Global Broadband Access Prices

Average prices in October 2007, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In the U.S. market, speeds keep going up and prices down.

Charter Communications, for example, will be upgrading speeds in most of its markets over the next three-to-four months. Charter's 3 Mbps tier will be bumped to 5 Mbps, the 5 Mbps service will be upgraded to 10 Mbps service and the company's 10 Mbps tier will be boosted to 16 Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream. Prices apparently will vary by market.

Verizon in October launched a new tier of symmetric internet access service over its FiOS network that increases upstream and downstream speed up to 20 Mbps.

Why Google Will Be a Mobile Force

Google is poised to charge the mobile Web applications for a very simple reason. Mobile advertising is an ad-supported medium it hasn't yet begun to dominate. Second, Google dominates Web applications, period, according to Net Applications.

And if you believe the mobile Web will be THE Web for billions of users, and an increasingly useful adjunct to PC-based Web apps for billions more, Google has to play.

Google and Sprint

We might know by the end of the day what the relationships are, but Sprint Nextel's fate hangs on just a couple things right now. It has to fix its customer service problems and has hired 4,500 people to get that done. Assuming that stops being a problem, it has to decide what to do about protecting its base business while dealing with its WiMAX network. Right now Sprint runs two separate physical networks and WiMAX makes three. Then there are the logical networks for voice and data. Plus back office systems that are in the process of unification, but not all there yet.

More immediately, if it can get a deal with Google, and push the device really hard, it has a chance to stop the excessive customer churn that prevents it from dealing with the WiMAX issue effectively. Google devices might help Sprint with churn, giving Sprint time to repair its customer service reputation and plot a reasonable future for WiMAX.

Most of the churn seems to come from the Nextel side of the house in any case. Is it so crazy to consider divesting Nextel and proceeding with WiMAX?

In Business, BlackBerry Users Happiest

BlackBerry devices manufactured by Research in Motion rank highest in overall customer satisfaction among business wireless smartphone users, according to J.D. Power and Associates.

RIM ranks highest in overall smartphone customer satisfaction with a score of 702 points on a 1,000-point scale, performing particularly well in the operating system factor, which includes the speed of moving between applications and speed of sending/receiving e-mails. RIM also performs particularly well in battery aspects, including the length of battery life. Treo manufacturer Palm (698) and Samsung (698) tie to closely follow RIM in the ranking.

Highly satisfied owners are more than 50 percent more likely to repurchase the same brand than those who are not satisfied with their smartphone, J.D. Power says.

Silicon Valley Wi-Fi Hits Wall

Silicon Valley has been working for nearly two years to roll out an ambitious Wi-Fi plan covering the entire area. The project continues to face delays, though, among them investment. So far, investors aren’t willing to foot the $500,000 bill for pilot testing. Muni Wi-Fi is facing problems everywhere.

Google Mobile Changes Paradigm

We'll know the details soon enough, but the outlines of Google's assault on the mobile business are clear enough already. Apple deserves credit for chipping away in a significant way at the closed model traditionally employed by mobile service providers. Google appears poised to transform the model altogether. In bringing an open platform and ecosystem to the mass markets for the first time, it might be fair to say that what Google is attempting is the creation of an Internet model for the mobile business.

That is to say, as any device and application can be used on the Interent, so Google proposes to allow any application or device to be built on its open model, and used as a mobile computing device. In that sense, Google is attempting to create a new mobile PC business more than take share in a mobile phone business.

Give credit to Apple for opening the door. Watch for Google to blow the door down.

More Google Partners

Japanese wireless carriers KDDI and NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Broadcom, HTC, Intel and Texas Instruments also are said to be partners for the upcoming Google phone initiative.