Is Voice a Product or a Feature?

It appears the Australian National Broadband Network is setting wholesale pricing policies that will raise new questions about the ways voice services can be packaged for sale to consumer customers. 


Each wholesale connection apparently costs a retailer $24, and both broadband and voice are included and required at that price. In other words, a retail provider "must" buy both broadband and voice capabilities from the NBN.

That raises an interesting question. Will re?"tailers sell voice and broadband separately, or as a bundle? And if they do, will consumers reset their expectations about the features a broadband connection "typically" provides, and what it costs?

In other words, is domestic voice a "feature" or a "product?" There are growing signs in the U.S. market that service providers are starting to consider shifting retail packaging from "voice as a product" to "voice as a feature." The new Verizon Wireless "Share Everything" plan moves in that direction, with voice and text messaging essentially becoming part of a basic "use the network" connection fee. 

Charter Communications is reported to be considering ending all sales of consumer voice as a stand-alone product. Apparently, in the future Charter voice will be a product that only can be purchased as part of a bundle including something else, the obvious candidates being broadband access or video entertainment. 

That's a half step towards making voice a feature of a network connection fee. Just how far the trend might go is not yet clear. But a reasonable person might argue that making voice services a feature, rather than a product, is the "best" way to assure future voice revenue. 

Charter Move Shows Why Fixed Network Voice Will Not Ever Go to "Zero"

Since the number of fixed network voice subscriptions has been dropping for at least a decade, some might suspect that there is no end to the decline. Some of us have argued that there is some equilibrium point that will be reached, when the number of subscriptions actually stabilizes. 


A new policy by Charter shows why that will be the case. Apparently, Charter is going to stop selling voice subscriptions as a discrete product, and will in the future only sell voice in conjunction with at least one other service, either entertainment video or broadband access. 


"Going forward, we will not offer Charter Phone as a standalone product," a Charter spokesman apparently has confirmed. 


If you think about it, that also is how Verizon Wireless will price its "Share Everything" services. use of the Verizon Wireless network requires a basic subscription that includes unlimited U.S. domestic voice and texting, with variable payments for mobile broadband service. 


The point is that if voice becomes a feature of a broadband access service, the number of voice accounts in service will drop only so far as broadband access or entertainment video. 

Are Telecom Profit Margins "Excessive?"

Gross revenue is never the same thing as "profit." But many businesses are so capital intensive that actual profits are slim. In fact, though it often is believed that oil industry profits are out-sized, they actually aren't, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Standard & Poors and the American Petroleum Institute. 


Oil and natural gas industry profits were about 6.7 percent in the third quarter of 2011, for example. 


Telecom service provider profit margins aren't that much different. Verizon has a six-percent profit margin while AT&T has about an 11 percent margin. 




 

Are Tablets Better Commerce Vehicles than Smart Phones?

Tablets are "better"than smart phones as a channel for commerce and shopping, in part because users are more likely to purchase after searching for a local business and tend to spend more per purchase than mobile phone users, a study sponsored by the Online Publishers Association has found. 


Some studies also show that tablet purchases are larger than those from PCs.   According to the 2012 Shop.org and Forrester Research "State of Retailing Online" survey, 49 percent of retailers say their average order value from tablets is now higher than traditional web sales. 


Nearly three in 10 (28%) retailers say they are seeing about the same average order value from tablets as their website. 

Consumers Will Store More Than 1/3 of Their Digital Content in the Cloud by 2016

The desire to share content and to access it on multiple devices will motivate consumers to start storing a third of their digital content in the cloud by 2016, according to Gartner. 


Gartner said that just seven percent of consumer content was stored in the cloud in 2011, but this will grow to 36 percent in 2016.


"Historically, consumers have generally stored content on their PCs, but as we enter the post-PC era, consumers are using multiple connected devices, the majority of which are equipped with cameras." said Shalini Verma, principal research analyst at Gartner. "With the emergence of the personal cloud, this fast-growing consumer digital content will quickly get disaggregated from connected devices."


Gartner predicts that worldwide consumer digital storage needs will grow from 329 exabytes in 2011 to 4.1 zettabytes in 2016. This includes digital content stored in PCs, smart phones, tablets, hard-disk drives (HDDs), network attached storage (NAS) and cloud repositories.


Average storage per household will grow from 464 gigabytes in 2011 to 3.3 terabytes in 2016. 

Do Millennials Really Complain More Often Than Others, Online?

Millennials leave the most critical review online, a study sponsored by Bazaarvoice has found, but by such a small margin a reasonable person might well conclude there is essentially no greater amount of "negative" reviews left by Millennials, than created by members of other generations. 


Overall, about 82 percent of online reviews are "positive."(click on the image for a larger view)

Baby Boomers are slightly more positive than the other generations, assigning three percent more five-star ratings to products than members of other generations tend to do. 


Millennials give one percent more one-star product ratings, the lowest rating possible;  the most of the three generations studies. 


Millennials are "decidedly middle-of-the-road," Bazaarvoice says, creating the highest percentage (seven percent) of three-star reviews, but the fewest one-star (very negative) and five-star (very positive) product ratings.


You might argue that Millennials are the most realistic reviewers, in fact. If life is a "Bell" curve, with the great mass of instances "in the middle," and only small percentages at the very high or very low ends of the scale, in terms of product quality, then the Millennial ratings make perfect sense. 

Verizon Wireless "Share Everything" Helps Marketers Using Text Messaging

Obviuously, as more subscribers shift to Verizon Wireless "Share Everything" plans, there will be implications for application providers and other third parties whose customers use the Verizon network.


The plan isn't  favorable to streaming video providers, is relatively neutral where it comes to most other application providers and actually could help marketers who use either text messaging or multimedia message service. 


Historically, text message marketers have had to worry about annoying prospects by essentially making users pay to receive messages. Under the new "Share Everything" plans, that won't be an issue.


The central annoyance still will be the sense of "invasion" on the part of users to unobtrusive messages in a channel that is considered highly personal and private. No change of plans is going to change that constraint.