Sprint Nextel WiMAX Launches This Year

Sprint Nextel announced initial service launches in several markets by the end of 2007 and expects to reach 100 million people across the country by yearend 2008. Sprint has chosen Samsung for PC cards available in both single WiMAX mode and dual CDMA 1xEV DO/WiMAX mode for WiMAX service launch use. Additionally, Sprint has selected ZTE Corporation to supply multiple WiMAX 802.16e devices including PC cards in express and USB form factors as well as advanced modem solutions. Sprint Nextel also chose ZyXEL Communications for modem products.

WiMAX service areas for the 2008 launch include Chicago, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Minneapolis. Samsung will develop Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Providence and Washington D.C. Nokia will develop Austin, Dallas, Denver, Fort Worth, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and Seattle.

In large part, Sprint Nextel's early success will be determined by customer demand for high speed access services. In part that is because Sprint Nextel seems to be focusing its WiMAX effort on non-voice services supported by mobile data devices. The other reason is that sharing photos, Web content and ringtones, the leading 3G apps, can be provided on the existing network.

The Sprint WiMAX mobile broadband network will use the company’s 2.5GHz spectrum holdings, which cover 85 percent of the households in the top 100 U.S. markets.

The Only Question: Who Buys Vonage?

Pundits used to kick around the idea of "who will buy Vonage?". We are going to find out. With the noise around patent infringement no help, the stock price has dropped to the $3 level. So Vonage's life as an independent company is drawing to a close. Now, to be sure, Vonage executives probably always assumed they would be acquired, someday. That it would be such a "distress" sale probably wasn't comtemplated, at least not initially. No cable company is going to touch it, so that leaves telecom segment players as the only conceivable "network service" buyers. It isn't so clear what value Vonage might represent to application providers. I haven't done the math yet, but at $3 a share, buying the company probably gets close to "customer acquisition cost" for at least some potential buyers with a srategic need for wireline VoIP customer base and associated platform elements. In any event, we are going to find out.

HDTV Bandwidth Planning

One of the thorniest questions faced by all access providers is how much bandwidth will be required to support high definition and other forms of TV. Operationally, the discussion tends to turn on how many simultaneous HDTV streams might be required. The thinking in some quarters is that only a single HDTV stream and one or two standard definition streams will have to be supported concurrently.

SureWest Communications is planning to support multistream high definition DVRs and that will require additional bandwidth, says Bill DeMuth, SureWest Communications CTO. "We are already experiencing about 1.5 HD TVs per home so that is two streams, and if you want to watch one and record two streams it can easily lead to three to four streams of HD being delivered at the same time.

EarthLink Introduces Wi-Fi Phone

And it's attractive in the way an iPod is. No mistake, no doubt. About what one would expect from a company that has consumer marketing in its genes.

The phone is manufactured by Accton Technology Corporation and currently is in beta use at the company’s municipal wireless network in Anaheim, Calif.

EarthLink has no illusions about the difficulty of moving its business model forward, after beginning life as a dial-up Internet access provider. Still, it has a better shot than most who began business life that way, and already has done better than many would-be VoIP providers.

It always will be tough to compete with the cable and telephone companies, so you have to appreciate EarthLink's grittiness, toughness and marketing savvy. As they say, "thumbs up" for the phone design.

PhoneGnome Adds Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo!

The PhoneGnome free calling community now includes GoogleTalk (Gtalk), MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! users. PhoneGnome users can now also place free VoIP calls to users on GoogleTalk (Gtalk), MSN Messenger, and Yahoo!

These destinations can be entered in the ‘Quick Call’ box or added to a users' on-line Contacts and called with click-to-dial or by dialing the assigned speed dial code directly on your phone (for PhoneGnome box owners).

The PhoneGnome free calling community now includes:
* All PhoneGnome members, whether web-only, PC, or box, all over the world
* SIPphone/Gizmo Project
* Free World Dialup
* EarthLink MindSpring (formerly Vling)
* Hundreds of additional VoIP services reachable via SIPbroker
* Any SIP user, anywhere in the world (including Asterisk PBXes
* Millions of numbers reachable free through our private peering relationships
* ISN/ITAD numbers (freenum.org)
* GoogleTalk (Gtalk)
* MSN/Live Messenger
* Yahoo! Messenger
* PhoneGnome box users can even use a regular phone as a Skype phone.

"Each day, we get one step closer to pure Internet free calls to everyone," says David Beckemeyer, Televolution CEO.

Application Optimized Phones

Danger. BlackBerry, iPhone. Someday soon, Google phone. Just a few illustrations of the development of application optimized phones. Not application specific, as they are multiple function devices. Rather, optimized for a particular set of functions, with voice as a lowest common denominator

"Some of the time the engineers are dedicated to developing a mobile phone," Google executive Isabel Aguilera is quoted as saying on the Spanish-news Web site Noticias.com.

Simeon Simeonov, Polaris Venture Partners partner, has been told the Google Phone will be a BlackBerry-like device running C++ at the core with an operating system bootstrap, or loading program, and optimized Java, and that it would offer VoIP.

Rumors also link Google and Samsung as partners developing a phone, code-named "Switch." Google and Samsung announced a partnership in January to bundle mobile versions of Google Search, Google Maps and Gmail on certain Samsung phones.

Google has on its payroll Andy Rubin, the founder of handheld device maker Danger who later started Android, a mobile-software maker that Google bought in 2005. Google also acquired mobile-applications company Reqwireless and secretly acquired a company called Skia, whose first product is a portable graphics engine that renders 2D graphics on handhelds.

Verizon Dangles Bait. Will Fish Bite?

Verizon is dangling financial bait in front of returning or new customers. Consumers who have chosen to use cable phones, computer phones or wireless phones for their primary lines can now add the reliability and security of a Verizon landline to their household for $9.99 a month for a year. Win back programs are a staple of the competitive communications business, so the mere fact of a win back offer isn't surprising. Even the promotional price, though quite promotional, is unheard of.

The key element here is that Verizon is signaling that it has had enough of competitor poaching, and is prepared to halt the erosion, even at the price of destroying its POTS line margins. The prize now is shifting to lines in service. Broadband may be foundational, but a customer relationship is key to upselling other services. If that is POTS, so be it. The worse thing at this point is stranded assets, not margin off a POTS line, necessarily.