Cut Prices or Else: EU to Carriers

EU telecomumunications Commissioner Viviane Reding has given the mobile phone industry until July 1 to cut the price charged to people for sending text messages or surfing the Web on their laptops while outside their home nation in the EU region.

Hoping to head off mandatory pricing and regulation Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and KPN also have announced cuts in their data roaming prices.

As many in the computing and Web worlds are starting to discover, governments and regulators have much to say about which services and companies can succeed in the communications business, and even affect the amount of profits any contestant can make.

Any mandatory EU intervention to cut the price of sending text messages or using the Internet while traveling outside one's home country would be limited to the wholesale level. In other words, the EU would regulate the prices carriers can charge other carriers for roaming access, but leave service providers free to set their own retail prices.

Telecom Italia: Functional Separation of Access Network

It's official: Telecom Italia is creating a separate wholesale access operation clearly separated from Telecom Italia retail operations. When the new change takes effect, Telecom Italia retail and all other competitors will buy access services from the wholesale business.

Open Access will develop and maintain the access network infrastructure and manage activation and other processes.

The move is the latest example of ways different service providers in different countries are adapting to differing regulatory regimes and competitive "facts on the ground."

While there have been discussions of structural separation in the U.S. market, there never has been any political will to change the regulatory regime strongly in that direction, though aggressive wholesale discounts were the rule, for a period after 1996, and began heading the other way after about 2004.

Markets where functional separation has been adopted tend to be characterized by weak ability on the part of cable operators to provide meaningful competition in voice and high-speed Internet access services.

That isn't the case in the U.S. market, where regulators basically have decided that a competitive duopoly where cable and telco incumbents battle it out will lead to the greatest consumer gains, in the shortest amount of time. As a practical matter regulators probably got this one right.

Given the current state of capital markets over the past four or five years, it is virtually impossible to raise enough money to build a third, widespread broadband terrestrial network. Aggressive wholesale requirements meanwhile were all the excuse the large telcos needed to drag their feet on rapid broadband upgrades.

It is no coincidence that Project Lightspeed and Verizon FiOS really cranked up after it was clear the aggressive wholesale requirements would not stand.

That said, nothing in the telecom world ever is completely stable. What the government gives, the government takes away. At some point, the rules will begin to change again. As always in the U.S. market, the issue is whether the problem is too much freedom or not enough.

Vonage Churn: Not an Issue if it Survives

Should Vonage survive, it might be able to get its churn rates under three percent a month. But it would be a surprise if, even under the best of circumstances, it got churn below two percent a month.

That's a big "if," but history suggests lower churn is possible, if not easy. The reason is that, over time, customers learn the value of a new type of service or application, and gradually come to have a better understanding of why it is they actually need and use a service. There always is lots of churn at first.

The U.S. cable industry struggled precisely with churn at the same levels Vonage grapples with, in the late 1980s and 1990s. Today's churn levels are far below that, but not much below two percent a month. And there's a reason even for that level of churn.

People move. That's called "uncontrollable" churn because there isn't a heck of a lot most providers (except those with a huge footprint) can do about people moving. Wireless providers used to have three percent a month churn as well. These days, most save Sprint Nextel are down just a hair under two percent a month.

They don't necessarily have the "customer is moving" problem so much with the advent of continental U.S. calling buckets that mean local calls cost the same as long distance. A new dwelling in a new area doesn't necessarily mean any change in calling rates and charges, so there is less "uncontrollable" churn.

Still, even the largest of the wireless carriers have just a bit under two percent a month churn. So far, in the consumer markets, that's about as good as it gets.

In the commercial markets, guess what the monthly churn rate is for many smaller independent service providers? Three percent.

That's not great, but the point is that it is hardly unusual, especially for new services, smaller providers and any service tethered to a location. The good news for Vonage is that, like a mobile provider, its service is not tied to a physical location. Over time, and should it survive, it can expect, with diligence and the passage of time, to get its churn down to about two percent a month.

The issue is simply to stay in business long enough for the learning effects to kick in.

Broadband Adoption: Under Par for the Course

Since broadband first became widely available to consumers in the late 1990s, adoption has hit the
halfway point faster than most other information and communication technologies.

It took 18 years for the personal computer to be used by 50 percent of Americans at home and 18 years for color TV to reach half of homes.

Mobile phone penetration took 15 years to reach the "half of homes" point. It took 14 years for the video cassette recorder, and 10 and one half years for the compact disc player to reach the same level of penetration.

It has taken about 10 years for broadband to reach 50 percent of homes. We can argue about the price of broadband, the definition of broadband, the quality or terms of service under which broadband can be purchased.

But it continues to surprise me that some observers still think there is some sort of crisis or problem here. Over the last year bandwidths have been leaping, not just incrementally increasing. There's more third generation wireless access, more WiMAX, more Wi-Fi. With a new SpaceWay satellite in orbit, there's much more satellite broadband capacity coming online as well.

And the last time I checked, some 98 percent of U.S. homes had access to at least one wireline broadband provider, and depending on where the location is, one or two satellite providers. Again, depending on location, users have access to one to three broadband mobile networks as well.

