nearly All Mobile Backhaul Orders

Wireless network operators are requesting fewer T1s and more carrier Ethernet connections for mobile backhaul, and could stop ordering T1s entirely as soon as next year, Tower Cloud Inc. CEO Ron Mudry says.

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U.S. Consumers Show High Interest in Femtocell Services, Survey Finds

More than half of U.S. broadband households with mobile phones are interested in femtocell benefits, and are willing to pay for the devices and associated new services, a survey by Parks Associates, conducted for the Femto Forum has found.

The survey found that fewer than 10 percent of consumers were previously familiar with femtocells. However after hearing a description of the femtocell and its benefits, 56 percent of respondents found femtocells appealing, and two thirds found the technology either “very” or “extremely” appealing. Additionally, 89 percent of those respondents who were already familiar with femtocells  found them appealing.

The primary driver for femtocell interest was improved in-home coverage. Important secondary drivers included increased mobile handset battery life, faster mobile broadband, advanced femtocell services and home-zone calling tariffs.

The survey found that 72 percent of consumers who found femtocells appealing were very interested in at least one advanced femtocell service. Examples of such services include "Virtual Home Number," which rings every cell phone in the home, or "Family Alerts," which warn when a subscriber has left or returned home.

Half of these respondents indicated a willingness to pay $4.99 a month for their single favorite service or $9.99 a month for a bundle of their favorite three services.

Although Wi-Fi is sometimes viewed as a femtocell alternative, the survey showed that 84 percent of people who heavily use Wi-Fi on their 3G devices found femtocells appealing, apparently because of the improved voice coverage and battery life.

Among consumers who consider themselves likely to change operator in the next 12 months, 44 percent said that they would very likely reconsider if their current operator offered a femtocell. Similarly, 35 percent of consumers in multi-operator households said they would likely consolidate their services around a single provider who offered a femtocell.

Demand is highest when upfront device costs are in the $20 to $50 range. This demand is cut in half when device prices are in the $50 to $100 range and halves again when the cost exceeds $100.

“The clear message from this research is that femtocells have widespread appeal and consumers are willing to pay for them," said Harry Wang, director of mobile product research, Parks Associates.

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Verizon Tests 10 Gbps to Home

Verizon says it has managed to push 10 gigabits per second through its FiOS trunking network, including 2 gigabit per second service to a customer’s house with two simultaneously-used PCs.


The XG-PON field trial connected a FiOS customer location with 10 gigabits per second downstream to the home and 2.5 Gbps upstream.

The test demonstrates the capability of the Verizon's FiOS network to accommodate a wide array of new and emerging video services and the growing demand for streaming video content and other bandwidth-intensive applications.

The latest field trial was conducted in May in Taunton, Mass., with a XG-PON system developed by Motorola, a supplier of BPON and GPON optical networking equipment to Verizon.

At the customer's home, the optical network terminal (ONT) received the 10/2.5 Gbps feed and used two data communication ports to simultaneously provide transmission speeds of close to 1 Gbps to each of two PCs inside the home. Combined, the two ports delivered approximately 1.85 Gbps in aggregate bandwidth in each direction.

Tests were designed to simulate what two different customers might experience while using their PCs to download, upload or share files to the Internet when served by a 10G PON system.  In addition, speed tests were performed to Verizon's speed test server located more than 400 miles away in Reston, Va., realized speeds of up to 915 Mbps between the PC and the speed test server.

"XG-PON can provide the capacity needed to support the explosive growth in bandwidth envisioned for new and emerging services such as 3DTV and Ultra HD TV, and the growing demand for streaming video content to the PC and TV, as well as the increased use of concurrent applications," said Vincent O'Byrne, director of technology for Verizon's FTTP architecture and design effort.


Verizon trumpeted the test as proof that its gamble on building out a large fiber-optic network will pay off in the future, as user needs for bandwidth outstrip the capabilities of cable and DSL.

The test appears aimed to reassure investors that Verizon made the right decision to deploy the fiber-to-home network, and to assure observers that Verizon can keep up with any new bandwidth initiatives cable competitors may deploy.

Verizon Pushes 10 Gbps Through Fiber Network | Epicenter�| Wired.com

FaceTime Would Crash Mobile Cell Sites

At 667 Kbps, just 20 FaceTime users would saturate a 14 Mbps HSPA based 3G cell even if one assumes no scarcity at the base station backhaul, and that every user was in perfect range operating at the peak transmission/receive rates, and that there was no other traffic on the network.

That's why FaceTime is limited to Wi-Fi operation.

Digital Society � Blog Archive � Estimate of network bandwidth for iPhone 4 FaceTime

Where are the Broadband Apps?

Some people probably just can’t understand why more than 70 percent of Americans are happy with their existing broadband service. The usual explanation for this state of affairs (besides blaming people for being "dumb") is that there are no applications driving consumer demand because broadband is too slow to allow for higher bandwidth applications.

Experience from markets where 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps service is available suggest it is applications that lag, even when bandwidth is not a particular problem. After 10 years, what truly important applications have developed in markets such as South Korea, for example? You might point to gaming or video on demand.

But some of us would argue those are relatively trivial innovations. They don't seem to change a nation's productivity, and neither of those apps are "new" things we hadn't thought of before.

With over 40 million broadband homes since 2008 with more than 6 Mbps of connectivity, one would expect that there would be more applications that require and thrive at 6 Mbps, some would argue. There arguably are new things people do that involve piracy (content), and there might be some premium subscription services that have at least some penetration.

Don't get me wrong; it is entertaining to watch YouTube or Hulu. I'm just not sure that was what we generally had in mind when we have argued that huge pipes would lead to all sorts of interesting and socially or economically useful new developments. New ways to watch television are interesting to lots of people and companies, to be sure.

But was that what you had in mind?

Digital Society � Blog Archive � Reality check – Americans like their broadband service

Google Wins Copyright Suit Over YouTube Video

Google has successfully defended itself from a 2007 lawsuit filed by Viacom, alleging that Google's ouTube operation was guilty of copyright infringment by allowing users to post 160,000 unauthorized clips on YouTube, and that those clips had been viewed 1.5 billion times.

