New Delhi Plans Free Public Wi-Fi

Officials in New Delhi are formulating plans for public Wi-Fi, offering residents up to 1 GB per month of free Wi-Fi access, at a minimum speed of 1 Mbps, supplied by private operators.

In the first phase, expected to be completed in a year, public Wi-Fi would be deployed in government and private colleges, according to the Times of India.

Ashish Khetan, vice-chairman of Delhi Dialogue Commission, said that in a second phase, public Wi-Fi will be provided in rural areas, followed by some urban areas.

There are roughly 275 rural and urban villages which don't have Internet access.

The business model is not clear, but it seems as if the Delhi government will pay a fee of some sort to the providers, based on end user consumption.

New Delhi Plans Free Public Wi-Fi

Officials in New Delhi are formulating plans for public Wi-Fi, offering residents up to 1 GB per month of free Wi-Fi access, at a minimum speed of 1 Mbps, supplied by private operators.

In the first phase, expected to be completed in a year, public Wi-Fi would be deployed in government and private colleges, according to the Times of India.

Ashish Khetan, vice-chairman of Delhi Dialogue Commission, said that in a second phase, public Wi-Fi will be provided in rural areas, followed by some urban areas.

There are roughly 275 rural and urban villages which don't have Internet access.

The business model is not clear, but it seems as if the Delhi government will pay a fee of some sort to the providers, based on end user consumption.

Which Way for Sprint?

Was SoftBank’s acquisition of Sprint a mistake? Some, possibly even including SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, might agree with that assessment. The growing view is that SoftBank believed it could swiftly merge Sprint with T-Mobile US, creating a more-hefty competitor in the U.S. mobile market.

Perhaps that, more than any ability to replicate in the U.S. market what SoftBank had done in the Japanese market, was key to the strategy.

If so, a misreading of U.S. telecom policy doomed the initial strategy. Some believe, based on Son’s own statements, that SoftBank would have sold Sprint, if were there any bidders. It appears there have not been any such potential buyers.

Some believe Sprint might get another shot at a merger with T-Mobile US after the U.S. presidential elections. Others believe a buyer or partner could yet emerge. But many think the size of Sprint’s debt and it’s on-going financial losses will be a big barrier.

Sprint recently has generated some $8 billion in quarterly revenue, but lost $2 billion on those sales. It has cumulative losses of $50 billion since about 2007.

What will Sprint (or SoftBank) do next, in its effort to regain financial value? Options appear to be more limited than when Sprint first was acquired by SoftBank.

Sprint cannot grow through acquisition, and likely cannot be sold, at the moment. That leaves mostly the difficult task of turning the business around, on an operating basis. As has been the case for years, reversing Sprint’s sales subscriber growth and profit picture is a fundamental requirement for any other positive outcome: acquisition, sale, merger or organic growth as an independent company.

Rival T-Mobile US, in fact, points the way. Having achieved robust organic growth, T-Mobile US arguably has become a more attractive acquisition.

At this point, a merger between Sprint and T-Mobile US, as logical as that might seem to many, is a less likely outcome than the acquisition of both firms by other entities. Dish Network and Comcast are the names most often raised in that regard.

Most of Dish Network's value now resides in its spectrum licenses, not its operating business. And Dish will forfeit that value if it does not somehow create an operating network using those frequencies, or sell them.

Comcast, for its part, will move deliberately. It is unlikely to buy a troubled asset, and even less likely to want to enter the mobile business without some clear sense of differentiation.

For the  moment, that likely means Sprint will have to work on organically reshaping its business, for any eventual sale. .

No Sustainable Advantage on Canada-U.S.-Mexico Calling

Sustainable advantage is quite difficult in any competitive market. So it is in the U.S. mobile market. Some might debate who moved first to lower tariffs across Canada, the United States  and Mexico.

A reasonable person might say it was AT&T, promising to make calling between the United States and Mexico as seamless as calling within the United States or Mexico, that prompted T-Mobile US to launch its own offer.

Within short order, Sprint and Verizon Wireless all responded with offers offers of their own.

Fairness or Optimized Performance? Choose One

In many ways, the difference between traffic management and network neutrality is rather subtle.

In fact, one objection some have had to mandating “best effort only” consumer Internet access is that although some applications do just fine, others might require network-specific performance assurance.