Few countries save Japan have prices-per-megabit lower than U.S. consumers do. By all means let us solve problems. But it doesn't do much good to keep trying to "solve" problems that already are in the process of being fixed.

And by any historical standard broadband access is a product being adopted by U.S. consumers at a faster rate than other highly-popular innovations have. In fact, one would be hard pressed to name another popular innovation that has penetrated the market so quickly.

More Price Regulation Coming?

Though European Union regulators are putting strong pressure on Europe's service providers to dramatically lower data and voice roaming costs, that isn't likely to happen anytime soon in Asian markets, says Rosemary Sinclair, International Telecommunications Users Group external relations officer, and reported by CommsDay.

“The significance to me of what has happened in the EU is that it indicates to us that the cost structure of delivering these calls is much, much lower than the retail prices,” Sinclair says. “The operators know exactly what the costs of services are,
but they are not prepared, without regulatory oversight, encouragement,
or if necessary, intervention, to do something about it."

"At the moment, as far as I can see, the only thing that would fix this is regulatory action," she says.

Service providers take notice: a re-regulatory wind is blowing around the world, though it isn't as windy everywhere. Telstra seems to be in a different situation than EU carriers. U.S. carriers have enjoyed a decade of less intense regulation. But there's one thing you can be sure of: it the telecom business, no set of rules, and no climate, lasts forever. The next swing will be back the other way.

Vonage Shifts Tactics

In its efforts to control marketing cost, Vonage has been targeting geographic regions where it has a greater chance of signing up customers with high need to call international destinations. For the most part that means urban areas with large immigrant populations.

So although Vonage's marketing up to this point has been able replacing other landline services, the new value pitch is more nearly the "cheaper long distance" segment whose buyers might otherwise be looking at calling cards, dial-around or other ways of calling globally for less money.

The move highlights a perhaps under-appreciated aspect of the voice communications business. Though most executives think "voice is a commodity," and are right in most respects, an argument can be made that voice is not actually a "commodity" in a classic set, but rather a set of "commodities," or perhaps not a classic commodity at all.

Sugar, salt and flour generally are classic commodities. But sugar is not a substitute for salt or flour. In that sense, mobile communications is not generally a substitute for landline voice, a business phone system, PC-to-PC communications or texting, though in some ways each of these modes is partially a substitute for each of the others.

Even email, surely something most people would say is a commodity, is not completely so. Mobile email is a different product than Gmail, or else everybody would be using mobile email. The point is that the mode of consumption, the cost of consumption, the places and time where consumption occurs, as well as the essential required features for successful use, are not so substitutable as to make all of them fully interchangeable commodities.

And the point of that observation is that industry proponents sometimes do not work hard enough at understanding the real differences that make each of these modes and use cases "different products." Which is to say, no commonly interchangeable commodities.

The point at hand is Vonage's new marketing pitch. True, for some users Vonage is a substitute for legacy wired voice service. For others, it is a substitute for long distance calling, calling cards, callback service or dial-around.

To say voice is a scale or volume business, a low-margin business or even a "bulk" business is one thing. To say it is a "commodity" business might be more correct within a single segment or use case. It is wildly incorrect across the full range of use cases that "voice" now represents.

Some might point out that short message service (text messaging) is a distinct business. Others will say it is part of the mobile voice business. Some might say it sometimes is part of the mobile business, and sometimes a "PC-initiated" and "mobile terminated" business.

If such opinions can exist, it is confirmation of the "non-commodity" (in the sense of non-interchangeability) nature of the business.

That isn't to say differentiate is easy. It is hard. But to argue it cannot be done, because voice is a commodity, is off the mark. That isn't to say it is easy to differentiate without obtaining scale. Providers might rationally choose not to differentiate. But that is different from arguing "they cannot."

Android, iPhone: Finding the New in the Old

Sometimes the insight that leads to an assault on a new market is to discover the new market hidden in the weeds of an older and established market. Incumbents in the mobile phone market have dismissed the Apple iPhone simply because the volumes of devices shipped by the leading players is so overwhelming.

Though it is less often said, the same sort of dismissal could be aimed at Android, the open-source operating system under development by Google and 30 or so other partners.

And it's hard to argue with that perspective. Unless you dig in the weeds and reimagine a market. If one looks at smart phone (perhaps more aptly described as mobile PC or mobile Web device)penetration, it is still quite low.

Looking just at smart phones, which have low penetration, the market volume to be shared by all players is still quite small, so the market share doesn't have nearly the same meaning it would in a large volume market.

"Smart phones" or "mobile Web" devices or "conference in a pocket phones" or "email in a pocket" phones remain a developing market, not a saturated market. So new players still have a shot of ultimately achieving significant influence and share, no matter how small their efforts might appear if the market is defined as "mobile phones."

Hughes de la Vergne, Gartner analyst, estimates that even powerful Symbian has just two to three percent share of the U.S. smart phone operating system market, for example.

But that's just the U.S. market. The numbers certainly look daunting just about everywhere else.