Smart Phones and Tablets Lead Consumer Electronics Sales

Mobile connected devices, including smart phones and tablets, continue to drive consumer electronics (CE) industry sales, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, representing 32 percent of all revenue in the consumer electronics industry in 2013.

Overall consumer electronics industry revenue will hold steady relative to 2012 levels, growing an estimated 0.2 percent in the United States in 2013.

Once upon a time, consumer electronics sales were lead by TVs and TV-related appliances. More recently, sales of personal computers took the lead.

But if you want to know why people in the mobile industry now attend the Consumer Electronics Show, it is because mobile devices now lead sales.

New categories such as fitness technology, desktop 3D printers and Bluetooth/airplay-enabled speakers are among the product categories CEA now tracks.

Smart phones are expected to maintain their position as the leading revenue driver for the industry in 2013, with unit shipments projected to reach 127 million in 2013.

Smart phone revenues are expected to surpass $37.8 billion in 2013, a 14 percent increase from 2012 levels.

Tablet computing will continue double-digit growth in 2013, with unit sales of tablets projected to reach 87.1 million in 2013 and revenues expected to surpass $27.3 billion.

Separately, researchers at Parks Associates estimate that 48 percent of U.S. broadband households own at least one tablet.

Tablet ownership increased by nearly 33 percent in one year, with 22 percent of households reporting a tablet purchase. About seven percent of households bought an e-reader in 2012, down from about nine percent of households in 2011.

Tablet purchases surpassed desktop purchases for the first time in 2012 and will match or exceed laptop purchases in 2013.

VDSL2 Gets Traction

VDSL2 vectoring is rapidly taking ground in the race to provide added bandwidth to meet the broadband needs of consumers. This was the conclusion reached at the TNO DSL Seminar held last month in Scheveningen in the Netherlands.

But service providers differ about their own plans to deploy G.fast or “fiber to the distribution point” (FTTdp) as prefered methods of upgrading all-copper networks.

How Much Traffic Will Carrier Wi-Fi Offload from the Mobile Network?

Mobile service provider use of Wi-Fi for data offload will  grow at a 215 percent compound annual growth rate from 2012 to 2017.

User-driven Wi-Fi offload, using at-home, at-work or other connections, will also grow at a significant growth rate of 49 percent.

Perhaps significantly, iGR predicts Wi-Fi-only connections from devices such as tablets, laptops, ereaders, and handheld gaming consoles will decline. That represents a predicted shift to more mobile carrier connections, something that already is seen as users shift to shared access data plans that allow a single account to use a shared bucket of data usage, across all devices on the account.

mostly driven by user preference for at-home, at-work or other Wi-Fi connections not directly provided by a service provider.

But the amount of Wi-Fi offload provided directly by a service provider, in high traffic locations, will grow as well, according to researchers at iGR.

Analysts at iGR estimate that in 2012, Wi-Fi-only devices consumed a total of about 0.38 gigabytes (380 Mb) each month, per active device. The analysts say this form of access is the smallest of the Wi-Fi offload usage scenarios.

User-driven Wi-Fi offload, where a subscriber or end user chooses to use a Wi-Fi connection outside the home or office in place of a mobile broadband connection, represented in 2012 about 0.41 GB (410 Mb) per month per active device of usage. This is the predominant form of Wi-Fi offload at the moment.

But carriers also are shifting to use of their own Wi-Fi offload services, directly shifting user access off a mobile network and onto a local Wi-Fi connection, either outdoors or indoors.

Analysts at iGR estimate that in 2012, a total of about 0.04 GB (40 Mb) per month per active device was offloaded to carrier Wi-Fi.

Some service providers, notably NTT, are less sanguine about such offload potential. In part, that is because high density in many Japanese urban areas also means high signal interference, which limits the effectiveness of Wi-Fi hotspots for traffic offload.

Chromecast: Internet TV is Not About the Display

"Internet TVs" sometimes are thought of as being about the display device. That is one reason many believe Apple is working on, or should be working on, some sort of receiver, otherwise known as a "TV."

In truth, Internet TVs might be more about the appliance that allows the display to show Internet-accessed content. 

Google's Chromecast is a $35 plug in that allows Internet-compatible TVs to show content accessed by a local Wi-Fi network connected to the Internet.

It requires an HDMI port, and also that the user has Wi-Fi communications with the Internet, and a CPU that can access the Internet. 

Essentially, a user orders up a web page and then the content is delivered over the Internet connection directly to the Chromecast. 

To be sure, "receiver" or "processing" functions traditionally have been integrated with displays. That's what a "TV" has been. Notebooks, smart phones, iPods and other devices come integrated with screens. 

Cable set-tops traditionally have substituted their own tuners for the tuners built into the TVs. 

But desktop PCs traditionally have been sourced unbundled from the display. Some might argue that is the way Internet TV will become popular. 

In other words, the display arguably is just a dumb component, where the intelligence is supplied by the decoder device. YouTube content, for example, though controlled by some other CPU in the home, is sent directly to the display through the Chromecast device. 

U.S. Average Internet Access Speed Grows 69% Last 12 Months

It always is hard for regulators to keep up with the pace of change in the Internet and even telecom ecosystems. Not so long ago, the Federal Communications Commission decided to base its broadband measurements on speeds of 4 Mbps. 

To be sure, there is a difference between a ceiling and a floor, so regulatory officials recently have been talking about how to get to 100 Mbps as a goal. 

Already, though, about 25 percent of U.S. locations are connecting at speeds higher than 10 Mbps, Akamai says, while peak rates are above 36 Mbps. 

Year over year, average bandwidth is increasing 69 percent, Akamai also says. 

Yuilop Calling/Texting App Launches in U.S.

Yuilop, a cloud-based communications app popular in Europe, has launched in the U.S. market, offering unlimited, national calls and text messages in the domestic U.S. market, and no incremental charge international calling (you need to earn credits to do so), even to friends and family who don’t have the app.

Yuilop’s business model based on use of a virtual currency that is earned when users talk to to non-Yuilop users  or convince them to join the network. Credits also are earned when talking with another Yuilop user, using the app, or engaging with promotions such as sponsored content or ads.

Yuilop has not yet gone with a “freemium” model that would allow users to buy credits, but that certainly is within the realm of possibility and logic.

In the United States, Germany and Spain, yuilop provides users with a free unique yuilop mobile number called yuilop.me. Having a number enables users to receive credit for most inbound calls and SMS and reduces or eliminates the need for credit for makes outbound calls or SMS. Currently, SMS from Germany and Spain to the United States, and text messages sent within the United States are free.

Yuilop says it has “built the whole architecture on open standards” such as xmpp and the mobile number (MSISDN).

That means Yuilop users can call and message non-Yuilop users at no incremental charge.

Yuilop  is available for download for iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone.

Spectrum Sharing or Not in 1755 MHz to 1780 Mhz Band?

Spectrum sharing is a relatively new concept in the licensed spectrum arena, and we might soon get a glimpse of how well it works if U.S. mobile operators and government users wind up sharing access to the 1755 MHz to 1780 Mhz band, as its current users say they are willing to do.

Mobile operators would prefer exclusive access, as usual, but the more interesting scenario would be sharing. If it works, it would then be more feasible to consider sharing of spectrum across other frequency bands, between current non-profit users and commercial operations.

As always, spectrum clearing costs are an issue. The U.S. Department of Defense estimates it will cost $3.5 billion to retrofit radios within the 25 MHz of shared spectrum.

But such costs always come into play when existing users have to move out of a band.