It does seem inevitable that tensions between “fairness,” the objective of most network neutrality rules, and “effectiveness,” the ability of a network to support specific applications, as they require, will be an on-going issue.

Suggestions that future fifth generation networks will support “network slicing” provide yet one example. If specific apps have different functional requirements, Ericsson’s vision for 5G includes the ability to tune the network to support those specific apps, giving each app what it requires, without the overhead of generic resources unrelated to app performance.

Each use case will require a different configuration of requirements and parameters in the network.

In other words, networks will be built in a flexible way so that speed, capacity and coverage can be allocated in logical slices to meet the specific demands of each use case.

But that is not “treating all bits equally.” That’s the enduring problem. “Fairness” conflicts with “optimizing performance.”

AT&T Expecs Higher Earnings, Cash Flow Next 3 Years

The addition of DirecTV, Iusacell and Nextel Mexico will be directly accretive to AT&T in terms of revenue and earnings, something that does not always happen with transactions so large ($48.5 billion for DirecTV) or small (Nextel Mexico represented a deal less than $2 billion in size).

AT&T said it will earn $2.62 to $2.68 a share in 2015, above the $2.60 analysts had anticipated. Revenue will grow in the double-digit range, the company said.

Moreover, AT&T expects earnings and cash flow to grow over the next three years as well.

Those results are driven by a revenue mix, products, geographies and customer bases that are significantly different.

AT&T expects that, by the end of 2015, its largest revenue streams will be, in descending order: mobility and business solutions (mobile and wireline); entertainment & Internet; consumer mobility; and international mobility and video.

In other words, services sold to business customers has become AT&T’s biggest single revenue stream. Video entertainment and Internet access is the second largest bucket of revenue, followed by consumer mobility.

Mobile services remain a key driver of revenue in all but one of the segments.

The company plans to begin providing detailed reporting on these segments beginning with the third quarter.

AT&T also is operationally a changed company. AT&T now is the largest linear TV provider in the United States and the world, serving more than 26 million subscribers in the United States and more than 19 million customers in Latin America.

AT&T has 132 million wireless subscribers in the United States and Mexico; offers 4G LTE mobile coverage to nearly 310 million people in the U.S. and expects LTE coverage to 350 million people in its North American service area by the end of the year; covers 57 million U.S. customer locations with high-speed Internet; and has nearly 16 million broadband subscribers, the company said.

The three-year view of certain financial metrics now features 2015 double-digit consolidated revenue growth due to the DirecTV acquisition.

From 2016 through 2018, the company expects in each of the next three years consolidated revenue growth in line with GDP growth or better and adjusted earnings per share growth in the mid-single digit range.

The broader trend across the tier-one service provider landscape might soon begin to reflect the importance of business customers, compared to consumer customers.

In the U.S. market, a similar trend has developed for three former rural telcos, each of whom now drives a clear majority of revenue from business customers, not consumers.

Of $4.4 billion in CenturyLink second quarter 2015 revenue, business revenues represented $2.7 billion while consumer revenues were about $1.5 billion. In other words, the business segment represented 61 percent of company revenue.

That is a huge transformation for a firm that once mostly got its revenue from subsidies and consumers.

Since about 2010, both Windstream and Frontier have earned most of their money in the business segment as well, despite the continuing preponderance of consumer accounts.

In its second quarter of 2015, Windstream had revenues of $1.4 billion. Consumer revenues  represented just $314 million--about 22 percent--of total revenues.

Frontier Communications total revenue of about $1.4 billion as well, with consumer revenue of about Total residential revenue was stable at $615 million for the second quarter of 2015, while total business revenue was $621 million. So a bit more than half of revenue was generated by business customers.

Over time, many former incumbent providers are likely to discover that they are best suited to serving customers in the business segment, while other providers take market share in the consumer segment.

15% Globally Own a Streaming Media Appliance or Device

Globally, about 15 percent of respondents to a survey report they own a streaming video device such as a Chromecast stick or a dedicated streaming media device such as a Roku that enables streamed content to be viewed directly on a TV.

About 25 percent of U.S. respondents reported owning such a device.

Those sorts of developments are important. For any new trend to develop, the underlying ecosystem (Internet access, content rights, access devices, affordable service plans, the right value proposition) must be in place. Internet-connected TVs, dedicated devices and sticks are part of the required infrastructure.