Comcast Boosts Usage Caps to a Terabyte

In markets where it is testing usage caps for its Internet access customers, Comcast has raised the monthly usage from 300 Gb to 1,000 Gb (a terabyte).

Comcast says its typical customer uses about 60 gigabytes of data in a month.

To be sure, some advocate no caps or any kind, ever, arguing that there actually are not cost implications for unlimited use. ISPs would disagree, of course. All networks are dimensioned for some amount of expected usage, and further designed to support peak loads.

Capital has to be invested when peak loads grow substantially. So the amount of usage by typical and the heaviest users does matter.

The terabyte cap allows for viewing of 700 hours of high-definition video, or about 23 hours at is each day. No single person watches that much video, and even if shared between four people, that amounts to nearly six hours per day, per person.

Power users (less than one percent of Comcast’s high speed access customer base) who want more than a terabyte can sign up for an unlimited plan for an additional $50 a month, or they have the option to purchase additional buckets of 50 gigabytes of data for $10 each.

As a practical matter, nearly all of you who actually have kept track of data usage under both “unlimited” and data plans with large buckets of usage, would likely agree that, as a practical, a reasonably-sized usage bucket is virtually indistinguishable from an “unlimited” plan, as a practical matter.

U.S. Mobile Customers More Satisfied, AT&T Leads, But Billing Issues Still Drive 44% of Inbound Customer Service Traffic

In its latest study of mobile service provider customer care satisfaction, J.D. Power found U.S. consumers were more satisfied with customer care experiences.

But some things do not seem to change. Questions about billing are huge drivers of in-bound customer service activity.

Among wireless customers contacting their carrier by telephone, billing (44 percent) is the most frequently reported reason for contact.

The same is true for customers contacting using the online channel (52 percent).

On the other hand, the majority of mobile customers visiting a retail facility for customer service purposes do so with questions about service options and equipment (40 percent).

AT&T ranks highest among  full-service carriers, with an overall score of 820. So some things change, in the mobile consumer satisfaction area.

AT&T performs particularly well in the walk-in (retail stores) and online channels, and performs above the full-service average in all four service channels, J.D. Power said.

Consumer Cellular ranks highest for the first time among wireless non-contract carriers, scoring 878.

Consumer Cellular performs above the non-contract average in all four service channels, especially in the automated response system channel, followed by the customer service representative  channel.

AT&T ranks highest among wireless full-service carriers, with an overall score of 820. AT&T performs particularly well in the walk-in (retail stores) and online channels, and performs above the full-service average in all four service channels.

Consumer Cellular ranks highest for the first time among wireless non-contract carriers, scoring 878. Consumer Cellular performs above the non-contract average in all four service channels, especially in the ARS, then CSR channel.

Overall satisfaction among mobile full-service customers is 804, an improvement of 16 points from the 2016 Full-Service Study—Vol 1, J.D. Power said.

Satisfaction among non-contract wireless customers is 761, a significant 23-point increase from the 2016 Non-Contract Study—Vol 1, J.D. Power aded.

Overall satisfaction is highest among customers whose online contact was via a user forum (838), followed by social media (836), email (827), carrier website (826) and online chat (813).

Researching information on the carrier's website (51%) is the most common activity via online contact, followed by online chat (44%), email (26%), user forums (23%), and social media (7%).

One More Proposed Low Earth Orbit Satellite Constellation Ultimately Featuring 2,956 Satellites

Boeing Co. has applied for a license from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to launch and operate a network of thousands of satellites in low earth orbit, enabling  high speed Internet access and communication services that likely will reach every inch of the earth’s surface.

That, of course, would help maritime applications, but also could bring high speed access to isolated areas at new, and lower, price points.

Mariah Shuman, O3B Networks

Of course, Boeing is not alone. SpaceX and OneWeb also plan to launch LEO constellations, and O3b (using a medium earth orbit constellation) already is in commercial service.

Boeing said it planned to initially deploy 1,396 satellites into low-earth orbit within six years of the license approval.

Eventually, the aerospace giant said its system would total 2,956 satellites designed to provide Internet and communications services for commercial and government users around the globe.

There still is some possibility Boeing--if successful--might take a wholesale approach, launching the constellation but then leasing capacity to third parties.

And, as was the case in the 1990s, the business models might not work, for some or even most of the potential contestants. How extensive demand will be is the issue. With mobile operators expected to step up their Internet access efforts, and with new backhaul methods, using balloons or unmanned aerial vehicles, and with new options based on use of either 5G mobile or fixed wireless, there will be many options for supplying high speed Internet access to isolated places.

So the LEO constellations are racing all the other would-be providers. The biggest areas of natural advantage for the LEO providers are the traditional maritime, government and commercial users, as well as isolated areas such as South Pacific islands and island archipelagos including Indonesia and the Philippines.

