Verizon Wireless 4G Caps "Unfair"?

Verizon Wireless boss Lowell McAdam reportedly said at a Barclays Capital conference that Verizon Wireless likely will move away from unlimited plans on the 4G Long Term Evolution network, instead charging for 'buckets' of megabytes.

That is one more sign of the direction the entire industry will take. Some observers think this is somehow unfair. They sometimes base this belief on the lower "cost per megabit per second" or "cost per transferred megabyte" of a 4G network, compared to a 3G network.

It is no more inherently unfair than a company lowering its headcount, wage rates, reducing advertising or any other steps it may take to keep costs in line with anticipated revenues.

The fundamental trend in the communications business is that the "retail price" of bandwidth keeps dropping. When that happens, providers must sell more units to maintain flat revenue. In a business that also has major declining lines of business, any entity must, over time, reduce its costs in line with the revenue drops in those lines of business as well.

The net effect is a need for greater efficiency, and the lower cost per bit of a 4G network is part of that effort, as much as it is a hedge against constantly-growing bandwidth demand.

Moore's Law adequately captures the typical pace of semiconductor density change. But most of the rest of the natural world cannot improve its performance metrics at that pace. Not batteries, not construction, transportation, manufacturing or marketing cost. Greater efficiency in the transmission network is simply part of preparing for a future where bandwidth costs, per unit, will keep squeezing.

Verizon looking at non-unlimited plans for 4G data

New MIT Study Finds Broadband Speeds Much Faster than FCC Reported | Broadband for America

A new MIT study says that previous estimates of U.S. broadband speed may have underestimated just how fast our national networks really are. In March, the FCC said that the broadband network was only half as fast as advertised.

However, the MIT study found that those measurements didn’t fully measure the speed of the “access network,” which Internet service providers (ISPs) control. For example, using the best method, Ookla/Speedtest, current typical speeds are 7.7 Mbps, not 3.8 Mbps.

According to the study, a simple figure for broadband speed isn’t sufficient to understand the quality of the nation’s digital infrastructure, and it’s just as affected by a user’s computer and the location of servers being accessed as it is by the ISP.

That's a bit akin to attributing all of an iPhone's dropped call performance to AT&T, and attributing zero to the iPhone's design, to the extent that the device itself can cause dropped calls.

New MIT Study Finds Broadband Speeds Much Faster than FCC Reported

Bad Connection Inside the iPhone?

Much attention has been focused of late on the external antenna design of the Apple iPhone 4 as a cause of signal attenuation (weak signal). Much attention also has been paid to AT&T's wireless network in at least some locations--New York and San Francisco, for example--as regions where bandwidth problems are worse.

But Wired magazine also claims that software issues related to the iPhone's baseband radio, might also be playing a part in the "dropped call" problem. Wired magazine says Apple sources confirm that the software running the iPhone’s main radio, known as the baseband, was "full of bugs" and contributed to the much-decried dropped calls.

What’s more, Apple had chosen to source the radio from Infineon, whose hardware was used widely in Europe but rarely in the United States, where cell towers are placed farther apart and reception is therefore less forgiving. The suggestion is that the radio has not be tweaked for different tower spacing, at least not well enough.

In truth the relationship between smartphone manufacturers and service providers likely has grown more complex. Handset vendors want maximum feature richness so the devices become indispensable. But carriers obviously would rather that the consumer bond be with the network, not the device.

Also handset suppliers want their devices to be used. To the extent that such use put additional demand on the networks, wireless providers might prefer that wireless data services did become essential, but not terribly network-taxing in terms of bandwidth consumption.

It's hard to tell, anecdotally, whether users typically blame AT&T or Apple for reception problems, but most might agree that AT&T has gotten the blame, up to this point. Perhaps the view will be a bit more balanced now.

Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown

Redbox Plots Web Strategy

Redbox is developing an online strategy to stay competitive with larger rival Netflix.

Redbox is losing some business as renters use kiosks to get new releases and go to Netflix for older, harder-to-find titles. Adding an online distribution component might help Redbox, which generally stocks about 200 new and top releases in its kiosks.

Redbox Plots Web Strategy in Challenge to Netflix - Bloomberg

Why Marketers Can’t Afford to Ignore Baby Boomers

Baby Boomers should matter to marketers and consumer products companies because they spend 38.5 percent of CPG dollars, says Nielsen. Yet it’s estimated that less than five percent of advertising dollars are currently targeted towards adults 35-64 years old (which includes the latter half of Generation X in addition to Boomers).

With most marketers generally targeting 18 to 49 year olds, more than half of the affluent Boomer demographic is ignored entirely.

One wonders whether marketers really are missing the boat or know something, or believe they know something, about what they are doing. Maybe the incremental spend targeted at Boomers would not pay returns as high as the traditional targeting of younger demographics.

Why Marketers Can’t Afford to Ignore Baby Boomers

Verizon's LTE: Not Just Speed, Better Latency Performance

One of the finer points of the Verizon Wireless Long Term Evolution launch is the better latency performance, which will be helpful for real-time services such as video and voice. Reportedly, latency of 30 milliseconds is promised.

The 5 Mbps to 12Mbps downlink speed is nothing to dismiss, either. Verizon has said it will launch LTE in 30 cities by the end of the year.

Verizon's LTE rollout is imminent, computers updated for 4G SIM cards -- Engadget:

Apple's Antenna Claims Bogus, Say HTC, RIM, and Nokia

Nokia says its devices are not affected by the way a user holds its devices, though it was not specifically accused of having that problem when Apple defended its iPhone 4 antenna design.

"Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying how people hold their phones and allows for this in designs, for example by having antennas both at the top and bottom of the phone and by careful selection of materials and their use in the mechanical design," said Nokia.

Apple's Antenna Claims Bogus, Say HTC, RIM, and Nokia