Web Use Shows Serious Fragmentation of Attention

In March the average American visited 111 domains and 2,500 web pages, according to Nielsen Online.

The average time spent per page is 56 seconds. Portals and search engines dominate, capturing approximately 12 of the 75 hours spent online in March.

That's what you call fragmentation.

Sprint Narrows Losses; Kindle and Prepaid Help

Sprint Nextel's 182,000 total net subscribers represents a sequential improvement of over one million subscribers and the best sequential net change in total subscribers in Sprint Nextel history, says Hesse.

Sprint Nextel appears to be having success adding prepaid customers, a trend noticeable at some other wireless firms, as well as with its wholesale business, driven in part by Amazon Kindle subscriptions.

Sprint Nextel had 49.1 million customers at the end of the quarter, compared to 49.3 million at the end of 2008. This includes 35.4 million post-paid subscribers (25.3 million on CDMA, 8.9 million on iDEN, and 1.2 million Power Source users who utilize both networks), 4.3 million prepaid subscribers (3.5 million on iDEN and 800,000 on CDMA) and 9.4 million wholesale and affiliate subscribers.

In the first quarter, total wireless customers declined by approximately 182,000, including net losses of 1.25 million post-paid customers – comprising 531,000 CDMA and 719,000 iDEN customers (including a net 94,000 customers who transferred from the iDEN network to the CDMA network).

The company also lost 90,000 prepaid CDMA customers. The company gained a net 764,000 prepaid iDEN customers and 394,000 wholesale and affiliate subscribers. The company achieved total subscriber growth on the iDEN network.

Wireless service revenues for the quarter of $6.4 billion declined 10 percent  year-over-year and two percent quarter over quarter.

Wireless post-paid ARPU in the quarter was stable sequentially and year-over-year at $56, primarily due to growth in fixed-rate bundled plans such as "Simply Everything," offset by seasonal declines in usage.

Data revenues contributed greater than $15 to overall post-paid ARPU in the first quarter, led by growth in CDMA data ARPU. CDMA data ARPU inow represents more than 31 percent of total CDMA ARPU.

Prepaid ARPU in the quarter was approximately $31 compared to $29 in the year-ago period and $30 in the fourth quarter of 2008. The year-over-year and sequential increases reflect a growing contribution from prepaid subscribers on unlimited plans.

Do You Actually Own Your Brand, When Social Networking is Growing?

Some day we are going to look back at this period and wonder "what were we thinking?" about how social networking is integrated with business processes. Consider "branding," the creation of a company image. These days, an actor can do so much. After that, users take over.

Recalling my management studies in grad school, is "leadership" something leaders do, or is it something "followers" give? That's leadership as distinct from bureaucratic management (I give an order and you follow it). Think of the normal military chain of command--that's management--and contrast it with combat leadership.

Managers must be obeyed because of their roles. Leaders are followed for different reasons.

Management is the sum total of all the efforts firms make to create and sustain a brand; brand leadership is the voluntary assent of consumers to agree with a firm's promise, or to give the brand a new promise.

What is clear is the serious attention enterprises now are giving to social networking and how to use it.

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/archives/2009/05/social_networki.html

New U.K. Satellite Broadband Service Launches

Eutelsat Communications has launched "Tooway" consumer Internet access service in the U..K, offering 2 Mbps downstream access for £29.99 per month. Company executives say 14 to 20 percent of U.K. homes cannot today get service at 2 Mbps. Service had been launched in France earlier in the year. Service providers in Italy and Spain also use Tooway.

But more is coming. In 2010, Eutelsat will launch a new Ka-band satellite that will offer downstream speeds of 10 Mbps. By way of comparison, the new bird will have the capacity of 40 traditional satellites and will offer service comparable to terrestrial ADSL2 networks.

Eutelsat says video services will be available using a single receiver and antenna once the Ka-band satellite is operational. It is possible that VoIP services might also be possible, though some latency issues will remain for online gaming.

Voice support would be key, as it would allow Tooway to offer an actual triple-play service over a single network, much as terrestrial competitors do.

BT 21CN Hits Turbulence

BT Group might be rethinking or simply slowing deployment of its 21CN voice network architecture, based in large part on a network element called a Multi-Service Access Node (MSAN), intended to dramatically simplify access plant operations.

It isn't clear whether it is the architecture or simply the price points at which BT now is able to source MSANs that are the issue.

But at least one Internet service provider that wants to use the 21CN network has found the cost unappealing, lending at least some credence to the notion that the costs of its MSAN-driven access infrastructure remain higher than desired.

"Things are not entirely going to plan," says says Andrews & Arnold Ltd., operators of AAISP.net, on the company blog. "Some of the cost reductions we expected are not happening as we expected, which means 20CN lines will continue to cost us a lot more than 21CN lines."

"Until we get a new service (WBMC IPStream connect) from BT (which could be 6 months off) we don't make any savings moving lines to 21CN and in fact increase costs," AAISP says.

But "the last straw" is the cut-over process, AAISP says. Many customers were out of service for days as the network cut-overs were executed. "We have had something like six whole exchanges that have not worked in the last week alone," AAISP says.

So AAISP is trying to cancel all planned customer upgrades to the 21CN network. BT normally charges AASIP £15 for each cancellation so AAISP is seeking a mass waiver these charges so it can cancel all pending cut-overs to 21CN.

Separately, BT Wholesale has been under pressure as well. We hear that the cost of fully integrating what used to be the Infonet network now are so high that BT is simply going to run its legacy network and the former Infonet assets separately.

Unfortunately, it appears the complexity of the BT Wholesale networks overall are great enough that salespeople have been quoting costs that actually are less than the cost to provide services. Those of you who have had to deal in such things will appreciate the complexity of those sorts of issues.

Most of us will be wishing BT the best of luck resolving both the 21CN and BT Wholesale issues. Some competitors obviously will not be saddened, and perhaps some retail customers are happy they are buying service below cost.

But the U.K.'s broadband infrastructure hangs on BT getting things fixed, since so much domestic capability is dependent on the carrier of last resort.

http://aaisp.blogspot.com/2009/04/state-of-play.html

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=176244&f_src=lightreading_gnews

200 Goats at Google

200 goats "mowing" the grass at Google headquarters.  Google thinks it is a lower carbon approach than the typical mowing using gasoline-propelled mowers.

That might or might not be true. The goats have to be trucked to the site and then back home.

Don't get me wrong; I love goats. They are a more pleasing way to cut back weeds and other flammable material. I'd do it, too.

But I'm not sure it actually produces less carbon, overall.

Here Comes the Cloud Computing Hype Cycle

Nothing is more predictable than hype cycles in the information technology business. So here comes the peak of the "cloud computing" hype cycle. 

Click on the graphic to expand it.