New Peak Load Issues for Mobile

There's only one problem worse than dealing with peak load, and that is average load that starts to look like peak load. In the voice world, peak load has been the bigger issue, not average load.
Data networks have peak load issues as well, but those issues are mostly about the number of bits to pushed through the pipe, not generally use of circuits or network elements or ports.

Wireless is starting to have other problems, though, as data usage grows. And you instinctively would think bandwidth has to be the issue. It isn't. But take the easy stuff first.

Just as there are two “rush hours” on the road (6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.), enterprises typically experience two “rush hours” on their phone systems, says Art Yonemoto, owner of his own telecom expense auditing firm. For most enterprises those PBX rush hours happen at mid morning (10 a.m.) and early afternoon (2 p.m.). Hospitals, though, tend to have one of their busiest hours at 9 a.m., especially on Mondays, as their patients call to schedule appointments.

For the most part, though, enterprises handle their phone system peak loads quite well. Mobile networks cannot say the same. as they generally are designed to handle about 80 to 90 percent of calls on a non-blocking basis. At peak hours, blocking occurs.

Some calls simply go straight to your voice mail. The other obvious issue is a dropped call, which happens because you are moving from one area to the next, and the next cell tower has no free radio assets to hand off the call.

But there are other problems emerging, and that is amount of data traffic, and the different characteristics data applications impose on the network. Bandwidth alone is not the entire problem, any more than bandwidth is really the problem for voice traffic.

The issue is that radio resources are tied up even when not that much bandwidth is flowing over the radio network. An obvious example is a mobile virtual private network client, which essentially nails up a connection even when actual data is not flowing. The issue then is the strain on radio resources, not bandwidth as such. Other applications that don't actually consume much bandwidth might have lots of signaling and pinging. Some social networking applications and even mobile email devices can create that sort of stress.

So for wireless networks, it now appears application interactivity--not just bandwidth--is becoming a gating issue. It is an issue bandwidth alone does not fix. The additional new issue is occupation of radio resources.

Enterprise iPhone? Just talk to RIM Servers

Though there are other issues, Apple would get far down the road as an enterprise device if it did just one thing: ensure compatibility with Blackberry servers.

Though Microsoft Mobile is growing its share, BlackBerry is the device to beat. Apple will keep getting heat for its lack of security as well.

But the main thing is the ability of a user to get company email on an iPhone, not just on a Blackberry.

Sprint Unlimited Plan: Unlimited Everything

Sprint Nextel now has responded with a new “Simply Everything” plan offering not just talk, not just unlimited texting, but unlimited Web surfing, email access, GPS navigation services, DirectConnect, GroupConnect, Sprint TV and Sprint music.

The $99.99 Simply Everything plan is available to customers on both Sprint's CDMA and iDEN networks, and goes way beyond T-Mobile's comparable plan that includes unlimited voice and texting.

Sprint has thrown in the kitchen sink.

Existing Sprint customers can switch to the Simply Everything plan without extending their current contract either by contacting Sprint customer service or by stopping by any participating Sprint retail location.

New line activations require a two-year agreement.

For families, Simply Everything includes an incremental $5 discount for each incremental line, up to five lines on the same bill. For example, two lines would amount to $194.98 ($99.99 + $94.99); a third line would cost an additional $89.99. This is in sharp contrast to the multi-line unlimited rates offered by some competitors. The Sprint plan offers significant savings the more lines a customer adds.

Observers were wondering whether Sprint would go nuclear. This move is more "nuclear" that offering an unlimited voice plan for lower prices than the now-industry-standard $100 a month. Sure, Sprint Nextel would have frightened a lot of people if it had gone with an $60, or even an $80 unlimited voice plan.

What it has done, at least for users who really like several of the enhanced features, is create a package so compelling lots of people are going to upgrade lower-priced plans to get them. Don't worry about some high-end voice plans being downgraded.

