Better Broadband a 2-Edge Sword for Mobile Service Providers

You won't find too many people arguing that Long Term Evolution, WiMAX or 4G in general is a bad thing, long term. You can find lots of people who might say the timing of the investment is an issue, that the danger of overpaying to acquire spectrum is an issue, or that protocol decisions carry some risk.

One hears less talk about the impact on voice services as lower-latency mobile broadband services are introduced. One advantage LTE offers application providers and access providers is much better latency performance, which means better real-time services performance. That means better voice and video.

But that lower latency is better for all providers of real-time services, not just the mobile broadband provider.

"Because LTE is all-IP and offers lower latency, it puts mobile calling services from OTT providers like Skype on more equal footing with existing carrier wireless voice services," says Tole Hart, Yankee Group senior analyst.

In other words, though LTE is strategic for mobile service providers, it also means a better platform for over-the-top application providers who have services requiring good latency performance.

Yankee Group forecasts smart phone penetration reaching 50 percent by the end of 2011 and 70 percent by 2013, meaning there will be more customers using their smart phones to download alternative calling apps from application providers like Skype, Vonage and Google Voice, and possibly from social communities like Facebook in the future.

The standard "advice" for mobile service providers is to enhance the value of their captive voice services. It's good advice, though strategically problematic, since the application providers will continue to enhance the value of their own services as well.

Obviously, at stake for carriers is a portion of the approximately $730.4 billion in global mobile voice service revenue. But there also will be danger from application providers who bundle text messaging with their voice services, as well.

Text messaging generates about $74.7 billion worth of revenue, and very-high profit margins.

Mobile service providers have important advantages in terms of creating bundles of services that will tend to keep customers "glued" to a basket of features including voice, text messaging and broadband access. That would be a simple adoption of the fixed-line "triple play" strategy, where the incremental cost of any one service is relatively low, in a package of three or four services.

Of course, in some markets mobile service providers might also be able to apply native quality of service mechanisms that provide meaningful experience advantages for end users, and are not available to other application providers. In other cases mobile service providers might want to sell those capabilities to third-party voice providers as a revenue-generating product.

The point is that there is no simple, fool-proof way to "firewall" a mobile voice service from more-effective application provider competition once an LTE network is in place. Bundles and quality assurance are likely to be important weapons, though.

77% of Tablet Users Say the Device Replaces PC Actions

When asked whether they used other connected devices more often or less often since purchasing a tablet, 35 percent of tablet owners who also owned a desktop computer reported using their desktop less often or not at all, while 32 percent of those who also owned laptops, said they used their laptop less often or never since acquiring a tablet, according to the Nielsen Company.

Those findings do not necessarily settle the issue of whether a tablet can completely replace a PC. That will be true in some, perhaps many cases over time, especially as tablets become devices that work right out of the box and do not have to rely on a PC for configuration or updates.

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A Content Curation Case Study

sme_bw2010_adam_ostrow_v1 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.
Content curation (assembling content produced by third-party sites) has become a hotter topic lately, as more brands move to more active roles in content marketing. Here's an analysis of how "Mashable" succeeded by curating lots of content.

Casual News Users Referred by Google, Other Search Engines; Facebook a Factor Sometimes

A new report by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism provides new evidence of the role Facebook now is playing in driving traffic to media sites. "Casual users" who are those more likely to be drawn to major news stories now make up the majority of the online news audience.

Google is still the main outside entry point, driving on average 30 percent of a news site's traffic. About 60 percent to 65 percent of visits are from direct traffic.

In 2010, all but one of the top sites for which there was referral data derived at least some of their audience through Facebook.

Facebook ranked as the second- or third-highest referral source for six of the largest 25 news sites, with Huffingtonpost.com getting the biggest share of traffic from the social network, at eight percent. NYTimes.com got six percent of traffic from Facebook. Despite its growth, Twitter still isn't a major factor in sending visitors to news sites.

Of course, that last tidbit has a nuance. Heavy Twitter users are more likely to be driven to news sites than heavy Facebook users, one would suspect. Some Twitter users might not be heavy Facebook users, for example, so more of those user redirects would come from Twitter than Facebook. The Pew study might simply be reflective of the bigger Facebook user base.

Facebook Driving Traffic

Half of Consumers Say Fraud Detection is a Reason to Allow Tracking

Privacy, like most other issues, has a dual character. It can provide user benefits and danger. A survey by the Ponemon Institute revealed the majority of consumers are comfortable with online behavioral tracking for fraud prevention purposes, but remain hesitant around advertising and promotional purposes.

About 74 percent of consumers expressed some level of concern about online advertisers collecting and using their information for future promotional activity.

But the survey also showed that half of respondents think it is acceptable to use information about their online behavior as long as it’s used to detect potential fraudsters.

Some 24 percent said they don’t think behavioral targeting in any form is appropriate, whereas 26 percent said it is okay for online businesses to use their information to either send them ads or monitor potential fraudsters.

Tracking Online Behavior: Three in Four Consumers Say Using Their Information For Fraud Detection Purposes is ‘Okay’

Apple The World's Most-Valuable Brand

Apple is the world's most-valuable brand, Millward Brown's 2011 BrandZ study of the most-valuable global brands now shows. Apple ended a four-year run by Google at the top of the brand ranking.

Click image twice for a larger view.

Google now is the second most-valuable global brand, followed by IBM, McDonalds, Microsoft, Coca Cola and AT&T, the top-ranked telecom brand. Vodafone ranks 12th and Verizon 13th. All those telecom firms rank ahead of Amazon.

Apple Ends Google's Four-Year Run as Most Valuable Brand

Rogers to officially become a "4G" Provider

Purists might gnash their teeth, but users mostly won't care that Rogers will change the nomenclature of its HSPA+ "3G" network to "4G" on May 9, 2011.

Effective May 9th Rogers will call its HSPA+ network, technically 3G, a “4G HSPA ” network.

Rogers says this “is simply a network name change” to align with the International Telecommunicaitons Union standards and also to “bring up on par with Bell and TELUS and close the perceived gap”. In other words, the mobile broadband access market has shifted. Despite the fact that most consumers likely could not tell the difference between a 4G and an HSPA+ 3G network, the marketing platform around 4G has become important.

TELUS announced their new “4G” network in February and Bell closely followed in March 2011. Soon after SaskTel and MTS both declared their networks were also being marketed as a “4G” network.

Rogers simply has to keep pace, in the marketing wars. Of course, that also creates another problem, namely how to market 4G in its Long Term Evolution variant.

Verizon Wireless can fairly clearly make an argument that its 4G network differs clearly from its 3G network in terms of speed and latency. It will be a bit harder to draw the distinction between a good HSPA+ network and an LTE network, in many cases, since field tests show an HSPA+ network can offer experienced speeds as high as some LTE networks.

Rogers to officially become a "4G HPSA " network on May 9th | MobileSyrup.com