$99 iPhone Available Now, 2-Year Contract Required

The 8GB 3G iPhone now can be bought for $99. A two-year contract is required to get that price, and monthly costs for a package with 450 out of network voice minutes, 5,000 night and weekend minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calls to other AT&T customers, with 200 text messages,will cost $88 a month after the taxes are added to the R75 monthly cost of service.

Sprint Offers Corporate Liable Customers $39.99 Mobile Broadband

Sprint is Selling a $39.99 mobile broadband service for "corporate liable" accounts, providing 500 MBytes of data monthly, a bucket Sprint says is two times what Verizon offers and 10 times what AT&T offers at the same price point.

In addition, customers pay only five cents per for each additional megabyte of usage, which is less than half what the competition’s $39.99 plan charges for overage. Verizon's $39.99 plan has a 250 MB cap and charges 10 cents per MByte for overage.

AT&T's $40 plan has a 50 MByte cap and $1.00 per MByte for overages. 

The AT&T "moderate user" plan is probably enough for users who basically only check email and do some light Web surfing. 

The Verizon plan probably is enough for traveling workers who use the Web pretty heavily on the road and check email. 

The Sprint plan probably is sufficient for traveling workers who watch streaming video to a certain extent. 

The assumptions are monthly email consumption of about a couple Mbytes a month and per-day Web consumption of a couple of megabytes a day a day when out of the office. 

The issue is video streaming, which will be the driver of overages for most users. Most enterprise workers who are not watching tons of video probably only require a couple of gigabytes of usage each month. 

If one assumes a worker at a desk most of the day, and really using the Web heavily, could consume 50 Mbytes to 100 Mbytes each day, you have some idea of how to estimate usage. Most workers probably do not consume even that much. 

On the road, most people are doing other things, so it wouldn't be unusal to see daily consumption drop far behow behavior seen at a desk.

Perhaps 5 Mbytes a day would be typical. Of course, every user is different, but most enterprise workers who travel a couple days a month, and are in meetings or doing technical support will not even use 5 Mbytes a day when on the road. 

Streaming video, though, will upset all those assumptions. 

Online Advertising Dips 5% for First Time

Some people seem to be shocked that online advertising, which has been growing for seven straight years, dipped about five percent in the first quarter. It wouldn't be the first time people have argued, or seemed to believe, that something related to the Internet can transcend the operation of markets.

At the turn of the century, new "Internet" business models were touted that seemingly defied the normal business rule that one must have revenue to be sustainable. Others argued that valuations of Internet companies were different from valuations of companies based in the physical world. 

Anybody who argued to the contrary was ignored with a direct or indirect "you don't get it" attitude. That belief was proved devastatingly wrong.

Online advertising is advertising. Advertising is a cost of doing business. Companies are being careful about the costs of doing business. So it is no surprise there is a bit of a dip. The Internet is part of human life. It is not immune from things that happen in the broader spheres of life. 

Nor is the delusion especially new. After 1917, the Soviet Union believed it could wall itself off from the global economy. After World War II it maintained the fiction of two global economies, one capitalist, one socialist. The Soviet Union was wrong. 

The Internet changes lots of things. It doesn't repeal or escape economic laws or human behavior.

IP PBX Line Shipments Will Dip for First Time Ever in 2009

IP PBX lines shipped in 2009 will decline for the first time ever in 2009, say analysts at Dell'Oro Group. Aside from the global recession, vendor instability (Nortel, in all likelihood) is causing a bit of hesitation.

“For 2009, we anticipate a degree of vendor volatility that will cause many customers to stay on the sidelines for a longer period of time than we would expect if downward pressure was coming only from the weakened economy,” says Alan Weckel, Dell’Oro Group director.

“In the current environment, some customers will hold on to existing analog and digital lines for a longer period of time,” Weckel says.

According to the report, Cisco, Avaya and Nortel had the most IP line shipments in the quarter. The eight largest vendors in the market, including Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, NEC, Nortel and Siemens represent about 49 percent of total line shipments in the first quarter of 2009.

Notwithstanding, IP telephony penetration will continue to grow this year, albeit at a slower pace compared to the previous years.

Branch Offices Ripe for Cloud Computing?

At many enterprises, branch offices account for 20 percent of a company’s IT infrastructure, according to Forrester Research. Since IT departments are seeking to cut costs, branch office IT investments likely will be shifted to remote services provided by some sort of cloud computing infrastructure.

The potential impact on the service provider business is not so clear, but one might assume there will be greater bandwidth requirements at remote locations and in the backbone than presently is the case, as the traditional trade-off in computing is between local processing and bandwidth. One can compute locally, substituting cycles for bandwidth, or compute remotely, substituting bandwidth for cycles.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Branch-Offices-Ripe-for-IT-Consolidation-Forrester-239188/?kc=rss

Social Networking Explodes 83%, Facebook 700%

U.S. users increased their time using social networking apps 83 percent last year, according to Nielsen Online. In fact, total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009.

One wonders what all those users are doing less, as they network more. Even if one assumes multitasking is going on, attention and time still are linear. People can't do more of one thing withoug doing less of another, or at least are attention sharing to the point where it is questionable how much actual attention is being paid to something that is "available and in use."

INQ Mobile to Launch Twitter Phone

Cell phone maker INQ Mobile plans to introduce a "Twitter phone" for the Christmas selling season. The device is intended for sale at prices less than $140, and feature an Internet-based Twitter client, says Frank Meehan, INQ CEO.

The phone will use Internet connections for sending Tweets, not text messages. The idea is to spur usage by eliminating the text messaging charges, and using the mobile phone's data plan, instead.

INQ in 2007 had introduced a mobile device optimized for use of Skype. The move indicates a developing niche in mobile devices and applications: social networking as a lead application.

In a sense, you can think of the BlackBerry as an "email phone" and the iPhone as an "Internet phone." INQ earlier this year also introduced what some call the "Facebook phone," as it is optimized for instant access to Facebook, Skype and other social networking applications.

And the optimization might be working. Traffic on INQ1 "Facebook phones" are three to four times higher than from other phones, says Marc Allera, 3 UK director of sales and marketing.

About 65 percent useFacebook on a regular basis while 50 percent use Windows Live Messenger regularly.

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE5513L820090602?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true