Viacom, the parent company of MTV, Comedy Central, and Paramount Pictures, filed the $1 billion lawsuit in March 2007. Google argued it was protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the law that protects Internet service providers from the illegal sharing of copyrighted material among their users, if the service providers agree to take down offending material when notified by copyright holders.

The court granted Google's motion for summary judgment,  meaning that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act against claims of copyright infringement. The decision follows established judicial consensus that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online.

Not surprisingly, Google General Counsel Kent Walker says the ruling is a victory for consumers.

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160,000 Androids A Day

Google's Andy Rubin says 160,000 Android devices are being activated every day, up from 100,000 a day in May. Apps in the Android Market also are up to 68,000 or so.

160,000 Android devices being activated every day; 68,000 apps in Market | Android Central

Droid X Released by Verizon and Motorola

Verizon Wireless and Motorola have launched the Droid X, featuring a 1GHz processor; 4.3-inch screen, 3G Mobile HotSpot capabilities, dual-flash, 8-megapixel camera, HD camcorder and access to Android Market, which now has more than 65,000 applications.

DROID X by Motorola will be available at www.verizonwireless.com and in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores beginning July 15 for $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement.

Motorola Media Center - Press Releases - July 2010: DROID X By Motorola Lands On The Nation's Largest & Most Reliable 3G Network

GOAL!!!! USA Advances to Final 16 Round at World Cup

iPhone, Evo, Droid Incredible, Nexus One: Which Has Best Total Cost of Ownership

The iPhone makes the most economic sense of leading smartphones if you opt for a minimum voice/data/text plan, says BillShrink.

The catch is, BillShrink’s research has found that that average data usage per person has risen a dramatic 3.5 times over the last 15 months. If higher usage means a user cannot buy the iPhone minimum data plan, then a Nexus One on a T-Mobile USA unlimited plan offers the lower total cost of ownership.

Google and Music Industry: Distributor or Competitor?

BPI, Britain’s biggest recording-industry association, has sent a cease-and-desist notice to Google regarding links to copyright-infringed music files. Meanwhile, there are strong indications Google is getting ready to launch its own music service aimed at Android handsets.

Google is going to have to decide whether it really wants to be a music distribution partner or a competitor, essentially.

Google Needs To Decide Which Side Of The Music Industry Fence It Is On | paidContent

Unbundling, Wholesale Might Not be a Good Thing for Broadband

Almost without exception, owners of broadband access infrastructure are opposed to unbundling requirements (wholesale). Almost without exception, competitors who do not own facilities are in favor of such requirements.

Blair Levin,  former executive director of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative at the Federal Communications Commission and now Aspen Institute fellow, appears to have said that "due to the uncertainty of unbundling; providers will not be able to produce enough capital to support a business."

Levin was a top advisor to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was created and passed, and is quite familiar with the market impact of wholesale access policies.

It might go too far to say Levin prefers wholesale to other mechanisms. Under different circumstances, he might approve. But given the reliance on the competitors one has got, rather than the competitors one might wish for, he seems to have realistically concluded that, in the United States, at this time, the approach has to rely on continued investment by the competitors actually in the market and able to make facilities investments.

In other words, given the capital intesity of ubiquitous broadband deployments, the uncertainty around the business case and the prevailing constellation of commercial and governmental forces, it likely is unreasonable to expect more than a couple, perhaps a few, facilities-based contestants in the fixed-line space or the wireless space, though there may be more room for competitors in the wireless space.

Given those economic realities, policies that discourage continual investment by the few players able to compete on a facilities-based basis almost dictates a policy that does not impose wholesale or unbundling requirements that choke off investment.

It might not be the best of all possible worlds, but that is not the world we have been given.

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"Minimally Viable Product" and "Maximally Buyable Product"

Developers of new products will benefit from applying a "minimum and maximum" approach to crafting new products, says Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot CEO. "One of the key parts of the lean startup is the concept of a “minimally viable product," he says.

The MVP is a product that has the minimum set of features needed to learn what the market wants. The idea behind the MVP is to spend as little energy is possible figuring out whether what you’re building is something people want.

The other element is reduction of barriers to adoption. He calls that the “maximally buyable product.”

To be "maximally buyable, there are some elements everybody would intuitively grasp. Products or applications should be easy to understand, easy to try and easy to buy. For many products, the business model and design should also make it "easy to remain a customer." In other words, design for longevity of customer relationship.

In many parts of the communications service provider market, consumer customer relationships last three years or less. Application relationships can last months to a year. Changing the length of customer relationship can have dramatic impact on profit margins.

Customers with longer tenure tend to have fewer support requirements, since they know how to use the product. Since there is a marketing cost to gain a new customer, the longer the relationship, the lower the average cost to acquire customers. Customers with longer tenure tend to buy additional products a company offers, and therefore tend to have higher average revenue per user, as well.

The non-intuitive advice is to make a product "easy to leave." This runs counter to any marketer's thinking, which will more naturally lean towards customer lock in. But the easier you make it for customers to leave, the more likely that are to buy in the first place.

On Startups by Dharmesh Shah

World Cup Affects U.K. Latency, Packet Loss

As you would expect, the World Cup has driven up video consumption. Timico, a U.K. Internet access provider, set a new record for video usage online, with usage up 309 percent over average. So what's happened on the technical side that affects end user experience?


Higher latency and packet loss seem to be the main effects."Some users may only see a slight increase in latency or a small amount of packet loss whilst for others latency has quadrupled and packet loss is in the region of five percent," says ThinkBroadband.

In one test, the average latency has quadrupled from around 28 milliseconds to approximately 120 milliseconds at peak World Cup time and packet loss increased as well.

The hit to user experience is video occasionally breaking up or freezing from packet loss, while websites would load more slowly.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4282-can-the-uk-broadband-network-cope.html

iPhone 4 a "Major Leap" Says Walt Mossberg

Wall Street Journal technology reviewer Walt Mossberg says the Apple iPhone 4 is "a major leap over its already-excellent predecessor, the iPhone 3GS," on both hardware and software fronts.

The iPhone 4 redesign features a radically-sharper screen; a second, front-facing camera; a larger battery; a better rear camera with flash; and a faster processor into a body that is 24 percent thinner, a bit narrower, and retains the same length and weight as its predecessor's, says Mossberg.

