Windstream's Gardner: Enhance focus on business, wireless backhaul and broadband services - FierceTelecom

Windstream Communications is no longer content to just be the local telephone company offering just plain old voice service, says Jeff Gardner, Windstream CEO and president.

That should surprise nobody. There now is universal agreement that the revenue model, which is different from the value model, will over time shift from voice to broadband, wireless and other types of services and revenue sources.

"We're transforming from a residential voice model to one that's much more focused on broadband and business, and the idea there is to get to a point where we can generate some top line revenue," says Gardner.

The perhaps new wrinkle is the new focus on business customers. That might originally have seemed a rather large task, given Windstream's largely rural and smaller market footprint. By definition, business customers are a smaller percentage of total customers in any smaller market than in a bigger "metro" market.

The new wrinkle is not so much that Windstream expects to have more success with business customers in its historic footprint, but that it now is acquiring out of territory assets that are focused on business customers.

At a larger level, an argument can be made that even tier one providers increasingly find they are doing better with business customers than consumers, in large part because cable and satellite companies are taking more market share in the consumer space.

Windstream's Gardner: Enhance focus on business, wireless backhaul and broadband services

Bing is Still Google's Biggest Problem

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Productivity Apps Generate 59% of App Store Revenue

News аnԁ entertainment smartphone apps аrе downloaded thе mοѕt, bυt productivity smartphone applications generate thе mοѕt revenue, analysts at In-Stat say.

Productivity applications such аѕ mapping, business аnԁ enterprise applications аnԁ phone tools аnԁ utilities generate 59 percent οf аƖƖ smartphone application revenue, according to In-Stat.

Entertainment Apps Dominate Download Volume, But Productivity Apps Is Where the Money Is At

DirecTV Would Bundle with Cable

DirecTV chairman and CEO Michael White says DirecTV is "looking hard" at offering bundled video and data service, and would even team up with a cable operator if the opportunity presented itself.

DirecTV already offers video, voice and data bundles with phone companies CenturyLink, AT&T and Verizon, but it isn't clear whether cable companies would want to help out a dangerous competitor, even if it meant some incremental sales of voice or broadband subscriptions.

DirecTV Looks At Bundle Opportunities

Video Cord Cutting is Real, Verizon Argues

Though the data remains quite inconslusive, there are reasons different participants in the video ecosystem say different things about the danger of video cord cutting, where consumers terminate their multichannel video subscriptions and substitute other forms of entertainment video instead.

It's to the advantage of attackers to say the threat is imminent. It's to the advantage of cable and satellite execs to deny the extent of the threat, with telco executives a bit less inclined to downplay the issue, in part because other competitors have more to lose.

The cable business  is going to go the way of the wireline telephone business, says Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg.

Seidenberg says he doesn't believe demand for multichannel video entertainment is going away immediately. But it will, he said.

“We take the over the top issue with video very seriously,” he said. “I think cable has some life left in its model…but that it is going to get disintermediated over the next several years.”

Verizon might lose some of its video subs as well, but the issue is a matter of business model impact. As telcos have been hit very hard by voice compeititon and abandonment, while cablers have gained at telco expense, something like that will happen to cable, the dominant video provider.

Decline of demand for multichannel TV might affect Verizon, but nothing like it will cable, which relies on video revenue in the same way that telcos have relied on voice revenue.

It might take a few more quarters to see whether there is a new trend in multichannel video, but there is at least a possibility that a peak has been reached in the multichannel video entertainment business, and that henceforth the total number of subscribers will start falling, as landline voice subs have for nearly 10 years.

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Verizon Wireless Readies Tiered Data Pricing

"Verizon Communications expects to introduce its own form of tiered mobile data pricing, possibly over the next four to six months, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Verizon has not said percisely what form the tiers will take, other than to note that Verizon Wireless's offering wouldn't simply copy rival carrier AT&T's approach.

1/2 of Internet Users Read Blogs

More than half of internet users will read blogs at least monthly, according to eMarketer. By 2014, readership will rise to more than 150 million Americans, or 60 percent of the internet population in the United States.

One reason for the rise in readership is that blogs have become an accepted part of the online media landscape.

The Continued Rise of Blogging