When Bad People Use Good Technology

Technology now plays a key role in enabling terrorists, says New York Times reporter Jeremy Kahn. The attackers studied satellite images of the city online, navigated using the global positioning system, used a satellite phone and VoIP. In fact, VoIP was used during the Mumbai hotel attacks during the occupation of at least one hotel to keep terrorists aprised of security force movements, Kahn notes.

Indian security forces surrounding the buildings were able to monitor the terrorists’ outgoing calls by intercepting their cellphone signals. But Indian police officials said those directing the attacks, believed to be in Pakistan, were using a VoIP phone service that has complicated efforts to determine their whereabouts and identities.

In mid-October, a draft United States Army intelligence report highlighted the growing interest of Islamic militants in using VoIP, noting recent news reports of Taliban insurgents using Skype to communicate. 

Some people reflexively complain about electronic surveillance and privacy, which are reasonable concerns. Despite being unable to name a single instance when a a lawful U.S. citizen's use of technology has proven to be a problem, those same people would deny intelligence agencies the tools they need to prevent attacks or catch perpetrators. 

Several hundred innocent people are dead. A bit of balance would be nice. 

Recession ARPU Impact: This is Why

Alan Weinkrantz over at 3Screens.com makes a point that illustrates the likely impact of the current recession on retailers of voice, data an video services to consumer customers: average revenue per unit is going to be under pressure. Weinkrantz points out that he reduced his triple play billing from $164 to $94 per month by threatening to churn to another provider. 

"You just have to call 800-288-2020 and ask for a discount by telling them you are thinking of switching to your local cable or satellite provider," he says, saying that his U-verse Voice service pricing went from $35 to $25; U-verse 400 went from $99 to $59 and 

Broadband Elite went from $30 to $10. The discount is good for six months. 

"I told them to note it on my record that I was going to call back in May to ask for the same thing again," he says. 

53% of American Adults are "Gamers"

Some 53 percent of American adults age 18 and older play video games and about one in five adults (21 percent) play everyday or almost everyday. While the number of video gamers among adults is substantial, it is still well under the number of teens who play. Fully 97 percent of teens play video games.

Younger adults are considerably more likely than older adults to play games, and the likelihood that an adult is a video gamer decreases significantly with age.

Fully 81 percent of respondents18-29 years old play games, while only 23 percent of respondents 65 years old and older report playing games, according to to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project poll.

Overall, men (55 percent) are slightly more likely than women (50 percent), and urbanites (56 percent) are a bit more likely than rural-dwellers (47 percent) to play any kind of digital game. There is no significant difference in game playing across income groups or between suburbanites and adults from other locales.

A person’s education level is another predictor of video game play. Some 57 percent of respondents with at least some college education play games, significantly more than high school graduates (51 percent) and those who have less than a high school education (40 percent).
Current students who are 18 or older are also avid players. Notably, 76 percent of students (82 percent of full-time and 69 percent of part-time students) report playing games, compared with 49 percent of non-students.

AT&T Will Hit 10% Video Penetration in December 2008

AT&T now says it will end the year with more than one million U-verse (multi-channel video) subscribers. The company expects to surpass that milestone in mid-December. That is important for people who track progress telcos are making in the video market, which is the mirror image of telcos losing voice customer share to cable companies.

At that level, AT&T will have surpassed 10 percent penetration within one year when we begin marketing operations. That itself is a milestone on the way to stable long-term penetration for wired network providers, which has in some other cases reached 30 percent or higher levels in a few markets where there is robust multi-channel video competition. Verizon has attained that level in some of its FiOS video markets, for example.

Most telcos probably think they will get to 20 percent in several years. Verizon already has hit about 24 percent penetration where it offers FiOS video. On average FiOS TV achieves 17 percent penetration in just 12 months and over 26 percent penetration within two years, Verizon reported in the third quarter of 2008.

Covad Certifies PBXes

Covad Communications has certified IP PBXs from TalkSwitch, Grandstream, Vertical and Epygi for its new Covad Integrated Access service.
 
IP PBXs certified by Covad include:
* TalkSwitch IP PBX equipped for VoIP (models 244/248vs, 284/288vs,  484/488vs and 844/848vs)
* Grandstream GXE502X ALL-IN-ONE IPPBX 
* Vertical Xcelerator IP
* Epygi Quadro 2x and Quadro 4x IP PBX

Mass Media Will Miss the Bottom...Again....

Count on the mass media to miss the "bottom" of the present recession: they always do. You now are seeing headlines about layoffs at larger and mid-sized companies.
Economists now say we have been in recession since December 2007. The only good news there is that one year of the recession already has passed.

So whether you think this is a garden-variety recession or a longer one, the average recession lasts 18 months. By the end of the year we'll have been in recession a full 13 months. And layoffs always are a lagging indicator.

So as you note news reports about job losses, keep one thing in mind: when we reach the peak of the job losses, the recession will have hit bottom and the recovery will have begun.

Peak job losses in the 2001 recession were 325,000, which were reported in October, the last month of that recession. Peak losses during the 1990-91 recessions—306,000—were reported in February 1991, again one month before the recession ended.

During the 1981-82 recession, peak job losses were 343,000, a figured reported four months before the end of the recession. A bottom in the labor market often indicates the near bottom of a recession, since employment is a lagging indicator.

There are implications for service providers. Though not every company is as cash rich as Cisco or Apple, opportunities to take market share or reshape a market always present themselves in a recession.

And there is clear evidence that in some customer segments, such as small business, hiring actually increased every month of 2008, says SurePayroll, a company that makes its living processing employee payroll checks (through the end of November, the last month where data is available).

Hiring tends to drive increased buying of communications products, so whatever weakness you think you will see in the enterprise segment, small business trends could well be quite different.

Small Business: Conventional Wisdom is Wrong

With all the bad news we are hearing, the conventional wisdom is that small businesses will be cutting back on hiring. As sometimes occurs, the conventional wisdom often is wrong. Keep in mind that economists now have concluded the U.S. economy has been in recession since December 2006.

So what might surprise you is that SurePayroll, a company that makes its living processing employee payroll checks, hiring in the small business segment climbed steadily through 2008.

What that means for providers of communications services to small businesses is that underlying demand in the small business segment grew all year in 2008.

After the carnage of October 2008, one might have expected, and news reports suggest, a wave of layoffs starting in November 2008. But SurePayroll says U.S. small businesses increased their staff levels by 0.26 percent in November. “It was the second lowest percentage increase this year, but it extended the run of monthly hiring increases to an impressive twenty-four months,” the company says.

The SurePayroll Hiring Index, which tracks the size of small businesses, ended the month of November at 11,249, which is 30 points higher than where the index stood in October.
For the first 11 months of 2008, when the economy was definitively in recession, small business hiring went up 3.3 percent nationwide.