With the front-facing camera, and clever new software called FaceTime, Apple has brought simple, high-quality video calling to mobile phones, albeit, for now, only over Wi-Fi and only among iPhone 4 owners.

In addition, the iPhone now includes an updated operating system that adds catch-up software features such as limited multitasking; folders for grouping related apps and a unified email inbox for multiple accounts and the ability to present messages as threaded conversations.

"While its 3.5-inch screen, once considered huge, is now smaller than those on some other smartphones, the high resolution packs in a lot of material and makes text appear almost like ink on fine paper," says Mossberg.

"Voice quality was quite good, even on long speaker-phone calls, and data performance over Wi-Fi was excellent," he adds. "Video and audio streamed from the Web played smoothly."

Apple claims longer battery life for most functions—seven hours of talk time, for instance, versus five hours on the earlier model.

Some will question the degree of multitasking support, though. To prevent a drain on battery life, Apple has allowed only certain apps to fully multitask, such as Pandora or voice-prompted navigation apps, which keep working while you're on a call. Others that fully work in the background include Internet calling apps, and those that perform long downloads, he says.

"But some logical candidates, such as Twitter and Facebook, merely pause in place when you switch away from them," says Mossberg.

Apple says constant fetching of hundreds of social-networking updates in the background would kill the battery too quickly.

"In fact, for many scenarios, such as games, Apple's version of multitasking is really just fast switching among open apps that save their place," he notes.

Because iPhone users can easily accumulate hundreds of apps, it can become difficult to organize them. So the new iPhone OS now allows you to group them into folders.

"The most important downside of the iPhone 4 is that, in the U.S., it's shackled to AT&T, which not only still operates a network that has trouble connecting and maintaining calls in many cities, but now has abandoned unlimited, flat-rate data plans," he says.

In an effort to improve performance, Apple added a wrap-around antenna, and the device automatically tries to connect using the least-congested frequencies as well as frequencies with higher quality (less signal interference).

"Just as with its predecessors, I can't recommend this new iPhone for voice calling for people who experience poor AT&T reception, unless they are willing to carry a second phone on a network that works better for them," says Mossberg.

"For everyone else, however, I'd say that Apple has built a beautiful smartphone that works well, adds impressive new features and is still, overall, the best device in its class," he says.

20% of Android Apps Grant 3rd Parties Access to Private/Sensitive Info, Study Says

Some 20 percent of applications in the Android market grant a third party application access to private or sensitive information that an attacker could use for malicious purposes such as identity theft, mobile banking fraud and corporate espionage, according to SMobile Systems.

About five percent of applications have the ability to place a call to any number, without requiring user intervention. Dozens of applications have the identical type of access to sensitive information as known spyware, while two percent of market submissions can allow an application to send unknown premium SMS messages without user intervention, SMobile Systems says, after analyzing more than 48,000 Android apps.

Nearly 10,000 Android applications give third party apps access to private or sensitive information, in total.

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26% of iPhones Break Within 2 Years

About 25.6 percent of iPhone owners experienced a failure in the first two years of use, according to warranty data from SquareTrade. If you have teens or college-age children, you might say the failure rate is higher than that.

The typical but it’s actually below the industry’s average, according to SquareTrade. The expected failure rate over a two-year period was 33 percent one year ago, when SquareTrade only examined the iPhone and the iPhone 3G.

Most of the failures (18.1 percent) result from accidental damage, while only 7.5 percent are a result of a hardware malfunction. Touchscreens are most likely to fail, followed by power supplies.

26% of iPhones Break Within 2 Years [REPORT]

How Much Speed is Enough?

Lots of people think 100-Mbps or 1-Gbps access services are the wave of the future. One facetiously wonders whether they might always be. Mostly everybody likely agrees that bandwidth requirements are growing, and that "more" bandwidth is a good thing. The problem is that it is hard to answer the question of "how much is enough?"

StarHub, for example, already offers a commercial 100-Mbps service, and sells the "MaxOnline Ultimate" service for $62.40 a month, in Singapore.

Only five percent of customers have bought it, says Neil Montefiore, StarHub CEO. "I'm unconvinced about consumer demand for 100 Mbps."

U.S. access providers who already sell 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps connections seem to have had the same results. When it is available, relatively few customers choose to buy services running at such speeds.

"No one is quite sure what people will do with 100-Mbps symmetrical," he said. "Do people really need that speed?" The other issue is whether raw bandwidth of very-high capacity is sufficient, rather than merely necessary, to ensure creation of compelling and useful applications and services. In other words, higher bandwidth is needed as a prerequisite for valuable new apps. But it isn't so clear that where 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps access is available, that much of anything noteworthy has developed, beyond what could be done at 10 Mbps or 20 Mbps, for example.

The other question is how much demand there is for very-high-speed services, even when prices are reasonable.  If customers can buy 100 Mbps for about $63 (U.S. currency), but they can buy 50 Mbps for $50, is the issue the extra bandwidth or the value-price assessment which leads people to conclude that high bandwidth, but not super-high, is a better deal, and sufficient to accomodate their needs.

Consumers can buy 16-Mbps service for about $37 a month, as well, or cheaper 3 Mbps or 6 Mbps services.


German cable network operator Kabel BW claims that around 40,000 customers are using broadband with speeds of 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps. About three million homes are able to buy service at those rates. So buyers represent about one percent of customers.

Also, the price for the 50-Mbps access service is about $41 a month. What is not clear is what percentage of those buyers actually are businesses, rather than consumers.

It is a laudable thing to call for 100 Mbps service, available to most U.S. users, by 2020. What is missing at this point is evidence of robust-enough demand for speeds of 50 Mbps, at $100 a month.

Kabel BW has found only about one percent take rates, at prices of $41 a month. Obviously, no investor in his or her right mind would loan money to a service provider to offer 50 Mbps service at the same prices as users presently pay.


A new survey by Leichtman Research Group finds that 71 percent of U.S. broadband Internet subscribers are very satisfied with their current Internet service at home (rating satisfaction 8-10 on a 10-point scale), while just three percent are not satisfied (rating satisfaction 1-3).

