"Middle Mile" Might be Key for Automated Trucking, Not Just ISPs

Many in the connectivity business are familiar with the concept of the “middle mile,” the distribution network connecting core wide area transport with the actual access network supporting services to end user customers. 

As a business issue, the middle mile often is a problem for internet access providers who do not own their own WAN facilities, and must buy distribution services from a third party, often in rural areas where costs are high. 

Something of the same issue exists for autonomous trucking, where the immediate application is likely to be the “middle mile long haul” between local transfer hubs. As Deloitte envisions the autonomous trucking market developing, human drivers would handle the “local loop” or “access network” chores at either end of a trip. 

source: Deloitte 

Autonomous trucks are likely to be an early application of driverless vehicles, in large part because the business case and financial returns are so clear, say consultants at Deloitte. 

The actual autonomous journey would occur only between transfer hubs where loads are transferred to driverless vehicles for movement along highways. That would simplify all the logistical and control issues a full end-to-end driverless vehicle approach would entail. 

“Self-driving trucks offer sizable economic and operational benefits for companies across the supply chain; most notable is a projected 30 percent or more per-mile cost reduction as compared to the current human driven truck model,” the consultants say. 

“Our model predicts that autonomous truck technology will likely be first commercialized in the Southwest—specifically, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, followed quickly by Oklahoma” for reasons of favorable regulation, weather, and road conditions, the Deloitte researchers say. 

Coverage then would begin to extend to northern and eastern locations where the initial conditions are not as favorable.

Next Normal or New Normal?

The post-Covid business environment--for connectivity providers as much as for any other industry--might be “next normal” or “new normal.” The former might indicate bigger changes for some industries but fewer disruptions for others, essentially accelerating trends already present.

The latter might indicate fairly permanent and significant life alterations that were not already in place. “Just different” is one way of describing “next normal,” while “never be the same” characterizes “new normal.”

McKinsey consultants analyzed the change potential across more than 2,000 tasks used in some 800 occupations in the eight focus countries.

“Considering only remote work that can be done without a loss of productivity, we find that about 20 to 25 percent of the work forces in advanced economies could work from home between three and five days a week,” McKinsey says. 

“This represents four to five times more remote work than before the pandemic and could prompt a large change in the geography of work, as individuals and companies shift out of large cities into suburbs and small cities,” McKinsey notes.

The geography of communications also should shift, with some possible ramifications. Pre-Covid, mobile traffic demand was generally concentrated at 30 percent of cell sites. That should lessen, with a greater percentage of traffic at the other 70 percent of sites.

That also should alleviate some capital investment intended to boost radio capacity at the busiest urban sites. Additionally, mobile data demand could grow less rapidly than before the pandemic, if significant percentages of workers stay at home, more of the time, connected to their Wi-Fi networks. 

Less urban traffic also means less demand for all the associated businesses catering to urban workers. That suggests less demand for small business connectivity, for some time, or perhaps even permanently.

Less demand for urban office space will shrink the market for business connectivity supplied to those locations. There eventually should be higher demand for at-home upstream bandwidth as well, as more people need better support for two-way video sessions. 

Use cases for fixed wireless should improve, as the suburban and rural locations more people will be working from are precisely those locations where sustainable business cases for new fiber to home installations are toughest. 

There will unpleasant social implications, as low-wage, lesser-skilled jobs are among those which will be displaced, post-Covid. As has been the case for decades, the growth will be happening in health care and knowledge work. 

source: McKinsey 

“Compared to our pre-Covid-19 estimates, we expect the largest negative impact of the pandemic to fall on workers in food service and customer sales and service roles, as well as less-skilled office support roles,” McKinsey says. 

“Jobs in warehousing and transportation may increase as a result of the growth in e-commerce and the delivery economy, but those increases are unlikely to offset the disruption of many low-wage jobs,” McKinsey adds. 

“In the United States, for instance, customer service and food service jobs could fall by 4.3 million, while transportation jobs could grow by nearly 800,000,” McKinsey notes. “Demand for workers in the healthcare and STEM occupations may grow more than before the pandemic.”

On the other hand, it also is fair to ask whether travel, hospitality and some forms of business travel will be permanently depressed. A year ago, some quipped that “trade shows are dead,” as a permanent trend. To be sure, all large in-person events were temporarily halted, for health reasons. 

But we need to be careful about extrapolating present circumstances into the future. The pandemic will pass. And we can be sure that any linear extrapolation from pandemic behaviors will prove incorrect. 

Gradually, demand for experiences provided by in-person events will return. For business-to-business sales operations, they will be almost necessary. 

“We found that some work that technically can be done remotely is best done in person,” McKinsey says. “Negotiations, critical business decisions, brainstorming sessions, providing sensitive feedback, and onboarding new employees are examples of activities that may lose some effectiveness when done remotely.”

U.S. Telcos Add Internet Access Accounts in 2020, First Gain Since 2014

U.S. fixed network telcos gained less than one percent of the net internet access account additions in 2020, which might seem paltry, but at least was not a net loss, as has been the case so often over the past 20 years. Cable ISPs gained more than 99 percent of the net new accounts in 2020. 

In 2019 the top telcos lost more than half a million accounts. In fact, the annual net gain, though small, was the first gain since 2014. 