The big issue here is a potentially significant upgrade of lots of other plans, to get the huge palatte of upgraded features. It is the sort of move one would expect from Dan Hesse.

For users who don't mind the lack of subscriber information modules (SIMs), the plan offers more value than competing plans offered by T-Mobile, which bundles unlimited voice and text messaging. Both at&t Wireless and Verizon Wireless plans provide unlimited voice for $100 a month.

For users who simply want unlimited voice, Sprint will offer a $90 voice-only plan. So far, the feared price war has not broken out.

As for why unlimited plans might not damage wireless carrier revenue, take a look at what Sprint has been finding with its Boost mobile prepaid business. After launching unlimited plans, traditional prepaid growth slowed, but unlimited plans more than made up for the slower growth for the traditional plans.

Luster Off MVNO in U.S. Market

Ed Mueller, Qwest Communications CEO, now can be counted among executives who believe their mobile virtual network operator ventures have been a bust.

After operating an MVNO using the underlying Sprint network, Qwest now has concluded it simply hasn't worked well enough to keep doing. "We have a hole in wireless and we don't have the assets and we aren't going to invest," he says.

In Qwest's case, at least, an MVNO isn't financially attractive, but also is weak in the market place," Mueller says. One of the issues is access to the latest, greatest phones. "We don't have scale to get the new phones," he says.

"The financials and economics are really difficult," he says. "Only six percent of our customers bought, where the national average is 200 percent."

"Even if we had access to all the new phones, it would still have been difficult," Mueller says. And he also acknowledges a historic reality resellers of basic communications products of all sorts have faced: low margins. "We won't get rich on this, even if we have wireless that works," he says.

So why bother? "As part of a bundle, though, wireless gives us great stickiness," he says. He likes the resale agreement with DirecTV just fine, for many of the same reasons. "We have nine percent penetration of video," Mueller says.

That's about the same penetration as at&t or Verizon get in some of their markets in the first year. But at&t as well as Verizon expect, and get, higher penetration than that after as few as six to nine months. By the end of a year of full marketing, penetration can be in the 13 percent range.

The real money in wireless over a three-year time frame is data, not voice, Mueller says. "Voice will be a ride-along on the data," he adds.

The other thing is Qwest's interest in fixed mobile convergence, especially ways to use mobile handsets inside the home. "FMC is about strong signal inside the home," he says. "So we want a partner with a data network."

Nor does Qwest want to wait for handsets. "We want to be equally advantaged on the product set immediately, not in six months," Mueller says. "Two of the four wireless networks do not have wireline assets and should be a good fit for us. "

In other words, Qwest doesn't want an MVNO agreement, even if it is reselling another provider's network services.

Fiber to Home: Density Matters

When evaluating prospects for fiber-to-home deployments, density really does matter. As recent data from the Fiber to the Home Council shows, countries with higher rates of fiber access tend to be highly dense, where a "fiber to the basement" approach is feasible. Japan is the exception. Generally speaking, fiber to the home penetration is high in countries with high density, though other factors, such as government financial support and regulatory framework, also play an important role.

50 Mbps from Comcast by 2010?

Comcast will offer customers 50 megabit-per-second service, upstream and downstream, available to half its subscribers and homes passed, by 2010, DSLPrime's Dave Burstein argues. What remains unclear is how many customers Comcast or any other cable company will be able to support at those rates, in any single neighborhood of 500 homes or so, unless a very large amount of analog video bandwidth is freed up by moving them to the digital service tiers.

Apple Inches Closer to Enterprise iPhone

Apple is convening a meeting to unveil its software development kit on March 6. For critics who have panned Apple for producing a closed device not suitable for enterprise users, Apple now will begin to prove at least some of those critics wrong. Salesforce.com, for example, already has moved to position its services for iPhone users. In fact, its own sales force demanded that this be done. And small business users, who don't have all the enterprise software issues to face, already are using the iPhone as their preferred device.