What is Telco Equivalent of Automaker Investments in Ridesharing?

How to deal with disruption of one’s legacy business is never as easy as it seems. Facing over the top voice competition, some telcos tried creating their own branded OTT offers, without notable success. Others tried to do so with messaging, again without notable success.

At least so far, some of the most notable “new service” initiatives have involved taking market share from other providers (telcos getting into entertainment video; cable TV companies getting into voice).

The notable exceptions have come in Internet access and mobile services. Both provide the best examples of a new service that achieved ubiquity.

Cable TV firms, on the other hand, have been successful at creating or buying content assets, which providers something of a model for an investment approach for telcos.

So far, access providers have not taken one possible approach, namely taking minority stakes in leading OTT firms.

Auto manufacturers are taking a slightly different approach, investing in the ridesharing firms the automakers believe could disrupt the “car ownership” market. That approach is akin to Microsoft buying Skype.

At least so far, though, the auto investments represent an approach telcos and other access providers have not achieved, the equivalent of AT&T and Verizon becoming minority investors in Google, Facebook and Netflix.

We might yet see something on that model in the Internet of Things arena, though. The key will be a willingness to accept minority ownership, with the corresponding lack of full control.

What we generally have not yet seen is a willingness on the part of some access providers to envision a major change in business model and ecosystem role.

Auto manufacturers actually are investing in ridesharing services because they fear the auto sales business might shrink. So they are hedging by investing in transportation services, rather than vehicle sales.

Driverless cars will be the determining factor if car ownership declines in favor of ride-hailing services, many believe, in large part because removing the need for human drivers can sharply lower costs.

The cost of owning and driving a car an average of 15,000 miles per year in the US is approximately $0.57 per mile driven, according to AAA.

UberX costs $2.15 per mile in New York City and UberPOOL costs $1.61 per mile.

However, if a ride-hailing company could cut the driver out of the equation with driverless vehicles, it could undercut the cost of owning a car.

The parallel shift, for an access provider, would be a shift towards ownership of content and application assets, rather than sales of access services.

As unlikely as that seems, it represents the hedge automakers are making with their ridesharing investments.

Automakers are redefining themselves, in part, from being in the "making cars" business to being in the "transportation" business. The issue is whether service providers can recraft at least some portion of their business from "access" to "apps."

"Wearable" Value Proposition Seems Unclear to Most

A new study of wearable adoption suggests the value proposition is a bit unclear. “Of all the users of wearables surveyed, around one in 10 said they no longer used their wearable devices, with one third of these owners abandoning them within a couple of weeks of purchase,” said Ericsson.

So, at least so far, it does not appear that wearables--especially watches--are the "next big thing."

Ericsson says abandonment rates are declining, but user expectations also are rising. A common cause of dissatisfaction is feeling tethered to their smartphone.

Among those who have abandoned wearables, 14 percent did so because wearables were lacking standalone connectivity.

source: Ericsson

In fact, 83 percent of all smartphone users surveyed expect wearables to have some form of standalone connectivity.

When asked what form they would expect this connectivity to take in the future, around 40 percent of existing wearables owners and 46 percent of non-wearables users preferred Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity, with existing users expressing a two times higher preference for built-in mobile connectivity compared to non-users of wearables.

On the other hand, the cost of an additional mobile data connection charge is a barrier to wearables use. About 33 percent non-users indicated that the cost of keeping digital devices connected is a key reason why they haven’t invested in wearable technology.

The survey also suggests consumers believe additional drivers, such as personal safety, could be future adoption drivers by 2020. Demand for a wide range of other potential use cases seems unclear, in the medium term.

source: Ericsson

As was the case for the smartphone, which functionally displaced use of other consumer devices (cameras, clocks, GPS devices), many consumers and industry executives believe wearables could replace a wide range of other existing devices.

source: Ericsson

U.S. Fixed Network Internet Access Actually is Dropping

More U.S. households now seem to be abandoning even fixed Internet access in favor of mobile access, as it now is common for households to rely on mobile voice, instead of fixed network voice, or over the top video entertainment in place of traditional subscription services.

