"Hyperconnection" Driving Wireless Broadband?

Some 16 percent of Internet users live a “hyperconnected” life, meaning they regularly use more than seven devices and more than nine applications, says Scott Wickware, Nortel general manager.

Some 36 percent are “increasingly connected,” meaning they use four devices and nine applications, he adds. About 20 percent are passive online users and 28 percent are "not very connected," he says.

So although about half of Internet users might not agree they are living in "a hyperconnected world” that requires or benefits from mobile broadband access, Wickware suggests 52 percent are candidates for mobile broadband.

The logic is simple enough: as users got comfortable with email and then wanted to have email available in their pockets and purses, so they increasingly will want access to their social networks, video and audio entertainment in the same way.

As voice once was a service delivered to "places" and now is delivered to "people," so email used to be delivered to "PCs" and now is delivered to mobiles. Roughly the same process will unfold with broadband as well, most argue. Where broadband used to be delivered to a place, it increasingly will be delivered to people; where applications are used on PCs, they in the future will be used by people on a number of mobile devices in their purses and pockets.

2.3% IT Spending Growth in 2009, Says Gartner

Granted, everybody is looking in the rear-view mirror, but Gartner analysts now expect an information technology spending increase of 2.3 percent in 2009, revised down from the original expectation of 5.8 percent, according to  Peter Sondergaard, Gartner SVP. 

“Developed economies, especially the United States and Western Europe, will be the worst affected, but emerging regions will not be immune. Europe will experience negative growth in 2009, the United States and Japan will be flat.”

Give it a quarter, though. October's impact might not yet be so clear. 

How Long Will Your Cash Last? Start-Ups Too Casual

Entrepreneurs are not worried enough about herding their start-ups through a rough patch, Rafe Needleman, CNET News writer says. A recent survey of 491 respondents found that 30 percent reported having two or more years of money in the bank, or are cash-flow positive.

About 21 percent say they have a year's worth of cash set aside.

About 49 percent reported having only three or six months of cash. That suggests as many as 50 percent of firms will be in serious trouble if an economic slowdown lasts more than a year.

Also, only 33 percent of the 524 respondents say they are "worrying about revenue and payroll."

Granted, the slowdown does not to some of us appear to be a "nuclear winter," though one could get a huge argument going on that score. Still, when young companies cannot raise the next round of funding, they die. Hence the importance of cash on hand.

Wireless Reconnectors: Wireless-Only Has Downside

A recent survey conducted by Nielsen Mobile suggests wireless-only households now have reached about 17 percent penetration nationwide, and could well hit 20 percent penetration by the end of the year.

But Nielsen also found something else: 10 percent of U.S. households with landline phone service in the second quarter 2008 were previously wireless-only users, and had chosen to buy wired voice service again.

That is important for obvious reasons. Just as some users find wireless-only service to be attractive, 10 percent of users also have found wireless-only service to be unsatisfactory.

The issue is “why?” When we look at the landline tenure of these former wireless-only users, approximately one percent of wireless-only users may return in any given quarter, Nielsen Mobile says.

As it turns out, mobile coverage is sometimes perceived to be insufficient for would-be or former wireless-only users. Dropped calls and poor audio quality are reasons wireless-only users decide a landline service still makes sense.

Web 2.0 Bubble Burst: Been There, Done That

For some of us who were part of companies that cratered during the Internet bubble burst starting in 2001, past truly is prologue. Some companies will discover "zero" is their present valuation. Others will be gobbled up by the elephants in the room. Larger, better-capitalized firms are going to find attractive assets to buy, and buy them.

Media companies will move relatively early, even telcos might find it is the right time to "move up the stack" from layers one and two to the application layer, in broader ways.

Remember the last sea change? All of a sudden, "eyeballs" (reach) largely ceased to matter. Revenue did matter. But firms that already have scale and revenue might be able to reposition acquired assets that primarily represent "reach," and convert reach into revenue.

In the start-up business, 80 percent failure rates are the norm. All that will happen now is that failure rates will accelerate, as firms find they cannot get the next financing round. But the elephants will be dancing.

Typical Media-Buying Behavior Seen

Given that consumer spending has been generally sluggish all year, even before the recent liquidity crisis, it shouldn't be surprising that some discretionary purchases are showing sluggishness as well. 

Mid-summer research by Changewave Alliance, for example, has been showing slowing consumption of downloaded media. Compared to a year ago, ChangeWave's latest survey of 2,248 consumers shows entertainment downloading has actually slowed. 

Where in July 2007 about 48 percent of respondents reported downloading songs, in July 2008 just 43 percent said they currently were downloading songs. Likewise, where 14 percent of respondents in July 2007 reported downloading movies, just 11 percent said they had done so in July 2008. The same declines were seen in TV show downloading, computer games downloads, music or book downloads as well. 

Moreover, the percentage of our respondents saying they do not download entertainment has risen to 41 percent, about six points higher than in 2007. 

This sort of behavior might be likened to what one typically sees in times of economic stringency: people downgrade some forms of discretionary entertainment spending. People do not tend to disconnec their cable or wireless services. But they might downgrade a service package to eliminate premium channels like HBO or Showtime. 

Downloads of songs, movies or TV shows fall into that category. One can simply download fewer titles to save a little money, while keeping the basic subscription services (broadband stays, but fewer items are purchased). 

Xohm Latency Performance Stands Out

In recent tests conducted by Computerworld, Sprint's 4G Xohm network showed latency performance far superior to the AT&T "Broadband Connect" 3G network, with higher throughput as well. Where downloads ran at about 1.3 Mbps to 1.7 Mbps for Broadband Connect and 3.4 Mbps to 4.4 Mbps for Xohm, the more-important statistic might have been the latency figures.

Where the AT&T 3G network had a "ping" response of about 234 milliseconds, the 4G Xohm network had 97 millisecond pings. In layman's terms, Xohm-delivered applications responded faster to user requests. 

Low-latency performance--sometimes described as latency performance identical to a traditional wired network--has been a key design goal for the Xohm network, and has been deemed important for support of real-time applications.