Verizon has a Brand Promise Problem

Verizon arguably has a problem: its positioning in the mobile market as the carrier with the best network is challenged by T-Mobile US, though on several dimensions Verizon still has a small lead.

One example: The two service providers were tied for first place in OpenSignal 4G and overall speed metrics.

To be sure, Verizon maintains a slim lead. OpenSignal testers were able to find a Verizon LTE signal 88.2 percent of the time, but T-Mobile US 4G availability was less than two percentage points below Verizon's, OpenSignal says.

In fact, says OpenSignal, “either Verizon or T-Mobile won or shared every single national award in our report.”

The LTE speed race between T-Mobile and Verizon has long been a close one, but in our last U.S. report T-Mobile US  held the edge, OpenSignal says. “That narrow lead, however, disappeared in our latest round of testings.”

“We measured average LTE download speed on T-Mobile at 16.7 Mbps and on Verizon at 16.9 Mbps, results close enough to produce a statistical tie,” said OpenSignal.

The point is that such rankings pose a key marketing problem for Verizon. It always has claimed to have the best network. Arguably, it still does, but by such a slim margin that the difference is negligible. So if Verizon does not have a demonstrably-better network, what is the point of paying a “quality premium” for buying Verizon?

AWS has 40% Public Cloud Services Share

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is maintaining its dominant share of the burgeoning public cloud services market at over 40 percent, while the three main chasing cloud providers--Microsoft, Google and IBM--are gaining ground but at the expense of smaller players in the market, Synergy Research Group says.

Microsoft, Google and IBM increased their worldwide market share by nearly five percentage points over the last year and together now account for 23 percent of the total public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) market.

Synergy estimates that quarterly public cloud infrastructure service revenues (including both public IaaS and public PaaS) have now reached well over $7 billion and continue to grow at almost 50 percent per year.

If managed private cloud services are included, quarterly cloud revenues are now well over $9 billion.

The cloud providers and rankings are very different in the managed private cloud, where IBM continues to lead while Rackspace and traditional IT service providers feature more prominently than they do in public cloud.

source: Synergy Research

Half of Website Visits are Driven by Bots

Nearly half of website visits monitored by Imperva Incapsula were by bots, not humans, Imperva Incapsula says. More prominent mobile bot activity is the result of a larger trend toward mobile browsing. Since November 2016 mobile traffic has been greater than desktop traffic, reaching 50.31 percent of total.

“In 2016 we tracked 504 unique good bots, 278 of which were active enough to generate at least 1,000 daily visits to our network,” the company says.

The relative amount of bad bot visits (and bot visits in general) is higher to less trafficked websites. For instance, on the least trafficked domains—those frequented by ten human visitors a day or less—bad bots accounted for 47.7 percent of visits while total bot traffic amounted to 93.3 percent.

Good bots fall into several buckets.

• Feed fetcher – Bots that ferry website content to mobile and web applications, which they then display to users.
• Search engine bots – Bots that collect information for search engine algorithms, which is then used to make ranking decisions.
• Commercial crawlers – Spiders used for authorized data extractions, usually on behalf of digital marketing tools.
• Monitoring bots – Bots that monitor website availability and the proper functioning of various online features.

The most active feed fetcher—and the most active bot in general—was that associated with Facebook’s mobile app. It fetches website information so it can be viewed in the in-app browser. Overall it accounted for 4.4 percent of all website traffic on Incapsula network.

Average Fixed Network Internet Access Costs $98 a Month, Globally

In the fourth quarter of 2016, the average monthly charge for fixed network residential broadband services was $98, down slightly from $100 in the third quarter of 2016, apparently unadjusted for purchasing power parity, which adjusts all local prices to allow cross-country comparisons.

The average bandwidth provided to residential subscribers was 118 Mbps, compared to 112 Mbps in the third quarter of 2016. As has been the case in the U.S. market and United Kingdom, “the increase in the average bandwidth was due to a jump in the average speeds provided over cable connections.”

That trend is expected to continue.

The average global cost per Mbps was 83 cents at the end of the fourth quarter of 2016, compared to 89 cents per Mbps at the end of the third quarter of 2016.

