Video Snacking, Not Feasting, is One Impact of New AT&T Tariffs

AT&T's latest realignment of its smartphone wireless data plans based on how much bandwidth they use is hard to characterize in a uniform sense. Heavy users won't like it, but the plans reflect more realistically the value they derive from the network.

Lighter users might find they actually can save money by switching plans. Lots of non-users who believe they are likely to be light users will benefit. Moderate users will have to think about whether to keep their unlimited $30 plans or switch to the $25 plan.

The clearest impact will be on new users signing up starting June 7, as the difference between the unlimited plan and the 2-Gbyte plan will mean users will likely wind up snacking on video rather than feasting. That doesn't mean actual behavior even under the old plan would have been much different. Users likely were mostly snacking, to begin with.

It's just that the 2-Gbyte cap will encourage people to watch their video consumption more closely.

And that likely is modestly bad news for the mobile video industry, to the extent that revenues are based on subscriptions or advertising. In the first case it will be harder to sell a recurring subscription service when users are not sure what it will cost to use the service, in terms of bandwidth charges.

In the latter case people will be watching less video, therefore being exposed to fewer ads, and resulting in less activity that can be monetized.

Even AT&T's high-end, $25 monthly plan, including 2 GB of bandwidth, can be used up in less than a day of watching video. And while AT&T's $10 per GByte overage charges are much more reasonable than previous industry charges, they're still unlikely to be popular.

A two-hour movie, even compressed, could use upwards of 500 MBytes of data. that could mean variable and unexpected charges, and consumers hate that.

 link

Family Plans Now Dominate Mobile Industry

Family plans now dominate consumer mobile service packages. More than two thirds of consumer contract plans are family plans, up from less than 50 percent at the end of 2005, according to Nielsen Co.

According to a new T-Mobile survey, 73 percent of households with both family plans and children 22 or older still have an adult child on their plans.

At T-Mobile, for instance, an individual plan with 500 minutes and unlimited texting costs $49.99 a month with a two-year contract. A family plan with 1,500 minutes and unlimited texting costs $99.99 a month for two lines, or about the same per person for more minutes. Adding two additional lines costs $10 a month, and cuts the price per person to $27.50.

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

Adopt a bird.....adopt a bird...adopt a bird...

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):