EarthLink Wants to Sell Municipal Wi-Fi Assets

EarthLink is considering "strategic alternatives" for its municipal Wi-Fi business, says Associated Press, a phrase that generally means it is for sale.

EarthLink originally had hoped it might be able to come up with a revised business plan that relied on additional investment by partners, including the municipalities that wanted the networks in the first place.

The company "decided that making significant further investments in this business could be inconsistent with our objective of maximizing shareholder value," says Rolla Huff, EarthLink CEO.

Enterprises Can't Block User Mobile Phone Choices

As most enterprises struggle to get a grip on mobility costs and strategy, users continue to impose their own desires for devices that better integrate their jobs and personal lives, says Zeus Kerravala, Yankee Group analyst. They will use what they find most useful in both settings regardless of any corporate efforts to slow or block adoption.

Enterprises were not able to stop users from bringing consumer messaging and VoIP applications into the office, and mobile devices won't prove any different, despite general IT executive opposition.

According to Yankee's latest research, at least 45 percent of all enterprise workers operate outside of the traditional office setting at least part of the time.

If consumer-driven mobile systems offer workers better performance and more robust applications than the devices endorsed by their employers, they will use them, Kerravala says.

Google Riding Global Wave

As much speculation as there has been about a possible Google bid for 700 MHz spectrum, there now are new reasons to think Google is deadly serious, and that provide new strategic reasons to win the auction, not just to bid for tactical reasons.

A U.N. telecom meeting has decided to give mobile service providers access to similar bandwidth currently reserved for terrestrial television broadcasts, making mobile Internet access a major new wireless feature globally by 2015.

Google simply would be early in the new business if it acquires and then operates a mobile Internet service. Significantly, global data roaming will be much easier as the new rules on spectrum use will rely heavily on common frequencies in diverse regions, meaning handsets will be able to interoperate. That promises higher sales volumes and hence lower costs, on both the infrastructure and handset fronts.

Consumers in the United States are to gain access to at least some of the spectrum in question by 2009, but it will take an additional six years before those in Europe, Africa, China, Russia and much of the Middle East will have the same access.

A U.S. government auction of key 700 MHz spectrum 698 megahertz to 806 megahertz range)is scheduled for February.

The same frequencies will be available for mobile services throughout the Americas, India, Japan, Korea and a number of other Asian countries, while the rest of the world will initially use only the 790 megahertz to 862 megahertz range.

Unlike many recent spectrum auctions, which essentially resulted in more bandwidth to support legacy services, most observers think the new spectrum largely will be used for IP-based Web applications and data.

Despite the challenges and risks, Google might want to move more aggressively given the new global implications.

Email Communication Declining in U.K. Market

Most people would guess that teenagers send more instant or text messages than emails. In the U.K., says ComScore, it is a quantifiable trend. As it turns out, people now are communicating more from within the context of their social networks than using portal-based email. That isn't yet true for business communications, of course.

But it stands to reason that personal use of email is for communication with friends and family. And if those people are part of a social network, one doesn't have to go outside the network to send messages. Some day soon, people will launch and receive voice, video and other communications from within the social network as well.

Mobile IM Use Increasing

According to the second annual AP-AOL Instant Messaging Trends Survey, 25 percent of respondents send instant messages from their mobile phones, including 32 percent teens.

In addition, IM users are instant messaging from within their social networking profiles.

More than 27 percent of users say they use instant messaging at work. Further, half of at-work IM users say that instant messaging makes them more productive at work, a 25 percent increase over last year.

More than half (55 percent) of teen IM users have used instant messaging to get help with their homework. This is a 17 percent increase over last year. Meanwhile, 22 percent of teens say they have sent an IM to ask for or accept a date.

Forty-three percent of teen IM users say they have used instant messaging to say something they would not say to someone in person. Teenage girls are more likely than boys to do so. Nearly half of teenage girls surveyed have used instant messaging to say something they would not say in person, compared with just over a third of teenage boys.

Nearly three in four teens (70 percent) and one in four adults (24 percent) send more instant messages than emails.

Multi-tasking remains very popular, as IM users tend to engage in multiple online activities while sending instant messages. Checking email is the most popular activity among eight in ten adult and teen IM users. After email, adult IM users most often conduct online searches (49 percent), while teens say they like to research homework assignments online (57 percent).

Nearly four in five (79 percent) at-work IM users say they have used instant messaging in the office to take care of personal matters. One in five (19 percent) IM users say they send more instant messages than emails to their co-workers and colleagues.

Google Will Bid on 700 MHz Spectrum!

Google is preparing to bid at least $4.6 billion for wireless spectrum to be bought at the Federal Communications Commission's January auction, the Wall Street Journal reported says. The company is planning to bid without partners, a move some of us would not have predicted.

The company is beta testing a wireless solution in preparation for running a full-scale national mobile network. Obviously, Google as a mobile network services provider would be highly disruptive to the existing legacy carrier business models, given the likelihood Google would emerge fairly quickly as a packaging, pricing and
network functionality innovator.

One simply has to point back to packaging and pricing innovation by just one carrier--AT&T--to illustrate the fact that a significant new pricing pattern, in this case the concept of a bucket of minutes for a flat fee, can cause an entire industry to react.

A bid obviously would vastly complicate Google's other efforts to gain favorable placement of its software on all sorts of devices compatible with all sorts of carrier networks. But Google probably wins even if it loses. By creating a "bid" poker chip, it can wring concessions out of recalcitrant carriers who might be wary of giving Google more play.

And there are very real costs to be borne by the likes of Verizon and at&t if Google enters the bidding contest. It is not simply the threat that Google wins. If Google bids, the final price paid by the auction winner, whether at&t or Verizon, will be higher than if Google had not been a contestant.

Making War on Your Customers a Mistake. Duh!

Edgar Bronfman, Warner Music CEO, says mobile service providers should not make the mistake the music industry did. "We used to fool ourselves,' he says. "We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was."

"We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding," he says. "And of course we were wrong."

"We inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won," he says.

Mobile operators risk making the same mistake with their music services, he says.

"The sad truth is that most of what consumers are being offered today on the mobile platform is boring, banal and basic," Bronfman says. "People want a more interesting form of mobile music content."

"They want it to be easy to buy with a single click," he adds. "And they want access to it, quickly and easily, wherever they are, 24/7."