AT&T Might Consider Usage-Based Access Pricing

AT&T might consider a usage-based approach to pricing broadband access, a solution to the problem of supporting very-heavy bandwidth users without resorting to blocking or traffic shaping, says CTO John Donovan. He says "one percent of the company's customers account for 20 percent of the network usage; the top five percent account for 40 percent of the usage."

In other remarks, Donovan says "traffic on our backbone is growing 60 percent per year."

"I don't view any of our customers, under any circumstances, as pirates -- I view them as users," Donovan said. "A heavy user is not a bad customer."

And users aren't dumb. If they have incentives to use P2P at off-peak hours, they will. BitTorrent use on the AT&T network peaks around 4 a.m., when other traffic is at an ebb, he says.

Peer to peer traffic represents about 20 percent of total network traffic, he adds.

You Can Say That Again!

Instead of being tied to their wired network infrastructures, most enterprise users are becoming untethered, with apps accessible from smartphones and laptopsn say analysts at the Burton Group.  This has huge implications for enterprise network infrastructures, how applications are built/deployed, and security, they say.

U.S. Users Spent 68 Hours Each Online in April

According to the latest Nielsen Online figures, the average U.S. Internet user spent nearly 68 hours online during the month of April. That's a bit more than two hours a day.

The average user visited 104 separate domains and viewed 2,361 pages.

Millennial Impact

One of the arguments to be made about where buying preferences are moving is that the Millennial generation, and to some extent "Generation X" gradually are assuming positions of influence and authority on the buying side of virtually every communications and information technology.

To simplify the argument, Millennials and in many similar ways Gen Xers, are "different" from their baby boomer parents, the lead edge of which is starting to retire.

Baby boomers essentially are digital immigrants. They have learned to use digital technology. Gen Xers have been using it for quite some time, in some cases not since they were born, but very close to it.

Millennials are totally "digital natives." They never have known a world where the Internet, PCs and mobiles did not exist.

So note that baby boomer spending is less than that of Gen X, and dropping. Gen X is growing to replace the baby boomer economic activity. By 2017, Millennials will be spending more than baby boomers are today.

Therein lies the argument that service providers and application providers might well find they are selling very-different products and services to Gen X and Millennial users than they sell today when baby boomers are doing a great proportion of the buying of all manner of communications and software products.

That might explain why Web 2.0 concepts and ways of creating and using software now are emerging in the enterprise space, as similar concepts have emerged in the consumer space.

2Q IT Spending Even with 1Q

Overall IT spending in the second quarter appears to have been at about the same level as the first quarter, a ChangeWave survey finds. About 11 percent of respondents said their company had spent "more than planned," up one percent since February.

Another 27 percent say they've spent "less than planned," unchanged from the previous quarter.

"Things haven't gotten any worse," ChangeWave notes.

Looking ahead to the third quarter, 24 percent of respondents say their company's IT spending will decrease or that there'll be no spending at all. That's one point worse than the previous survey. In addition, only 15 percent say spending will increase, unchanged from the last survey.

The softness in projected spending is occurring across companies of all sizes, although once again things have stopped getting worse, ChangeWave notes.

We asked respondents about their IT spending outlook for the entire second half of 2008 (July-December), and 28 percent think their IT budget will be less than first half of 2008, "a whopping eight points worse than previously," ChaneWave says.

Only 18 percent of respondents think their company's IT budget will be greater than it was in the first half of 2008. Another 44 percent say their IT budgets will remain the same.

Verizon to Add 25 HDTV Channels

Verizon FiOS TV will add more than 60 new channels to the lineup, including high-definition sports and multicultural content.

Verizon plans to expand its lineup to offer by the end of the year up to 150 HD channels, which will include all available major HD programming.

Other Verizon HD choices include hundreds of video-on-demand (VOD) titles per month, with 1,000 HD VOD titles by the end of the year.

Verizon will roll out the new content, region by region, to areas where FiOS TV is available, beginning in early July. The new channels will be activated in FiOS systems across the country over the following few months.

Included in the new content will be more than 25 high-definition channels, bringing the total number of HD channels to between 52 and 65, depending on the customer's location.

$55 Billion Health Vertical Spending

The hospitals, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance providers that make up the $2.3 trillion US healthcare system will be spending $55 billion on telecommunications services over the next five years, says Insight Research Corporation.

Spending by the US healthcare industry on telecommunications services will grow at a compounded rate of 8.4 percent over the forecast period, increasing from $7.5 billion in 2008 to $11.3 billion in 2013.