Global Bandwidth Consumption Grows 63% in 2007

International bandwidth grew 63 percent in 2007, which just about matches the 50 percent annual growth in bandwidth use reported by SureWest Communications, an independent telco, as well as other broadband access providers.

For buyers of global bandwidth, it appears aggregate prices were "stable," as industry watchers note, meaning a decline of 10 percent or in some cases 20 percent on capacity prices. Global bandwidth, especially on well-supplied routes, tends to decline over time as buyers consume more optical products that offer lower price-per-megabit ratios.

However, prices are opaque, and pace of price changes varies dramatically—by route, by service provider, and by bandwidth product, TeleGeography notes. There can be quite a lot of price variation even on a single route, and for a single product, as these prices for London to Paris indicate.

Mobile Social Networking Forecast

In-Stat forecasts over 229.5 million mobile subscribers globally could be using mobile social networking services by 2012. Blogging, photo and video sharing, location-based socialization services, games, SMS, and IM will eventually be combined to afford the mobile user the entire social networking experience from a handset application, In-Stat says.

Carriers will benefit from wider use of data plans, to be sure. But the more important insight probably is that the handset becomes the focus of attachment. The mobile handset will simply become an extension of the user in most aspects of life, In-Stat argues. If so, carrier brands will be less important than the handset brands.

"The critical issue most mobile social networking site and application developers struggle with is how to make money with their services," says Jill Meyers, In-Stat analyst. "There are three primary methods of revenue generation for mobile social networking applications- advertising, subscription services, and premium upgrades."

Little of that potential revenue is available directly to network service providers, though. And it remains unclear whether social networking actually is the foundation for a revenue stream or simply a really important feature.

Digital Savvy Dangers

Research from Scarborough Research shows that early adopters are different from other consumers. "Digital savvy" consumers use more technology and have more money, than the typical mass market consumer.

Cable operators never make the mistake of getting hung up worrying about early adopters. Everything they do is tuned for the average consumer, the sort of "other side of the chasm" customer technologists have to learn to deal with to achieve real mass market success.

It is important to note what sorts of experiences are getting traction, of course. It's just a different matter to tailor those experiences for the great mass of consumers who will not put up with much inconvenience when using new applications and services.

Lots of entrepreneurs fail when they don't clearly understand the differences between the bleeding edge early adopters and the real mass market.

Email Still Tops for Adult Consumers

Two-thirds of adult respondents said they preferred e-mail for communicating with businesses, say researchers at Ipsos.

Just as many—and this might be the important part—say they expected to continue preferring email five years from now.

The issue is how other younger age cohorts will adapt to the email-centric culture prevalent in business. One suggests they'll adapt quickly, even as they push for use of additional tools.

TiVo to Rent Disney Movies

TiVo says its subscribers will soon be able to rent Disney movies through their DVRs, as part of a service offered in conjunction with CinemaNow, NewTeeVee reports.

Content will be offered in both standard and high definition and will be available for a 24-hour rental period.

"Large" Suite Does the Job

Not all of us enjoy messing around with technology; backing up files, restoring software, tweaking application settings, defragmenting our hard drives and so forth. In that regard, I ran a scan using Large Software's "PC Tune-Up" suite on my XP machine.

The Suite quickly found about 504 problems, most of them said to be "serious" or "moderately serious." The dashboard information was clear, intuitive and the scan seemed to run faster than I recall other similar suites operating. Again, this was not a controlled test, so I can't speak to how other programs might have performed.

I will say the application executed much faster than I was expecting, especially in the defragmentation phase of the tune-up.

As service providers look to avoid "dumb pipe" status, supplying enterprise, peformance optimization would seem a logical place to extend the range of services such as anti-virus, firewall and anti-spam functions many Internet service providers now supply as an integral part of the access service.

The other thing is that some services are more "logical" parts of service bundles. An enriched software experience that improves Web and Internet performance probably will be seen by users as a logical extension of basic access.

Also, as the actual user experience migrates beyond a service provider network interface (a router in a small business setting, IP phones in an enterprise or mid-sized business setting or the PC in a consumer application, service providers of necessity will be seen as the "entity to call" when something isn't functioning properly.

If you can't avoid the calls to your customer service center, you might as well extend service and support to the actual end user device. Most of us by now have discovered the "dueling applications" problem when loading any new software. A hosted approach should eliminate that problem.

That's not to say I experienced a single issue using the downloaded version of the software. Set-up was completely uneventful and the application executed better than I expected. The observation is simply that distribution as part of a bundled "access" service would make sense.

Lots of us just want to do things. We don't want to be system administrators. This should help.

Average Capacity Prices Dropped 10 to 20% in 2007

The average price of wholesale circuits in most major markets dipped 10 to 20 percent in 2007, according to TeleGeography. For many, that would be considered price stability.

As price declines have moderated, international bandwidth demand has remained strong, growing at a compounded annual rate of 52 percent over the past five years, TeleGeography adds.

But revenue growth remains elusive for many wholesale network operators, the company says. A key reason lies in bandwidth buyers' changing purchase patterns: they simply are substituting bigger pipes for smaller pipes, paying more money in aggregate but at lower prices per megabit per second of capacity.

Companies that may have purchased a few 155 Mbps STM-1/OC-3 circuits five years ago are now opting for 2.5 Gbps or 10 Gbps wavelengths. These large circuits are far cheaper in terms of the price per Mbps of capacity than the smaller circuits.

"The effective price per megabit per second of capacity sold is falling a lot faster than nominal circuit prices, themselves," says TeleGeography Research Director Robert Schult. "Carriers need to sell ever larger volumes just to maintain stable revenues."