23% of U.S. Business Sites Now are Fiber-Served

What percentage of U.S. business locations would you suggest now have optical fiber connections available to them? According to Vertical Systems Group, just 23 percent of U.S. sites and 15 percent of sites in Europe have optical access.


While most large enterprise locations in the United States and Europe are fiber-connected, small and medium business sites generally are underserved with fiber from any service provider.


"The good news is that overall accessibility to business fiber has more than doubled within the past five years," says Rosemary Cochran, Vertical Systems Group principal.


The challenge ahead is to extend fiber connectivity to remote business locations. Of course, not all smaller business locations need the fiber that typically supports gigabit-per-second bandwidth. Given that 1.544 Mbps connections are the mainstay for most smaller and even many mid-sized businesses, many customers might be quite satisfied with speeds in the tens of megabits per second.

Consumer Price Points for Recurring Subscriptions are Fairly Clear

One might infer from average pricing for a variety of services ranging from fixed telephone service to broadband access, wireless and multi-channel video service that consumers have price sensitivity for any single service above $50 a month.

According to researchers at Pew Research and the Federal Communications Commission,  fixed voice costs about $48 a month. Wireless costs about $50 per user, while multi-channel video costs about $60 a month and broadband access costs about $40 a month.

Some of you immediately will note that your own spending is higher than these average figures suggest, with the greatest variability occurring in the mobile arena, as that is a service bought a person at a time, where the other services are bought household by household.

That's worth keeping in mind when surverys suggest there is robust consumer demand for just about any new application or service. Very few products ever have gotten mass adoption at prices above $300. Very few subscription products ever have gotten mass adoption at prices above $50 a month.

That doesn't mean it cannot be done; obviously it can. It simply is to point out that getting lots of consumers to buy a new recurring service at prices ranging from $5 to $10 a month is a big deal.

That's the reason so much consumer-focused content is advertising supported.

37% of Broadband Users Want Streaming Video to TVs

Nearly 37 percent of broadband households in North America are "extremely" or "very" interested in viewing over-the-top video content on the home TV, according to In-Stat.

Streaming should be easier in the future as more TVs, Blu-ray Players, digital media players and set top boxes support Internet connections.

By 2013, In-Stat predicts that nearly 40 percent of all digital TV shipments will be Web-enabled devices. Across all categories, there will be over half a billion Web-enabled consumer electronics devices in operation worldwide by 2013.

Shipments of such Web-enabled devices will see a compound annual grow rate of nearly 64 percent between 2008 and 2013, In-Stat predicts.

It always is hard to tell how well consumer input of this sort will translate into actual behavior, especially when spending on one category of purchases has to be shifted from some other existing category of expenses.

Doubtless the stated intentions are closer to reality when there is no incremental cost to view such content, and drops fairly predictably as the price of doing so raises above "zero."

50 Million Tweets Every Day

Twitter now has reached 50 million tweets a day, excluding all spam, says Twitter analytics staffer Kevin Weil.

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day, he says. Tweets grew 1,400 percent last year to 35 million per day. "Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second," says Weil.

Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about, he says.

Still, as with Skype's "concurrent users" metrics, it is a milestone.

Wal-Mart to Become an Online Video Service Provider

What do you do when you are one of the top retailers of DVDs in the United States, and the product starts to face serious substitution from a newer product?

You start selling the newer product. Or so Wal-Mart thinks.

The retail giant, according to the New York Times, has agreed to buy Vudu, a three-year-old  online movie service built into an increasing number of high-definition televisions and Blu-ray players.

Wal-Mart’s move is likely to give a lift to sales of Internet-ready televisions and disc players, which generally cost a few hundred dollars more than devices without such connections.  Nor is the move the first attempt by Wal-Mart to figure out a way to make a transition from sales of packaged media to online forms of video consumption.

Wal-Mart dabbled in aq Netflix-style online DVD rental several years ago, but sold the operation to Netflix after getting 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers. Wal-Mart also attempted to get into video rentals with HP in 2007, but it gave up on that project after a year.

The Vudu acquistion would instantly make Wal-Mart a significant force in the video streaming business, and would make the company a direct competitor to Netflix once again.

Vudu initially entered the market with a set-top box that offered access to its video streaming service, but gave up on building its own hardware, and started offering its service as a software offering that could be integrated into other consumer electronic devices.

That might make more sense, as Wal-Mart also now is one of the leading retailers of consumer electronics.

Of course, Wal-Mart also has to position its electronics sales against Best Buy, a major competitor that likewise  is working with CinemaNow to enable streaming video services on its own consumer devices.

Cloud-Based Services Will be Lead by Enterprises for Next 5 Years

It is highly likely that enterprises will drive most of the $9.5 billion in cloud-based mobile applications that Juniper Research believes will be bought by 2014, but consumer revenues are likely to overtake enterprise-generated revenues after five years.

 Juniper Research predicts that enterprise applications will account for the majority of revenues over the next five years, with businesses increasingly seeking to capitalize on platform services that will be used to provide scalable, flexible data storage solutions and device agnostic, synchronised office services.

But consumer-oriented apps will comprise an ever-larger proportion of total revenues over time, derived both from time-based subscriptions to services such as mobile online gaming and advertising from cloud-based social networks.

While the onset of a cloud-based ecosystem may further erode the strength of the mobile operator-to-customer relationship, cloud computing offers operators the opportunity to develop new revenues streams as well.

100 Mbps "Can't be Done"

I learned long ago that when somebody says something "can't be done," it is best to understand that claim as "I can't do it." I think we also have learned that even when somebody says something can be done, they might mean "it can be done so long as not that many people want to do it."

And that might be the case as cable operators prep broadband access services capable of running at speeds as high as 250 Mbps, at least so long as most people do not desire to buy services running at such speeds.

Broadband Reports says cable operators will start talking about a 250 Mbps service sopmetime later this year, though nobody will be able to buy it. Comcast also says it will be offering 100-Mbps service to about 25 percent of its potential customers by the end of 2010.

Comcast should be congratulated for that move, though it is not clear what might happen if lots of people actually bought it.  The rub is that providing 250 Mbps requires bonding of about eight standard 6-MHz channels.

The issue there is the same problem satellite operators have when providing downstream bandwidth. There are finite numbers of channels available, so cannibalizing bandwidth for data services reduces the amount of bandwidth available for video services.

The point is that some providers--particularly cable operators--will be able to claim speeds of at least 100 Mbps, at least in terms of what is commercially feasible at low penetration. it isn't clear any network can support 100 Mbps at high penetration, at least not at prices in two, rather than three digits.

Still, it is a reminder that when somebody says something "can't be done," one has to consider the source. Just because one company can't do it does not mean all companies cannot do it.

The other relevant observation is that "hero" devices and services are feasible. What is not clear is whether "mass market" availability is possible.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-Exploring-250-Mbps-Service-107002