Verizon Shows its Hand: Four New Phones

We will start to see what Verizon ihas been thinking as it reportedly turned down the iPhone and the rumored GPhone as well. There are business model issues to consider, of course. But there also has been speculation that Verizon had something in mind to satisfy the iPhone segment of the market.

Perhaps we will start getting our answers soon, as Verizon has introduced four new phones with high visual appeal, built by Samsung, Research in Motion and Lucky Goldstar.

The new Samsung Juke, BlackBerry Pearl, LG Venus and LG Voyager are being launched simultaneously. That's sort of like responding to a cannon shot with a salvo.

The "Juke," Verizon's name for the Samsung U470 and reportedly features 2 GBytes of storage, A2DP Bluetooth and a 1.3 megapixel camera. The Juke will be sold exclusively by Verizon Wireless and will be available in blue, red and teal at launch.

BlackBerry will contribute a new Pearl model with a 2 megapixel camera, A2DP and a 3.5mm audio jack. Tinted silver, a color exclusive to Verizon Wireless, the BlackBerry Pearl 8130 has built-in GPS.

The dual screen "Venus" slider by LG features a miniSD expansion card slot, A2DP, a 2 megapixel camera and touchscreen capabilities, including vibration feedback. Available in both black and pink, it features one screen with vibration feedback. It also offers a microSD memory port that accommodates up to 8 GB of expandable memory.

The LG Voyager features a large external touchscreen and a QWERTY keyboard, plus a second screen. Verizon says the phone will feature a full HTML browser, microSD expansion card, 2 megapixel camera, A2DP and built-in stereo speakers. The Voyager will be available exclusively from Verizon Wireless. There is a removable microSD memory slot that holds up to 8 GB of memory.

Juke, an ultra-narrow phone that comes in three colors and is shaped like a chocolate bar, is said to be aimed at fashion-conscious users who don't need heavy email or Web surfing. Voyager most nearly squares up with the iPhone, but also appears better suited for heavy email and text usage. The new Pearl appears aimed at work users who want to carry the same device with them in their roles as consumers.

Verizon Wireless has not given exact pricing beyond saying each phone would target a different segment and range from under $100 to about $400.

Carrier Fiber Plans Accelerating?

Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, hasn't come to terms with BT about ways to speed up fiber to customer investments in the U.K. market. Up to this point BT has objected to earlier proposals that would have applied relatively robust wholesale requirements to new optical access plant. Perhaps there is new hope for some compromise that reassures investors, speeds up fiber deployment and yet offers some hope of a return.

Around the world, fiber to customer deployments seem poised to accelerate, but both competitive providers such as Illiad in France and Verizon in the United States have been punished by the financial community for daring to proceed with such deployments, which are costly, no doubt. U.S. cable companies have the same problem. Every time there is a hint that capital spending plans might intensify, equity values get hit. Comcast appears to be under that cloud as well at the moment.

Irrespective of the competitive elements of such decisions--obviously the providers making the investments want to keep the rewards, if they can be had--these networks can only be built by private capital. And private capital keeps making clear concern about the payback, whether those investments are made by cable companies, incumbent telcos or competitive providers.

At this point it is a simple fact that the investment framework has to reassure the capital markets. Yes, competition is desirable. But that has to be balanced against capital markets that actually loathe competition. Let's hope Ofcom and BT can thread this needle.

at&t to Launch VoIP Bundled with fiber

By the end of the year, at&t U-verse customers will be able to buy voice services running over the fiber-to-neighborhood service, instead of running a separate circuit-switched voice network to customer locations. The move signals that at&t is completely comfortable with the ruggedness and dependability of its VoIP offering, and is moving towards IP-based voice that can be interwoven with other services at&t plans to offer.

The move also is an early harbinger of a time when VoIP widely will be used as a standard replacement for landline voice, much as cable companies now use VoIP to deliver "digital voice" services that are feature equivalent with plain old telephone service but use IP technology.

The new VoIP offerng also will not be based on the CallVantage platform, because CallVantage "doesn't scale," at&t executives say.

