The Reason for "Mobile First" or "Mobile Mostly"

"Mobile first" or "mobile mostly" have become watchwords for application providers for one very good reason. People are using smart phones and other untethered or mobile devices for a growing percentage of their Internet and application activities.

Looking only at search, some analysts expect mobile search volume to surpass desktop or PC search volume by about 2015. 

Mobile vs. PC Local Search Volumes (BIA/Kelsey Forecast)

The ISP Speed Claim Dilemma

ISPs face marketing issues no different than other providers of goods and services, namely that consumers generally have some expectations about what features and what prices constitute a reasonable offer.

That means every provider wants to appear to have an edge of some sort, and at a minimum, to supply the baseline of features consumers expect.

ISPs have one additional problem, namely that their product is essentially intangible. As with any other intangible product or service, a consumer cannot fully evaluate product claims until after the product is purchased.

But it still is reasonable to argue that most consumers considering the purchase of an Internet access service will evaluate the advertised speed and the advertised price. That means there will always be pressure to advertise the highest possible speeds.

But consumer protection agencies and regulators do not tend to like exaggerated claims. That is why more attention now is focused on how closely ISPs are able to deliver on speed claims. And there might be more work to do on that score in Europe than in the United States.

Actual European Internet access speeds are about 74 percent of advertised speeds during peak hours, a new study sponsored by the European Commission has found. Recent studies by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission have found that U.S. ISPs deliver actual speeds about 96 percent of advertised speeds.

The average download speed across all measured countries was 19.47 Mbps during peak

hours, and this increased slightly to 20.12 Mbps when all hours were considered.

Performance varied by access network technology.

Digital subscriber line services achieved 63 percent of the headline download speed, while cable services managed to achieve 91 percent of headline speeds. Fiber to home or VDSL services delivered 84 percent of headline speeds.

Fiber to home services achieved the fastest speeds in absolute terms, at 41 Mbps. Cable

services achieved 33 Mbps, whilst DSL services delivered 7 Mbps, on average.

In the September 2012 testing period, U.S. ISPs on average delivered 97 percent of advertised download speeds during peak periods, statistically equivalent to the last report, which found that the studied ISPs were able to deliver 96 percent of advertised speeds during peak hours of use, the FCC has reported. Those results were in line with testing conducted in 2011 as well.

On average, during peak periods DSL-based services delivered download speeds that were 85 percent of advertised speeds, cable-based services delivered 99 percent of advertised speeds, fiber-to-the-home services delivered 115 percent of advertised speeds, and satellite delivered 137 percent of advertised speeds, the FCC says.

This compares to July 2012 results showing largely the same performance levels: 84 percent for DSL, 99 percent for cable, and 117 percent for fiber. These results suggest that many ISPs are meeting established engineering goals for their respective technologies.

It isn’t immediately clear why DSL networks in the U.S. market were able to deliver real-world speeds more nearly matching advertised speeds, compared to European DSL networks.

But a reasonable guess is that the gap is explainable almost entirely by ISP marketing claims.

The EC study says two countries did not achieve 50 percent of advertised speed. Those two countries primarily use DSL networks, but more importantly “advertised their services

using only a handful of very high headline speeds.”

Hungarian ISPs delivered actual speeds that were 94 percent of advertised.  DSL services also achieved over 90 percent of advertised speeds. So it appears the difference is the marketing of service, not something inherent in the networks.

Since DSL performance is directly related to loop length, experienced speeds for consumers closer to the central office will increasingly diverge from speeds experienced by consumers further away from the central office.

It makes quite a difference whether the typical speed at 1,000 meters is used as the reference, compared to 5,000 meters.

But loop length is not the only consideration for DSL or other providers. Contention ratios and the degree of sharing also will affect performance. ISPs simply need to market services that reflect all the known limits, if they want to deliver on promised speeds.

But that is the dilemma. A more-realistic set of claims might mean forfeiting an advantage to other providers.

SK Telecom Launches LTE Advanced at 150 Mbps

SK Telecom is launching Long-Term Evolution-Advanced service in South Korea, a move that will about double Internet access speeds over the existing version of LTE SK Telecom now is running.

The new network is theoretically capable of download speeds of 150 Mbps, using the amount of spectrum SK Telecom will have to support the new network.

LTE-Advanced, if enough spectrum is available, can deliver up to 1Gbps of downlink and 500 Mbps of uplink.

SK Telecom’s LTE-Advanced network will pair two blocks 0f 10 MHz to provide a 20 MHz carrier capable of 150 Mbps.In the future, SK Telecom says it will aggregate multiple 20 MHz carriers to achieve download speeds of 300 Mbps or more. To begin with, the service is available in Seoul, 42 other cities in the provinces of Gyeonggi-do and Chungcheong-do, and 103 universities. 

SK Telecom Launches LTE Advanced at 150 Mbps

SK Telecom is launching Long-Term Evolution-Advanced service in South Korea, a move that will about double Internet access speeds over the existing version of LTE SK Telecom now is running.

The new network is theoretically capable of download speeds of 150 Mbps, using the amount of spectrum SK Telecom will have to support the new network.

LTE-Advanced, if enough spectrum is available, can deliver up to 1Gbps of downlink and 500 Mbps of uplink.

