No Nationwide Free Wireless Broadband, FCC Says

The Federal Communications Commission has decided not to authorize a coast-to-coast free wireless broadband service across the low end of the "AWS-3" band.

The proposed service, which M2Z has been arguing for for several years, would have been ad supported for the consumer service and also would have sold services to commercial customers.

M2Z Networks wanted free access to the spectrum in return, and said it would finish the national network in a decade, and pay five percent of its annual revenue to the United States Treasury.

Given the FCC's vision for broadband deployment, new fourth-generation wireless networks and new top-end speeds for cable networks and telco network a like, both fixed and mobile, the agency might have thought the relatively-modest M2Z speeds were simply too little, too late, at a proposed 768 kbps.

Plan for nationwide free wireless broadband finally shot down

Half of Consumers Don’t Know When Their Mobile Phone Contract Expires

According to a recent study commissioned by Best Buy Mobile, the mobile specialty retail unit of Best Buy Co., more than half of American mobile phone owners do not know the month and year when their current mobile phone contract expires.

In addition, only four in 10 say they received a reminder notice that their contract was about to expire, leaving many consumers in the dark about upgrade eligibility and the plan options available.

You probably aren't surprised that many people don't know when their contracts expire. Most people probably are on family plans, making the issue even more complicated.

But it does seem curious that mobile providers do not take greater efforts to try and retain customers in advance of expiration. Either that or they are banking on consumer ignorance not to remind users they soon will have a chance to leave.

Best Buy Mobile Survey Finds One in Two Consumers Don’t Know When Their Mobile Phone Contract Expires

Singtel, Telstra Show Where Priorities Lie

It typically is instructive when any business decides to get out of its legacy business entirely, or give up its monopoly.

Few remember it, but Rochester Telephone, an independent telco operating in Rochester, N.Y., once wanted to get into the competitive long distance business badly enough to trade away its local access monopoly, breaking itself up into a "wholesale" infrastructure company and a separate retail entity that bought network service from the wholesale company just like any other competitor in the market.

Choices made by SingTel and Telstra also indicate where those companies see the tradeoffs.

SingTel decided to give up its local monopoly in the same way Rochester Tel did, in exchange for freedom to deploy its capital in other international markets.

Telstra has essentially sold its network assets to the wholesale-only National Broadband Network in exchange for rights to bid on Long Term Evolution spectrum.

The similarities? All three have given up their historic businesses to pursue growth other ways. For Rochester Tel, it was the unregulated part of the business. For SingTel it was expansion offshore. For Telstra it is mobile.

Big bets. They also show how companies are having to work at growth strategies.

National Broadband Network is that to achieve the plans goals, the NBN was essentially forced to purchase all of the Telstra network infrastructure. Telstra, who is the largest Internet provider in Australia was originally a government owned entity that was privatized in the late ’90′s and early millennium. Telstra believes that the future is in wireless and they have agreed to sell their entire network to the NBN for $11 billion and the rights to bid on precious LTE spectrum.

U.S. Should Consider Logistics of Australian Broadband Plan

What Happened to Enterprise Mashups?

Once touted as the future of business intelligence, providing quick and easy access to disparate information in one place, enterprise mashups, at least as a term, appear to have fallen out of favor.

Google search volume shows the trend. what happened to enterprise mashups?

It is possible that the process continues, but that the term has fallen out of favor. Consider "unified communications." It would be hard to argue that adoption continues, but the term doesn't have the hype value it did several years ago.

On the other hand, it is possible that "mashups" are just another victim of misplaced optimism. Not all innovations succeed; not all are adopted as originally conceived.

Perhaps "mashups" have become relatively mundane because creating new widgets or apps from other existing apps happens at a practical, relatively small-scale level that doesn't drive the creation of huge new markets, which is one driver of hype cycles.

Maybe enterprises simply aren't talking about their mashups. Or, it could be that the new apps are too hard to create, too expensive or offer too little return on effort.

It is clear there isn't much talk about the subject in 2010, compared to 2008.

What Happened to Enterprise Mashups?

Mobile Gaming Revenues Growing 19% at a Compound Annual Rate

Apple says the iPod "Touch" has more than 50 percent share of the mobile gaming market.

That presumably puts the Touch in line to garner a disproportionate share of mobile gaming revenues growing at a 19 percent a year compound rate.

Where paid gaming is growing about 17.5 percent, ad-supported gaming is growing at a 39 percent compound rate between 2010 and 2014.

That is one reason Apple thinks its iAd network is going to be valuable.

Apple Updates iPod Line

Apple has refreshed its line of iPods. A new iPod Shuffle combines buttons and voice controls in a new small design. It will be in 5 colors, will get 15 hours of battery life and will hold 2GB of music for just $49.

New iPod Nanos have eliminated to the click-wheel and now feature a touch screen with a square-shaped miniature iOS device. It also features a clip on the back like the shuffle, and the screen can be rotated with a pinch-and-twist motion. It has the same colors as the shuffle, plus granite and red versions. $149 for 8GB, and $179 for 16GB.

The iPod Touch, the top portable game player, is now thinner and gets all the hardware upgrades from the iPhone 4, including the Retina Display, the A4 chip, the gyroscope.

Also, it features forward and front-facing cameras, and can now run FaceTime for chatting with iPod and iPhone owners. $229, $299 and $399 are the prices for 8, 32 and 64 GB models.

Apple Event Announcements Rundown: iOS 4.1, New iPods, iTunes 10, Ping and Apple TV

iPod Touch is Top Mobile Gaming Platform

The iPod touch has become the number-one portable game player in the world, Apple CEO Steve Jobs says. The iPod Touch outsells Nintendo and Sony portable game players twice over, he noted, and controls more than 50 percent of the mobile gaming market.

Everything Apple Announced Today