IP Carrier

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Smartphone Adoption Patterns Differ Globally

Smartphone adoption patterns globally are different from patterns seen in the United States. Symbian, to use one notable example, is relatively widely used elsewhere, but sparsely in the U.S. market.

Apple's market share in the U.S. market is far higher than it is globally, for example.

Mobile Content Delivery Networks Might Be Affected by Net Neutrality

Content delivery networks routinely are used to improve end user experience for all sorts of applications. The same sort of logic would indicate that the same sorts of techniques will be used by mobile applications as well.

But network neutrality rules could affect the pace and scale of such application performance enhancement, indirectly if not directly.

Today, it is the application provider that makes the decision to use a CDN. Network neutrality rules that forbid quality of service features would not change that, but would prevent access providers from creating such levels of service.

One example would be a service provider capability that applies expedited or assured delivery for any video stream, or featured video streams. Much the same functionality could be provided for other types of traffic, including voice, conferencing or enterprise data interactions, for example, depending on how any possible rules are crafted.

Up to this point such enhancements have not been terribly necessary. But the amount of real-time traffic is growing.

According to the Yankee Group, fewer than 600 million smartphones will be in use in 2010, but that number will more than double in 2014 to nearly 1.4 billion.

One key difference between smartphone usage patterns and more-traditional devices is the increased amount of video traffic consumed by smartphone users.

Yankee Group :: Research Report

AOL Thinks It Can Fix "Banner Effectiveness" Problem

AOL thinks it can "solve the problems associated with use of banner advertising, including clutter and end user inattention.

The basic premise of Project Devil is that “advertising is content.” The problem with banners is that they force the consumer to cancel what they were doing and look for a marketer’s message across the web. So AOL wants to move banners "into" the context of the web page and application the user already is engaged with at the moment.

link

Global Social Media Trends: Surprise or Not?

If you have been following user behavior in the social media space, you intuitively know that some people are more active than others.

Some people post, blog or comment quite a lot, while others mostly read.

Forrester Research breaks users into a number of categories based on their behaviors. You might, or might not, be surprised that the number of active content creators has not grown as much as the ranks of "readers."

The latest Forrester Research surveys indicate that the number of active content creators has basically stabilitzed, while the number of readers grows.

Whether that is a surprise or not might depend on what you originally thought might happen.

At a rough level, the difference might be something like the difference between newspaper readers and writers. If you were expecting that most people would suddenly start "writing" as social media became established, you'd take one view of the new data.

If you assumed that would not actually happen, and that lots of people derive value mostly from reading, rather than writing, you'd have another view.

The latest Forrester Research data tends to indicate that not everybody actually wants to "write."

The Latest Global Social Media Trends

House Preparing New Net Neutrality Legislation, It Appears

With the caveat that introducing a bill in the U.S. Congress is not a guarantee it will be considered, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) apparently is preparing to introduce new legislation creating a framework for network neutrality that, in its present form, seems to be far less onerous than rules the Federal Communications Commission has been attempting to put into place.

The draft also would prohibit the FCC from imposing regulations on broadband Internet access service or any component of the service under Title II of the Communications Act, except when a broadband Internet access provider prefers to do so.

The rules would apply to all consumer broadband connections, wired and wireless.

The short draft, which of course always could be amended into something quite different, should it advance, basically codifies the existing "Internet freedoms" rules the FCC has bee using, without apparently adding language that prohibits application of quality-of-service features to consumer broadband access.

The rules would prohibit service providers from blocking lawful content, applications, or services, or prohibit the use of non-harmful devices, subject to reasonable network management. Service providers do not object to those rules.

The draft also would prohibit "unjustly or unreasonably" discriminating against lawful traffic over a consumer’s wireline broadband Internet access service. Depending on later elaboration and interpretation, this likely would not be objectionable to service providers, either.

The draft language also would allow reasonable network management practices, specifically saying that such practices "shall not be construed to be unjustly or unreasonably discriminatory."

The language also specifically makes clear that it addresses consumer broadband connections, not all broadband connections, an important distinction as one would not want any new rules to apply to business services.

The draft language so far does not elaborate on whether enhanced services or other quality of service features are permissible. The language so far focuses on "minimum" standards of behavior, but does not specifically address whether consumers have the right to buy services that offer expedited or quality-assured delivery.

read the bill here