Top 10 Global Broadband Providers

If the number of fixed-line broadband subscribers were the measure, Comcast and Time Warner Cable would rank among the world's top-10 largest Internet service providers.

The 10-biggest broadband ISPs in March 2010 had 191 million total subscribers, representing 39 percent of the world’s 492 million broadband customers.

KT of South Korea, the world’s tenth largest broadband ISP, is the only new member of the top ten ranking, having displaced Telecom Italia, which is now the 11th largest broadband ISP globally.

Just two providers, China Telecom and China Unicom, accounted for 20 percent of global broadband subscribers.

Broadband provider rankings: The Rise and Rise of China

53% of Mobile Customers Use Data

About 53 percent of mobile users now use mobile data services or applications of one sort or another, Validas reports. That is up from 42 percent in 2009. The typical user consumes 145 Mbytes a month, compared to  96.8 MBytes in 2009. The typical smartphone user consumes 415 Mbytes, up from 139 Mbytes in 2009.

Mobile PC broadband users consume 1.5 Mbytes a month, up from about 1.4 Mbytes in 2009.

Feature phone users consume about 68 Mbytes a month, up from 46 Mbytes.

Verizon Wireless posted the largest percentage increase in mean data usage per user from 48 MBytes to 147 MBytes.

T-Mobile users consume 121 Mbytes, typically. Sprint users consume about 133 Mbytes, primarily because more Sprint customers now consume 50 Mbytes or less each month.

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0.3% of BitTorrent Files are Legal

The large majority of content found on BitTorrent is illegal, a new study out of the University of Ballarat in Australia has confirmed.

Researchers from the university's Internet Commerce Security Laboratory scraped torrents from 23 trackers and looked up the content to determine whether the file was confirmed to be copyrighted.

They found that 89 percent of the files they sampled were confirmed to be illegally shared, and most of the remaining ambiguous 11 percent was likely to be infringing.

Only 0.3% of files on BitTorrent confirmed to be legal

AT&T Credit Rating at Risk

S&P may lower AT&T’s credit rating, on the heels of Sprint-Nextel posting a widening loss.

“AT&T Inc. may not be able to achieve financial metrics fully supportive of the current rating within a reasonable time frame,” S&P said.

That might not mean much to most people, nor is it a user's responsibility to worry about the service provider's problems. But the potential downgrade is important because it illustrates the pressures the largest U.S. communication carriers now face. A lower credit rating means higher borrowing costs, and therefore less money available to fund network upgrades.

The potential move also illustrates a situation that gets too little attention from policymakers, who tend to act as though America's largest providers of communications services are "too big to fail."

In fact, any careful analysis would suggest there is huge risk in the communications business, and that the objective now is to avoid negative growth. Most of the revenue growth the biggest carriers now get simply replaces revenue being steadily lost from legacy lines of business. They are hardly "too big to fail."

AT&T’s ‘A’ corporate credit rating and the ‘A-1′ short-term and commercial paper ratings were put on CreditWatch with negative implications. “We expect that a potential downgrade of the corporate credit rating, if any, would be limited to one notch,” S&P noted.

AT&T Gets Slammed By S&P, ‘A’ Corporate Credit Rating In Doubt

More Women Than Men Use Social Networking

Globally, women demonstrate higher levels of engagement with social networking sites than men, new comScore survey finds.

Although women account for 47.9 percent of total unique visitors to the social networking category, they consume 57 percent of pages and account for nearly 57 percent of total minutes spent on these sites.

Women spend significantly more time on social networking sites than men, with women averaging 5.5 hours per month compared to men’s 4 hours, demonstrating the strong engagement that women across the globe share with social sites.

Social Networking Sites Reach a Higher Percentage of Women than Men Worldwide

Mobile Category Will Dominate Consumer Electronics Growth in 2011

Mobile computers will provide the consumer electronics industry's primary revenue growth in 2011, according to the Consumer Electronics Industry.

CEA projects that mobile computing, which includes laptops, netbooks and tablet computers, will reach more than $26 billion in shipment revenues by 2011, and "most" of that segment's growth will be driven by tablet PCs.

Wireless handsets, which have driven growth in recent years, also will represent about $26 billion worth of revenue, says CEA. Together, mobile PCs and phones will represent about 53 percent of total consumer electronics industry revenue.

CEA Says Mobile PCs, Mobile Phones Will be 53% of Consumer Electronics Revenues

Is Multichannel Video Business in Danger?

Smaller providers in the communications and cable TV business never have had a terribly easy time coping with the emerging shift to broadband-based services. Scale is an issue, and smaller providers, by definition, do not have scale.

Small telcos often cannot take advantage of wireless or video in the same way that Verizon and AT&T can. Small cable companies often cannot take advantage of either wireless or video scale economies.

For many smaller telcos, hanging onto the voice business is a key challenge. Now some might argue the same is true for small cable operators and their video businesses.

"What's dead this year is video," said Needham & Co. analyst Laura Martin. "The programmers are destroying the video business" by shifting to online and mobile distribution channels, she argues.

Consumers are gravitating to Internet and mobile applications, she argues, so operators should focus on mobile services, commercial services and the data access business.

"Take the cash flow, if there is any after the programmers get done with you, and what you need to do is protect the future," she said.

Clearly, Martin sees online video as a direct threat to the multichannel video business. It might be shocking to hear an analyst recommend that a cable company get beyond video, as it once was a shock to hear analysts suggesting telcos had to get beyond voice. But the logic is hard to argue with, as tough as the advice will be to heed.

‘Video Is Dead', Analyst Laura Martin Declares