Clearwire Offers 50% Off Promotion in September

Clearwire is offering a September promotion providing six months of service at 50 percent off on its entry-level unlimited usage plan, selling for $22.50 during the promotional period.

One normally expects pricing innovations of this sort from new entrants in a market, or competitors seeking to grow their market share rapidly. Clearwire already offers casual use pricing that is akin to casual Wi-Fi hot spot pricing.

One wonders how much more innovation Clearwire is thinking about, aside from temporary price promotions.

AT&T Adds "A-List" Calling Feature

AT&T has introduced "A-List with Rollover," allowing AT&T customers unlimited mobile calling to and from five “VIP” domestic phone numbers at no additional cost. FamilyTalk members can select unlimited calling to up to 10 lines.

The program essentially extends "free" calling from other AT&T Wireless customers to a select number of numbers off the AT&T network.

When A-List premieres on Sept. 20, customers can manage their A-List exclusively online at www.att.com/alist.

“This is an incredible value for many of our customers that essentially lets them ‘double dip’,” said David Christopher, chief marketing officer, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. “Not only will they not use minutes from their monthly plan when they call their A-List numbers, but our unique Rollover feature means they can keep those minutes for use in future months.

Customers with individual Nation plans of $59.99 or higher can use A-List with Rollover to select up to five domestic phone numbers to call anytime, including landlines and wireless numbers on any network, without using any of the minutes in their plan.

FamilyTalk customers with plans of $89.99 or more can select up to ten numbers which any person in the FamilyTalk plan can call as much as they want.

A-List: Numbers must be entered online at MyWireless Account at att.com/wireless.com. Only standard domestic landline or wireless numbers are eligible.

Broadband Seen as a Utility, Survey Suggests

Nearly 70 percent of all respondents believe uninterrupted broadband access should be as readily available as other utilities like electricity and water, across all ages, race, income brackets and geographic lines, according to a new survey commissioned by SuperComm and conducted by Opinion Research Corporation.

A majority of respondents believe uninterrupted access is essential, while an overwhelming 75 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 want to see broadband available like other utility services.

Also, almost 80 percent of respondents in the same age group believe faster broadband speeds improve productivity at work.

The results, while hardly surprising, suggest some danger for communications service providers. Demand for broadband is nearly ubiquitous. But the analogy to electrictiy and water, both of which commonly are provided as regulated monopoly services, is potentially worrisome. That is the way the communications business has been viewed for most of its history, and there remains danger of a return to such thinking if service providers do not demonstrate that competition works better than regulation.

Most users do not remember what communications was like before the 1984 divestiture of AT&T. But low rates of innovation and high prices were facts of life back then. Matters arguably improved with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, though many might fault the results, or the amount of competition that was enabled.

Fortunately, we have benefitted from mobility, the Internet and broadband, which together arguably outweigh anything that has been done, or not done, on the telecom regulatory front. Nothing less than continued innovation and advances in consumer welfare will prevent some from attempting to turn back the clock.

Communication Spending Not a Good Economic Predictor

U.S. consumer spending on mobile phone, broadband and other communication services is not a very-good predictor of where the economy is, most of the time. The reason is that spending on such services is so stable, averaging between 2.2 percent and 2.5 percent of household spending. Though consumers might shift a bit at the margins duirng tougher times, they do not necessarily spend much more during buoyant times.

For such reasons, one cannot predict very much about the potential health of the economy by looking at consumer behavior in the area of communications spending. Credit availability, on the other hand, almost always tells us lots.

According to the Federal Reserve consumer credit report for July 2009, consumer credit fell almost $22 billion to $2.74 trillion. The figure has been dropping fairly steadily since the middle of last year.

The July number represents an annual rate of decline of more than 10 percent. Bluntly, the government still has not discovered a way to get large financial firms to loan money, and the economy is not likely to recover sharply until it does.

reviewed the data and told Reuters, “There is no way that this recovery can be sustained unless we see a pickup in household spending," says Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at The Economic Outlook Group.

The Fed data says a great deal about what is wrong with programs to revive GDP growth. Money spent on long-term infrastructure projects and healthcare may be well-intended and even completely necessary, but that capital does not have the capacity to put people back to work quickly or get them to spend money that they genuinely believe that they do not have.

So the 2009 holiday spending season may be the most important one in memory. If retail spending is flat or declines, it likely will mean that the hibernation of the consumer will continue well into next year.

The good news is that traditional measures of recovery seem to be perking up. The bad news is that the recovery seems fragile. Still, as the saying goes, it is "darkest just before dawn." The recovery is inevitable. The issue many raise is the glide path up from the bottom.

The good news for communications service providers is that the business is structurally stable, year in and year out. The bigger problem remains the structural change in revenue models, away from voice and towards data services. If historic patterns hold, even with a robust economic recovery, consumers will not spend very much more than they do now.

