Wireless Access Substitution?

At a recent carrier event hosted by Denver-based carrier neutral co-location provider Comfluent, an independent provider of Ethernet access in the Rocky Mountain region was musing about how he would be able to compete with the likes of Qwest in the enterprise space, not to mention Time Warner Telecom. One of his particular worries was wireless substitution in the Ethernet access domain.

So Brough Turner notes that DoCoMo, in an experiement, has squeezed about 50 bits into one Hertz of free space bandwidth, albeit at the cost of 100 MHz of spectrum in an unused and very high frequency. The best modulation techniques out there commercialy for mass applications run at about 50 bits per Hertz (the symbolic information conveyed by the oscillation time of a single radio wave in one second). Impressive.

But there are issues. That much continuous spectrum is going to be hard to find in North America or Europe. And when found, it will be at very high frequencies. And the problem with very high frequencies is signal attenuation. Signals won't go very far. Nor will they penetrate tree leaves or walls very well at all. So while useful for mobile, outdoor or short-range indoor distribution, really high modulation techniques won't rival optical Ethernet.

A single optical wavelength replicates the bandwidth of the entire radio frequency, plus all the optical frequencies, and every wavelength can replicate the same frequency again. Every fiber can replicate all of the bandwidth provided by all the multiplexed waves. There's just no way free space is going to keep pace with that.

One Internet or Several?

An issue clearly emerging in the wireless business is its need to figure out a way to unify the "wireline accessed" Internet and the "wireless accessed" Internet, including the latest generation of participatory Web 2.0 applications, says The Yankee Group analyst Matthew Hatton. Of course, that is going to raise a question mobile operators might not want to answer. The question is transparent access to such apps on the same basis users would have if they were using their fixed connections.

That's an issue because mobile historically has been among the most walled of walled gardens. Of course, there was a time when AOL's controlled experience seemed to be "the Internet" for lots of users, and we can see how that all turned out. This isn't going to be an easy tension to overcome, though there's no question it must be surmounted if a seamless Web experience, transparent to devices and networks, is to be obtained.

Web Channel Grows

Large cable firms and telcos appear to be getting some traction in the Web channel, says The Yankee Group. That's significant for a couple reasons. For some customers and products, nothing beats the Web as a sales vehicle. There also is growing evidence that customers who order using Web channels churn less, at least in part because they have done more research into the products they are buying, and especially may be more knowledgeable about technology products.

Bye Bye Fiber to Node, Analyst Says

AT&T will alter the strategy on its broadband network upgrade within the next 12 to 18 months, shifting to a fiber-to-home design, says market research firm Pike & Fischer. Keep in mind that this is a separate issue from how well U-verse might be working.

Unless AT&T makes that investment, the U-verse service will not keep up with the cable industry's improvements in bandwidth and functionality, says Tim McElgunn, Pike & Fischer chief analyst.

"Pair bonding and compression, AT&T's current response to its network's bandwidth limitations, will not change copper to glass and will not provide AT&T with a long-term solution, in our opinion," says McElgunn.

Fiber to the node retains a cost advantage over fiber to the home, but costs continue to decline, and there's an overriding strategic consideration here. Sooner rather than later, FTTN will find itself unable to compete in a superior way with similar cable operator Hybrid Fiber Coax network designs, which FTTN essentially is, except for modulation techniques.

YouTube iTunes?

Ted Wallingford suggests iTunes go YouTube in its embrace of user generated content. That would be a bit of a switch for Apple, whose approach to innovation historically has involved working with legacy players rather than attacking them, and there is at least some reason to think powerful content companies still are ambivalent about YouTube.

Link

Style Counts

Mobile phones are the most widely sold consumer electronics product in the world. By some estimates more than 600 million handsets are sold every year. That's five times the number of TVs or personal computers sold annually. And every successful producer of consumer electronics will tell you that "style" counts as much as "price." So maybe industry executives ought to focus a bit more on the details of the devices as much as the pricing and packaging of their services plans. Fair enough?

There's clear upside, as well. Tired of selling voice minutes or bandwidth forever-decreasing retail prices? Then stop selling commodities. The point is that the ability to talk is just part of the value of a mobile handset, as we would all agree. There's all the text, camera, Web access, faceplate customization, ringtones and other personalization angles.

The mobile phone is a consumer electronics product, not a "telecom" product. So fashion is important. Looks are important. Image is important, and not just for the super trendy younger users executives normally assume are the only people who care about the details of their devices. Lots of people care about those things, because most people care about the little details of their highly-used consumer electronics products.

I suppose it isn't necessary to dwell further on the iPhone, huh?

Site Temporarily Unavailable

Probably not the best way to run a video download service such as Wal-Mart has launched.

Wal-Mart's beta service includes more than 3,000 movie and TV titles for view on PCs, laptops and portable media players. All the major studios are on board and new movie releases will be available for video download on the day of the DVD release. The price for new movies ranges from $12.88 to $19.88. Catalog titles cost $7.50. TV shows cost $1.96 per episode.

Wal-Mart allows customers to purchase the physical DVD and have the option of downloading the same title for a small additional price to use on portable devices and PCs. Among the likely results are further deals by studios with other services such as iTunes.

He said other studios have been reluctant to participate due to fear of a Wal-Mart reprisal. The chain represents a large percentage of Hollywood's multi-billion dollar DVD business. If a studio agreed to sell movies on iTunes at a price too low for Wal-Mart's taste, that studio might suddenly find its movies removed from Wal-Mart's shelves.

Wal-Mart's video download service doesn't work with Firefox version 2.0.0.1...aside from not working at all on any browser.