Cord Cutting Growing, But Landlines Relatively Stable: Why?

Switched access lines provided by telcos in the United States have decreased by 17 million lines from 2005 to 2008 and telcos will lose another 10 million by 2011, says Patrick Monaghan, Yankee Group senior analyst.

You might think that is caused by users dumping their landlines in favor of mobile-only service.
But Monaghan doesn't think wireless substitution explains much of the incumbent line loss. In fact, he says, residential home phone service has only experienced a two-percent year-over-year loss from 2005 to 2008.

That's something on the order of five million subscribers. His conclusion: Most consumers are not cutting the cord. They simply are choosing cable or other providers.

There's one other important data point. Business lines in service have grown slightly over that same time period. Paradoxically, cord cutting has increased at the same time that fixed voice lines have held about level.

All of that is hard to square with estimates that 13 to 16 percent of U.S. homes already are wireless-only.  The logical inference is that higher numbers of households headed by younger people are wireless only, at the same time that business use of fixed voice is up a bit and consumer use is down a bit.

An impressionistic example: as my four children headed off to college, my own household dropped one landline and added one mobile account, but now there are four more wireless-only "households" out there.

Broadband Stimulus: Mapping Isn't the Issue for Rural Areas

Some people argue that the broadband stimulus funds should not be spent until we have better mapping to tell us where the problems are. People at the local level know where the unserved areas are.

You never will ever meet a rural telco or rural cable operator that isn't painfully aware of locations where broadband isn't available by wire.  Small communities aren't like big metro areas. People know each other, and that goes for anybody charged with providing broadband services using wires.

"Underserved" is a different matter. First you have to decide what that means, and what causes it. In some cases, lack of money, lack of PCs or lack of interest or knowledge are big issues there.

But lack of knowledge isn't the hold up in rural areas. Local people know where they need to get. Let them get there.

http://thelobbyist.net/lobby/archives/940

Consumers Want Choice: Will They Get it?

There's no question but that the central value multi-channel video services provide is "more choice."

Up to this point, industry economics have worked fairly well. Distributors have been able to build sustainable businesses delivering more choice, adding more niche channels to a basic tier.

As recurring fees continue to increase, resistance will grow, some believe. Analysts at the Diffusion Group, for example, say more consumers are unhappy than happy about having to buy a bundle of channels to get access to the relative few they actually watch.

An argument can be made that any move to full a la carte buying will reduce choice, as most smaller networks will not be able to create advertising revenue streams under such a regime.

You will know a tipping point has been reached when the first major network decides it can forego exclusive distributor carriage. That tipping point still seems relatively far off, though. It is hard to see any change from the current bundled offerings that is anywhere close to revenue neutral, even for the largest networks. Small networks will be hurt by a la carte.

http://asktdg.com/blogs/tdg-opinions/archive/2009/04/10/paytv-operators-must-embrace-expanded-consumer-choice-that-is-if-they-hope-to-avoid-becoming-dumb-pipe-providers.aspx

Broadband Stimulus "Ts and Cs" Might be Decisive

There's lots of speculation about whether large telcos will apply for American Recovery and Reinvestment projects to be sponsored by the National Telecommunications & Information Administration portion of the act. Much depends on the definitions and strings.

Though the precise meaning of "underserved," "unserved" and "broadband" are important, other apparently smaller matters, such as wholesale obligations, could be decisive. Carriers large or small are unlikely to apply if it means any new infrastructure, or an entire network, would be subject to mandatory wholesale rules, beyond those already in force.

At the moment, nobody can be sure what those terms and conditions might be.

http://www.dailytech.com/Broadband+Firms+Waiting+to+Apply+for+Stimulus+Funds/article14840.htm

Broadband Stimulus: Internal Contradictions

Not that it really will matter, but among the more-obvious internal tensions built into the "broadband stimulus" provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is the difference between "create jobs" and "create broadband." ARRA is supposed to be about jobs, broadband is secondary.

The other obvious intellectual inconsistency is the preference for non-profit applicants for the National Telecommunications & Information Administration program, with the concomitant preference for projects that can be self-sustaining after program funds are exhausted.

The logical way to create self-sustaining capabilities is to allow for-profit entities to create a business case, and then fill a need by building new broadband infrastructure, or by creating other enabling mechanisms to encourage greater use or greater speeds and capabilities.

But that would be business logic, not political logic. There is a logic to political rationality. It just isn't the same thing as business rationality.

UC: Video as Lead App

Of late, unified communications has been as much about conferencing as anything else, despite all the effort that continues to be made to position unified communications as a "super category" that includes elements of phone systems, messaging, desktop and mobile communications.

UC integrator U4EA Technologies, for example, now has a partnership with Vidtel. By combining U4EA’s Fusion series Multi-service Business Gateways (MSBG) with Vidtel’s new video calling and conferencing services, the two companies hope to ensure video call quality and the fully utilization of WAN bandwidth.

U4EA says it is the only QoS technology specifically designed to support unified communications, including video applications.

Mobile and Proximity Marketing Won't Avoid Typical Mistakes

Every new medium inevitably begins life as a new way of doing something that already exists. Mobile marketing, proximity marketing and other location-based media will not escape this pattern, either. Still, practitioners seem more widely attuned to the idea that conversations are the perhaps-uniquely new aspect of mobile marketing. In fact, facilitating conversations might be the most significant new development for practitioners whose traditional mission has been to position and sell things.

http://ow.ly/2Guv