AT&T to Change Broadband Marketing Language

At the Federal Communications Commission Pittsburgh broadband hearing, AT&T Senior Federal Regulatory Vice President Robert Quinn is reported by Broadband Reports to have said the company would in the future stop advertising speeds "up to" a specified rate, and would instead "strive to provide service within the speed tier purchased by the customer."

When AT&T finds it is not providing service within the ordered speed tier, AT&T will take action either to bring the customer's service within the ordered tier or give the customer an option to move to a different tier," he said.

Today, customers can order service "up to 7Mbps" tier, while plant conditions limit them to lower real-world bandwidth. Under the new scheme, customers will be offered the expected speed the plant supports, and then supplied with the higher speeds actually possible on their chosen plans.

AT&T also says it will supply customers information about how much bandwidth various applications consume, so they can choose the right plans. To Broadband Reports, that sounds like a precursor to some form of usage-based billing. It may well be. AT&T has been pretty clear that usage will play a bigger role in future access plans. That is an issue many will argue about.

But giving users a better understanding of their bandwidth requirements is a good thing, as is the policy of selling actual service that matches the marketing claims.

Expect Continued Line Losses as Telcos Report Earnings

In the 12-month period between March 2007 and March 2008 U.S. telcos lost 8,647,000 access lines while cable companies added 4,508,400. That suggests the balance of lost telco lines either wound up in the "wireless" category, taken by independent VoIP providers or were part of business line contraction made possible, on the user side, by IP and broadband technologies that provide voice services over a broadband connection of some sort.

It is quite hard to avoid the conclusion that the lost lines taken by cable companies were solely due to "lower price," since cable digital voice normally has no new IP features, is provisioned in a "whole house" manner that mimics POTS, and differs mostly in its price, not its quality.

The drivers might be more complicated in the other cases. VoIP customers sometimes buy based on price, at other times because of the new IP features. Enterprise or business customers often simply substitute voice services delivered over broadband for "voice grade equivalents."

Make no mistake, telcos are behaving deliberately. They simply seem to conclude that losing lines is preferable to across-the-board price reductions. It wouldn't be the first time industry participants have decided that harvesting a declining business is the best course of action.

So long as that continues to be the case, there seems little prospect that the line losses will abate. That being the case, the metrics to watch for are how well broadband-based revenue streams are building. Wireless still will be a bright spot, of course. But telco wired network performance is all about broadband revenues.

Voice simply is being harvested.

Google Maps Adds Walking Directions

Starting today, July 22, 2008, you can tell Google Maps that you want walking directions, and Google will try to find you a route that's direct, flat, and uses pedestrian pathways when we know about them, says the Google Lat Long blog. Just get directions as you normally would, for distances of 10 km or less.

As is usual for a "perpetual beta," there are some refinements Google wants to make. Right now, walking directions work well for short trips in urban areas, but Google says it does not presently always know if a street has a sidewalk, or if there's actually a special pedestrian bridge for crossing a busy street. Or for those of you navigating certain parts of Chicago's downtown loop, whether there are elevated roadways in your path that have to be navigated.

Google says it is working on ways to improve those sorts of features. Very useful, though, for those of you who travel and will be walking to a destination instead of driving.

Where Enterprises Buy Internet Access

Enterprises buy Internet access where you would expect: mostly from larger service providers. About half of all buying is from the former Regional Bell Operating Companies and Sprint.

Level 3 Communications, TW Telecom and Savvis have notable shares as well. About 37 percent of ISP access services are bought from a variety of other service providers, say reseachers at BackChannel.

More Use of Open Source Mobile Web Browsers

It might not be the case that control of a mobile browser necessarily means control of the applications environment. It might, though, mean substantial upside in terms of software customization and enhancement of user experience. So mobile device manufacturers seem to be focusing on use of open-source browser platforms as a way to leverage creation of other applications that can lead to differentiation of user experience.

As consumers increasingly surf the Web on their mobile phones, handset vendors are looking toward open-source browsers such as WebKit – the browser engine at the heart of the iPhone’s Safari browser – as a way to bring it to them. However, despite growing interest in WebKit and Gecko (the engine for the Mozilla Corporation Firefox browser), commercial browser vendors such as Opera and ACCESS continue to see growth in their businesses.

According to ABI Research, overall growth in the mobile browser category will lead to a total pre-installed revenue of $492 million by 2013, driven by the trends of more complex HTML-based browser integration.

“Device manufacturers are interested in open-source solutions where there is a desire for increased control of their software footprint, and where they can bring internal programming resources to bear,” says research director Michael Wolf. “

Open-source offerings such as WebKit are experiencing adoption by vendors such as Apple, Nokia, and others. Google made WebKit its core browser and Web-rendering engine for the Android platform; and application framework vendors such as Trolltech have integrated WebKit into their development framework. Mozilla also continues to develop its version of mobile Firefox, and Nokia has integrated a Gecko-based browser on its N800 Internet tablet.

More Evidence of Cloud Computing, SaaS Trends

Coghead, which provides a platform for authoring applications that are "mashups" added to other existing business apps, now is selling its services on a usage-based basis, in addition to a per-user basis, Clint Boulton, eWeek staff writer, notes. That change allowsCoghead to price in a way more attractive for lighter users, and using a model similar to Salesforce.com, the popular application sold as a service.

Coghead CEO Paul McNamara saysCoghead, to date, has charged per user—$49 per month for five users as a base plan—regardless of how much users were using its applications. That worked well for active users but not so well for infrequent users.

Coghead will continue to offer per-user pricing plans for full access to Coghead applications.

Coghead hopes the new pricing will help keep its current customers from jumping ship to Salesforce.com, Bungee Labs or Google App Engine, while luring new users with the flexibility options.

The changes illustrate the growing importance of business-oriented software sold as a service and the simultaneous use of utility computing "in the cloud" to create and deliver the services.

Packet8 Launches IP Key System Service

8x8 has introduced new Packet8 hosted Internet Protocol telephony services designed to replace traditional premise-based telephone "key systems" typically used by companies whose size or structure dictates the sharing of multiple, common phone lines among employees, regardless of where the employees are located.

Note the key phrase "shared line appearance." Since one of the issues hosted IP telephony providers have faced is a bit of confusion about why to adopt, the new Packet 8 service goes about as far as one can to position a feature other than "saving money" as the reason for a particular buyer segment to dive in.

Driven by the new Packet8 675xi series of IP desktop phones and the addition of shared line appearance services to the Packet8 Virtual Office platform, the new hosted key system solution provides businesses an opportunity to migrate to VoIP without altering the features, functionality and user behavior they have traditionally relied upon.Packet8 Virtual Office hosted iPBX solution," said 8x8 Vice President of Sales & Marketing Huw Rees.

The system is said to be ideal for offices where multiple users require the ability to view and answer more than one shared phone line at their desk or anywhere in the business

The SIP busy line appearance function apparently is quite difficult to do, but is essential for customers that require the ability for somebody else to pick up an inbound call without parking, says Rees. "It seems like a small function but it is actually quite complicated to do."