Patent Troll Seeks Cable Operator Toll

Yikes. Rembrandt IP Management, a suburban Philadelphia firm whose sole business is to buy up technology patents, and whose business model is based on patent royalties derived from those assets, has filed numerous lawsuits in numerous venues to force large cable operators and major broadcasters to pay substantial license fees on the transmission of digital TV signals and Internet services. Rembrandt seeks royalties for use of intellectual property related to cable modem services as well as digital TV broadcasts.

Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications, Cox Communications and Cablevision Systems are named as patent infringers.

iPhone 2nd Best Selling Smart phone in Q4

Smart mobile device shipments hit 118 million in 2007, up 53 percent over 2006, reports Canalys. In the fourth quarter, newcomer Apple shipped the third most devices globally. Nokia remained the global market leader, shipping 60.5 million smart phones.

Research in Motion shipments grew 112 percent year-over-year to 12.2 million, to take second place.

Symbian remains the operating system leader, with 67 percent share, followed by Microsoft with 13 percent, with RIM on 10 percent. Apple garnered seven percent while Linux had five percent share.

High-end devices represented around 10 percent of the global mobile phone market by units in 2007, with annual growth of 60 percent.

Apple’s entry into this market in 2007 with the iPhone sparked a lot of media attention and speculation about how much it could disrupt the status quo and take share away from companies such as Nokia, RIM, Palm and Motorola. “When you consider that it launched part way through the year, with limited operator and country coverage, and essentially just one product, Apple has shown very clearly that it can make a difference and has sent a wakeup call to the market leaders,” said Pete Cunningham, Canalys senior analyst. “What it must demonstrate now is that it can build a sustainable business in the converged device space, expanding its coverage and product portfolio. It will also need to ensure that the exclusive relationships that got it so far so quickly do not prove to be a limit on what it can achieve. Apple’s innovation in its mobile phone user interface has prompted a lot of design activity among competitors. We saw the beginnings of that in 2007, but we will see a lot more in 2008 as other smart phone vendors try to catch up and then get back in front. Experience shows that a vendor with only one smart phone design, no matter how good that design is, will soon struggle. A broad, continually refreshed portfolio is needed to retain and grow share in this dynamic market. This race is a marathon, but you pretty much have to sprint every lap.”

Canalys estimates that Apple took 28% share of the fast growing US converged device market in Q4 2007, behind RIM’s 41%, but a long way ahead of third placed Palm on 9%. This was also enough to put Apple ahead of all Windows Mobile device vendors combined, whose share was 21% in the quarter according to Canalys figures. In EMEA, where the iPhone officially launched part way through the quarter in only three countries, Apple took fifth spot behind Nokia, RIM, HTC and Motorola, but ahead of several established smart phone providers such as Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Palm.

For the full year 2007, as in 2006, the Asia Pacific region was the biggest in volume terms for converged device shipments. Apple has of course not yet launched the iPhone in the region, and many vendors who are successful in other parts of the world, such as RIM and Palm, have also made relatively little impact there so far. Nokia continues to lead in the region, with more than 50% share in converged devices, ahead of Japanese smart phone vendors Sharp and Fujitsu. Motorola, despite enjoying fourth place, has seen its Linux-based smart phone shipments in the region fall 28% from their high in 2006.

Symbian led in the Asia-Pacific (85 percent) and Europe-Middle East-Africa regions (80 percent) while in North America RIM was the clear leader on 42 percent smart phone share, ahead of Apple at 27 percent and Microsoft at 21 percent.

What's a Google Phone?

Apparently, just about any smart phone with broadband access, according to Financial Times reporters Maija Palmer and Paul Taylor. Google head of mobile operations Vic Gundotra says "it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset."

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Gundotra says. "If the trend continues and other handset manufacturers follow Apple’s lead in making web access easy, the number of mobile searches will overtake fixed internet searches “within the next several years."

More mobile searches than fixed! I don't know about you, but my sense is that if that volume of activity can happen on most broadband-connected smart phones, Google won't have to worry much about creating a "Google phone," any more than it has to worry about a "Google PC."

Google has never separated out its mobile revenues but Gundotra says the business was growing “above expectations”, both in terms of usage and revenues.

Executives at at&t Wireless have said average revenue per user for iPhone users was nearly double the average, because iPhone plans come with capacious data plans.

Sprint Won't Reach Xohm Goal by 2009

No kidding. Sprint originally expected to have 100 million subscribers for its Xohm WiMAX service by the end of 2009. It now says it won't make that goal, and nobody is surprised.

Xohm, slated to deliver mobile broadband services of 2 Mbps to 4Mbps, for $40 to $50 a month, is slated to launch on a more or less full deployment basis in three cities this spring (Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.). There's no conceivable way any new service of this sort, selling into a nearly-saturated broadband access market, is going to get that kind of traction so fast.

VoIP, Broadband Growth is Slowing

One of the tentative conclusions we might reach from Comcast's fourth-quarter results is that the broadband access market is approaching a saturation point, with slowing net additions. Comcast added about 331,000 broadband subscribers in the three months ending Dec. 31, 2007, down 26 percent from the 450,000 subscribers it added in the third quarter. That's congruent with net adds from telcos as well, and has perhaps a little to do with the economy and slower housing starts. But mostly it is simply that we are approaching the point where nearly every potential customer for broadband already has become one.

VoIP net adds are slowing as well, again confirming a broader trend seen in the consuemr segment of the VoIP business overall. Basically, significant numbers of people who are persuaded VoIP makes sense for them right now have become customers.

After adding 662,000 new subscribers in the third quarter, Comcast’s total net new voice additions dropped to 604,000 in the fourth quarter. None of this is unexpected.

T-Mobile 3G This Summer

T-Mobile USA will launch commercial 3G services this summer, finally. The company blames spectrum issues for the delay (3G was supposed to launch mid-2007). T-Mobile invested $4.2 billion in 2006 to more than double its spectrum holding in the top 100 U.S. cities it serves.

Those of you who have had to live with EDGE access speeds (just like most iPhone users) will be happy. Up to this point, EDGE access has felt remarkably like "dial up" access. And how many of you can imagine doing important work, or trying to get any of the normal sorts of information you look for in a day, over a dial-up connection?

People don't use the mobile Web much because it's too painful, even if there were interesting applications.

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.