In fact, because of mobile use, fixed network Internet access rates actually are dropping in the United States, having reached an apparent peak in 2011.

source: NTIA

Those sorts of trends pose key questions for service providers and regulators, since one has to ask important questions. If consumers are abandoning the fixed network, making the business case more difficult, what is the appropriate service provider investment strategy?

What is the right regulatory approach for services that are declining? Even if “parity” of regulation makes sense when technology platforms change, how much additional cost should regulators be placing on declining services--even services based on the newer platforms?

In an almost-unnoticed trend, more U.S. households, in every income bracket, are going “mobile-only” for Internet access at home, in 2015, compared to 2013.

In fact, says the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, between 15 percent and 29 percent of surveyed households now rely solely on mobile platforms for Internet access.

That trend has been gaining strength since at least 2011.

Trends such as the substitution of mobile for fixed access now have altered, or are poised to alter, the methods people use for voice, messaging, TV and Internet access. That has clear implications for service provider strategy and investment and for regulation of fixed services as a whole.

Some of us would argue that it makes little sense to apply more burdensome regulations on platforms that are in decline. Likewise, if the shift is to mobile and wireless communication, then it makes sense to continue allocating more bandwidth for mobile and wireless access.

There are a whole range of subsidiary issues where such choices must be made.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission wants all ISPs offering IP-based voice services to provide battery backup, as legacy “plain old telephone service” has been line powered.

Frontier Communications says there is very little demand for battery backup for VoIP services, a finding that is consistent with prior consumer behavior.

That position is not surprising, as any universal battery backup plan would impose additional cost. Cable TV providers, for example, seem to have no objection to offering optional battery backup, but oppose mandatory backup for all carrier IP voice lines.

Frontier argues (as have cable TV operators for years) that, even when offered for sale, consumers do not generally buy battery backup services.

Frontier, in fact, argues, that few of its customers actually buy an IP telephony service, in marked contrast to cable TV operators and “fiber to home” providers, which universally offer IP telephony as their only voice option.

Frontier’s experience, in large part, also shows that the company continues to rely on legacy voice, instead of offering IP telephony. In large part, that is because the company does not use fiber to home platforms on a ubiquitous basis, which virtually requires that voice be provided using IP telephony.

Frontier notes that, according to the FCC’s most recent voice telephone services report, for all ILECs nationwide there are only 26,000 residential customers that actually use an OTT interconnected voice (IP telephony) product.

That hardly seems right, but appears to be a definitional issue. The FCC reported there were 48 million interconnected voice subscriptions in use by December 31, 2013. So Frontier clearly is using some definition of “connected voice” that is different from that used by the FCC.

That noted, given the prevalence of mobile service, rare in the extreme is a household that actually relies solely on fixed network voice.

Roaming Rate Controversy Illustrates "Large Carrier, Small Carrier" Economics

In wholesale communication markets, it matters whether a supplier is small or large, and whether most traffic is on-network, or off-network. At any given level of rates, smaller carriers will have a larger percentage of traffic roaming off network, while larger networks will tend to have less roaming traffic, all other things being equal.

That is a controversy within the European Union as regulators move to institute a complete ban on roaming tariffs for voice, text  and mobile data, by June 2017.

As you would guess, smaller service providers and larger service providers with high amounts of customers who roam are at odds about the actual remaining roaming rates. Within the EU, the big divide is between net receivers and net providers of traffic.

Operators in countries with lots of incoming roaming traffic such as Spain, Greece and France want high wholesale rates.

Operators in countries with low domestic rates and whose customers travel a lot, such as Baltic and eastern European countries, want low rates.

Wholesale prices are currently five euro cents a minute for calls, two euro cents for text messages and dive euro cents per megabyte of data.

Small carriers, with small customer bases, typically “send” more traffic than they “receive,” meaning in this instance that high rates are costly, as they will “get” less inbound roaming traffic (and revenue) than they send, and buy.

That is an issue for mobile virtual mobile networks, for example.