To be fair, with broadband, appetite changes over time. But the issue is how to match actual demand, at market prices, to the amount of bandwidth that should be delivered.

While 77 percent of broadband subscribers do not know the download speed of their Internet service at home, they are generally pleased with the speed of their Internet connection. Overall, 66 percent of broadband subscribers rate the speed of their connection 8 to 10 and six percent rate it 1 to 3.

The findings are based on a telephone survey of 1,600 randomly selected households from throughout the United States. The survey also found that more than 70 percent of respondents said they subscribed to a broadband service.

Some 26 percent of broadband subscribers are very interested in receiving faster Internet access at home than they currently receive (rating interest 8-10 on a 10-point scale), while 44 percent are not very interested (rating interest 1-3).

Of all Internet subscribers, three percent of respondents say that broadband is not available in their area. In rural areas eight percent of online households say that broadband is not available in their area.

Overall, 1.4 percent of all households are interested in getting broadband, but say that it is not available in their area. Less than one percent of all households are interested in getting broadband, but cite cost as a reason for not currently subscribing to broadband.

Nobody can tell "how much bandwidth is enough." For the moment, though, the evidence here seems to suggest that there is not huge pent-up demand for dramatically-faster speeds. So far, the evidence from markets such as Singapore and other U.S. areas where either 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps is available for purchase, does not support the thesis that dramatically-higher speed is a huge need, at the moment, at least at prices far lower than they presently are.

Everyone expects demand for bandwidth to keep expanding. What seems less clear is the pace of that growth.

Will iPad Be the Fastest-Adopted Mobile Device, Ever?

At this rate, the Apple iPad might wind up becoming the fastest-growing mobile device ever.

Borders Essentially Drops E-Reader Price Before Release

Borders, which will begin shipping the Kobo, its e-book reader, in early July, has joined the round of price cutting going on in the e-book reader space by bundling a $20 gift card with the purchase of its $149 Kobo. Though the originally-planned price remains in effect, the gift card effectively lowers the cost to $129.

But Borders also plans to make its inventory available to other devices such as the iPhone, Android devices and the iPad. The unresolved issue is how the e-book reader ultimately will fare as a way to create and protect a content distribution business, since virtually all the leading readers are moving to application-based delivery in addition to sponsoring their own hardware.

The price cuts come only a couple of months after Apple introduced its iPad, which offers considerably more features than e-readers and starts at $499. Many analysts believe that booksellers will not compete with the iPad but will slash e-reader prices and make up the loss of money by selling more e-books.

U.S. sales of digital reading devices are projected to reach five million units this year from 2.2 million in 2009, according to the Consumer Electronics Association

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Spread Networks Offers New "Lowest" Latency Route Between New York and Chicago

Spread Networks, a privately-owned telecommunications provider has launched a dark fiber private network specifically optimized for ultra-low latency for financial industry customers who communicate between Chicago and New York trading centers.


The TABB Group estimates that the $15 billion spent by financial firms on data centers in 2009 was largely driven by a need to reduce propagation delay by collating servers. But the Commodities Mercanile Exchange remains in Chicago, while trading partners do business in New York and London, as well as with dozens of other financial centers around the world.

That irreducible geographic fact means collocation can solve only some latency issues. Transmission networks must do some of the work as well. That explains why there has been a relative flurry of activity on the Chicago-New York route this year. A single kilometer of optical fiber path adds about five microseconds worth of latency to a connection. So it helps to have the shortest physical route between Chicago and New York.

Over time, the shortest path has dropped from roughly 1,000 fiber miles to 900 fiber miles, now to 825 miles.

In part, Spread Networks can offer unparalleled levels of latency performance because it has built a brand-new, direct route over the shortest possible route from New York to Chicago, 825 fiber miles long, reducing round-trip latency to 13.33 milliseconds. Up to this point, the lowest latency on the New York-Chicago route was about 15.9 milliseconds, according to Brian Quigley, ADVA Optical Networks senior director.

Where other low-latency connections between those cities uses railroad rights of way, Spread Networks has built along alternate routes, to shave distance, and hence delay. It’s just a guess, but if you want to follow the straightest-possible route between New York and Chicago, you’d follow U.S. Highway 80. That would allow a carrier to relatively easily negotiate rights of way agreements with a few entities and obviously allows easy trenching along the medians.

“Spread Networks has established the competitive standard for trading latency between these two important
financial centers,” said David Barksdale, CEO of Spread Networks (Barksdale was Netscape’s CEO) .

Spread Networks provides customers two strands of dark fiber, which are lit using optoelectronics provided by ADVA Optical Networks. Traffic is kept at layer one to avoid the additional latency if the traffic were carried at a higher level of the protocol stack.

The route terminates at 350 East Cermak Road in Chicago Illinois (telX) and 1400 Federal Blvd in Carteret, New Jersey (Lexent Metro Connect).

As part of the service, ADVA monitors the routes, providing real-time latency reporting. Repeater huts are spaced at 120 kilometers and the route uses low-noise optical amplifiers, dispersion compensation, cut-through switches and no protocol conversion or higher-level switching as part of the effort to achieve the lowest-possible latency performance.

How Regulation Can Make or Break an Internet Business

Google and Twitter have weighed in on the 'hot news' doctrine, which grants newspapers in some states a time-limited, quasi-property right over facts they report, arguing that the legal concept is old 'n' busted in the instantaneous Internet age.

The companies filed an amicus brief in the legal case between financial website theflyonthewall.com and Barclays Plc, claiming that Internet chatter cannot be contained and that restricting the spread of news content could hurt the public.

A U.S. federal judge ruled in March 2010 that a news site called "theflyonthewall.com" had misappropriated content from major analyst firms by publishing highlights of new equity research by Morgan Stanley, Barclays Plc, and Merrill Lynch.

The judge agreed that they had invested time and resources into researching the market, and that flyonthewall.com was making money off of their hard effort by offering subscriptions so that users could access The Fly's near-realtime writeups of the analysts' work.

An injunction was issued, but then flyonthewall.com asked whether it was permissible to publish information that already had appeared elsewhere, as for example news reports by Dow Jones, Reuters, Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal.

