Comcast Upgrades Sacramento, Davis, Roseville and Placerville Calif. Cable Modem Speeds

Comcast is doubling its highest Internet speeds for residential customers in the Sacramento, Davis, Roseville and Placerville areas to download speeds of 16 megabits per second and upload speeds of 2 Mbps.

Customers who already get Comcast's highest-speed service, which offers 8 Mbps downloads and 1 Mbps uploads, will be automatically upgraded to the faster service at no charge. The automatic upgrade to the new higher-speed service begins June 31.

Comcast offers two other, lower-tier services of 4 and 6 Mbps. Those customers would need to sign up for Blast! to receive the higher speeds.

Comcast and other cable operators typically conduct such market-by-market upgrades when competing against higher-speed telephone company offers. AT&T is a factor, but in Roseville, SureWest Communications offers a 10 Mbps Ethernet access service broadly to consumer customers.

Mobile Transaction Processing: $1.9 Billion

The market for mobile digital commerce services grew to $1.9 billion in 2007, say researchers at S2 Data Corp.

Digital commerce service providers process the financial transactions that monetize premium content from music, video and gaming companies over the mobile operator's network.

By 2012, the market for mobile digital commerce services will grow to $1.9 billion.

Operators are seeing data revenue exceed 30 percent of total service revenue as the ring tone market shifts from a primary to a partial revenue stream in a premium content mix that includes ringback tones, games, full track downloads and mobile video, S2 says.

Tolerance for Email Outages?

Oddly enough, though many users will tell you that email is more important than voice, they also seem more tolerant of email than voice outages.

Most organizations put up with periodic outages and most seem to tolerate that state of affairs.

But email seems to benefit from different expectations, in particular the store and forward use model.

The fact that voice mail is the same sort of experience doesn't seem to detract from the possibility of a synchronous session at least part of the time.

Curious, don't you think?

WiMAX Threatens 3G, Fixed Wireless

WiMAX provides the right mix of
features and pricing to appeal to consumers, though business users will provide more of a challenge, say researchers at In-Stat.

The commercial user frequently requires ubiquitous coverage, which will be an issue initially.

"While early WiMAX network coverage will not be as large as 3G cellular, it will be adequate to appeal to consumers," says Daryl Schoolar, In-Stat analyst.

"When respondents were presented with
service examples and picked the one they most preferred, the one representing WiMAX was picked more than two-to-one over the one representing 3G cellular data, he says

Respondents are very interested in a wireless broadband service that
will allow them to connect multiple devices under a single service
plan, Schoolar notes.

Respondents also say they want a service that can meet both their at home and away Internet needs.

For this reason, fixed broadband operators are vulnerable to losing subscribers to WiMAX.

Survey respondents reported increased usage of public wireless broadband between 2006 and 2007, with expectations for further increases in 2008.

Belgacom Eyes Cable

A growing strategic reality in the global telecom business is the need to "go out of region" to fuel growth. Belgacom, for example, is offering €420m to the cable companies and municipal shareholders of the Belgian cablenet Interkabel.

In a statement the incumbent telco said that its offer was €70m more than had been made by its rival Telenet and 40 percent more than the upfront payment offered to the municipalities.

In this case there is the additional tactical consideration of buying customer base and revenue that is denied a key in-region competitor.

But make no mistake: organic growth is slow, tedious work these days. Leaps occur mostly through acquisition.

Sprint Churn Bottoming?

Sprint Nextel has lost one million customers since the end of 2007, a fact mirrored in surveys of ChangeWave Research members.

The more important news, though, may be a possible bottoming. It is possible Sprint finally has stabilized its churn problem.

In March 2008, for example, a survey of 3,597 consumers found 11 percent reporting they are Sprint Nextel customers.

Some 31 percent said they use Verizon while 28 percent reported using and AT&T. To be sure, that indication of market share among survey respondents does not track very well with other measurements of market share, such as the carriers own quarterly and annual reports of subscribership.

No surprise: Sprint customers are least satisfied of all of the major provider customers. When asked how likely they were to change service providers in the next 6 months, a relatively high percentage of Sprint customers (21 percent) said they're likely to switch, compared to just 10 percent of Verizon customers and 11 percent for AT&T' users.

When people do change cellular service providers, very few are switching to Sprint (three percent ). The good news is that the number of switchers looking to join Sprint actually turned up one percentage point since the last ChangeWave survey.

iPhone Sales to Triple?

Right now it's hard to say for sure, but there's sound logic behind predictions that Apple now will attempt to dramatically increase sales of iPhones, now that carriers are subsidizing the device. The rationale?

Richard Windsor, Nomura analyst, notes that higher volumes are necessary. "Apple must increase its volumes very substantially to make up the difference” between what it was making before, and what it will be making now on subsidized devices, without a recurring revenue share.

Windsor notes that a dollar from revenue share has EBIT margins of 100 percent, while hardware revenues have an EBIT margin of closer to 30 percent.

So a simple back of the envelope analysis suggests that if Apple wants revenue to grow, it will have to sell three times as many devices at the lower margins, to make up for what it might have earned under the old business model.