As always, we are likely to overshoot on investment, meaning there will not be commercially viable niches for all of the would-be suppliers. It might also be reasonable to suggest that, eventually, all of the surviving LEO constellations will be sold to incumbent satellite services companies, who themselves are looking to move beyond legacy video backhaul services that are threatened by the rise of over the top video consumption ill suited to satellite delivery.

Still, some idea of the value of the advances are clear enough. O3b, for example, is the backhaul for mobile operator Digicel’s service in Samoa, providing significantly higher retail end user speeds than possible in the past using geostationary satellites, and better latency performance for applications such as voice.

Mariah Shuman, O3b Networks maritime and international regulatory affairs director, will speak about such constellations, and their value, at the Spectrum Futures conference. Here’s a  fact sheet and Spectrum Futures schedule.

Eventually, Net Neutrality Rules Will Not be Needed

The argument for regulation of communications services of any type always is justified on the basis of scarcity: that some product or service is supplied by too few suppliers, on too limited a basis, to allow competition to act as the regulator.

Eliminate scarcity and the argument for government regulation goes away. Eventually, even network neutrality rules justified on the basis of scarcity (a few ISPs are so powerful they can shape or limit competition) is going to go away.

Huge amounts of new spectrum; including 29 gigaHertz of new wireless communications capacity, as much as seven gigaHertz to be made available on an unlicensed basis; new competition from Google Fiber, municipal networks and independent ISPs; new economics of fixed wireless; spectrum sharing and new next-generation mobile networks are going to eliminate scarcity.

"Five Nines" Now is Effectively Impossible for Consumer Web Experience

It probably goes without saying that the Internet is a complex system, with lots of servers, transmission paths, networks, devices and software all working together to create a complete value chain.

And since the availability of any complex system is the combined performance of all cumulative potential element failures, it should not come as a surprise that a complete end-to-end user experience is not “five nines.”

Consider a 24×7 e-commerce site with lots of single points of failure. Note that no single part of the whole delivery chain has availability of  more than 99.99 percent, and some portions have availability as low as 85 percent.

The expected availability of the site would be 85%*90%*99.9%*98%*85%*99%*99.99%*95%, or  59.87 percent. Redundancy is the way performance typically is enhanced at a data center or on a transmission network.

For consumers, “hot” redundancy generally is not possible for devices. One can keep spare devices around, but manual restoration (switch to a different device, power it up) is required. Most often, “rebooting” is the restoration protocol, as “I will call you back” is the restoration protocol for a dropped mobile call.

Component	Availability
Web	85%
Application	90%
Database	99.9%
DNS	98%
Firewall	85%
Switch	99%
Data Center	99.99%
ISP	95%

Some of us are old enough to remember joking about “rebooting your TV,” a quip meant to suggest what would happen as TV signal formats switched from analog to digital, from standard to high-definition formats, from playback devices to Internet-connected devices.

Of course, we sometimes find we actually must reboot our TVs, set-top decoders, Wi-Fi and other access routers, so the quip was not without foundation.

In the past, some might have contrasted the availability (uptime) of televisions compared to computing devices. There are many issues.

Software with lots of code, and little fault isolation, can lead to some amount of crashing, and therefore lower availability. Drivers are known to cause faults.

One study of server availability found that 58 percent of IBM servers operated at 99.999 percent availability, but 46 percent of Hewlett-Packard servers and 40 percent of Oracle servers. Such issues normally are dealt with by building in automatic failover to redundant machines.

But many servers have “two nines” 99 percent availability, off the shelf.

Still, although 79 percent majority of corporations now require a minimum of 99.99 percent uptime or better for mission critical hardware, operating systems and main line of business applications, that target obviously is less than the “five nines” standard for telecom services.

On the other hand, IBM “fault tolerant” servers are supposed to operate at “six nines” of availability, higher than the telecom standard.

Whether software is as reliable, or less reliable, than a “five nines” network is debatable. But most would agree that software and hardware (without redundancy) operates at less than 99.999 percent availability.

There is a big difference between 99 percent availability (88 hours of downtime per year) and 99.9 percent availability (8.8 hours of downtime per year); or 99.99 percent availability (53 minutes each year) and 99.999 percent availability (a bit more than five minutes a year).

It is a myth that “five nines” remains the operational definition of availability for modern IP-based systems supporting voice, web and other over-the-top applications, even if service providers can produce reams of data proving that their core networks actually perform at that level.

In other words, even if networks are highly reliable, human beings use devices and applications that never work close to “five nines” in terms of availability.

The fundamental problem is that end user appliances, applications and operating systems cannot reach “five nines” levels of performance. And the whole calculation of availability is based on concatenated chains of devices. Element A might operate at “five nines.”

But, without redundancy, any transmission chain with three elements would be calculated as 99.999 times 99.999 times 99.999. By definition, the total chain involves the downtime caused by any single element in the chain.

