Despite Video, Text Still Rules, So does Voice

There are some interesting parallels between "voice" and "text," and the relationships can illustrated by the difference between "telephony" and "IP communications," or "text" and "video."

Voice usage continues to increase, even as more text, blogging, video and conferencing occurs as well. But voice is not necessarily "telephony." Voice is used in many different ways, even as buying of traditional consumer voice lines continues to decline in favor of mobile or VoIP alternatives.

Likewise, lost of news, commentary and entertainment now is moving away from legacy print and towards online formats. But text seems to have grown in importance as legacy "print" channels have struggled. Again, what we see is a pattern similar to that of "voice" usage. More usage, but using new formats, media and channels.

But user behavior is quite complex. As Steve Rubel points out in this post, text remains key for Web-based and mobile communications, even as Web video has emerged as the next wave of Web media.

One can look at video growth, telephony "decline", and make the wrong forecast: that people mostly will communicate using video. Likewise, one can look at the demise of newspapers or magzines and assume people are not reading. They're reading, but it is tweets, blog posts, news feeds and Web pages. Text simply is used in different ways.

As Rubel notes, though, an argument can be made that text still "rules."

Thinking the Unthinkable: Telcos Have Done Better than Publishers

Over the course of some years I have on occasion used the airline analogy to look at structural issues faced by telecom service providers. Both are capital-intensive industries with huge economies of scale, multiple customer segments, important regulatory backdrop, and similar market entry and incumbent response patterns.

At other times I have used the analogy of how Internet Protocol is changing the telecom business to describe what is happening in the print media business, arguing that the underlying business impact is similar in both industries.

Neither the print nor the airline industries have performed as well as the telecom industry in coping with dramatic change.

Clay Shirkey's article is a provocative but largely accurate assessment of why print publishers--newspapers in this case--have failed to adapt as rapidly as telecom providers have.

More than 77 percent of wireless subscribers in the U.S. subscribe to or purchase text-message capability, says Nielsen Mobile. And uers now send and receive more text messages than they do voice calls.

In the United States, about 200 million of the 259 million wireless subscriber lines subscribe to or purchase text-message capability. Of these, 138 million--53 percent of all mobile subscribers--use text-messaging on a regular basis.

Nielsen recently reported that in the second quarter of 2008, mobile subscribers sent or received an average of 357 text-messages per month, compared with 204 phone calls. And while the average number of text-messages sent or received has increased 351 percent (from 79 text-messages sent or received last year), phone traffic have not become less popular.

In fact, phone useage has been constant, suggesting that text messaging adds to, rather than replaces, voice communications.

U.S. and U.K. Users Represent Half of Mobile Web Browsing

About 29 percent of global mobile Web browsing traffic now happens in the United States, with about 20.3 percent happening in the United Kingdom. Between them, the United States and United Kingdom now represent about half of global mobile Web browsing, says bango.

That might come as a surprise to many. What might be a bigger surprise is the number of people who now land on Web sites using a mobile. That could be an issue: sites not optimized for mobile access might not execute some expected functions at all, others poorly.

But most businesses do not have mobile-optimized websites.“Many people simply have no idea that they have visitors from mobile devices accessing their PC-optimized website, says Anil Malhotra, Bango SVP."These mobile visitors are simply invisible to them.”

The statistics also show that while some countries such as India and Indonesia have a good appetite for browsing on their mobiles, it doesn’t always convert into purchases. In fact, only five countries in the Top-10 browsing chart are also in the Top-10 payments chart. Those countries are the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, South Africa and Spain.

“When it comes to payments though, the US is accelerating faster than any other country and now accounts for 57 percent of payments worldwide,” says Malhotra.

No matter how high the browsing rate, it is only converted into a high purchase rate where people have a good disposable income and can pay for content on their phone bills, bango says. In regions such as India, South Africa, Indonesia and Egypt the driver for mobile browsing is a lack of fixed-line broadband and PCs for accessing the Internet which means that the mobile device is the only way people can get onto the Internet.