Google and Twitter have filed briefs supporting flyonthewall.com's right to publish once the information already has been made available elsewhere on the Internet.

Google and Twitter pointed out that it's nearly impossible to implement some period of exclusivity for news when it can spread so quickly across blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, and that upholding such a restriction could actually hurt the news-consuming public.

It's just another example of the decisive rule regulations and laws can have in creating or destroying a business model.

Google and Twitter pour cold water on "hot news"

Google Voice Now Open to Everyone in the U.S.

Google, Apple, Microsoft Trusted by Half of Adults, Just 8% Trust Media

Nearly half (49 percent) of U.S. adults trust Apple, Microsoft and Google, according to a new Zogby Interactive survey.

About 13 percent of respondents trust Facebook.

Almost nobody trusts traditional media or Twitter, each of which had a trust level of eight percent.

Google And Apple Trusted More Than Facebook And Twitter | jatiN mahindrA doT coM

RIM and Android Eat into Apple's Mobile Ad Dominance

Mobile ad impressions from smartphone devices running Google's Android OS and RIM OS grew in May, while those from Apple devices fell considerably, according to data from Millennial Media.

The mobile ad network reported ad impressions across its network from Apple smartphones fell 14 percent between April and May, while Android and RIM devices saw growth of five percentage points and two percentage points, respectively.

Most people are used to thinking about Google when it comes to Internet-related ad revenues. In the mobile space, Apple is the clear leader, with about 48 percent of impressions.

RIM and Android Eat into Apple's Mobile Ad Dominance - ClickZ

Apple Has Sold 3 Million iPads In Less Than Three Months

Apple announced today that it has sold over 3 million iPads in just 80 days. This shatters most analyst expectations for the iPad. Just last week Katy Huberty at Morgan Stanley forecasted 3 million iPads sold for the entire quarter. Apple beat that by a few weeks.

It appears Apple has succeeded in once again creating a new device category.

Apple Has Sold 3 Million iPads In Less Than Three Months

Congress to Hold Closed Door Meetings on Communications Policy

Communications policy will be examined by the U.S. House and Senate behind closed doors June 25, 2010. Presumably among the issues to be examined are the Federal Communications Commission's proposed common carrier regulation of broadband access, which a majority of Congress already say they oppose.

Among the organizers include Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation; Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce; Senator John F. Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet; Rep. Rick Boucher, Chairman, of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet.

BroadbandBreakfast.com: Congress to Hold Closed Door Meetings on Communications Policy Issues

BT Has Same Cost Problem as AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink

BT has said that there is a commercial case for it to upgrade about two thirds of its national network to fiber-to-the-cabinet and fiber-to-the-premises networks. The rest of the country, though, is too sparsely populated to justify wholly private investment, BT insists.

People sometimes forget how sensitive infrastructure costs are to the vagaries of population density, terrain, soil composition and duct or pole access. In the United States, as elsewhere, loop length (distance from customer location to the nearest central office) is inversely proportional to population density. So are capital requirements. The cost of serving the last 10 percent of customers is extraordinarily high compared to the cost of reaching the most-dense 30 percent of locations (click on image for larger view).

Whitehall invites broadband subsidy goldrush • The Register:

Smartphone Navigation Features Up 10X in 2010

Smartphone-based navigation systems are set to grow by a factor of 10 in 2010 and boom by nearly 40 times in 2014, iSuppli Corp. predicts.

The number of smart-phone-based OEM and aftermarket on-board navigation systems is projected to rise to 81 million units in 2010, up from 8 million in 2009. By 2014, usage will increase to 297 million.

“Smartphones over the next decade will rival PCs as a market for hardware, software, communications and location based services,” said Danny Kim, analyst and global manager for automotive research at iSuppli. “In the last two years alone, the smart phone has become the most important platform for map and navigation usage. With maps becoming a standard feature in a growing number of smart phones, the number of smart phone map users is increasing sharply.”

Smart Phones Become the New Location Based Services (LBS) Battleground

Verizon Offers new FiOS Customers "No Contract: Service

Verizon Communications now will allow customers to sign up for its FiOS television and Internet services on a month-to-month basis at the same price as long-term contracts and without early termination fees. Though Verizon might have preferred the revenue stability contracts tend to provide, consumers hate them, especially the early termination fees.

And though many observers do not believe there is sufficient competition in the fixed broadband access market, the Verizon move seems clearly a result of marketing by its cable competitors blasting the Verizon requirements and touting the ability cable TV customers have to buy without contracts or early termination fees.

Verizon in January 2010 raised the early termination fees for FiOS customers to $360 from $179. To be sure, Verizon's economic rationale was the cost to activate a location. But that's a business issue Verizon has to deal with, as all providers incur additional expense to activate a customer.

But market pressure seems to have had effect. Effective immediately, all new Verizon FiOS customers can opt to pay for a bundle on a month-to-month basis, at the same prices charged to customers purchasing a term contract, and receive price protection for one year without an early-termination fee.

New FiOS consumers who order a Verizon bundle as part of a two-year contract can take advantage of the "Worry-Free Guarantee," allowing them to cancel their service within 30 days of the date of activation, with no termination fee.

The month-to-month option and "Worry-Free Guarantee" expand upon offers introduced earlier this year in Florida and Pennsylvania and that have met with very favorable customer response. It's hard to imagine those offers getting anything less than that reception, given the distaste consumers have for contracts and termination fees, despite the "goodies" that sometimes are part of the overall offers.

http://newscenter.verizon.com/press-releases/verizon/2010/new-verizon-fios-customers.html

Apple Wants to Sell Razors (iPads), Amazon Blades (Media)

Some observers will point out that about half of Amazon's total revenues come from selling media (books, for example) and that the Apple iPad is an obvious danger to the extent that digital content distribution moves out of its control.

To be sure, Kindle inventory can be bought on an iPad. But Apple is going to push its iBooks offering, shifting sales away from Amazon.

To be sure, notes Citi analyst Mark Mahaney, Amazon enjoys a lead for the moment in product breadth and depth. Comparing Kindle and iBooks, using the New York Times best sellers list as the data source, Mahaney notes that 88 percent of New York times  fiction and non-fiction best sellers are available on Kindle, compared to 63 percent from iBooks.