Some would argue that Internet interconnection involves the same traffic and cost dynamics, even when regulators ignore such differences. In other words, all other things being equal, large networks tend to accept more traffic than they send to smaller networks.

Small networks send less traffic to larger networks than they receive from large networks.

The big exception is content networks, which virtually always send more traffic than they receive. In fact, it is correct to say there are, among network types, "customer networks" operated by retail Internet service providers that mostly receive traffic, and "content" networks that mostly send traffic.

One might argue that the costs of unbalanced traffic are insignificant. That might be more true of the server and interconnection costs. It is manifestly untrue for ISPs that have to build gigabit and higher capacity access networks.

source: European Commission

Will 28 GHz Work for Consumer Gigabit Access?

“Will it work?” is a question more executives are going to be looking at, where it comes to fixed wireless platforms for Internet access. Technology issues (coverage, rain fade, interference) are important, as always.

Just as important are the payback questions: can the new networks deliver enough bandwidth, far enough, to be a functional substitute for fiber access, at prices consumers will pay?

Executives have been asking these sorts of questions for decades.

If you have been around long enough, you have seem several iterations of the “fixed wireless is the answer” for access operations, for a number of potential audiences and customer segments, in a number of different settings.

The rise of competition in the long distance voice communications business was pioneered by Microwave Communications Inc. (MCI), which used point-to-point microwave to compete with the AT&T system in the 1980s.

Also in the 1980s, point-to-point microwave was seen as a platform for educational TV. The MMDS bands (2.5 GHz to 2.7 GHz), also originally licensed for educational TV, were repurposed for delivery of multichannel television subscriptions. Now those bands are available for mobile communications.  

Sprint is a major holder of former MMDS spectrum, for example.

Fixed wireless now is enjoying something of a renaissance, as firms including Google, Facebook, Verizon and AT&T now are testing new forms of fixed wireless, including but not limited to use of new 5G spectrum, and also millimeter wave bands.

The attractions are the same as ever: fixed wireless promises lower deployment costs and access to additional customer locations that otherwise would lack a payback model.

That is especially important for fixed network providers faced with higher levels of competition, and therefore lower potential addressable market, higher risks of stranded investment and growing demands for consumer bandwidth at gigabit speeds.

The value is highest for providers not using the cable TV hybrid fiber coax platform, which can reach gigabit speeds on already-deployed platforms.

Some tests suggest signal propagation at 28 GHz will not be as big a problem as many fear.

In fact, the LMDS band has been available for decades, originally as a platform for TV distribution, and later viewed as a platform for high-bandwidth communications for business customers in urban markets.

What remains unknown is how much propagation distances might change as 28 GHZ is adapted for small cell network architectures, instead of point-to-point links. In an earlier period, reach of 1.5 miles was routine for point-to-point links, and distances up to three to five miles sometimes were possible.

In a new small cell deployment, transmitting at lower power, distances of 1,000 meters (about 0.6 miles) might be reasonable.

We do not have all the answers, yet. What we do know is that reasonable people believe technology advances will offer a better solution than possible in the past, just at a point when gigabit speeds are market necessities, and deployment costs are more crucial than ever.

High Speed Access Top of Amenities List for Renters, Study Finds

High speed access is among the top-two amenities for an apartment rental, a study by RVA for the FTTH Council suggests. Both potential renters and property owners rank high speed access at the top of a list of amenities, along with in-unit washers and dryers.

The study provides “direct evidence that satisfaction with broadband correlates with overall MDU property satisfaction itself.”

As always is the case with arguments and beliefs about the role of Internet access as a driver of economic growth or social well-being, correlation is not necessarily causation, a fact briefly noted by the study.

But “causation is not proven,” the study says.

Though we always act as though high speed access matters for economic activity, learning and social well-being, about all we really can say is that there is a correlation. We cannot prove causation.

Nearly 40% of All Internet Users are Members of LinkedIn

Time will tell whether Microsoft can spin value out of its LinkedIn acquisition. But LinkedIn's reach is impressive: nearly 40 percent of all Internet users appear to be members of LinkedIn, according to GlobalWebIndex.