VoIP 40% of French Market Traffic

VoIP now represents close to 30 percent of all telephone subscriptions in France, according to French regulatory authority ARCEP, and is growing by about one million subscriptions every quarter.

IP calls now represent 40.5 percent of traffic originating on fixed phones(compared with less than 27 percent a year earlier) and 59 percent of traffic for international calls. VoIP traffic now represents 42 percent of in-France calling and 18 percent of traffic to mobiles.

VoIP services are generally used more intensively (5 hours and 34 minutes) than “traditional” telephone service (3 hours and 16 minutes) per subscriber, per month in the first quarter of 2008.

Most fixed lines (66 percent) in service represent a single “traditional” telephone subscription on the PSTN, dropping by three percentage points each quarter. The reduction primarily is caused by customers substituting VoIP services.

Some 15 percent of lines in service at the end of the first quarter 2008 support both VoIP and legacy telecom.

Text Still Will Dominate Mobile Data in 2011

Text messaging is now, and will still be, the top revenue-generating mobile data application in 2011, say researchers at Informa. Video is the application that will have the fastest growth rate between now and 2011, though.

AT&T to Clarify DSL Speed Expectations

AT&T expects to modify the way it packages its broadband Internet service, offering more precise levels of service that promise minimum and maximum transmission rates.

AT&T Senior Vice President Robert Quinn told the Federal Communications Commission the company would offer "non-overlapping tiers" of broadband service, rather than its current offerings which go "up to" varying speeds of data transmission.

"When we provide broadband services based on speed, we will do so in discrete tiers that are disclosed to our end-user customers," Quinn said.

Quinn said the changes were among "clarifications and improvements" AT&T plans to make to its customer disclosure policies, which the company hopes to roll out later this year.

"If we find that we are 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," Quinn said.

Comet Resurrects "Push"

If Web-based applications are to have a true shot at displacing apps run off local hard disk drives, response time issues must be solved. As is typical for Web apps, though, new tools may help solve that problem. Comet (or Reverse AJAX), for example, is a significant departure from the “click-and-wait” interaction we traditionally associate with Web applications.

In fact, as with so many innovations--recall "push" technology or "application service providers"--timing is everything. Some applications that simply were too cumbersome 10 years ago now are possible with the spread of broadband, faster broadband, caching, peer-to-peer and software such as Comet.

Being right often is less "good" than being timely.

Comet is said by its supporters to resurrect push capabilities with better IP communications.

Simply put, push communications like Comet remove the requirement for an end user to explicitly click on a link or button to request information from a server.

Instead, the server is free to send messages to clients anytime a server-side event occurs. Therefore, content no longer needs the tried and true “click” to reach you. Web pages from hereon out will simply update as new data is made available, finally laying to rest the refresh button on your browser.

That has implications for bandwidth usage profiles, bandwidth intensity and usefulness of interactive or social applications.

Comet makes it possible to build any application that requires real-time updates, enabling true desktop-like functionality to be delivered over the Internet. That has implications for the effectiveness of chat applications, social networking, online games; news updates and online collaboration, for example.

User Generated Video: Limited Ad Revenue

User-generated video will continue to account for close to half of total online video streams between 2008 and 2013, but disappointingly will produce no more than four percent of ad-related online video revenue at any time during this period, acccording the Diffusion Group.

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.

While the business of online video remains immature, Buckley notes that the continued growth in online TV viewing among consumers and the push to get this content directly to the TV will cultivate the larger audience for professional online video content.

No Mobiles on Planes?

H.R. 5788, "The Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace Act of 2008," was approved by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Aug. 31, 2008. That does not necessarily mean anything much. It is just a committee vote, and the legislation is not yet scheduled for a floor vote, much less for consideration by the Senate. But some of us agree that people talking on mobiles can be quite an annoyance in the now-cramped confines of aircraft.

The European Union, though, seems to be moving ahead on inflight cellular service.

AT&T Bet on Jobs

Leslie Cauley, USA Today staff writer, says AT&T got a one-year extension of its exclusivity deal for iPhone sales in the U.S. market as part of the new deal with Apple to pay an upfront fee, rather than a share of monthly recurring revenues. The original exclusive deal was set to expire at the end of 2009. So AT&T has another two and a half years to wring more magic out of the iPhone before contending with other carriers.

The iPhone might seem like a no-brainer now, but back then it was little more than a concept, with no name, design plan or software operating system. And it was offered by a computer company that had zip experience in wireless.

And credit AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson for making a key, and somewhat "un-telco-like decision." in staking so much on the Apple deal.

"We're not betting on the handset," Stephenson says. "We're betting on Jobs."

That appears so far to have been the right decision. It isn't just the handset. It was the intuition that Steve Jobs, whose firm never had built mobile phones before, could bring something spectacularly new to handset design, and by extension to the mobile data business.

Imagine any stodgy, old school CEO at a firm that big, betting on a person, rather than a company track record. It's a sign of new thinking, for sure.