The average price for eBooks on Kindle is $11.23 compared to  $12.31 for iBooks, a 10 percent advantage for Amazon.

About half of NYT fiction and non-fiction best sellers are available for both platforms, and 80 percent of those items are priced identically on each platform. About 20 percent of the items that are cheaper on Kindle are about 11 percent cheaper, on average.

That's probably not a sustainable advantage, as a 10-percent price advantage on a $12 item is just $1.20, not likely a sustainable "moat."

The iPad is not exactly a "give away the razor, buy the blades" strategy. Apple very much wants to sell razors. Amazon, on the other hand,  really wants to sell blades. That illustrates an interesting difference in business models. Apple would merchandise content to sell media consumption devices. Amazon really would rather merchandise the platform and make a living selling the content.

Apple sells devices in the $500 to $800 range, while Kindle sells in the $189 to $489 range (basic version or the Kindle DX). Others may disagree, but it would seem Amazon has incentives to figure out how to "destroy" its hardware pricing to grab more media sales. That certainly makes more sense in the near term than trying to move upmarket directly into the iPad space.

Amazon Cuts Kindle Prices to $189

The reaction didn't take long: Barnes & Noble Inc. cut the price of its Nook e-reader to $199 on June 21, 2010. So did Amazon, just a few hours later. Amazon's standard Kindle e-reader now costs to $189, down from $259, though the "Kindle DX," featuring a larger screen and global mobile coverage, still sells for $489.

The strategic issue is whether e-book readers essentially wind up even cheaper than current levels as e-book and e-content purchase volume grows. It wasn't so long ago that would-be e-book reader suppliers thought a $400 or higher purchase price would still be viable.

Obviously the rapid emergence of a potentially-rival tablet market, exemplified by the Apple iPad, at about the $500 price point, plus Amazon and Barnes & Noble marketing at the $260 price point, has dashed a few business plans.

Of course, ask yourself which device you'd rather use, despite the higher price of the iPad. There's nothing wrong with the Kindle, but it is a monochrome e-book reader.

The iPad is a multi-purpose device that also doubles as an e-book reader.

Did Skype Rip $143 Billion a Year Out of Global Voice Revenue?

Skype CEO Josh Silverman offered a few statistics at Communicasia about how disruption works. Today, 12 percent of the world’s international calling minutes are on Skype, and Skype users spend seven to eight minutes of "free" calling for each minute that is a "paid" minute of use.

Skype’s on-net international traffic (between two Skype users) grew 51 percent in 2008, and is projected to have grow 63 percent in 2009, to 54 billion minutes (TeleGeography has not yet published 2009 figures).

Already the world average retail price of an international call is under one-fifth of the $1.20 per minute price of 15 years ago, says Telegeography. Which leads to an interesting exercise.

Assume for the sake of argument that an "average" international long distance call today costs 22 cents a minute.

Assume that, over the last 15 years, competition alone would have driven average prices down by 50 percent, so that the average price of an international call dropped to 60 cents a minute, even without further price pressure from Skype and other IP voice providers.

Then assume the "Skype effect" (overall pricing impact caused by Skype and other VoIP providers) is 38 cents a minute, the difference between the "natural" decrease to 60 cents a minute and current 22-cent rates arguably lower because of Skype and other VoIP providers.

Using those assumptions, the global telecom industry now "loses" $142.9 billion a year in revenue because of overall lower rates caused by VoIP competition, even assuming that Skype market share is simply a shift of some traffic and revenue ($11.9 billion imputed value) from the incumbent providers to a "new" competitor.

It's just an exercise, as it is impossible to determine precisely how much lower prices would have affected demand, in the absence of the impact of VoIP on average calling prices, or how much prices would have fallen for other reasons.

The point is that disruption can create an "okay" business out of a "really good" business, looked at from the standpoint of an attacking provider. If a firm has zero market share, then creating a business worth nearly $1 billion in annual revenues is not a bad thing.

Obviously we are dealing here with "imputed" revenue, not actual revenue, since Skype doesn't today make anywhere near 22 cents a minute, on average, across all of its traffic. Indeed, seven to eight times more zero-revenue calls are made, compared to "paid" minutes of use.

The overall impact is quite a bit more dramatic on legacy providers, though obviously good for buyers and users of trans-border voice service. Losing some amount of market share is not the most-important impact. The bigger issue is the overall decline in average prices per minute.

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What Becomes of Microsoft?

Investors largely believe Microsoft will gradually become the equivalent of a technology utility, a boring but necessary provider of the software that runs the world's business community, says Henry Blodget. A smaller, more optimistic crowd is still arguing that, one day, Microsoft will be able to turn its fortunes around, and fight its way back into an industry leadership position.

Blodget suggests a much darker potential scenario, where difficulties in the company's core operating system and Office franchises simply become less important in the world which seems to be developing, Blodget argues.

The Internet has continued to free app-makers from dependency on Windows or any other desktop platform while Apple's iPhone has revolutionized the mobile business, unleashing a whole new wave of personal computing devices.

Apple's iPad seems on its way to supplanting the low-end PC business.

Importantly, none of these trends depend in any way on Microsoft's original monopoly and cash cow, Windows, Blodget says. "Microsoft is nowhere" in mobile or tablets, he says.

Google, meanwhile, is trying to do the same thing to Apple that Microsoft did to Apple 15 years ago: Separate software and hardware and create a ubiquitous software platform for the world's developers to build

To be sure, lots of smart people thought that was exactly what would have to Netflix, and the doomsday scenario has so far refused to play out. But analysts get paid to analyze and create scenarios. This scenario might seem far fetched as anything other than a scenario many analysts get paid to imagine.

But it does illustrate the dangers for any dominant franchise when computing models shift, as nearly everybody now believes is about to happen. Nor does history offer much optimism. Never in computing history has the leader in one computing era emerged as a leader in the new era.

That will not stop firms such as Microsoft, Cisco and Apple or Google from trying. But they will have to make history to emerge as leaders in the next era.

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Are Mobile Apps More Like Songs or Software?

