Netherlands to Mandate Cable Network Access

At some point, as cable operators become more substantial providers of voice and data services, they will find they start to come under the regulatory frameworks long established for other telecom providers. Cable operators in The Netherlands appear to be at the front of that trend.

The Netherlands regulatory authority OPTA is proposing mandatory access rules for cable operators very similar to rules governing wholesale access that apply to KPN, for example, but in the video services area.

OPTA says the emergence of terrestrial digital TV, satellite and IPTV platforms have failed to bring about a greater choice for buyers of multichannel video. OPTA says the option of imposing a freeze on prices is not a sustainable solution that would lead to greater competition.

So now it wants to create a wholesale access regime for video services. The actual text is not yet available, so it is difficult to assess the extent of the rules. It does seem reasonable that what OPTA is after is something more than the ability to resell the existing cable services. More likely, the rules will allow competing video packagers access through the local cable network for alternate providers offering differentiated fare.

Why Open is Good for Mobile Service Providers

Recent efforts by Apple and Google to reshape the wireless industry ultimately will help mobile operators and handset vendors, In-Stat argues. The reason is simple: in a business environment where partners and third-party developers now are essential for rapid development of new applications, the more-open and standardized frameworks will allow for faster rates of innovation, even if carriers find the change a bit unsettling.

The current telco-centered approach to developing Internet mobile applications has created an ecosystem for application developers that is complex, fragmented, difficult to enter, and offers a high risk of failure, the high-tech market research firm says.

Look for early examples in the location-aware advertising area, especially as revenue sharing models come into play.

Jajah, eMobile Launch IP Mobile Voice Service

Jajah and Japan-based eMobile have launched an IP-only mobile device, the EM-ONE, allowing users to make and receive voice-over-mobile-broadband calls without a traditional mobile phone connection.

The Jajah Mobile software uses the data channel, a HSDPA connection, to deliver voice services. In 2007 Jajah and eMobile released an outbound-only IP-mobile service, which attracted thousands of Japanses users. Now eMobile customers can not only use their device to make calls to more than 200 global destinations, but for the first time also to receive calls.

For about $5 a month, eMobile customers can purchase a Direct Inward Dialing number, for their Sharp EM·ONE Ultra Mobile Device running Windows Mobile 6, which turns their device into a fully functioning mobile phone, without a cellular connection, beginning August 1, 2008.

Analysts at Ovum predict that, by 2010, 77 percent of the voice connections in the Asia-Pacific region will be mobile and that the region will host over two billion fixed and mobile voice connections, 42 percent of the global total. Ovum’s annual voice service forecasts mobility to be the key growth technology in the voice market for the foreseeable future.

In addition to low cost long-distance and international calls, calls between eMobile customers are free and transmited over a pure SIP connection.

Digital Living Room Market Still a Bit of a Niche

While data-centric home networking is mainstream, the market for Internet-connected TV devices is still nascent. Early adopters of networked digital home services today are found, as you might expect, in higher-income homes.

The target connected digital living room consumer household has household income between $100,000 and $150,000, says MultiMedia Intelligence. These households typically have children and are located in a metropolitan area on the East or West Coast.

So Much for UGC Advertising

Would-be film makers hoping to make a little money creating content and posting that content on video sites will do exactly that" generate a little money.

Though user-generated video will continue to account for close to half of total online video streams between 2008 and 2013, UGC content will produce no more than four percent of ad-related online video revenue at any time during this period, according to The Diffusion Group.

In fact, UGV mostly will be an indirect way of drawing more viewers to professional online video sites capable of generating sustainable ad-related revenue, TDG says.

According to Mugs Buckley, UGV currently accounts for 42 percent of online video streams, yet generates less than four percent of video ad-related revenue. Conversely, professional online video (including both short-clip and long-form content) accounts for 58 percent of streams and 96 percent of ad-related revenue, a reality unlikely to change over the next five years.

So much for the unrealistic hope that amateurs are going to reshape the content business.

Why I Won't Be Defecting from the Windows Ecosystem

Windows Vista operating system has been a challenge for many of us. It is not a secret that lots of us prefer using XP, and will continue to do so for a while. That doesn't mean we aren't planning to switch.