The new VoIP product will be available in markets where at&t delivers U-verse TV.
at&t says its upgraded network will reach about eight million homes by the end of this year. The company intends to pass 18 million homes by the end of 2008.

Apparently at&t plans to move slowly offering VoIP services that run over Digital Subscriber Line, though.

From at&t's standpoint, that makes sense. Having watched IP, flat rate plans, competition, mobility, family plans and other forces wipe out much of the profit in long distance, VoIP stands poised to attack voice-based local access revenues as well. at&t will move, when it has to. But it is hard to fault them for not wanting to hasten the revenue decline from that product line.

Nokia Navteq: a Service Provider?

Nokia is acquiring Navteq, a leading provider of digital map information for navigation systems and devices, Internet-based mapping applications, and government and business solutions. Navteq also owns Traffic.com, a Web service that provides traffic information and content to consumers. Navteq had 2006 revenues of $582 million and has approximately 3,000 employees located in 168 offices in 30 countries. Nokia is paying $8.1 billion.

By acquiring Navteq, Nokia will strengthen its location-based services and take a step away form being a device manufacturer and becoming an applications provider, at least in part. And why not? More and more of the value of any product are provided by the services wrapped around the device.

Nokia says it plans to use location capabilities to expand into areas such as entertainment and communities. In Japan, location services already are a fairly significantly used feature.

Time Warner Launches Business TV

Time Warner Cable Business Class has launched BusinessLink.tv, an IPTV service that delivers real-time, high-speed broadcast TV video service directly to the computers of its business customers in select New York and New Jersey markets.

The BusinessLink.tv service delivers high-quality news and information video programming to clients via cable modem across their enterprise LAN using IP multicast connectivity. It is, in other words, bandwidth efficient.

The television networks included in the BusinessLink.tv New York City offering are: NY1 News, CNN, CNN Headline News, CNN International, CNBC, CNBC World, Bloomberg TV, Fox News, Fox Business News, and The Weather Channel. This 10-channel IPTV delivery service requires a 4 Mbps core local area network bandwidth.

And you thought people were wasting time using Facebook! Just kidding. I do the same thing in sneakernet fashion, having one of the news channels up all day in the background while working. It is quite helpful. Of course, I'm in the news and analysis business, so it is simply another form of "scanning" the environment. I would not give it up.

Open Source or Proprietary? Even Split

When functionality is equivalent, IT security professionals have an almost equal preference for deploying open source software (53 percent) as commercial software (47 percent), according to a recent survey of 228 security professionals by Barracuda Networks.

In the survey, 80 percent of respondents cited pricing as the top reason for adopting open source software over commercial software, while 57 percent selected access to source code and 41 percent chose community code review as the primary reasons for open source preference.

On the other hand, the survey found that the top reason for deploying commercial software was vendor professional services, at 65 percent, while 47 percent of respondents named ease of adoption in their organization and 47 percent said automated updates were key.

Better bug fixes are one open source advantage. So is access to the source code. Proprietary software, on the other hand, benefits from the perception that it will be easier to deploy and support over time. We can argue about how long that will continue to be true. There isn't much doubt that open source also is becoming part of the larger fabric of software offered by suppliers who historically have offered proprietary solutions.

All of which suggests that open source simply has become another tool to use, when it works and when it fits.

BT Gets Jabber

Jabber, Inc. BT Group has selected the Jabber Extensible Communications Platform (Jabber XCP™) to provide instant messaging for BT's 21st Century Network (21CN) program. Jabber will license software to BT for consumer, government, and enterprise users worldwide. In addition, the engagement between BT and Jabber includes consulting and development services which will fully integrate the Jabber XCP platform into BT’s common capabilities network.

Integrating Jabber XCP will allow BT to extend messaging across applications and services, providing BT customers with a centralized view of message routing, one-to-one IM, group chat, offline messages, message history, file transfer, and interoperability with other messaging systems such as Yahoo!, MSN, Google, and AOL.

The 21CN program, BT Group’s ongoing network transformation project, will replace the United Kingdom’s incumbent Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) with an Internet Protocol (IP) system while facilitating additional services such as on-demand interactive television, mobile television, and mobile radio.