$4B Cut in Verizon, AT&T Wireline Spending

Analyst Dan Burstein is a smart guy. He's taken a look at Verizon and AT&T capital spending and finds Verizon's wireline capital spending in the first six months of 2010 was $3.35 billion, down nearly $1billion from last year.

The numbers at AT&T are similar, he guesses. AT&T cut U-Verse spending by a third last year.

Dan says lots of carriers reduced capital investment in hopes the broadband stimulus funds could be used, instead of their own capital. That's undoubtedly true in many cases, but likely not for AT&T and Verizon, neither of which, as far as I can tell, applied for any funds.

Some of us might suggest other, entirely rational reasons for why that lower rate of investment might be happening.

A rational executive looking at where growth prospects are highest would logically conclude it lies in wireless, not wireline services. A rational investor might argue the returns are higher overseas than in the U.S. market.

A rational executive might conclude that users screaming for better mobile coverage for their iPhones have a valid point, and that investment has to be targeted in better facilities where those congestion problems are occurring.

Investment analysts for years have been pointing out that financial returns from fiber-to-customer investments do not appear high enough to justify too much investment. Analysts have pounded cable executives for years on that score, frowned on Verizon's fiber-to-home approach and generally have concluded that a less-intensive investment approach makes more sense.

One might argue that reasons such as those are substantial enough for prudence on the wireline investment front, without any need for nefarious motives.

One might also reasonably conclude that firms such as Verizon have concluded the financial return from such upgrades will in fact not provide a payback that is reasonable, leading to divestiture of rural lines and customers.

All of that lies within the realm of a normal strategic review of expected financial returns from capital investments, not to mention the need to raise cash for spectrum acquisitions and then construction of new fourth-generation networks.

Nobody has abundant and extra capital laying around, these days. Hard choices have to be made, and who could fault an executive for concluding their firms would do better shifting capital into the wireless network and services?

We might all agree on the facts, though we might disagree on how to explain the facts. 

$4B Cut in Verizon, AT&T Fiber DSL Spending

Global mobile data traffic nearly triples over last year

Ericsson's latest measurements show mobile data grew 10 times faster than voice over the last year.

Mobile broadband currently accounts for only 10 percent of total mobile subscriptions but a rapidly increasing majority of the traffic.

Ericsson's measurement of actual traffic in networks around the world show that global mobile data has nearly tripled in the last year, growing more than 10 times faster than voice.

Mobile data traffic continues to grow exponentially even after the historic cross over point in December 2009 when data first exceeded voice.

According to Ericsson statistics, global measured mobile data traffic stands at nearly 225,000 terabytes per month as of the second quarter of 2010.

Global mobile data traffic nearly triples in 1 year - Ericsson

US energy use is dropping and shifting to renewables

Analysts at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Labs have run the numbers on the US energy use in 2009, and come up with similar results to those obtained when examining the country's carbon emissions: energy use is dropping at a pace that is faster than would be expected based on the slowing economy alone.

Even better, the growth in renewable energy, coupled with increased use of natural gas, is displacing significant amounts of coal.

It seems not to be fashionable at this moment to argue people and organizations will act, on their own, to "go green," "recycle" or take any other set of desirable actions we might think of.

Yet, that is what people and organizations do, in markets where people are free to deploy their own resources, and where incentives exist to encourage the desired behaviors.

US energy use is dropping and shifting to renewables

Voice Usage Relatively Stable in Most Age Cohorts, Except Those 34 and Younger

Voice usage per person is roughly stable in most age categories 35 and above, data from Nielsen suggests, at between 400 minutes to 900 minutes a month.

But voice usage per month seems to be dropping in the 34 and younger cohorts, even though younger users tend to have the highest usage, with activity declining steadily in every older age cohort.

Intensity of Texting Grows Over Time

The amount of texting people in just about every age category is increasing over time, as more messages originate and are responded to it that format, data from Nielsen suggests.

Voice Usage and Texting Trends Headed in Opposite Directions

You can see where this is going. Younger users text more than they talk, and though today's users 25 and above still talk more than they text, the usage pattern is uniform: younger age cohorts text more than older age cohorts.

So as each age cohort advances, one might predict that texting behavior will grow over time. How much it grows is the only real question.

Users 18 or younger actually"talk" about as much as users 55 to 64. One suspects an awful lot of "voice" activity is of the coordination and collaboration sort, so that younger and mid-life workers might be in work groups that require more coordination than workers 55 to 64.

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