The Asia-Pacific region had the highest speed levels, at 419 Mbps compared to 328 Mbps in the previous quarter. The region also had the best “value for money” in terms of bandwidth compared to price.

Western Europe had average bandwidth of 168 Mbps in the third quarter of 2016 but had the lowest price per Mbps.

North America had average bandwidth of 143 Mbps in the fourth quarter of 2016, up from 122 Mbps in the third quarter.

Cloud Data Centers Now Originate, Terminate Traffic

Among the many changes happening in the global communications industry are changing patterns of traffic origination and termination. It has been some time since central offices originated and terminated most traffic. For some decades, internet exchange points were the places where traffic moved to, and from. 

Now it is starting to be the cloud data centers that originate and terminate most traffic. 

How Artificial Intelligence is Relevant for a Mobile Apps Company

Charles Fan, Cheetah Mobile CTO, has a marvelous ability to take somewhat abstract ideas and make them concrete. You might wonder, for example, why a mobile apps firm actually thinks about how artificial intelligence and machine learning affects its business. 

The immediate application for Cheetah is a news curation app. But Fan thinks artificial intelligence algorithms, which might today seem to represent value, eventually will be commoditized. When that happens, value will no longer be conferred by access to the algorithms, but to owners of content stores. 

In other words, he wins who has the best data stores. That will be a change from today, when perhaps value is generated by firms able to hire "hundreds of PhDs." In the future, that will not confer value, Fan argues. 

Managed Wi-Fi Service: How Big an Opportunity?

Consumer interest in managed Wi-Fi services represents a $6.7 billion missed opportunity for service providers globally, a new study from XCellAir suggests. That includes up to $3.3 billion in incremental revenue, as well as $3.4 billion in lower operating costs (fewer customer service interactions and truck rolls).

Data from a new survey of 1,000 consumers each in the United States and United Kingdom reveals that on average, 15 percent of consumers say they would be willing to pay for managed Wi-Fi service from their service provider or a third party, and are willing to pay $34 per year for such managed services.

Presumably, the main problem consumers experience is “coverage.”

The XCellAir Home Wi-Fi Advisor service for ISPs has in the past found that the average household typically is a single family of three people, with 14 internet connected devices.

The average home has two floors, with the majority keeping their primary Wi-Fi router on the first or ground floor.

While the average Wi-Fi speed need for a household is 23 Mbps, the peak speed needed to support all devices within the home is 40 Mbps.

Taking into consideration the number of people, devices, and size of home, the average household requires 2.6 access points in order to have complete Wi-Fi coverage throughout the home, XCellAir argues. So, presumably, the big advantage of a managed service is placing and monitoring the performance of multiple Wi-Fi base stations or repeaters.

As Wi-Fi suppliers increasingly market systems capable of such management, on their own, it is not so clear that the service opportunity is so much the solution as the diagnosis.

The consumer study, carried out in December 2016, found that 50 percent of consumers blame their internet service provider for problems with their Wi-Fi, regardless of who provided their router.

Despite 18 percent of consumers blaming their Wi-Fi equipment when service falters, as many as 39 percent of consumers would still call their ISP to assist with troubleshooting faults or problems.

The survey also revealed that as many as 89 percent of consumers have completely unmanaged Wi-Fi, yet there is notable appetite for managed and paid-for services from their ISP or other third party.

Some 80 percent of consumers surveyed experienced at least some issues with their Wi-Fi, with 31 percent experiencing occasional or frequent Wi-Fi problems.

As many as 19 percent of users in the United States, and 10 percent of respondents  in the United Kingdom, said they were willing to pay their service provider or a third party technical services firm, such as Geek Squad or Knowhow, to manage their Wi-Fi for them.

The mean (arithmetic average) fee per month that consumers are willing to pay for managed Wi-Fi in the US was nearly $4 per month, with six percent indicating they were willing to pay as much as $15 or more. In the United Kingdom, the mean fee was £1.49, with six percent willing to pay up to £4 per month.

Some 74 percent of consumers get their Wi-Fi equipment from an ISP.