What Will Consumers Do When Bandwidth Comes in Buckets?

AT&T's shift to aligning bandwidth consumption and retail pricing will be an important test of how well consumers actually understand how applications are related to bandwidth consumption, and whether price signals that work in virtually all other businesses also will work for mobile bandwidth consumption.

Lots of people think it will prove too challenging for the typial user. That might not be true if easy-to-use bandwidth dashboards are available. People will quickly figure out that video runs the meter hard while almost nothing else has to be thought about.

The other angle is that people are pretty good about figuring out that if "no additional cost" Wi-Fi hotspots can be used, or similar in-home or in-office bandwidth, they will do so, especially when there is a clear perceived value.

But there is really no way to know for sure until lots of users are on the new plans, and have time to adjust their behavior so they are intentional about bandwidth usage. It's really not that different from learning to be intentional about water, electricity, paper, gasoline, calories or just about anything else with real-world externalities.

The larger issue likely will develop as people start to use iPads and other tablet PCs, as well as netbooks, for the simple reason that people consume an order of magnitude more data on a fixed-line-connected PC than on a typical feature phone, or even a smartphone. But consumption patterns will change as the mix of connected devices changes.

Wireless offload to the fixed network will help quite a lot, and should be encouraged, as will easy-to-use and informative dashboards.

Adopt a Bird

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You can adopt a bird here...

We can't save some of them....but we can save many...Associated Press reports after six weeks with one to four birds a day coming into Louisiana's rescue center for oiled birds, 53 arrived Thursday June 3and another 13 June 4.

And, says center spokesman Jay Holcomb, more are on their way from the rookery on Queen Bess Island, near Grand Isle.

About 20 people are working at the center, and so far Holcomb says that's plenty.

He and veterinarians Heather Nevill of Tri-State and Sharon Taylor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say the birds were not yet ready for cleaning. They're being kept in wooden pens with mesh covers, white cloths over those and heat lamps to keep them warm so they won't preen themselves until they can be washed.

Can Clearwire Break Into Top-Five Mobile Ranks?

There being somewhere between 234 million and 238 million mobile customers in the U.S. market, one percent of market share represents about 2.4 million customers.

That means Clearwire now has less than half a percent market share, as it has about a million customers.

WiMAX no longer offering an advantage over Long Term Evolution, despite its headstart in the market for 4G services, one has to wonder whether it is realistic to expect Clearwire to reach the ranks of the top five contenders.

Clearwire is in eighth position at the moment, but with a healthy gap between it and number-seven Leap, which most observers think will become part of another company in the not-too-distant future. MetroPCS is the most-often-mentioned partner.

That would clear the ranks above Clearwire, allowing it to move to spot seven, but with a bigger gap than it now faces for future moves. A merged Leap and MetroPCS would have 12 million to 13 million subscribers.

Clearwire would have to leapfrog US Cellular to take spot number six, assuming US Cellular itself did not wind up as part of one the largest carriers.

One suspects Clearwire's center of gravity will have shifted to wholesale customers, rather than retail, several years into the future, as Sprint and Clearwire's cable customers ramp up sales of 4G services.

Breaking into the  top five retail ranks seems impossibly distant.

Verizon Marketing "Digital Voice" in 11 States and District of Columbia

Verizon now is marketing "FiOS Digital Voice" in FiOS markets in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Florida, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Delaware, Pennsylvania and California, marking Verizon's initial wave of efforts to transition customers off the legacy voice network and onto the packet voice network.

The transition process could easily last a decade or more, requiring Verizon to maintain dual access and switching infrastructures for the interim period, before being able to decommission the old switching network completely, along with the legacy copper access network.

Verizon touts an easy-to-use, online account-management tool as a key element of FiOS Digital Voice, enabling customers to conveniently use a broadband-connected computer to access and manage the service's integrated features. Customers also have the option to add another FiOS Digital Voice line, with its own assigned number and all the same features, for $9.99 a month.

The service comes standard with 22 features including "Live Voice Mail Screening," which allows users to hear voice mail messages as they arrive and then decide whether or not to take the incoming call.

Call logs list the caller name, telephone number (if available), date, time-of-day, location and duration of every incoming and outgoing call. Users can easily transfer contact information directly into their FiOS Digital Voice personal address book.

