Things Change Fast in the Mobile Payments Space

This graphic shows Sprint as a partner with Google Wallet, and there are growing rumors that Sprint is launching its own "Touch Wallet." Best Buy, Macy's, Target and Barnes and Noble are rumored to be retailers who will support the Touch Wallet. Mobile payments remains a complicated ecosystem, indeed.

Fiber to the Home Still is About Difficult Investment Conditions

The European Union wants its leading fixed network service providers to connect 50 percent of region households to high-speed broadband by 2020, using fiber to the home technology.

By "high speed," the EU means internet speeds of 30 Mbps or above for European citizens, with half European households subscribing to connections of 100Mbps or higher.

As always, the issue is how to get from here to there. Europe also features high reliance on wholesale access to existing copper access infrastructure, at prices competitors naturally want to keep low, and if possible, decrease.

Service providers who will be borrowing the money to invest obviously think that is detrimental to the business case for new fiber.

France Telecom expects a payback payback time of 30 years to 40 years, far exceeding the three-year to five-year payback expected of application investments.
A business plan with a payback of five years or less has to assume retail penetration of at least 30 percent, and ih many cases also with triple-play service offerings. Any payback analysis is of course highly dependent on the assumptions, ranging from capital cost per location passed, as well as service revenue per location, among other things

That indicates the risk France Telecom and other providers are facing. Those time frames are so long they typically only can be considered by very capital intensive utility firms that operate in monopoly style markets, as fixed network providers used to assume was the case.

These days, the fixed network business faces competition from other facilities-based suppliers, mobile and satellite networks.

"Share Everything" Plan Should You Buy?

As always is the case when mobile retail service plans are revamped in major ways, each account owner, and customers of other service providers, will have to do a bit of work to figure out whether the new plans are better than the existing plans any user is buying.

As always, the answer is that whether the new plans are better, roughly the same, or worse, for any given customer depends on how users on any account want to use mobile services.

For some Verizon customers who don’t use all their voice minutes and text allowance, the new plans, featuring unlimited domestic calling and texting, might not actually offer any new value, except theoretically. Such users might even pay slightly more.

Heavy voice or texting users might like the plans, and might save a bit of money.

Heavy data users might pay measurably more, but also can buy plans that match their usage.

If shared data plans have similar market impact to family voice and texting plans, the decision context will change. The big decisions will not be "choosing a new plan" for the same services and devices, but "adding new devices to the account" and "upgrading feature phones to smart phones." Those decisions, it is true, will increase recurring bills, but mainly because adding incremental new devices costs less than it would have in the past.

In all likelihood, that was part of Verizon Wireless thinking all along. To the extent possible, the new plans would aim to be revenue neutral for customers who do not plan to change the number of devices on any single account, or upgrade devices from feature phones to smart phones.

For accounts where the incremental costs now are more attractive, the decisions will more likely hinge on whether it now makes sense to spend a little more, to get more.

DirecTV Might Deploy Ad-Skipping Technology

DirecTV says it could deploy technology that would enable its millions of subscribers to automatically skip television advertising, Reuters reports. DirecTV probably wouldn't do anything until lawsuits pitting Dish Network against TV broadcasters, over the legality of such practices, are settled in court.

Fox, CBS and NBCUniversal separately have sued Dish Network over its new AutoHop service, which allows consumers to skip television ads. At the same time, Dish has filed its own lawsuit against all four broadcast networks seeking a declaration as to the legality of its new service.

Dish’s "Hopper" is a digital video recorder that allows Dish customers to automatically skip past all the commercials on some prime-time network TV shows. Understandably, the TV networks aren't too happy about that, even if Dish customers might like the feature, and they have sued Dish Network to stop the practice. 


TiVo also had earlier proposed allowing its customers to skip over all commercials, but TiVo disabled the feature after intense opposition from programming networks. 


In a sense, Dish is gambling that the "surgical" approach, allowing users to skip virtually all commercials on broadcast network prime-time programs, will please customers more than it irritates the few affected networks.


Hopper would have faced across the board opposition had it proposed eliminating all commercials from all programming, automatically. 

Mobile and Mobile Payment A Top Issue for Parking Industry

Technology-related innovations account for half of the top ten trends in the $30 billion parking industry. The single most important trend in parking today is the technological revolution
that is driving the industry, according to the International Parking Institute.

In fact, three of the top five trends identified in a  study focus on technology, including cashless or electronic payment, technologies to improve access control and payment automation, or increased real-time communication of pricing and availability by mobile phone or similar devices.

NCR Enables ATMs that use Mobile Devices and Barcodes

New software from NCR Corporation will allow consumers to initiate cash withdrawals from their banking accounts on mobile devices and then complete those transactions at an ATM by scanning a 2D barcode.

NCR Mobile Cash Withdrawal will make ATM transactions faster and more secure by removing cards and PINs from the process at the ATM. The entire transaction, while the consumer is in front of the ATM, can take less than 10 seconds, according to NCR.

The point is that there are lots of ways to handle the communications function between a mobile device and a transaction terminal. Near field communications is one way, but only one way.

Apple's Passbook Isn't a Wallet, Yet

But Passbook sure looks like a wallet app. Passbook formally aims only to store loyalty, reward or other account information, from retailers that support barcode apps for boarding passes, store cards, and movie tickets, for example.

Of course, you might note that Apple has about 400 million iTunes accounts linked to user credit cards. So everybody recognizes that Apple could become a wallet of its own, with a mobile-enabled payment mechanism, if it chose to do so. For the moment, it seems content to operate a closed loop service for content purchases from its own "stores."