FCC to Look at Traffic Shaping

The Associated Press says the Federal Communications Commission will investigate complaints that Comcast Corp. actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online.

This should be very interesting. One one hand, there's an issue about packet blocking. On the other hand there is an issue of exposure to copyright law, since much peer-to-peer traffic that Comcast and others appear to be blocking infringes copyright laws.

A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data. Two groups also asked the FCC to fine Comcast at a rate of $195,000 for every affected subscriber.

It is possible there are two intertwined issues here: packet blocking and copyright violations. The former might be technologically necessary to prevent the latter.

Satellite Broadband Gets Eutelsat, ViaSat Boost

French satellite operators Eutelsat SA and U.S.-based ViaSat want to leapfrog current and emerging generations of satellite-based broadband, and are putting money behind the effort, according to the Wall Street Journal.

To put the effort into perspective, the ViaSat satellite will have bandwidth exceeding the combined signal capacity of nearly all the two-way commercial communications satellites serving North America, ViaSat calculates. Basically, the two new satellites will offer price-per-bit performance an order of magnitude better than the advanced satellites in orbit today.

For its part, Eutelsat's one new advanced satellite will have a capacity equal to Eutelsat's entire 24-satellite existing fleet.

Each company has committed to separately build and launch a satellite with 10 to 15 times greater capacity than the most-advanced birds already in orbit. The companies say they plan to share some marketing and capital expenditures in securing wholesale customers.

Eutelsat hopes to launch its satellite in 2010, with ViaSat scheduled about a year later. In the U.S., the Internet connections are expected to cost between $49 and $79 a month.

Business Fiber: Better, Not Good

By some measures, business customers have better fiber access than they used to. By other measures, most businesses still do not. One has to be in a building with enough private line potential to support something on the order of four T1 circuits, says McLeodUSA CEO Royce Holland. And as recent data from service providers such as XO Communications shows, most business customers are not in those buildings.

In fact, despite strenuous efforts by all sorts of companies that make a living providing fiber-based services to business customers, lower T1 prices over the last decade arguably have made the "fiber to building" business case tougher. Lower T1 prices obviously reduce the amount of recurring revenue any provider can hope to make from a single site.

The countervailing trend is higher demand for optical services such as Ethernet. Though the cost of hardware has declined over the last 10 years, the cost of installation and construction has not, and that's most of the cost.

Skype Hits 11 Million Concurrent Users

Whatever concerns eBay might have about Skype's ability to attract new users, Skype recently hit the 11 million concurrent users level, after passing the he 10 million user milestone was passed 83 days ago on October 17, 2007. Since 2006, there has been concern about some slackening of the pace of new user additions and at least momentary dips in Skype usage. Concurrent usage arguably is a better metric than client downloads, and that growth rate seems consistent.

Robust Enterprise Social Networking

If ChangeWave Research is correct, wikis, blogs and social networking are being adopted by corporations at an explosive rate.

ChangeWave Research recently surveyed 2,081 companies and found 24 percent already using social software, while eight percent say they will start using it within a year. Wikis apparently are used by 20 percent of respondents, blogs by 18 percent, social networking by 15 percent, says Joshua Levine, ChangeWave researcher.

While current users find wikis to be most useful, future adopters think blogs (26 percent) and social networks (21 percent) will be most beneficial.

About 39 percent report their company is very or somewhat willing to use Web 2.0 social software for business purposes.

Current users say they use social networking to improve internal employee collaboration as well as to increase internal efficiency and productivity.

Users who say their firms will be adopting social networking also agree about the merits of internal communications, but also are more focused on using the tools to
improve external customer service and support, increase brand awareness and loyalty
and drive sales of products and services.

at&t, Telefonica Eyeing Targets?

Apparently, at&t wants to buy a stake in the mobile arm of state-controlled phone firm Telekom Malaysia , a Malaysian newspaper has reported.

Telekom Malaysia is spinning off its mobile business into a separately listed firm, TM International, which will include its domestic Celcom unit and operations in nine other countries, including India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Separately, there is talk of Vodafone or Best Buy buying Carphone Warehouse. There also are rumors that KPN is being eyed by Telefonica (KPN denies talks are underway).

Given the success Western European mobile providers are having in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, we might make one observation: though wireless has underpinned carrier revenue growth over the past several years, internal growth now is slowing sharply, meaning growth will have to be sought "out of territory."

Typically, when that sort of situation develops, it is a clear sign that internal growth prospects are limited.

Less Focus on Landlines?

Once upon a time, telecom analysts tracked the volume of a carrier's access lines in service, applied a revenue per line metric, and got pretty close to that carrier's annual revenue. No longer.

Given the mutltiple lines of business and products, if anything gets tracked as a more accurate predicator of how a carrier is doing, it is revenue-generating units.

Keep in mind that most tier one "telco" service providers get something on the order of 20 percent of revenue from consumer landlines these days. To be be sure, lines still are important cash flow generators, but no longer are driving growth.

That honor is reserved for mobile and broadband products. Businesses are a different matter, but for consumers, most of whom are equipped with wireless phones in any case, there just are more questions every day about why to keep a wireline circuit.

Some analysts predict that, by 2010 (two more years) wireless-only households should rise to 27 percent, from at least 13 percent in 2007, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Other analysts think the figures already are higher, in the 17 percent range.