"Caller ID on TV" allows FiOS TV customers to see incoming caller ID information displayed for several seconds in the corner of their TV screen.  They can decide to pause their TV programming to answer the call or let it go into their FiOS Digital Voice mailbox.  The feature can be turned on or off from the customer's set-top box.

"Locate me" allows users to program up to three numbers where they might be reached when not at home, and incoming calls will ring at each of those numbers, one at a time. Unanswered calls are sent to voice mail.

Simultaneous ring, do not disturb, voicemail with email notification and virtual numbers also are available.

New customers who sign up by July 24 for FiOS quad- or triple-play bundles that include broadband, TV and FiOS Digital Voice also will receive a guaranteed monthly rate for two years and a $20 monthly discount.

WiMAX and HSPA+ Speeds About Equal, in This Test

At least according to this test of the T-Mobile USA network and the Sprint 4G network in Philadelphia, Sprint's WiMAX network and T-Mobile's HSPA+ network delivered roughly similar download speeds, just shy of 3 Mbps on average.

These are real-world, average speeds, not "up to" numbers. By some estimates, 3 Mbps is easily twice as fast as the typical real-world speed with 3G, and faster than many home DSL connections.

4G Networks Tested: WiMAX vs. HSPA : The Numbers (Phone Scoop):

Sprint HTC EVO 4G gets its First Patch

Sometimes you only have to wait a few hours or days before a bug gets fixed. So it is with the Sprint HTC Evo, on sale today for the first time. Early beta users had reported a memory card issue that now is fixed.

The patch can be completed over the air, manually if required, by going to the "settings" and "system updates" menus and then following the directions.

Also, by this point all the initial units have been sold. As of 8:30 am Mountain time 90,000 units had been sold, leading one store manager to warn his staff that all units would be sold within an hour.

Activation computers appeared to be under strain as well.

Sprint HTC EVO 4G gets its first OTA update, fixes microSD issues

Is Clearwire's Future as a Wholesaler?

Clearwire today is partly a retailer of services under its own name, and a major retailer of spectrum services to cable companies and Sprint. But one wonders, given its continuing capital needs, and the existence of at least one major mobile provider that desperately needs new fourth-generation spectrum (T-Mobile USA) whether Clearwire will not ultimately find it is primarily or exclusively a wholesale provider of 4G spectrum.

Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable, Google and Bright House Networks are minority investors while Sprint is the majority owner.

A research note from Credit Suisse evaluates the value of mobile satellite spectrum of the sort Harbinger Capital has been touting as the basis for a brand-new U.S. Long Term Evolution network, as being worth something on the order of $0.50 per MHzPOP. That evaluation apparently is derived from prices paid in 2006 for AWS spectrum that mobile providers now are using.

If those prices are sustainable in today's marketplace, then Clearwire might well be sitting on spectrum worth about $20 billion, Business Week has suggested. Some think it might be worth more.

read the Business Week story here

For Clearwire, much is riding on whether its strategy of buying up some 85 percent of the U.S. 2.5-GHz spectrum band will pay off.

The $5 billion Clearwire will pay its license holders for its spectrum over the next three decades is a bargain compared to what its rivals are paying. AT&T and Verizon bought their spectrum that can be used for 4G at government auction in 2008, paying a combined $16 billion, though many would argue those allocations, at much-lower frequencies, have propagation characteristics so much better that the premium is worth paying.

An unfunded business plan also remains an issue. At its current rate of spending, Clearwire will burn through its cash in 2011, according to Steve Clement, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities. Clearwire may need $3.8 billion more to reach its goal of building a network that covers 270 million people, Clement says.

Clearwire now has about one million subscribers, double what it had in 2009. It added 283,000 net new subscribers in the first quarter, compared with 133,000 new customers in the previous quarter.

But even that rate of growth is unlikely to get Clearwire close to players such as Verizon Wireless, which had 93 million customers or so in the first quarter, out of 286 million total subscribers. Verizon has 31 percent of the market; AT&T has 25 percent; Sprint and T-Mobile USA both have 12 percent of the market.

Even at five million subscribers, Clearwire would still have only about 1.5 percent to two percent of the U.S. market, by the time it reaches that level, in two years, perhaps, assuming the overall market grows over the next two years about as much as it has been this year, and if Clearwire's growth accelerates.

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