Traditionally, telecom networks have considered 99.999 percent availability the standard for fixed network voice services.

These days, it is hard to find anyone arguing that actual end user application or service experience actually ever approaches “five nines.” The reason is that most of the applications people want access to on the Internet actually are processed in data centers whose servers cannot operate at five nines availability.

To cope with that issue, data centers use redundancy. In other words the issue is not how reliable any server is. The issue is how fast an entity can detect a fault and switch to a backup server.

That same approach (redundancy) is used by transport networks and business access networks.

But many apps still are delivered over networks that are unmanaged, even if availability on the part of the delivery chain any single network can control, is “five nines.”

A new way of thinking about reliability or availability is that modern application delivery systems cannot actually meet the old “five nines” standard, end to end, because the actual end-to-end systems are going to crash often enough that five nines is not possible, even when there are redundant “five nines” access and transport systems.

In other words, loss of local power alone is a threat to five nines for end user experience. Operating systems crash, access to websites hiccups, mobile phone calls drop. Devices run out of battery power.

Wi-Fi is the typical device connection in homes and offices, and no matter how well other elements and systems work, Wi-Fi operations alone would crash “five nines” performance, in terms of the actual experience of application and service availability.

The point is that “five nines” is a myth, when considered from the standpoint of a consumer end user of any Internet service or app, on any consumer device.

Apple Pay Shows Some Signs of Leadership in Mobile Payments

As a young business, it remains unclear where value and leadership will develop within the mobile payments business. In principle, retailers who are the immediate buyers of payment services; the processing networks; issuing banks; device suppliers; new service suppliers or access services providers could emerge in a driving role.

And, so far, there have been some notable misfires. A consortium including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile US failed to gain traction. A consortium of leading retailers likewise failed to get leadership.

Google’s own efforts have encountered modest success, while device-oriented systems linked to Samsung phones or Apple iPhones have been launched.

There have been some notable successes, though. Starbucks might be the largest mobile payment system in regular use in the United States. Square likewise has been a success in the small business point of sale transaction processing segment of the business.

Apple Pay has been gaining traction as well. According to Apple, Apple Pay now represents 75 percent of all contactless payment transactions made in the United States.

Apple says half of transaction value from payments made through Apple Pay are coming from non-U.S. markets.

Apple Pay is currently available in the U.S. the U.K., Switzerland, Canada, Australia, China, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Some evidence of Apple’s key role in the payments ecosystem can be gleaned by the actions of other in the value chain.

Four of the largest banks in Australia — Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, National Australia Bank, and Westpac Banking Corp — have asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to be allowed to join forces and negotiate with Apple as a single block.

While Apple does allow some of the banking apps be loaded on iPhones, it limits their access to the handset's hardware, such as antennas or NFC. As a result, the bank apps are more Internet banking tools than full contactless payment platforms.

Leadership still is not a settled matter in the mobile payment or contactless payments business.

Business Imperative: Replace 1/2 of Revenue Every 10 Years

“Over the last 16 years we have grown from approximately 25 million customers using wireless almost exclusively for voice services to more than 110 million customers using wireless for mostly data services,” said Lowell McAdam, Verizon Communications CEO, during the firm’s second quarter 2016 earnings call.

It is an illustrative comment for several reasons. It illustrates Verizon’s transformation from a fixed network services company to a mobile company. But the comment also illustrates an important business model trend, notably that of firms in telecom needing to replace about half their current revenues every 10 years or so.

In the U.S. telecom business, for example, we already have seen that roughly half of all present revenue sources disappear, and must be replaced, about every decade.

According to the Federal Communications Commission data on end-user revenues earned by telephone companies, that certainly is the case.

In 1997 about 16 percent of revenues came from mobility services. In 2007, more than 49 percent of end user revenue came from mobility services, according to Federal Communications Commission data.

Likewise, in 1997 more than 47 percent of revenue came from long distance services. In 2007 just 18 percent of end user revenues came from long distance.

That change in revenue sources is going to continue. Mobile voice and messaging already is declining, and in its place mobile Internet access is growing. For fixed network operators, video revenues are growing, while voice is shrinking, and high speed access has become the anchor service.

The point is that there is a very good reason for all service providers to assume they will have to replace half their current revenue in 10 years, and possibly for every decade thereafter. It now appears the auto industry is about to experience that same sort of change.

That is why so much of the content at the upcoming Spectrum Futures conference will focus on app development and app partnerships. Venture capitalists Wish Ronquillo and Jay Fajardo, as well as app development consultant and VC V. Shrinath will be speaking at the event.

Wish Ronquillo, Venture Partner, Ruvento Ventures, Singapore

Jay Fajardo, CEO, Launchgarage, Philippines

Shrinath V, Venture Capitalist and Google Developer Expert, India