To be sure, some Microsoft users will find they can switch to another operating system without losing much. But many of us will not find that appealing.

As somebody who gets asked to beta test new applications and services, I just find that running XP or Vista is a business requirement. If beta versions of new applications routinely are made available on some other operating system, that is a different story. If that does not happen, as the saying goes, "resistance is futile." One sticks with the operating system the rest of the ecosystem uses, and so far, in my case that means a Microsoft platform.

Many of the problems some of us encountered early on were incompatibilities with other devices and applications that worked fine using XP, and stopped working when Vista first launched. That doesn't mean we think those problems will not be fixed. They are being fixed. And the time will come when any application or device that worked with XP will work with Vista. Problem fixed. But it will take some time before that happens. How much time might be an issuse for some applications. But Microsoft's ecosystem will get all that fixed.

So everybody who remains on XP, sooner or later, will migrate to Vista. XP support will be discontinued, Vista support will be ubiquitous. It's a little like the reason end users are migrating to IP-based phone systems. All considerations of new features and lower costs aside, support for legacy TDM systems will some day end. So, going forward, everybody will move to IP-based systems.

Refreshingly, Microsoft owns up to the early issues. "We had an ambitious plan," says Brad Brooks, corporate vice president, Windows Consumer Product Marketing. "We made some significant investments around security in this product."

"And you know what, those investments, they broke some things," he says. "They broke a lot of things. We know that. "

Speaking to application partners, Brooks was honest and direct. "We know it caused you a lot of pain in front of your customers, in front of our customers."

"And it got a lot of customers thinking, and even yourselves and our partners thinking, “Hey, is Windows Vista a generation that I want to make an investment in?” he adds. So forget about the flash. Vista was designed around Internet security, and Brooks says it succeeded in that effort.

"There's been 20 percent fewer security problems on Windows Vista than XP in 2007," he says. "Windows Vista is the safest OS in terms of security vulnerabilities in its first year of operation, safer than any other commercial or Open Source OS in its launch."

"When you run Windows Vista you're 60 percent less likely to get malware on your machine than if you use Windows XP SP 2," he says.

"It is only getting better as we move forward, because Windows Vista, it's an investment in the long term," he says.

"The same architectural changes that we put in that caused the heartaches moving to Windows Vista are things that we are going to carry forward into Windows 7," he says. "And we are going to target roughly the same hardware specifications that we did when Windows Vista launched."

That means developers can invest in Windows Vista applications knowing they will run the same way in Windows 7.

That was the right thing to say, and I expect it is what Microsoft will do. Looking back on the specific incompatibility issues I encountered with Vista, it was those incompatibilities--now being fixed--that were the issue, not the particularities of Vista.

So despite the fact that I have chosen to run XP on my latest machines, not Vista, that does not mean I will not upgrade to Vista, or Windows 7. I might hope not to be in the first wave of adopters of Windows 7, but that's just a practice many of us have adopted over the years when a new OS is rolled out.

Microsoft does not have to worry about me defecting from the ecosystem. It does have to worry about its ecosystem defecting, though. So far, I detect no movement of that sort. For that reason, I am sure I'll be moving to Vista. The ecosystem is hard to ignore.

3G Smart Phone Battery Life: iPhone Leads

The battery life on Apple's new 3G iPhone isn't great, but it beats that of other 3G smartphones we've seen, say testers at PC World's Test Center. In the study's standard talk-time battery life test, an iPhone, on average, ran 5 hours and 38 minutes, a performance PC World deems "fair."

The original iPhone, which ran on AT&T's slower EDGE networ, lasted 10 hours of our test. But the 3G iPhone beat out the rest of the current 3G smartphone pack, most of which fell shy of the five-hour mark that's the cutoff between a word score of fair and poor in PC World's performance ratings.

The HTC Touch Dual had an average talk time of 5 hours, 18 minutes. The AT&T Tilt lasted 4 hours, 47 minutes, trailed by the Pantech Duo at 4:46; the Motorola Q9 Global at 4:43; and the Palm Treo 750 at an abysmal 3:53.

The iPhone 3G also beat out competitors on Sprint and Verizon's EVDO mobile broadband networks, including the Palm Centro (4:19) and the Samsung Instinct (5:33), PC World says.