What Happened to Free Speech in the U.S.?

Seriously, this is more than stupid. It shows imperial arrogance.

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Mobile Spending Now 10% of all E-Commerce

Almost always, an important new consumer electronics product or application hits an adoption inflection point st about 10 percent adoption.

It now appears th at inflection point has been reached, for mobile commerce.

ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. “One out of every ten consumer e-commerce dollars is now spent using either a smartphone or a tablet, and growth in this segment of the market is outpacing that of traditional e-commerce by a factor of 2x, which itself is growing at rates in the mid-teens. 

Tablets Might be Fastest-Growing Consumer Electronics Technology, Ever

Important consumer electronics innovations used to take decades to reach majority adoption.

Digital techologies get adopted much faster.  Years are more typical. Tablets might be the new benchmark.

Netbiscuits reported that the tablet market had a year-on-year growth of 65 percent by 2013. It was also revealed that the market has made room for new competitors other than Apple's iPad. In 2012, 60 percent of tablet sales were attributed to Apple, but that number has fallen to just 33 percent in 2013. Android tablet sales were reported at 38 percent in 2012, and rose to 63 percent in 2013.

Tablet adoption in India rose 400 per cent in 2012 and sales in Southeast Asia have spiked 101 percent. 

Will Vodafone Survive Verizon Wireless Sale?

Any Vodafone sale of its stake in Verizon Wireless could trigger additional deals. AT&T might want to buy Vodafone, some theorize. 

AT&T could pay about 80 billion pounds ($124 billion) for what’s left of Vodafone, according to Robin Bienenstock, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, basing her estimate on a valuation of six times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization.

AT&T has examined takeover candidates including Vodafone, U.K. mobile carrier EE (a joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and Orange), as well as parts of Spain’s Telefonica.

That might strike some as odd, given the declining amount of revenue being earned by European mobile service providers. But AT&T seems to be thinking, as does SoftBank’s Sprint, about ways to boost revenue by emphasizing fourth generation Long Term Evolution services.
Compared to the United States, for example, 4G is undeveloped in much of Europe.

But it would also be fair to say that if Verizon Wireless does buy out Vodafone, then Vodafone would be in position to be a buyer itself. And subsequent deals could set off a major round of consolidation. 

"Once you have companies that are after global scale, it becomes a case of eat or be eaten," said Robin Bienenstock, an analyst for Bernstein Research. "The chessboard is going to re-form really, really rapidly."

AT&T’s Contract-Free Prepaid Aio Service Goes National in September 2013

Aio, AT&T's new prepaid, contract-free service, will launch nationwide in the United States in mid-September.

And make no mistake, Aio is designed to blunt T-Mobile US market share gains at AT&T's expense. 

Many observers would say it is AT&T that is more vulnerable to attacks by T-Mobile US and the aggressive Sprint attack that is expected to follow.

Verizon Wireless should be relatively safter from such attacks, as Verizon is positioned as the "highest quality, most expensive" end of the U.S. mobile market. 

America Movil Encounters Obstacle in Effort to Buy KPN

America Movil, which has made an offer to buy Netherlands service provider KPN, has encountered an obstacle. A KPN shareholder foundation set up to protect key national infrastructure when the former state-owned monopoly was being privatized now has exercised an option to buy almost half of KPN's voting shares.

America Movil, which already owns 29.8 percent of KPN, has been planning to make an offer of €2.40 ($3.18) a share to take control of the Dutch company. But the foundation considers the move a “hostile” takeover bid, and is resisting the buyout.

That has lead America Movil to say it will walk away from its €8.55 billion ($11.32 billion) takeover of KPN. That would undoubtedly cause KPN share prices to fall.

The KPN bid is part of America Movil’s effort to acquire stakes in the European mobile services market. But the effort to acquire all of KPN also is related to the proposed Telefonica purchase of KPN’s interest in E-Plus in Germany.

Telefonica has raised its offer by six percent to 8.55 billion euros to win America Movil's support for the deal. The move by America Movil into Europe by acquiring just under a 30-percent stake in KPN, the proposed Telefonica purchase of KPN and the America Movil proposed buyout of the rest of KPN are examples of an expected major consolidation wave in the European telecom market.

But as often happens, proposed deals face opposition from other bidders or shareholders. Also, Europe's competition regulators still would need to approve the Telefonica purchase of E-Plus or the America Movil purchase of the rest of KPN.

Three U.K. Offers Domestic Tariffs for Roaming Call, Texting and Internet Access in 7 Countries

U.K. mobile service provider Three has launched “Feel At Home,” a retail plan that assures domestic U.K. prices for voice calls, text messages and use of mobile broadband when customers travel abroad in seven countries and call back to the United Kingdom.

In other words, Feel at Home customers will only pay U.K. prices instead of incurring international roaming charges, when contacting peoplein the U.K., Three says.

Initially available in Republic of Ireland, Australia, Italy, Austria, Hong Kong, Sweden and Denmark, Feel At Home will automatically activate as soon as a customer arrives in one of the countries.

Three is the first U.K. operator to offer customers the same in-country mobile phone and mobile broadband rates for no additional charge as if you’re at home or abroad. Those sorts of moves are one reason why some would argue that EU-mandated lower roaming costs ultimately will be happen as a normal part of the competitive process.

Some within the EU might agree.

European Commissioner for Digital Agenda head Neelie Kroes apparently has decided to back off a plan to massively reduce wholesale interconnection rates between 70 percent and 90 percent within the 28-country European Union region.

Some would credit opposition from EU service providers. Others would say opposition from EC competition officials is the more likely reason for the change.

The revised proposal is scheduled to be released on September 10, 2013.

To become law, the proposal requires approval from the 28 EU members countries and European Parliament.

The abandonment of the severe rate reduction plan illustrates some policy tensions beyond the normal friction between industry interests and regulator desires.

As sometimes happens, different influencers within the government regulatory sphere appear to have had dramatically different views about what should be done.

At least in part, those differences reflect the inherent tension between policies that appear to be beneficial to consumers (mandated lower rates and enhanced competition) in the short term, but are harmful in the long term (less investment in next generation networks).

In an earlier draft of her proposals seen by Reuters, Kroes proposed a cap of €3 cents per minute for voice calls from July, 2014 to June 2022, a 70 percent reduction from the €10 cent cap which came into effect in July 2013.

She also wanted to slash the wholesale cap for data roaming to €1.5 cents per megabyte from the current limit of €15 cents.

European Commission officials, according to the Financial Times, already had been thinking about amending the wholesale roaming proposals put forward by Kroes.

As was the case in the U.S. market, regulators are grappling with ways to balance two contradictory goals: expanding competition and also encouraging investment.

There has been concern that the big reductions in wholesale rates, intended as a way of encouraging the creation of a single EC communications market, would further depress service provider revenues and so hinder investment in next-generation networks.

Service providers were concerned, among other things, about the opportunity for arbitrage opportunities. That typically happens in communications when there is a wide disparity between wholesale rates and retail rates in any market.

Some had estimated that as much as £7 billion a year could be earned by wholesalers taking advantage of the rate spread. Such arbitrage discourages investment in facilities on the part of incumbents and over the top or wholesale-based competitors as well.

Analysts at Bernstein Research had estimated the rate reduction proposals would allow non-facilities-based rivals to undercut major network operators by between zero and 65 per cent, depending on prices in each country.

The biggest potential impact, they say, would be in some of Europe’s biggest markets, Bernstein Research argued.