SK Telecom’s LTE-Advanced network will pair two blocks 0f 10 MHz to provide a 20 MHz carrier capable of 150 Mbps.In the future, SK Telecom says it will aggregate multiple 20 MHz carriers to achieve download speeds of 300 Mbps or more. To begin with, the service is available in Seoul, 42 other cities in the provinces of Gyeonggi-do and Chungcheong-do, and 103 universities. 

Telefónica Adds Windows Phone 8 to Firefox OS Support, Wants Alternatives to Apple, Android

Telefónica is among global tier one mobile service providers that are acting to support mobile devices running on operating systems other than Apple and Android, by announcing a new program to boost sales of Windows Phone 8 devices.

Initially for a period of one year, Telefónica will enhance marketing activities in support of its Windows Phone 8 devices in the U.K., Germany, Spain, Mexico, Brazil and Chile.

Telefónica also is supporting devices running the Firefox operating system. In any part of the Internet ecosystem, there are natural tensions between participants, over revenue shares, influence or control.

Mobile service providers naturally believe app providers and device providers have too much influence, compared to the service providers, in large part because of end user affinity for certain apps or devices, which gives app or device suppliers leverage.

The long term issue is whether mobile service providers, who do have much sway over packaging and pricing, can really shift consumer preferences in a significant way, where it comes to device choices. People want what they want, when they want it, how they want it and why they want it.

And though it would be a very-serious step, tensions within the ecosystem sometimes can break out in more serious ways. Channel conflict is a perennial problem in technology businesses.

Branded ISP operations by Apple or Google could be an example of how natural tensions could become inflamed to a more significant degree.

Singapore is Looking at Authorizing 189 MHz of White Spaces Spectrum

Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority now is working on the framework for enabling use of former broadcast TV spectrum (TV white spaces) in Singapore, making Singapore among the first nations (United States, Canada and United Kingdom also are among the early movers) looking to commercialize use of TV white spaces for Internet access services.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission  is allowing white spaces operations on a license-exempt basis, with the management of such devices through a database.

The Office of Communications in the United Kingdom is adopting a similar approach. IDA is also considering adopting the same approach to facilitate the initial deployment of white spaces in Singapore.

The IDA also seeks input about whether some white spaces spectrum should be licensed, however, allowing those licensees to gain more certainty about spectrum for services that require something more like a traditional mobile service.

The IDA has allocated the VHF spectrum between 174 MHz and 230 MHz and the UHF spectrum between 494 MHz and 790 MHz for white space operations. A total of 21 MHz in the VHF band is available, including 181 - 188 MHz, as well as 209 MHz to 223 MHz.

There is more spectrum in the UHF band, including 502 MHz to 518 MHz, 614 MHz to  622 MHz, 630 MHz to 710MHz, 718 MHz to  742 MHz, 750 MHz to  774 MHz and 790 MHz to 806 MHz, representing a total of 168 MHz.

In all, 189 MHz will be made available, a huge amount of spectrum in highly-desirable frequencies.

IDA also is inviting views on allowing operation of white space devices in the 694 MHz to 806 MHz band until IDA allocates these frequencies for IMT deployment, set for 2020.

What Does Network Element Unbundling Promote?

Unbundling of network elements (either of full loops or parts of local access networks) has been touted as a reasonable way to enhance competition in markets where only one broadband access network dominates. Many will argue it has, in some markets, done so. 

But there also is new thinking that unbundling of network elements, and allowing competitors wholesale access to those network elements, at healthy discounts, has had a downside: namely reducing next generation network investment.

Perhaps oddly, some in the U.S. policy community have advocated adopting unbundling policies prevalent in the European Union, precisely at the point that the EU is moving away from some of the features of such policies, such as the amount of wholesale discounts, for example. 

Some of us might argue the shift in thinking is because new problems emerge in new periods of communications policy. Solutions to older problems might actually be problems in newer periods. 

In essence, that is why new questions are being raised in markets where widespread unbundling policies are seen as having succeeded in promoting competition. It is hard to solve new problems with yesterday's solutions, especially when the older solutions are directly related to the reasons the new problems exist.

Competition remains an issue, but is not the chief issue. The main problem is that the risk of investing lots of money in next generation networks is higher than ever before, because the returns from such investments are smaller and more uncertain that similar investments have been in the past. Investors dislike higher risk and uncertainty. 

The new issues are the ways unbundling and investment are related. U.S. regulators have supported mandatory narrowband service unbundling, but not mandatory broadband access unbundling. 

European policymakers, on the other hand, have applied mandatory wholesale rules to broadband and narrowband services.

The implementation of unbundling requires European regulators to make a challenging decision on access prices, balancing short-term consumer benefits (from low prices) and long-run benefits from investment and innovation, argue Martin H. Thelle and Dr. Bruno Basalisco of 
Copenhagen Economics.

"Several European fixed telecom incumbents have refrained from investing aggressively in next generation access networks due to regulation affecting the business case for 
fiber investments," they say. 

The problem is that the "unbundling approach does not suit the challenge of promoting investment in fiber-based infrastructure," they say.

Unbundling has created retail competition, but has not been effective at creating incentives for investment in next generation networks, said Roslyn Layton of the Center for Communication, Media and Information Technologies, Aalborg University Department of Electronic Systems.