EU "Digital Agenda" Has Application Targets

The European Union's "Digital Agenda" calls for 100 percent coverage of member state households with 30 Mbps broaband access by 2020, with an additional goal of 100 Mbps coverage of half of households by 2020.

That might not be the most interesting aspect of the Digital Agenda. The plan also specifies application targets. The plan calls for 50 percent of citizens buying online, 20 percent buying cross-border and 33 percent of small and medium businesses buying or selling online.

The plan also calls for 50 percent of citizens using e-government and 25 percent using e-government forms. Progress toward these goals is much more advanced than the connectivity goals, with five of the target behaviors already over 80 percent usage levels, says Chris Nicoll, Yankee Group analyst.

Bill Gates, former Microsoft CEO, famously admitted that he missed the importance of the Internet. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt now says he didn't move Google fast enough, or resolutely enough, to embrace social software.

Some might argue that will continue to happen in the Internet space. So targets might be helpful in some ways, but are unlikely to reliably measure all that is most important, simply because even "the smart guys" can't always foresee the big changes.

More Tests Show LightSquared Interference With GPS

A new set of tests by the National PNT Engineering Forum, a federal advisory group of engineers, showed that LightSquared's proposed mobile broadband network disrupted the signal strength to all GPS devices in the test area, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A separate Federal Aviation Administration-commissioned study found that "GPS operations below 2000 feet would be unavailable over a large radius of metro (areas)" for aircraft.

LightSquared argues it can prevent such interference, using better filters and possibly by creating bigger guard bands, though that will reduce the amount of useful spectrum LightSquared can use. The basic problem is that the adjacent GPS signals are quite weak, compared to the much-stronger Lightsquared signals.

But interference with other licensed users is the kiss of death for any new user of spectrum. It appears the interference issues are more substantial than LightSquared had expected, and it seems doubtful LightSquared's plans can proceed without substantial modification. There undoubtedly will be some demand that the plan be scuttled.

More Tests Show LightSquared Interference With GPS (subscription required)

62% of Information Workers Work Remotely At Least Part of Every Week

Some 62 percent of enterprise workers in North America and Europe work remotely at least part of every typical week, according to Forrester Research. 


E-mail and calendar apps were the most important for all types of mobile workers. 


Instant messaging came in a distant third. 


Audio and Web conferencing tools, team workspaces and social networking sites were popular with workers who spend a substantial amount of time outside of the office, such as managers and consultants.

62% of Information Workers Already Work Remotely

Small Businesses Consider Facebook, Other Online Marketing Channels "Highly Effective"

The sixth "Merchant Confidence Index" survey of 4,942 small business owners and managers shows that small business managers use a wide variety of online marketing channels, lead by Facebook, but also including Google, LinkedIn, Google Places, Twitter and other applications.

Profiles on social network sites are deemed the "most effective" channel, but email, local review sites and online Yellow Pages are considered among the most-effective channels used by small businesses.

MerchantCircle.com

Being Too Early is as Dangerous as Being Too Late

Former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin thinks the AOL-Huffington Post deal ironically fulfills the vision Time Warner originally had for merging AOL with Time Warner.

"Time Warner was basically a content distribution company and AOL was a digital service company and putting the two together was intended to put an Internet injection into Time Warner," he says. "It didn’t exactly work out that way, but the intention was really significant."

But he thinks, a decade later, that the strategy will work, or at least has a reasonable chance of working, where the Time Warner merger with AOL is widely viewed to have been a failure. Being too early is as dangerous as being too late.

Former Time Warner CEO on “delicious ironies” of AOL-HuffPo Merger

Time Warner Cable Sees Opportunity in 'Single Play' Broadband Business - WSJ.com

"'We've become less of a TV company than we were previously,"said Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable CEO recently said, adding that the company's focus has shifted more toward its role as a provider of infrastructure for the delivery of media. That might have been an odd statement 10 years ago, when both cable companies and telcos began to find that the competitive market was forcing a rethinking of product bundling.

In a monopoly environment, with high end user penetration, it is rational to build networks that have only a single service to sell. That used to be the case for cable operators selling video entertainment, or telcos selling voice. In a competitive environment, with multiple providers, any provider can expect penetration ranging from 20 percent for any major new service, and a declining share of the original legacy business, if there was one.

For a cable company or telco, that has meant selling multiple products to a smaller base of customers. That's why triple play or double play packages have become so important in recent years. Now, though, even that strategy requires revision. Once a network has been built, and a company has gotten about as many triple play or dual play customers as it can, it makes sense to avoid stranding assets by selling single services, if one can, to customers that have chosen to buy a key service from another provider.

In cable's case, that means acknowledging that, for many customers, a satellite service simply makes more sense, and that some customers will not give up their satellite TV services for a terrestrial alternative. So Time Warner Cable now wants to "take what the market will give it" by focusing new market attention on "broadband only" sales to customers unlikely to abandon their video or voice services providers.

That is not to say the fundamental economics of a broadband fixed-line network do not require healthy triple play or dual play sales. That still is necessary, under conditions where other contestants are going to get significant market share. But neither does it make sense to strand assets when some percentage of customers can be enticed to buy a single product, in cable's case broadband access.

There is another interesting nuggest in Britt's remarks, though. Note the statement about Time Warner Cable's overall "role as a provider of infrastructure for the delivery of media." That's a flat out acknowledgement that the growing part of Time Warner Cable's business is the "dumb pipe" part, broadband access, not entertainment video or voice.

Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, Britt is correct. Time Warner Cable is close to the point where its "dumb pipe" customers will equal the number of legacy video customers. The company has about two million customers who buy broadband access, but not video. It has 12.5 million video customers.

There is something else to be gleaned here. Britt noted that about half its "broadband only" customers were business accounts. So although Time Warner Cable expects to sell more "broadband only" accounts to residences, it likely also will find it is selling more business access accounts as well.

So not only is Time Warner Cable shifting from "video first" to possibly "video or broadband first," it also is shifting towards sales to business customers, where its legacy business has been consumer focused. That is not to say either cable or telco service providers will not strive mightily to create other new revenue streams. It is to say that "dumb pipe" remains foundational to the overall business.

Time Warner Cable Sees Opportunity in 'Single Play' Broadband Business - WSJ.com

SMS Growth Slows, Some Worry

Text messaging has been one of the most profitable services for carriers for years with profit margins reaching 80 percent, but growth is slowing.

The most-recent data from the CTIA suggests growth of about nine percent. That shouldn't surprise. Text messaging is a universal feature of all phones, and texting has grown quite popular. But no market grows indefinitely.

Apple's recent announcement of its own iOS messaging capability obviously has people wondering whether that capability will eat into carrier text messaging revenue. It's hard to say. Captive services are useful within the iOS community, but few captive communications media achieve widespread use until there is full interoperability.

At least in the U.S. market, many users have text messaging plans that are functionally or actually "unlimited," eliminating the economic driver to substitute iOS messaging for text messaging.

As SMS growth is slowing down, is a new era of free messaging coming up?