AT&T, Verizon Ramp Up DSL Marketing

It is starting to appear that a dramatic second-quarter fall-off in net new broadband access customers at AT&T, Verizon and Qwest was due to marketing inattention by telcos and brisk activity by cable companies. At least, that's what one would surmise based on ramped-up marketing programs AT&T and Verizon now are rolling out.

Verizon Communications Inc., in the second quarter the first telco ever to see a drop in DSL subscribers, now is offering customers six months of DSL service free if they sign up for the company's phone and Internet package. AT&T now is guaranteeing its current rates for two years.

Wall Street Journal staff writer Vishesh Kumar reports that "while the most generous offers are coming from the phone companies, some analysts expect cable companies will also become more aggressive in their own promotions as they compete to retain customers."

Cable and phone companies added 887,000 new broadband customers during the second quarter, half the number they added a year earlier, according to research from Leichtman Research Group.

It wasn't immediately clear, when the second quarter acquisition numbers appeared, what had happened. Basically, Verizon and AT&T experiences an unusual order of magnitude drop in net broadband adds, something completely at odds with several years worth of quarterly additions.

One conceivable explanation was a sudden shift in consumer preferences for cable modem service as compared to DSL. Another partial answer in Verizon's case was that broadband adds increasingly were shifting to FiOS, and away from DSL.

Also, aggressive promotioinal activity by cable companies undoubtedly played a role, combined with some sort of inattention to broadband marketing on the part of the telcos. Whatever the causes, it now appears marketing efforts by telcos will be much more aggressive in the third quarter.

Google to Launch Own Browser

Google Inc. plans to launch its own Web browser, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The browser, called Google Chrome, will be developed on an open-source platform, and is designed to make it easier and faster to browse the Web, by offering enhanced address-bar features and other elements.

That might seem like an odd move. But browsers have become important business model platforms. Though there might ultimately be other strategic advantages, the immediate emphasis seems to be the linkage between browsers and default search engine use. Browser revenue streams these days often rely on search engine revenue. That is the business model for the free Firefox browser, for example.

And for Google, the ad rates it can charge for search and related advertising are dependent on the scope and frequency of search engine queries.

"Too Much Information" a UC Opportunity

One of the most important skills executives need today is the know-how to manage and harness their personal information flow, says Steve Rubel, SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital.

By 2009, the Radicati Group predicts that we’ll spend 41 percent of our time managing email, he notes. Now add to that the IMs, documents, Facebook pokes, RSS feeds, Twitter tweets and text messages coming at us and we’re officially way oversubscribed, he notes.

That's an issue and an opportunity for providers of various unified communications services and applications. Human attention is finite; it doesn’t scale. So in a way, making it possible to receive any message, at any time, on any device, is going to make the information deluge worse, not better.

So the idea of protecting users from communications access is something of an unexplored territory. The notion is that the ability to protect users from getting messages might be more important than allowing them to get all messages, anytime, anywhere. Filtering, call screening and other limitation techniques are, in that sense, as important as accessibility.

Spam filters are somewhat helpful, though less so than one would hope if a user works in any business where messages from people one has not communicated with before are a daily reality. In some cases in can help to prioritize messages from people one has initiated communications with, or communicates with frequently. In other cases, where useful and important messages can arrive without benefit of "permission" tagging, filtering is a problem.

Unified communications, as helpful as it can be, carries with it the other problem of "overload." Someday, that's going to create new opportunities for application providers that can help with "pay attention to this" mechanisms.

Which Word Processor Do You Use? Does it Matter as Much?

Microsoft Word is the word processor of choice, but GoogleDocs now is used by 20 percent of users while OpenOffice is favored by 18 percent of users, according to a poll taken by 535 ReadWriteWeb readers. About seven percent of users reported a text editor, such as Microsoft's "Notepad," is the word processor of choice.

A couple of things got my attention here. Respondents were asked which text editor they "mostly used." My immediate impulse was to say "Microsoft Word." But then I thought about it. Looking at the text entry I do in a day, the number of occurrences is dominated by email messages, not an actual "word processor" application.

The other reflection is that, as a heavy blogger, I now use "notepad" or text editor apps, or the actual text entry areas of blog software more than the word processor itself. In fact, the clear pattern is use of email, notepad and blog word processing tools every day, Word for the few days a month when I actually prepare long-form magazine articles.

Add in other forms of text entry, such as short message service and traditional "word processing" doesn't get used, except for preparation of print magazine stories. All the other text is SMS, notepad, email or blog software. As I am on a temporary "get less connected" jag, I avoid starting up my IM clients. But that's another contender for text creation and editing.

I guess I hadn't really thought about it much, but my use of text tools has changed dramatically over the past few years, driven by blogging. I suspect most of us can cite similar or additional ways our use of word processing or text manipulation has changed over the past decade or so.

Cable, Internet Ad Spending Caveats

At first glance, opportunities for new providers to grab significant ad revenue generated by linear, multi-channel video would seem promising. According to Nielsen Online, about 24 percent of current ad spending goes to cable television.

So telcos ought to be able to tap a significant share of that revenue at some point, the logic would be.

The issue is that most of the cable television ad revenue is captured by programming networks, not by cable companies. Cable companies get about seven percent of their revenue from advertising.

If one looks at the share of online video ad revenue, Internet gets about seven percent. Same issue there: nearly all that revenue is earned by application providers; very little by ISPs.

250 Gbyte per Month Caps: Comcast

Comcast will cap Internet usage of its broadband subscribers at 250 Gigabytes per month starting Oct. 1, 2008. Typical users will not be liable for any hard caps, at that level. Comcast says median usage these days for its residential customers is about two to three gigabytes a month. To trigger the cap, a user would have to be watching a fair amountof video. Comcast says the cap would be hit if users watched 125 standard-definition movies.

Assuming a two-hour average movie duration, that works out to about 250 hours of streamed video, equivalent to eight hours a day, 30 days a week. That could get to be an issue at some point, but few human beings have time to watch that much streamed video and do much of anything else related to work, school, exercise or friends.

So far, the only users already "close" to the 250 Gbyte cap are less than one percent of heavy movie downloaders, one suspects. Comcast says less than one percent of its current users are "even close" to 250 Gbytes a month of usage.

EU Commissioner Proposes Billing Changes

European Union telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding does not like the way some mobile operators are charging by the minute rather than second for calls made while traveling between EU countries.

Mobile operators obviously don't relish the thought of new rules that would force them to bill in seconds or fractions of minutes. .

In France, Spain, Lithuania and Portugal, operators have to bill by the second, but national legislation is not practical for roamed calls, the Commission spokesman said.

The EU has already adopted a law to cap the price of roamed voice calls for three years, with the cap due to be lowered on Saturday and in August next year before the law expires in 2010. The EU is expected to renew the caps for another three years in October, and also might introduce new caps on text messaging charges when users are roaming.

EU nations and the European Parliament would have to approve the changes.