Sometimes Fiber to the Home is Not Enough

Sometimes, even optical fiber access isn’t enough. Consider Yukon Telephone, which serves extraordinarily isolated communities in rural Alaska. The company recently installed a fiber-to-the-home network serving Tanana, a village of about 300 people, mostly Athabascan indians, on the Yukon River in the vast interior of Alaska.

So you would  think Yukon Telephone customers in Tanana now can take advantage of optical fiber speeds. But there’s a problem, company  President Don Eller says. All the backhaul is by satellite (Tanana is really isolated. Historically, moving bulkier goods in and out of the village has required waiting until the Yukon unfreezes in the spring, and then halting again when the winter freeze comes again.)



And given the high cost of satellite backhaul (up to $12,000 a month for a single T1 circuit), the entire Tanana fiber to home network has 3 Mbps worth of bandwidth. If you wonder why so much of the “broadband stimulus” spending was for middle mile projects, Tanana shows why.



Tanana now has a state of the art fiber to the home network. What it doesn’t have is an affordable way to connect with an Internet point of presence at speeds that take advantage of that local access capability. The middle mile issue is the barrier, not the local access network.



The backhaul problem faced by Yukon Telephone, show the huge investment challenges and revenue models for fiber to home services. Everyone agrees people need more bandwidth, and for a fixed network, optical fiber is the long-term solution.



What remains unsettled is the revenue model, and therefore the wisdom of investing in such infrastructure.

EU Wants to Slice Copper-Based Wholesale Rates

European Union telecoms commissioner Neelie Kroes wants to create a new pricing model for wholesale access to incumbent telecom provider networks that would cut prices for copper access but exempt carriers from the rules if they sell fiber optic access to wholesale customers. The new rules would create incentives for replacement of copper infrastructure. Kroes calls for greater broadband investment

Private investors have been reluctant to invest the €270 billionn Kroes estimates is needed for Europe to replace its copper access network with an optical fiber network. Broadband investment is the issue

It’s a contentious issue, as you might guess, as service  providers remain unconvinced there is adquate end user demand for new services that would justify the investment, at least for the moment. And that has investors concerned as well.

Would Apple Want to Buy Sprint?

With the news that Sprint has agreed to buy $20 billion worth of Apple iPhones, and with Sprint having a market capitalization of about $6 billion, speculation will begin that it is well within Apple's potential to simply buy all of Sprint. 

That would cause Apple enormous channel conflict of course. In fact, Apple would not avoid much channel conflict even if it opted to create "iNet" using wholesale capacity leased from Sprint. 

Would Apple Buy Sprint?

Apple "Owns" Sprint

In a move that some believe could be a make-or-break move for Sprint, the company has committed to buy at least 30.5 million iPhones, even though it would likely lose money on the deal until 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal could represent a commitment of $20 billion at current rates, and Sprint has to buy the devices, whether or not it can sell them.

Apple was paid $632, on average, for each iPhone sold to mobile service providers  in its most recent quarter, according to Credit Suisse. Customers who are not happy with contract plans that allow mobile service providers to recoup the device subsidies can decide, and do decide, that a contract is a better value than paying full price for a new iPhone and avoiding a contract.

To sell that many iPhones, Sprint would have to double its rolls of contract customers, convert all of them to the Apple device or a combination of the two, the Wall Street Journal notes. 

Sprint virtually has to take some big risks as it attempts to get itself back on a growth track. As one of my sons would say, "Apple owns Sprint."

Inside Sprint's Bet on Apple's iPhone

What is Twitter, Really?

What is Twitter? Sure, it is a "social network," but lots of people also say blogs are social networks. Initially, the idea was that Twitter was Facebook in 140 characters. These days, most observers would tend to agree that Twitter is something different, which only raises the question of "what" Twitter actually is.

These days, some would say, Twitter might be seen less as a social network on the Facebook model, but something that is as much broadcast network as a "social network." Of course, these days all social networks seem to be "media" as well as the digital equivalent of any real world place where people casually hang out and talk.

These days, the term "information network" seems to be the accepted term. Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO, says “there’s this huge opportunity for us to surface all this great content.” The difference might be subtle, but it's a bit like the difference between "what you doing right now?" and "what's happening right now?"

The former is an example of personal communication. The latter is "media."

Will Twitter Become Profitable?

Social Media ROI is Tough to Measure

Return on social media investment is tough to measure, which should hardly be surprising. Any firm using multiple marketing and sales channels will have a tough time determining the relative impact of any single one of the channels, for example. 


Practitioners also measure what can be measured, which is not the same thing as a direct measurement of return, but only a proxy for such returns. It's still partly art, not fully science. But all marketing is equal parts art and science. 

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Digital Monopolies?

A "digital monopoly" can be a strange thing. An application, whether Facebook or PayPal or Google or iTunes can have external characteristics that resemble what might have been seen as monopolies in other earlier contexts.

But they are odd sorts of monopolies. They can be used "for free," so price gouging is hard to discern. There are other alternatives for all applications and devices, over time, so lack of choices is likewise hard to discern.

But in some quarters there is concern over such application "monopolies," even when traditional tests of consumer harm are virtually impossible to prove.

The rise of the digital monopolies