Nobody knows yet how the mobile applications will develop, and how big a business it might become for various ecosystem participants. So far, the Apple App Store has sold about $1.4 billion in apps, of which developers keep about 70 percent.

Some developers can point to mobile apps as a significant revenue generator in its own right. Most cannot make that claim.  But some might suggest the developing business is quite a lot more like the "song" business than the software business, according to Getjar.

On average, it takes about the same time to write a mobile app as it does to compose a song, says Ilja Laurs, GetJar CEO. Both cost about the same to download, $1.90 on average.

Advertising and e-commerce will add some revenue on top of actual sales revenue. But at least so far, most "for-fee" mobile apps appear to sell like single songs, rather than productivity or other apps people use on their PCs.

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How iPad Changes Gmail Experience

One of the more interesting questions about the tablet device market, assuming it does develop as a new and discrete mobile device category, is how user experience and application design might change simply because of the new form factor and navigation method.

For Google, one of the changes it already has made is a redesign of the Gmail interface on the Apple iPad.

"When you write an email you’ll now get a big full screen compose window instead of splitting the screen between your inbox and the compose view," Google says. More text is visible at once and there are no more distractions with messages on the side.

As with adaptations made to format content and navigation for smartphone screens, it appears Google already has made adaptations of the email-compose layout specifically for the iPad form factor.

For application providers, all this suggests a possible need for a "third" way to format web sites and applications, including different rendering for large PC screens, small mobile phone screens and mid-size tablet form factors.

The Iterative Web App: New Compose Interface for Gmail on iPad - Official Google Mobile Blog

Online Video Consumption Catches Broadcast by 2020

By 2020 Internet video consumption will eclipse the consumption of broadcast TV programming, according to researchers at The Diffusion Group. Keep in mind that this is different from arguing the revenue earned by content or service providers will reach a cross-over point in 2020.

While the amount of time spent viewing TV has remained relatively stable, the amount of time consumers spent watching online video increased 84 percent between 2008 and 2009. When extrapolated across the entire TV-viewing population, the average time spent viewing online video in 2009 was 52 percent more than in 2008.

TDG expects that this rate of growth will actually increase during the next five to seven years due primarily to the increased use of the television as the platform of choice for in-home web video viewing.

According to Colin Dixon, senior partner and co-author of TDG’s new report, “The total amount of time spent watching video from all sources, including PayTV and Internet video, will hold constant during the next 10 years at around 32 hours a week. With online video usage accelerating we expect the amount of Internet video watched to eclipse the amount of live broadcast TV around 2020.”

The forecast may appear shocking to some, and will hinge on developments in broadband access pricing, bandwidth quality and deployment, both fixed and wireless. Wireless providers are unlikely to permit high video consumption on their networks without creation of new revenue models or a change in end user willingness to pay.

Fixed providers and content providers are unlikely to encourage online video consumption when it simply cannibalizes existing multi-channel video revenue and imposes higher network access costs.

“Keep in mind that during this period, Internet and broadcast delivery of video content will become blended in such a way that consumers will be unaware of which conduit serves which content," says Colin Dixon, TDG senior partner.

It is conceivable that today's multi-channel video providers, for example, will be able to shift in a relatively revenue-neutral way if "TV Everywhere" packages are accepted by end users on a wide scale. That doesn't speak to the issues of access providers who have to support the dramatically-increased infrastructure, though.

One suspects the revenue equivalent of this forecast would not show cross over in 2020 for a variety of compelling reasons, including a more-uncertain regulatory environment leading to less investor interest in access infrastructure, need to develop new business models and possible disincentives to consume online video, such as plan overages.

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LTE of 100 Mbps at 75 Km

Telstra and Nokia Siemens Networks have conducted groundbreaking trials of Long Term Evolution networks in Australia, successfully achieving peak speeds of 100 Mbps download and 31 Mbps upload over a record-breaking distance of 75 kilometers in regional Victoria.

Performance of that sort helps explain why, after years of wrangling, Telstra has agree to essentially divest itself of its fixed-line network and become a wholesale buyer of capacity to support its fixed-line operations.

As has been the case elsewhere, incumbent carriers can be persuaded to trade away an access near-monopoly for something else of tangible value. For some, it is the ability to expand in non-traditional markets outside the existing footprint. For others it is a chance to invest in higher-growth or higher-margin businesses.

For Telstra, the LTE carrot is more appetizing than the structural separation stick.

IT-Online - LTE world-first trial achieves 100Mbps at 75km

TD-LTE A "Poor Man's" LTE?

Interest in TD-LTE is driven by one compelling reality. Because it can use unpaired spectrum, emerging and developing market operators could get lots more capacity into service at much-lower cost.

Since a single chipset apparently allows roaming between LTE FDD and TD-LTE networks, TD-LTE offers a more-affordable way to launch and operate a Long Term Evolution mobile network, while still offering roaming access to frequency-division LTE networks as well.

ZUMBEEL | Why The Sudden Interest In TD-LTE?

Netflix Faces Stiffer VODCompetition

Netflix faces competition in digital video-on-demand and pay-per-view offerings from players like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV and Dish Network, according to analysts at Trefis. The reason is a
recent Federal Communications Commission decision allowing new films to be made available on-demand before such films are available on DVDs.

The FCC generally prohibits the use of so-called "selectable output control" technology, which encodes video programming with a signal to remotely disable set-top box output connections. But the FCC granted a waiver from those rules for Motion Picture Association of America members who want to protect copying of content if a new digital release window is created.

Allowing movie studios to temporarily prevent recording from TVs could pave the way for movies to be released to homes sooner than they are today. The FCC said the waiver is therefore in the public interest, because the studios are unlikely to offer new movies so soon after their theatrical release without such controls.

The FCC decision allows movie studios (like Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Disney Studios) to block analog signals on TVs and video recorders when consumers purchase their latest on-demand movies.

This decision was pushed for by Disney, Time Warner and Viacom to reduce the likelihood of content piracy, especially for new films where instances of piracy tend to be high. While this move gives movie studios more control over their content offering, it also gives a boost to cable providers that compete with Netflix to deliver the latest films to consumers, Trefis argues.

Will Common Carrier Regulation Lead to De Fato Price Regulation?

