U.S. LTE Service Costs More Than Elsewhere

A comparison by Wireless Intelligence, a unit of the GSM Association, suggests that being in the biggest LTE market has not brought low prices to U.S. consumers.

According to the study, Verizon Wireless charges $7.50 for each gigabyte of data downloaded over its LTE network. 

That is three times the European average of $2.50 and more than 10 times what consumers pay in Sweden, where a gigabyte costs as little as 63 cents.

People sometimes immediately think there is something nefarious going on when they hear such things. It isn't mysterious, though. Retail service costs everywhere around the world are directly related to the cost of supplying the underlying infrastructure, and the U.S. market has among the highest overall costs 

It really isn't much more complicated than that. 




Costs vary from region to region both in absolute terms and as a percentage of income per person. 

Smart Phone Adoption Tops 1 Billion Globally

Suppliers have been selling smart phones since at least 1992. Only recently have they gotten to be a majority of devices sold in some markets, though.  

Australia, U.K., Sweden, Norway, Saudi Arabia and UAE each have more than 50 percent of their population on smartphones. 

An additional seven countries—U.S., New Zealand, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland—now have greater than 40 percent smartphone penetration. In the United States, Google research indicates. 



By way of comparison, Nielsen recently pointed out that U.S. smart phone penetration had surpassed the game console as the "most adopted" newer technology in the home environment. 

In terms of growth rates, nothing compared to the adoption of tablets, up about 400 percent over the last 12 months, Nielsen data suggests. 



Qualitatively, the smart phone adoption wave has key implications for any business that currently assumes people will use a PC when interacting with Internet content and information. increasingly, that is not a very good assumption.

As Facebook Expands in Mobile, Mobile Security is Added

Starting now, Facebook users will be able to download mobile security software from avast!, AVG, Avira, Kaspersky, Panda, Total Defense, and Webroot. 

Existing suppliers Microsoft, McAfee, Norton, TrendMicro, and Sophos will begin offering anti-virus software for mobile devices as well. Users can visit the AV Marketplace now to download free anti-virus software for PC, Mac and mobile handsets. 

In Praise of Deterministic "Flows"

Many of you are too young to remember the fierce debates about the principles that "should" guide the development of the "next generation network." That was before Internet Protocol stopped being an "interim" or "legacy" protocol and seemingly become the foundation for all next generation networks.

Telco architects had a different vision, based on the asynchronous transfer mode protocol, and popularly known at times as "broadband ISDN." Integrated services digital network was an earlier generation of thinking about the "next generation network." 

"Open Systems Interconnect" was supposed to replace IP. It didn't, obviously. But the backers of ATM knew something important, namely that some applications and services can tolerate delay and latency and packets arriving out of order. 

But some applications and services really do not work very well unless packets arrive in order, and that can be very challenging when so many packets have to arrive, so rapidly, that simple error correction methods, such as re-transmitting, do not work. 

That is true for video, and especially for high-definition video. Other services, such as real-time voice, likewise are intolerant of packets arriving out of order, because it is not elegant to retransmit the garbled bits and reinsert them into the stream fast enough to preserve quality.

In other words, the architects behind ATM knew something important about at least some forms of network-transmitted content, sessions and information, and that was that "best effort" often does not work for isochronous traffic. 

In other words, engineers now have to work around the "best effort" architecture of IP to replicate what would be built in to ATM, namely quality of service measures that handle different flows of information in a differential manner. 

Some will argue IP can be made to work that way. Others see problems ahead. 

 

Martin Geddes - Lean Networking from Martin Geddes

Mobile is the Way Most People Use Broadband, Voice, ITU Report Says

A new report by the  International Telecommunications Union confirms what you already know: mobile broadband has surpassed fixed broadband, on a global basis, as the way most people use the Internet.

And mobile is the way most people use voice services. 

From Mobile "Payments" to "Wallet" to "Commerce"

When nomenclature changes in a business, it usually indicates that supplier expectations of potential profit also have shifted. But sometimes, shifts of language also indicate that different segments of the supplier part of the market have decided to engage.

In 2010, for example, the language was about “mobile payments.” By 2011, the language had shifted to “mobile wallet.” In 2012, the language is “mobile commerce.” In part, that reflects a change in expectations about revenue potential.

In the U.S. market, for example, Isis has shifted its own revenue models from “transaction fees” to “advertising and marketing services.” And Google Wallet always has focused on advertising and marketing.

The mobile commerce language illustrates something else. A large number of observers, proponents and suppliers now say the issue is ways to use mobile devices and consumer behavior to change retailer business processes.

That includes a much broader array of potential suppliers, and a much wider range of business problems to be solved by the application of mobile technology. At least some of that change has been assisted, if not driven, by the widespread interest in tablet devices.

Retailers and suppliers of retailer technology have seized upon the tablet as an ideal device for changing the interaction with shoppers inside stores.

That isn’t to say that innovation about actual payment processing has ceased. PayPal has made major efforts to gain a foothold in processing of retail store transactions, a move that would fuel its business move from online to offline.

Other suppliers of online or offline services likewise see opportunities to sell solutions that bridge offline and online sales. The Merchant Customer Exchange, for example, is an effort by retailers to better control the mobile commerce process in ways that are more friendly to place-based retailers.

Managed Services Not Meeting ROI Expectations in Australia, Study Finds

Some managed service providers are not fully meeting the total cost of ownership and return on investment expectations of their customers, according to an IDC Australia study.

The study found that 23 percent of 100 Australian IT managers and decision makers surveyed have incurred an increase in costs under a managed services provider, not a decline, as one normally would expect. 

“That’s one of the highest figures in the entire region of Asia-Pacific — it’s higher than New Zealand, and the only place higher is Malaysia. Everywhere else, like Singapore for example, it's at five percent,” said IDC Australia associate research director Dustin Kehoe.

About  44 percent of the C-level respondents say costs have increased or costs have stayed the same. About 56 percent actually saw cost savings, the study found.