Google Voice to Launch Within Days

Nearly two years after acquiring GrandCentral, Google is preparing to relaunch the service with lots of new features. GrandCentral has been in private beta for the last two years and over the next few days Google will be prompting existing beta users to upgrade to Google Voice before rolling out the service to new users in a few weeks.

GrandCentral was a Web-activated IP voice service that uses a single "public" number that points to other numbers and devices, providing a range of visual voice mail and Web message retrieval and call management features.

Google Voice will add the ability to make free calls to U.S. telephone numbers and cheap calls to other numbers, make conference calls, and send, receive, store, and search SMS messages and create transcripts of voice mails.

From my perspective, one of the best new features is the ability to deliver the Google Voice number, even when placing a call from some other real device. The reason for that is that Google Voice features are applied to inbound calls using the virtual number.

If anybody calls using the actual device's "delivered" number (caller ID), the features aren't available. So it now will be easier to deliver the Google Voice caller ID on outbound calls, which virtually assures that return calls will arrive in a way that allows call management features to work.

Also, voice mail now will more nearly resemble email, and users can create transcripts of calls, a useful feature for many call settings.

Hopefully, Google will make address book importation easier as well. That, and the inability to simply deliver the GrandCentral virtual phone number, have been my two biggest problems using the service.

Comcast Passes Qwest as Phone Provider

Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable television company, says it now has become the third-largest provider of primary home phone service in the United States, overtaking telephone company Qwest Communications International.

Comcast, which started offering phone services in the spring of 2005, said it now has 6.47 million subscribers.

RCN Metro Has "Nice Problems"

Here's a problem any service provider sales staff would like to have: trying to figure out why sales are running ahead of projections for four months in a row. But that's precisely the issue Phil Alvarez, RCN Metro Optical Networks president, says he has been "grappling" with over the last four months.

"Gven our sales across all markets, we were trying to figure out why we are doing so well," says Alvarez. "You

question yourself." When RCN Metro dug into the numbers, it found very strong activity in wireless, a result of wireless providers really shoring up their backbones to support wireless broadband services. Need for more route diversity and the ability to provision very quickly also were factors.

You might think any provider with exposure to the financial services industry might face some exposure. Sure, there's some churn, says Alvarez. But "our services address trading requirements, data center connectivity and connections to customers and trading partners," Alvarez says.

So they still are buying. The financial services industry is used to periodic downturns, Alvarez says. They know business will pick up again so they have to keep moving. Their core business plans require capacity investments.

That said, RCN has seen some minimal recession impact. Some customers say they might substitute new providers for some services, on some routes, in some areas, in part because, on some selected routes, and for some services, a great deal of very-aggressive pricing is going on, in areas such as transit services. What is more obvious is pricing pressure on high-traffic routes, though. In other areas, on a highly route dependent basis, prices are relatively firm, or firming.

Generally, on routes where there is pricing pressure, it is Ethernet capacity pricing that is most exposed, not SONET capacity, which Maura Mahoney, RCN VP, says is quite strong.

That isn't to say the recession is haivng no impact at all. It is reasonable to assume that, industrywide, customers are asking for, and might be getting, more capacity for any given level of payment, especially when contracts are renegotiated early, locked in for more years or when upgrades from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, or 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps services occur.

That does not seem to be the case for10-Gbps and wavelength purchases, though, says Alvarez.

To be sure, lower prices wouldn't be much unusual in the capacity business, which is used to virtually annual decreases in price-per-megabit-per-second pricing.

In some cases, customers are asking for shorter contract intervals. Where customers might have been buying contracts of five to seven years' length, they are in some cases making three-year commitments. Historically, longer commitments have been associated with a belief that prices would be climbing, shorter commitements with a belief that prices will be falling. That might not be the primary driver at the moment, but could be playing a factor.

Crowded routes are being hammered by low price competitors, though, and Alvarez believes that is not sustainable.

Still, Alvarez says he has been "surprised" at the levels of demand.

A nice problem to have, these days.