The Federal Communications Commission says it has no interest in applying price controls to broadband access services. But even if formal rules are not imposed, some executives believe de facto price controls are the logical consequence of any move to regulate broadband access as a common carrier service.

At a minimum, any such rules are likely to immediately slow investment in broadband facilities for years.

The last time the Federal Communications Commission altered fundamental rules in the common carrier area,  AT&T cut annual capital spending by more than half, from $12 billion to $5 billion dollars a year. That cut lasted for four years, until the courts threw out the FCC's mandatory wholesale rules, which created pricing rules service providers found highly damaging, says Dennis Kneale, CNBC media and technology editor.

This time around, the rules might affect a wider range of industry suppliers, including cable and wireless providers, with potentially much-greater damages.

The last time the FCC tried such a major incursion, in the mid-1990s, Stephenson, then the company’s chief financial officer, cut annual capital spending by more than half, from $12 billion to $5 billion dollars a year. That cut lasted for four years, until the courts threw out the FCC mandatory wholesale rules.

Some telecom execs say the FCC’s agenda is downright radical and could thwart high hopes for the wireless Internet, arguably key to the future of the entire U.S. communications industry.

The agency assault could restack the pecking order of winners and losers and reshape their stock prices, affecting the portfolios of millions of retirees and investors as well, says Kneale.

The immediate matter at hand is a prohibition on any type of packet prioritization. But at least some telecom execs also fear this would lead to de facto price controls, primarily because inability to prioritze packets would jeopardize the effort to create enhanced and new services that provide quality of service mechanisms of the sort businesses routinely use.

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8 Liberal Groups Skeptical About Common Carrier Regulation of Broadband

Eight liberal advocacy groups signaled skepticism with a Federal Communications Commission plan for regulating broadband access as a common carrier service.

In a letter to Senate Commerce Chairman John Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), eight groups called for Congress to restore FCC authority over broadband after an April appeals court ruling appeared to undercut the commission's authority.

The Communications Workers of America, the Minority Media and Telecom Council, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the National Urban League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Sierra Club signed the letter.

Doubts about reclassification stem from the possibility that it could complicate the regulatory situation and lead to protracted litigation, according to CWA spokeswoman Debbie Goldman.

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Telstra Agrees to Structural Separation

Australia will join Singapore and likely New Zealand as countries in which there is a single wholesale provider of broadband connections and all retail providers lease capacity from the wholesale provider.

Telstra Corp. essentially has agreed to break itself up into distince retail and wholesale companies as the result of a new deal with Australia’s national government. A new framework agreed upon by both the government and Telstra, essentially results in Telstra selling its network to the government-backed NBN Co, which is building the new national broadband network, and putting its customer traffic on the network as well.

The new framework, which still must be ratified by a formal contract, a "yes" vote by Telstra shareholders, and approval by regulators, will launch Telstra on a new path. It essentially will not own and operate its own fixed networks any longer. It will not be required to provide universal service.

And it likely will be a much-bigger player in the fourth-generation mobile business than it is in the fixed business.

Telstra will be paid A$9 billion as part of the deal, which remains only a framework, not a contract, which will have to be worked out over the next few months. The deal also means Telstra is free to bid on new wireless spectrum, and can keep its 50-percent stake in cable operator Foxtel.

As part of the agreement, the NBN Co. will be able to use Telstra infrastructure, including ducts and backhaul fiber, rather than building duplicate infrastructure. Telstra also agreed to transition its current customers to the NBN network, becoming an anchor tenant.

NBN Co will operate as the wholesale supplier of last resort for fiber connections in greenfield developments starting January 1, 2011.

Telstra also will be shutting down its copper ADSL network as part of the new agreement.

A new entity, USO Co Ltd, will be established to take over Telstra’s universal service obligations starting July 1, 2012.

The terms of the lease were not disclosed but sources close to the negotiations told AAP the agreement was for a period much longer than 10 years.

Telstra and the government have been at odds about the  A$43 billion "fiber-to-the-home" broadband network, and the necessity of Telstra agreeing to at least a functional serparation of its wholesale and retail operations.

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Does Moving Content Online Make Newspapers Viable?

Can you make an unattractive product attractive simply by moving it online? So far, the answer seems to be "no," at least for most newspapers with the salient exception of the Wall Street Journal.

Half or more of the circulation at most newspapers is composed of individuals who are aged 50 and older. This concentration means that newspapers on average have twice as many senior readers as exist in the population as a whole, and that, by logical extension, they are not engaging the younger readers that they must attract for a prosperous future.

There are implications here for the communications business as well. All products have a lifecycle. Several years we might have argued that legacy voice was a product in the declining part of its cycle, while VoIP was just at the start of its cycle.

These days, some of us might go further and argue that all forms of landline voice are in a mature phase in the developed world, and that mobile voice has become the replacement product, though mobile voice also is relatively mature in the developed world.

In part, it depends on how one defines the "market." One can argue VoIP is a new product, or view it as the latest version of an existing product. You would get different answers about where each of those "products" is in its lifecycle depending on your choice of definitions.

These days, I lean towards seeing VoIP as the latest version of an existing product.

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Make no mistake: Newspapers are still in trouble

Sprint T-Mobile: New mega-carrier or four-network nightmare?

Though the integration issues would be formidable, Merrill Lynch analysts say T-Mobile USA’s owner Deutsche Telekom might be interested in buying Sprint. But while such a deal might make financial and strategic sense, analysts said Sprint could become an operational nightmare for its new owner.

Merrill Lynch said Sprint’s operational problems might cause it to dramatically cut prices, which would put it in direct competition with T-Mobile USA, which has staked out that position among the big-four U.S. mobile carriers.

A takeover bid, Merrill Lynch analysts suggest, would avert such a price war. A positive: Sprint’s stock is priced low, while Deutsche Telekom could count on relative strength of the Euro.

Of course, the big objection has been the operational complexity. Sprint now operates three distinct networks with different air interfaces. Adding T-Mobile would make four. Ultimately, Long Term Evolution would the unifying air interface for all but the iDen network used by Nextel. But Nextel could be spun off.

It might be a long shot. But nobody thinks the market is stable at the top.

Sprint T-Mobile: New mega-carrier or four-network nightmare?