TVs and Landline Phones Not Seen as Necessities by Growing Number of Users

The television set and the landline telephone are suffering from a sharp decline in reported public perception that they are necessities of life, say researchers at the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project.

Just 42 percent of Americans say they consider the television set to be a necessity, according to a new nationwide survey from the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project. Last year, this figure was 52 percent. In 2006, it was 64 percent.

The drop-off has been less severe for the landline telephone. Some 62 percent of Americans say it’s a necessity of life, down from 68 pecent last year. Also, some 47 percent of respondents say that the mobile phone is a necessity of life.

One might question whether actual behavior tracks what respondents are saying, though. Though there has to have been concern about an actual decline in the total number of subscribers to multichannel TV services in the second quarter of 2010, there has been no break in the long-term growth trend line for multichannel video subscriptions, says Michael Turk, a political and communications consultant.

He chalks up the second quarter decline of 711,000 total industry subscribers as an artifact of "artificially" higher sign-ups as the broadcast digital TV transition occurred, a process that lead to higher-than-typical signups, followed by slower demand in the aftermath, but well within the historical growth profile.

Also, for the 2010-2011 broadcast season, Nielsen estimates the total number of TV households in the U.S. will climb to 115.9 million, an increase of one million homes from last year. Nielsen also estimates an increase of more than two million persons age two and older in U.S. TV households, for a total of 294,650,000 people.

It is less possible to argue with behavior related to landline telephone subscriptions, where survey respondent attitudes tend to be reflected in the data on buying of those services.
The general understanding is that people are ditching landline phone service, and there is evidence that perhaps 25 percent of U.S. households now do not use fixed-line telephone service.

But the data is quite inconsistent, at first glance. The telephone subscribership penetration rate in the United States was 96 percent, an actual increase of 0.4 percent over the rate from March 2009, and the highest reported rate since the agency began collecting this data in November 1983, according to the Industry Analysis and Technology Division of the Wireline Competition Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission.

But there is a catch. The Industry Analysis and Technology Division of the Wireline Competition Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission includes both mobile and fixed voice connections within its definition. So this measure of overall voice penetration, per household, while accurate enough, does not specificially show what is happening in terms of fixed-line penetration.

Other FCC reports do show a decline of fixed line services in use over time. So what does seem clear is that people are backing up their attitudes with behavior. Their reported attitudes about televisions, though, do not seem supported by the data.

link to full report

Multigenerational Homes on the Rise

Here's a trend you might think was created by the recession: younger people moving back home instead of living out on their own.

But it appears the number of younger people, and older people, living in multi-generational households has been growing for decades, according to the Pew Research Center.

It appears 1970 was the peak year for formation of single-generation households.

Google and Apple Spar Over "Daily Activations"

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, says Apple was activating 230,000 devices a day, and questioned Google's claim that it is activating over 200,000 devices a day and growing.

"We think some of our friends are counting upgrades in their numbers," Jobs said.

Google says the Android activation numbers do not include upgrades and are, in fact, only a portion of the Android devices in the market, since Google only counts devices that have Google services.

Any way you look at it, that is in excess of 430,000 new Apple or Android smartphones going into service every day.

Google responds to Steve Jobs' activation counting accusations - Google 24/7 - Fortune Tech

Twitter Most Popular U.K. Business Social Media Platform

Twitter is the most popular social media platform used by U.K. businesses, a new survey by Virgin Media Business shows.

Virgin Media Business polled 5,000 businesses across the United Kingdom and found that a third use social media. About 33 percent of the companies that use social media to engage with consumers use Twitter, compared to 32 percent who use Facebook. MySpace followed third, being used by 29 percent of businesses, while 19 percent of respondents blog and 17 percent produce and distribute video content via Youtube.

Virgin Media Business also discovered that the U.K.'s biggest banks are missing out on thousands of opportunities a month to connect with their customers online. Virgin Media Business research indicates that Britain's biggest banks are being tweeted about 180 times a day on average. Yet, despite a growing number of businesses using social networks as customer service channels, Virgin Media Business found that only one bank has launched a Twitter account to monitor and respond to their customer's conversations.

link

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