Business behavior is different, owing in part to the changes in employment that can drive spending or restrict it. Most of the revenue changes one typically sees in a downturn are caused by business spending, not consumer spending. So business spending is more contingent on employment changes.

You can make your own guess about the pace of hiring during the recovery. Even there, though, there are changes. Voice lines tradtiionally have been where we have seen the incremental changes. These days, the insistent pressure is from bandwidth demands, which increase steadily each year, almost irrespective of headcount.

If you had to make a guess, you probably would do well to pay close attention to mobile and fixed broadband as the places where growth will be steady and measurable, no matter what the pace of recovery.

Who Uses Social Networks? Everybody, says Forrester Research

Who uses social networks? "Everybody," says Forrester Research analyst Sean Corcoran. Adults younger than 35 are nearly universally involved. Only three percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 10 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds are socially "inactive."

What’s more, a staggering 89 percent read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch user-generated video, read forums or customer ratings and reviews. Nearly the same percentage maintain profiles on social networks and visit social networking sites.

Almost half create content, far higher than any other age group.

Adults ages 35 to 54 rapidly increased their participation on social networking sites Compared with last year, this group grew its participation by more than 60 percent, and now more than half of adults ages 35 to 44 are in social networks.

About 38 percent of adults ages 45 to 54 use social network sites regularly. About 20 percent of users in these age brackets produce content. About 70 percent read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch user-generated video, read online forums or user reviews.

About 70 percent of online adults ages 55 and older use social tools at least once a month. About 26 percent use social networks and 12 percent create social content.

EU Issues Report on Mobile Phone Cancer Risk

The European Commission is the latest group to issue a report on non-ionizing radiation, any type of electromagnetic radiation including near ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, microwave, radio waves, and low frequency RF (longwave) that does not cause heating.

The EU report basically argues there is a "significant risk of brain tumors from cellphone use." The issue has been studied for decades, and there might be thousands of studies that investigate one form or another of non-ionizing radiation, with results that might fairly be called inconclusive.

Still, the EU study says there is enough uncertainty to warrant keeping "certain establishments free of wireless device radiation, including schools, child day care centers, retirement homes and health care institutions."

Dr. George Carlo, leader of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association’s $25M research project, for example, is said by the EU report to have found in 1999 "a statistically significant doubling of brain cancer risk" from mobile use. But three of the five subsequent brain tumor studies published between 2000 and 2002 found “non-significant” elevated risks.

But those studies also are said to show an elevated risk as years of mobile phone usage lengthen.

"Studies led by Professor Lennart Hardell in Sweden found significantly increased risk of brain tumors from 10 or more years of cellphone or cordless phone use," the report suggests. "For every 100 hours of cellphone use, the risk of brain cancer increases by five percent," the report suggests.

"For every year of cellphone use, the risk of brain cancer increases by eight percent," while "after 10 or more years of digital cellphone use, there was a 280 percent increased risk of brain cancer."

"For digital cellphone users who were teenagers or younger when they first starting using a cellphone, there was a 420 percent increased risk of brain cancer," the report says.

The study suggests that dangers are greatest for children.

The study also suggests, as you might expect, more studies of greater rigor. That is not a bad idea. Up to this point, the studies have been contradictory, and therefore inconclusive. But it would not be fair to say no studies have suggested any danger: some have.

Right now, some of us would say that mobile technology is a highly useful technology that might carry some risk, as do automobiles, airplanes or even other household tools. As with any tool, use them wisely.

SES: Back to the Future for Satellites

U.S. and European broadband stimulus plans are dampening prospects for delivering broadband Internet access using satellite networks, SES, the largest satellite operator, says. On the other hand, growing demand for satellite-delivered high-definition television likely will grow.

In many ways that is a "back to the future" move, as satellite point-to-multipoint networks always have been optimal for delivery of linear TV signals. Specifically, SES sees a growing role for use of satellite as the delivery mechanism for multi-channel TV by telcos in situations where fixed broadband networks do not have the capacity to delivery TV signals.

That might represent a market including 40 percent to 50 percent of locations.

“I personally believe the rollout of terrestrial broadband will be such that you can’t demonstrate the viability of satellite in the long term,” Romain Bausch, SES CEO, told the Financial Times.

SES provides two-way satellite broadband to 45,000 customers in Europe but would not invest in new capacity for purposes of serving Internet access demand, Bausch says. Support for mobile voice and video is a different matter, though.

SES plans to add eight satellites to its 40-strong fleet within three years, boosting capacity 19 per cent. About 170 of the 200 new transponders will cover emerging markets where SES supplies the “backbone” to mobile networks in remote areas.

High-definition television, which requires twice the satellite capacity of standard definition channels, continued to power SES’s video revenues.

BSkyB, an SES customer, has announced plans to pioneer 3D television in the UK in 2010, which will require a third more satellite capacity than current HD programming.Ultra-HD, being tested in Japan, could consume four times as much capacity, Bausch also notes.