BT to Expose Itself

Project Web21C BETA software developer kit will expose network capabilities to developers working in the .NET Visual Studio, Java, PHP and Python environments. Initially the thinking seems to be to provide developers a way to add communications and global positioning satellite features to applications. The Web21C SDK abstracts the services interface and serialization classes by providing the developer with a simple object model to interact with.

The Web21C SDK provides the ability to embed Short Message Service into an application, for example. It also allows applications to make phone calls, conference calls, presence information, authentication, a way to store and retrieve data about an individual and location information.

A somewhat parallel effort, the BT Applications Marketplace, aims to give developers a way to market apps to the BT customer base.

BlackBerry Outage Disrupts Enterprise Ops

In a webinar poll conducted April 18 by ProfitIine, 81 percent of responding large enterprise IT and telecom professionals reported disruption to operations from the BlackBerry outage. Some 44.5 percent reported "moderate or substantial" impact to enterprise productivity. Only 18.2 percent reported no impact from the outage.

Engagement Might be The Issue

A recent Forrester Research survey suggests that mobile data apps are moving into the mainstream. More than one-third of mobile subscribers use text messaging, and 18 percent send or receive picture messages, but adoption of the mobile Internet lags, with only 11 percent using it.

As you might expect, data users are not only younger, but their attitudes also expose a deeper engagement with their mobile phone and service, and they are more satisfied with all aspects of their mobile experience than are those who only use voice.

Which raises an issue: even as wireline providers are able to leverage IP to provide richer directory and call log features, as well as click to call, will those new attributes put a brake on user engagement with their mobiles?

Certainly Embarq believes that offering wireline call logs, directory services and click to call are going to enhance the value of wireline voice, says Bill Blessing, Embarq SVP. He's undoubtedly right about that.

The issue is that end user involvement with their mobiles seems to be increasing. Mobiles are personal. Landlines are tethered to places. Mobiles inherently are "mine." Landlines are "ours" or "yours." You might use a landline. It is not "you."

Don't Have It, Don't Want It

Some 29 percent of U.S. homes do not buy any form of Internet access, and 44 percent of the "resisters" says they don't buy service because they are not interested in anything on the Internet. About 22 percent say they don't buy because they do not own a PC. The 31 million U.S. Internet "resister" homes also say they don't plan to buy access for the next year either, says a Parks Associates study. Parks researchers also find that most new broadband access subscriptions are coming from dial-up customers who are upgrading, not "newbies."

MetroPCS: More Evidence Voice is Not a Commodity

MetroPCS provides more evidence that even mass market mobile phone service is not a commodity, in the strict sense. MetroPCS offers flat rate local and domestic U.S. calling in Miami, Tampa, Sarasota, Atlanta, San Francisco, Dallas, Detroit and the Sacramento metropolitan areas to more than three million customers at the moment.

It might be said to specialize in a several market segments: people who want flat rate wireline pricing plus mobility; people who have problems qualifying for prepaid plans; immigrant communities; people who don't like contracts; people who don't like credit checks or deposits; younger users and first time users.

MetroPCS offers a $30 per month service plan offering unlimited calling. For an additional $5 to $20 per month, ssubscribers can add nationwide long distance calling, unlimited text messaging (domestic and international), voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, picture and multimedia messaging, mobile Internet browsing, push e-mail, data and other a la carte options on a prepaid basis.

The company's most-popular service plans are the unlimited $40 and $45 rate plans which offer unlimited local and long distance calling, text and picture messaging, enhanced voice mail, caller ID, call waiting and 3-way calling. Those plans are purchased by more than 85 percent of MetroPCS customers.

On February 22, 2007 the company introduced a new $50 service plan which includes unlimited mobile Internet browsing and push e-mail in addition to the services included in our $45 service plan.

MetroPCS customers in all metropolitan areas averaged approximately 2,000 minutes of use per month, compared to approximately 875 minutes per month for customers of the national wireless carriers. Average usage at thsoe levels suggests that a substantial number of customers use MetroPCS as their primary telecommunications service. Approximately 65 percent are first time wireless users.

Though cable and tier one telecom providers clearly have bet their futures on triple and quadruple play strategies, MetroPCS (and Leap Wireless) show that a targeted wireless pure play is possible, if a provider is willing to segment. And note that the company's average revenue per user does not appear to different than that of the market leading companies.

Talking, generally considered to be a commodity, does not appear to be such a thing if one looks at the matter closely.

Satellite Gains at Cable's Expense?

According to a survey taken early to mid March, there's evidence some households are about to make a move to satellite TV, especially DirecTV. While Comcast remains the current leader among U.S. and Canadian TV service providers, DirecTV shows the most market share momentum, says the Changewave Alliance, after a survey of nearly 3700 members.

And though customer satisfaction does not reliably translate into loyalty, it appears that satellite video services rank well on that score. Satellite customers say they are much more satisfied than cable customers. "Moreover, Satellite satisfaction ratings have improved four points since our previous survey, while cable satisfaction rates have declined two points, Changewave says.

DirecTV now is the industry leader in terms of customer satisfaction and has also experienced the biggest improvement since November. Comcast has experienced the biggest decline.

Most significantly, satellite s about to gain at cable's expense, Changewave says. "A total of 13 percent of our survey respondents say they plan to switch providers in the next six months and nearly half of these (48 percent) say they’ll switch to satellite.

Amazon: Compute in the Cloud

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) appear to be getting traction. The whole idea is to provide easy to use computing and storage "in the cloud." S3 recently had a peak day with 921 million requests, says Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. At the peak second for the service, there were 16,600 requests. A year ago Amazon had 800,000 "objects" on the service. Now there are over five billion. S3 and EC2 are just a couple of reasons why the pace of Web application development has gotten so blistering.