IPTV Subs Increase 53%

IPTV subscribers have more than doubled for the second year running with an increase of 53.14 percent in the 12 months to 31 March 2008, and now stand at 15 million, according to Point Topic.

The statistics also show that worldwide broadband subscribers have reached over 370 million with DSL remaining the most dominant access technology with 65 percent of the world’s subscribers. However, fiber subscriptions have risen by 33 percent since the beginning of 2007, with over 10 million people connected to a fiber network. This increase in fiber subscriptions may be attributed to the increased popularity of bandwidth hungry services such as IPTV. However, the leading technology delivering IPTV today is ADSL2plus, with 12,049,817 subscribers.

Europe has over 8.4 million subscribers, making it the strongest market in terms of growth and total subscriber numbers.

DSL continues to be the most popular access technology with close to 240 million of the world’s subscribers. Cable subscriptions rates have slowed to 18 percent growth rate, while subscribers on FTTx rose 33 percent in the last year.

Mobile Phone Sales Slow Globally

Mobile phone sales began to slow in the second quarter, causing Gartner analysts to lower growth forecasts. said it cut its forecast for cellphone market growth in 2008 to 10 percent to 11 percent. Gartner previously had expected 10 percent to 15 percent growth.

"In the last month however, the economic environment started to negatively impact emerging markets as well as mature," Carolina Milanesi, head of mobile device research at Gartner, says.

It's iPhone Day

The App Store seems to be getting raves. So the issue is whether Apple can do for third party mobile apps what iTunes has done for music. So far games seem to dominate interest. But if other apps start to get traction, lots of entities will benefit.

Carriers will sell lots more data plans. Third generation and fourth generation networks will have a shot at creating revenue models for mobile Internet services and investments. Open platforms will get a boost, though international mobile calling prices will start to fall faster.

Innovation requires small companies. It also appears to require sponsorship of big companies. Apple and Google come to mind. But in sometimes halting fashion, so too the likes of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.

ISPs Agree to Block Some Content

AT&T will purge all servers containing child pornography Web sites and block user access to newsgroups that center around pornographic material relating to children. AOL, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint also have signed agreements with the state of New York doing the same.
The agreements point to the complicated nature of "blocking," "filtering," "traffic shaping," even anti-virus and anti-spam measures. In principle, most people would likely say they are in favor of "free speech" and therefore "no blocking" of Internet content.

In practice, there are lots of reasons nearly everyone would block some traffic, especially when it is harmful. The carriers have agreed to block some content lots of people think justified. That illustrates the complexity of Internet or other freedoms.

In other cases, as on most college campuses, though most people would say they favor free speech, some expressions of clearly political speech are deemed so odious the claim is made that there is "no freedom" for the expression of the clearly-political ideas, even though the same people might loudly protest other real or imagined threats to "free speech."
More than 40 years ago, in 1964, a "free speech movement" started on the campus of University of California at Berkeley in response to a ban on political activities. We may debate the later consequences, but there's little doubt rights of free speech were involved.

And 40 years later we may wonder how well those concepts are honored. These days, it is not university administrators but students and faculty that sometimes actively move to suppress ideas they disagree with. It is quite a turn of events.
The point, I suppose, is that defending free speech takes different forms in different eras. The term "political correctness" describes the current context within which free speech has to be evaluated. It might be helpful to remember that threats to free speech, historically and currently, have both left-wing and a right-wing sources. I don't think most people think left-wing suppression is any better than right-wing suppression.

I suspect most people think the carriers are doing the right thing. It's a legitimate thing to debate what free speech means in the current era. Strict constructionists might argue the "speech" to be protected is directly political speech, not any utterance, of any sort.

Carriers might take some heat for compliance with New York's rules. But it is the right thing to do. Rights are one thing. Responsibilities are another. Protecting the vulnerable among us might conflict with some notions of freedom.

In Catholic philosophy, freedom is the right to do the right thing. Ability to make a free choice is the issue, not the nature of the choice. Sometimes it might be the right thing to limit some expressions.
That isn't the same thing as blocking specific applications, or classes of applications, necessarily. But that's what makes net neutrality such a difficult concept.

So That's Why Internet Access Vaporized Yesterday

Workaround to Sudden Loss of Internet Access Problem

Date Published : 8 July 2008

Date Last Revised : 9 July 2008

Overview : Microsoft Update KB951748 is known to cause loss of internet access for ZoneAlarm users on Windows XP/2000. Windows Vista users are not affected.

Impact : Sudden loss of internet access

Platforms Affected : ZoneAlarm Free, ZoneAlarm Pro, ZoneAlarm AntiVirus, ZoneAlarm Anti-Spyware, and ZoneAlarm Security Suite

Where in Media Ecosystem does Google Sit?

There's absolutely no doubt that tier one communications service provider executives "fear" Google more than they fear competition from cable operators. For the most part, the concern is that Google (and other Web contestants) have the ability to "suck the air out of the room" as far as creating value for end users that translates into revenue and creates business models.

Nor is there much doubt that communications and media are ceasing to be two distinct businesses, already overlapping and in some cases destined to merge. Add in consumer electronics and you have a volatile and unstable business environment.

Volatile in many ways because traditional industry and segment boundaries are being erased. There's little argument to be made that Google is part of the media ecosystem, for example.

The tough part is figuring out the extent to which Google itself has become media. It's a hard question to answer because Google now has operations in the ad placement business (Web, newspapers, radio), which makes it part of the classic "ad agency" business, owns YouTube, which makes it part of the video business, and blog hosting, which makes it a distribution channel, akin to a magazine, radio or TV station or programing network.

If the definition of "media" is content supported in whole or part by advertising, then search now is "media." Where Google has stretched our notions is that it is a "non-traditional" form of media and also is part of the "advertising agency" business: it creates media and also places the ads.

That's the broader problem service providers grapple with as well. It is hard to see how far network-based businesses can move in the direction of becoming media. It is hard to foretell how much "over the top" distribution will displace any existing distribution method and business model. And it is hard to estimate how network services providers will be able to create new revenue out of relationships with Web-based services and applications.

The monetization issues Google is having with YouTube, and the relatively small sums it now generates in the newspaper and radio ad placement business, mirror the steps network service providers also are taking to capture space in adjacent markets such as video distribution.

This is more like a 10-year process than a five-year process, one suspects. And though advertising today represents a relatively small proportion of cable operator revenues, at about four percent of total revenue.

You might wonder why cable operators now are spending so much time on targeted advertising efforts, then. The thinking is that global ad spending is going to keep shifting, towards the Internet and mobile formats. Of the current $510 billion spent on advertising, there is general consensus that newspaper share, 15.9 percent or about $132 billion, is highly vulnerable, as share has been shrinking for more than a couple of decades. The other big bucket of spending is television, which gets 37.6 percent of all ad spending, or about $192 billion.

Cable operators now are thinking they can grow a new ad format by taking share from newspaper and other TV media. As TV and newspapers between them represent $324 billion, or 64 percent of all advertising, you can see the attraction.

To the extent that network service providers more familiar with voice and data also are in the entertainment video game, and also have the same targeting opportunities as cable operators do, it is fairly easy to predict growth in targeted ad capabilities at some point.

Google is media. So, ultimately are telcos, in their roles as video and Internet service providers. the only issue is how much in that direction telcos will move.

Madison River, Comcast

So what does "Madison River" have in common with "Comcast"? Both might wind up being examples of Internet service providers formally punished for blocking Internet traffic.

There are reports Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin will recommend that Comcast be fined for previous traffic-shaping practices that delayed peer-to-peer traffic. The vote is scheduled for Aug. 1, 2008.