Canadian Government Will Use National Security Criteria When Picking Communications Infrastructure Suppliers

The Canadian government has said that it will be invoking a "national security exemption" as it hires firms to build a secure network, as the U.S. government might do. The move follows a U.S. Congress committee report concluding that Huawei and ZTE pose security risks . 

The exemption allows the Canadian government to bar firms from competing for government infrastructure contracts if those companies, or in some cases their home countries, are considered security risks.

LTE Will Drive a Majority of Verizon Wireless Data Traffic "Soon"

Verizon Wireless said that more than a third of its data traffic is already travelling on its Long Term Evolution 4G  network, and that within a few months, the majority of data traffic will be on that network.

It is taking only two years to reach that milestone, compared to the eight years it took 3G to account for the bulk of data traffic, Chief Technical Officer Nicola Palmer said. Verizon expects to have LTE running in 400 cities by the end of October 2012. 

Australia Mobile Data Consumption: Growing, But Still Fairly Modest

The latest Internet Use, Australia report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that although mobile data consumption is growing, usage still is not "high."


Apple iPhone and Android smart phone users consume a "trivially small amount of data." In fact, the study suggests that a typical user consumers a little over 135 megabytes a month, compared to the fixed broadband user’s 23 GBytes worth of average monthly appetite. 

Even users of mobile “dongles” consume around 1.4 GB per month. But the study suggests "dongle" traffic growth is slowing.

On a per-user basis, fixed broadband consumption rose 18 percent in the latest survey; phone broadband consumption shot up 24 percent per user; while mobile broadband data card usage rose by just two percent.

Data: ABS. Graph: Richard Chirgwin, The Register

Although there are nearly three people using a mobile handset for broadband access for every one fixed account, fixed users still account for more than 94 percent of the total
bandwidth consumed.

iPhone Usage Among U.S. Teens Hits 40%

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says iPhone and iPad usage continues to surge among the U.S. teenager segment of the market. The survey of over 7,700 teenagers shows that 40 percent of respondents currently use an iPhone, up from 34 percent in the last survey conducted just six months ago.

Also, some 62 percent of survey respondents stating that they plan to obtain an iPhone as their next phone.

Ultimately, Service Providers Will Embrace Over the Top

Though many challenges obviously remain, many executives in the communications, device and over the top application industries think access providers, device manufacturers and independent application providers will find ways to work together.

Some 64 percent of respondents surveyed by Coleman Parks on behalf of Amdocs said they believed OTT apps would bring valuable innovation to the industry. Some 62 percent said that partnering was a strategy to counter or eliminate the OTT threat.

Some 42 percent of device or service provider executives said they could offer any service
an OTT player could, better.

Research firm Coleman Parks conducted 100 telephone interviews of 50 global service providers, 35 OTT and Internet Players and 15 device manufacturers
as part of the study.

Of course, the issue is that device suppliers, service providers and application providers all say they must own the customer experience, if not the customer relationship. That will be a complicated problem to resolve.

But some 58 percent of service providers believe the communications market will rationalize in the future, and that only players that partner will win.

Fully 73 percent of device manufacturers think their long-term survival depends on partnerships and  60 percent of device manufacturers also say that OTT players must partner or die.

89% of Small Business Employees Use Their Own Mobile Phones for Work

A new survey sponsored by CDW shows that 89 percent of small business employees use personally-owned mobile devices for work. 

The survey found that almost all small business users surveyed (94 percent) believe their mobile devices make them more efficient, and most (67 percent) believe their companies would lose competitive ground without those devices. 

Next Generation Investment Now Has Competition

Policy makers, no less than fixed network service providers, face challenges never encountered before, when pondering how to stimulate faster deployment of fast fiber access networks. 

“It’s become a challenge for operators to know how much to eventually invest in fixed broadband networks and services,” says Jeff Heynen, Infonetics Research directing analyst. Some of us might say that is a very polite way of saying that industry executives are not certain how big a payback they might get from making such investments in fixed networks. 

That is a huge development. In the past, neither executives nor policy makers or regulators had to question whether investment in fixed networks was profitable or not. In the monopoly period, within some reasonable constraints, investment automatically generated a return. That's the substance of "guaranteed rate of return," after all. 

In the competitive era, when network access and transport are severed from applications, none of that can work. There no longer is any predictability of revenue, end user demand, profit margin or operating cost.

That makes a policy maker's job; a regulator's job or a service provider executive's job much more challenging. 

“On one hand, fixed broadband is among the most profitable services a provider can offer," says Heynen. "On the other hand, the investment required to roll out or upgrade mobile networks is eating into their available capital.”

In other words, mobile investment now is a competitor to fixed network investment. As a result, the transition to next-generation fixed networks will take "longer than many in the industry had hoped."

Nor is the issue so "simple" as making the "right" technology choice. The business model for an incumbent fixed network service provider actually is an open question, at this point.