Perhaps 56% of U.S. "Tweens" Have Their Own Mobile Phones

There are relatively few human beings left in the United States who do not have their own mobile phones, a new study suggests.

One measure of the popularity of mobile phones is the near-ubiquity of mobile usage among “tweens” between eight and 12. Some 56 percent of respondents surveyed by ORC International say they have purchased cell phones for their young children, ranging from a high of 62 percent in households earning over $100,000 a year and a low of 41 percent in households under $50,000 a year.

Some 81 percent of parents of tweeners put their child on a contract-based mobile phone plan and 15 percent use a prepaid cell phone service. Some 84 percent of parents added a tween user to an existing family plan, the study found.

These days, communications is an attribute of many devices, but especially mobile phones that arguably have become the preferred way people use voice communications. And other data reinforces the notion that teenagers overwhelmingly use mobile communications as their primary communications method.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, for example, shows 54 percent of people 12 to 17 send text messages. Only 38 percent say they “call.”

DirecTV to Drop 26 Viacom Channels?

Contract negotiations between video service providers and programmers often go right to the brink of "channels going dark" before new carriage agreements are reached, and that might be the case for on-going discussions between DirecTV and Viacom.


Viacom’s distribution agreement with DirecTV is set to expire at midnight on Tuesday, July 10. Viacom says it has been negotiating for months but hasn't reached an agreement on a new contract. 


In part, that might be because Viacom claims DirecTV wants lower ratse than Viacom receives from any other distributor in the industry. 


So it remains possible that nearly 20 million DirecTV subscribers will be without 26 Viacom channels, including Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, VH1, CMT, Spike TV, TV Land, if a new agreement is not reached. 


Most often, though, some last-minute accommodation is reached. Still, the escalating number of disputes between distributors and programmers illustrates growing financial tension within the video subscription business. 


At least some consumers are finding they don't value subscription video as much as they used to. In other cases, especially with a growing percentage of Millennials, the value isn't high enough to convince them to subscribe, even when those consumers can afford to do so.

But affordability is a growing problem. Bernstein Research Senior Analyst Craig Moffett has argued that "after the necessities of food, shelter, transportation and healthcare each month, the bottom 40 percent of U.S. households have already exhausted all of their disposable income."

"There is," he says. "nothing left for clothing, for debt service, for cable or for phone."


That will put increasing pressure on service providers to hold the line on retail pricing or even reduce it. That will require any number of changes. Service providers can create modified and cheaper tiers of service, can drop whole channels, pay programmers less or cut some marketing expenses. 


Ultimately, the need to limit channels, and therefore operating costs, will be become a necessary step, unless programmers decide to yield on per-subscriber fees. In order for some networks to do that, the networks themselves will have to stop paying program creators as much as they presently do, as well. 


Up to a point, programmers and distributors will not want to upset a business model that has worked very well. But if the business model starts to crack, historically unusual steps will have to be taken.

T-Mobile USA Wrongly Slams Verizon Wireless "Share Everything"

The Verizon Wireless ’s "Share Everything" plans are "costly, complicated and punitive,"  T-Mobile USA argues. Using T-Mobile USA's own comparison, those complaints seem overblown. T-Mobile argues users can save "up to" $40 a month, for a customer who pays full retail for their new device. Under a standard contract plan, the savings might be $20 a month.


The same logic applies for plans with two or three users on a single account. For a three-device (smart phone) account, monthly savings for a user on contract, with subsidized phones, is only about $10 a month. Roughly the same difference exists for two-device accounts, with T-Mobile USA users saving about $10 a month, compared top a Verizon Wireless Share Everything plan.


That wouldn't strike some of us as especially "costly." Nor does it seem "complicated" or "punitive." There is a small difference. But not much. 

Is E-Commerce More Important in Developing Markets than in Developed Markets?

E-commerce might be more important for consumers in developing nations than in developed nations, according to Capgemini researchers. 


In developing markets, the study said the percentages were higher but that at least one third of the respondents in more developed markets agreed with the assessment. Developing nations don't have the retail shopping infrastructure that developed markets do. 


Paris-based consulting firm Capgemini found that more than half of shoppers globally think more physical stores will become merely showrooms by 2020. 


According to the report, which was based on interviews with 16,000 consumers from 16 countries, 51 percent of respondents said that, in the next eight years, they expect retail locations to be showrooms for selecting and ordering products. 

Tablet Screen Size is a Bit Like Mobile Cell Size: Highly Non-Linear

Tablet screen size is a bit of a non-linear matter, though it often seems as though it is quite linear. More accurately, screen size and mobile cell coverage area are "linear," but not on a 1:1 basis. 


The typical rule of thumb for decreasing a mobile cell site's coverage is that reducing radius of coverage by 50 percent requires a quadrupling of the number of sites. 


In somewhat similar fashion, an iPad "mini" of about eight inches screen diagonal would have roughly 40 percent more surface area than a seven-inch Kindle Fire or Android Tablet. Apple  might have business reasons for producing a smaller-screen device in precisely the dimensions it seems to be choosing. 

586 million LTE Devices to Ship in 2016

Some 586 million smart phones using Long Term Evolution, and 154 million network interface cards or routers will be shipped globally in 2016, according to the Marketing Intelligence and Consulting Institute. 

Global shipments of LTE terminal devices, 2012-2016 (millions of units)
	LTE smartphones	Other terminal devices  (network interface cards and routers)
2012	64	41
2013	188	69
2014	300	74
2015	440	117
2016	586	154

Source

Nokia, RIM, HTC Smart Phone Shipments Will Decline in Second Quarter of 2012

Nokia, RIM and HTC are expected to see their smartphone shipments, as well as market share, continue declining in the third and fourth quarters of 2012, according to a report. 


Despite efforts initiated by Nokia, RIM and HTC to fend off competition from Apple and Samsung Electronics, RIM and HTC already have reported lower than expected shipments for the second quarter of 2012, while Nokia is expected to see its second-quarter smartphone shipments drop below 10 million units.