Amp'd Customers Were a Collections Nightmare

Amp'd customers were heavy data consumers. Unfortunately, they also tended not to pay their bills. Amp'd apparently experienced an unprecedented growth of subscribers between November 2006, and February 2007 after running ads on MTV about the wireless phone company's lineup of mobile music and video content.

"Approximately 90 percent of the debtor's customers were on 18-month service contracts," according to Amp'd. By May this year, the number of nonpaying customers reached 80,000. That's nearly half of Amp'd's current customer base of 175,000 subscribers.

The filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, which says the company owes more than $100 million to creditors, including Verizon Wireless. Since Verizon is one of the largest creditors, it might make sense for Verizon to salvage something out of the mess, and acquire the 50 percent of customers who actually do pay their bills, and exhibit behavior Verizon wants to encourage.

Allo Goes Dark

Allo.com, a small independent VoIP provider based in British Columbia, went live in February. It apparently now is going dark. Five months.

One Reason why Skype is Not Growing So Fast

Jaxtr allows free international calls using mobile phones. Jaxtr says its membership has doubled to 500,000 users in the past month, and is signing up new users on the Web at a rate of more than 12,000 a day.

And then there are Jajah, Jangl, Rebtel and GrandCentral as well.

"No download is required, and our direct numbers can be dialed from any type of mobile phone or even ordinary landline phones," Jaxtr CEO Executive Konstantin Guericke said, contrasting its Web-based approach to certain complexities of other services.

SME VoIP: 30 Percent Annual Growth

IP Lines being installed into small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) will grow 30 percent a year over the next five years, according to the Dell'Oro Group. IP lines will grow from slightly less than 20 percent of lines shipments into SME locations in 2006 to almost 60 percent in 2011.

In contrast, digital and analog line shipments will decline at an average of 10 percent a year through 2011. Traditional systems will fair even worse, declining to less that 5 percent of the total market by 2011, Dell'Oro says.

This might be the least controversial forecast it is possible to make. Once analog-to-digital transitions really get going, it is hard to buy the older technology even if one really wants it.

Perhaps Google Can't Lose in 700 MHz Auction

If Google succeeds in getting a mandatory wholesale access requirement for the C block of spectrum, it wins. Whether Google itself wins the spectrum (probably not) or not, somebody will, so Google and Google can lease spectrum directly, or work with somebody else who will lease spectrum on its behalf.

Even if it entirely fails to win a mandatory wholesale clause, Google is no worse off than it used to be, because existing provisions for the 700-MHz equivalent of "Carterfone" will still make it easier for Google and its ecosystem to create features, devices and applications optimized for mobility.

One fact seems certain: as hard as it is to build a "wholesale-only" national infrastructure play, if mandatory access conditions are attached to the C block of frequencies, the business case will be harder for owners of retail spectrum in the other two blocks. The pricing umbrella of course will be set by the C block providers.

Clearwire and Sprint will face some issues because the radio propagation characteristics of the 700 MHz spectrum are much better than those for the 2.5 GHz blocks Clearwire and Sprint will be using to build their national 4G network. Like the old UHF broadcast stations who used the 700 MHz frequencies, signals got through walls pretty easily, even to "rabbit ears" antennae. Digital propagation should be better, since today's signal processing chips can reconstruct a signal from weaker or more refracted signal sources.

In fact, he 700 MHz signals should provide the "best" "through the walls" performance of any wireless networks, period. The higher frequencies conceivably will offer higher raw bandwidth potential (for reasons related to the more rapid oscillations of the radio signals at higher frequencies).

And there remains the possibility that the auction rules might emerge in final form someplace between formal wholesale access for the C block and hard-to-enforce "Carterfone" principles. In any event, Google's odds of winning are higher than its odds of simply being no worse off than it currently is.

Sprint, Clearwire to Create One National Network

Sprint Nextel and Clearwire say they will combine their efforts and spectrum to create a national mobile WiMAX network covering the entire United States. Sprint Nextel's network would cover 185 million people while Clearwire's would cover 115 million.

Services would be sold under a common brand. The two firms have set a target of 100 million potential customers initually, by the end of 2008. There is no word on what becomes of Clearwire's VoIP deal with BCE. As part of the deal, Clearwire will have the ability to offer Sprint Nextel’s third generation voice and data services as part of a bundle or on a stand-alone basis to Clearwire’s customers, which will also allow Clearwire to provide dual-mode services to its customers.

Sprint Nextel will take the lead in establishing relationships with national distributors and other potential strategic partners, including wholesale or mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) arrangements. The initial term of the arrangement is 20 years, with three 10-year renewal periods.

Nobody has excess capital to throw into a new national broadband access network, it certainly appears.

SunRocket, Ooma, Verizon, Vodafone, at&t

So the VoIP blogging community is talking about almost nothing but Ooma this morning. But as I mentioned on my other blog (www.ipbusinessmag.com), focusing so much energy on SunRocket's travails, which was the other recent item everybody was talking about, though obviously of high interest, has almost no strategic implications for the broader communications industry. Rumors that first had Vodafone pondering buying Verizon, though almost certainly an investment banker's trial balloon, are something else.

Today Andy Abramson says his sources say it actually is at&t that is talking about buying Vodafone. Now that would be quite a deal. And while this particular rumor also could be the result of an investment banker's strategy, it does fit quite well what new at&t CEO Randall Stephenson has been saying about at&t. It is a "wireless company" that has no intentions of abandoning its grow by acquisition strategy.

Ooma is interesting. What happened to SunRocket also is a high interest event. But neither is going to have truly strategic direct implications for the global VoIP industry. Whatever one might say about the particularities of the U.S. VoIP industry, VoIP continues to grow on a global basis, almost mechanically.

Wireless increasingly is the way voice gets done. Social networking portals, instant messaging and enterprise apps also are emerging ways voice and communications gets done. All of that is a really big deal.