Cable Companies	Subscribers, end 2020	Net Additions 2020
Comcast	30,600,000	1,971,000
Charter	28,879,000	2,215,000
Cox*	5,380,000	210,000
Altice**	4,359,200	142,200
Mediacom	1,438,000	110,000
Cable One**	857,000	101,000
WOW (WideOpenWest)	813,800	32,300
Atlantic Broadband	504,621	37,871
Cable Total	72,831,621	4,819,371

Telcos	Subs, end 2020	Net Additions 2020
AT&T	15,384,000	(5,000)
Verizon	7,129,000	173,000
CenturyLink/Lumen	4,544,000	(134,000)
Frontier^	3,100,000	(111,000)
Windstream	1,109,300	60,000
Consolidated	792,200	8,035
TDS	493,300	38,100
Cincinnati Bell	436,100	10,400
Total Telco	32,987,900	39,535
Total ISP	105,819,521	4,858,906

source: Leichtman Research Group 

At the end of 2020, U.S. cable ISPs held 69 percent of the installed base, telcos about 31 percent.

Service Providers Sometimes Get the Strategy Right, Sometimes Wrong

The advice to “stick to your knitting” or “concentrate on your core business” often is sage advice for market leaders, for the simple reason that if 80 percent of results are produced by 20 percent of the business, that properly requires one’s attention. 

The complication occurs when that core business is in permanent decline. Then the advice might change. Owners might be advised to “get out of that business” by selling the assets. When possible, owners might be told to harvest revenues from the declining business to fund replacements. 

When execution issues are not an impediment, the “harvest and reinvest elsewhere” advice can produce results. Many industries, including automobiles, energy production, retailing, music and video entertainment and most content businesses have had to face the challenge. 

The telecom business finds itself in that situation. Growth increasingly is slowing even in the fastest-growing regions of the business, while global growth rates in the one percent to two percent annual range. 

The great hope of the internet of things, edge computing and 5G itself is that growth can be reignited in the core communications business, without the need to diversify assets. 

Since retail service providers must replace about half their existing revenues every decade, diversification and growth within the connectivity sphere are considered far less risky than moves outside the core competency, if it can be done.

In my own experience, both execution risk and faulty strategy have bedeviled retail connectivity providers. When, in 1985, the monopoly AT&T Bell System was broken up, the “valuable pieces” were deemed by AT&T to be the long distance business and ownership of Western Union (later renamed Lucent Technologies). In other words, long distance service and the equipment manufacturing arm. 

The local access companies, the Regional Bell Operating Companies, were viewed as stodgy, slow-growth assets. That view was more broadly held, as well. When Rochester Telephone Company proposed deregulating its own monopoly in return for freedom to pursue the long distance business, the explicit reasoning was that long distance was the growth driver, local telephone service a slow-growth business with lower financial returns. 

The strategy proved flawed. 

Later, AT&T, struggling to find a facilities-based way back into the local access business, became the largest cable TV provider in the United States. The idea was to use the cable TV access lines for delivery of all services. But execution issues stymied that strategy, as AT&T could not support the debt loads the acquisitions imposed, nor could it get the hoped-for performance without major network upgrades. 

After that, AT&T gambled on growth from entertainment video, purchasing DirecTV to become the largest linear video supplier in the U.S. market. Now AT&T has pivoted again, moving the DirecTV assets off its books and betting on the streaming service HBO Max to drive consumer revenues. 

Many have argued the DirecTV strategy was wrong. Some say the same about the Time Warner content acquisition. Others would argue the strategy was the same as followed far more successfully by Comcast: diversify and then take share from competitors in the new lines of business. 

As Comcast sought to use the broadband network to deliver all services (including voice, enterprise connectivity and internet access), while diversifying revenue from connectivity (video subscriptions) to content ownership (networks, studios, theme parks), so AT&T attempted the same strategy. 

DirecTV would be a bridge to adding video entertainment revenues to the fixed network voice base, while owning Time Warner would create revenues not fundamentally based on connectivity operations. 

To be sure, the linear video business deteriorated faster than expected, to be replaced by streaming alternatives. And linear video underperforms most of the other lines of business in terms of cash flow generation. 

source: AT&T 

Many will be pleased at what they believe is a turn towards the mobility business, which generates most of AT&T’s free cash flow, with higher profits than the other lines of business. 

But the nagging question remains: if the mobile and connectivity businesses are in decline, how is growth to be maintained? Optimists will point to edge computing or IoT or enterprise services. 

The issue is whether incremental new revenues will come fast enough, or be big enough, to offset a loss of half of current revenue over the next decade. 

Product substitution will not abate. The ability to substitute applications for services--”free replacing fee”--is possible across a growing range of core products, including voice and messaging. 

Nor--for AT&T or the other market share leaders--is he most-logical growth path of buying competitors possible. Acquisitions are constrained domestically by governments that want some level of competition. 

Expansion internationally was a favored growth strategy over the past several decades, as government policy was either benign in terms of new foreign investment, or encouraged. Prevented from growing domestically, offshore growth made lots of sense. 

But as growth has slowed, many are retrenching again, partly to reduce debt burdens. 

In the past, usage has been tied to revenue: “use more, pay more” was the rule in the pre-internet and monopoly eras. Today, usage and revenue are uncoupled. As data consumption grows 50 percent a year, prices cannot be raised to match. 

As so often is the case in the internet era, higher usage often means higher costs occur faster than incremental revenue. 

The point is that growth options are difficult and risky, either concentrating on the core business or trying to move outside it. 

That noted, some competitors are able to take market share in the base business and grow that way, at least for a time. T-Mobile can grow by taking share, as cable operators took share in voice, business services and internet access. 

But flat industry revenue growth, plus attrition in the core business at a significant level, might tough decisions for the market leaders. If one cannot hope to take significant market share, and in the absence of significant new revenue growth in the core business driven by some combination of 5G, IoT and edge computing, focusing on the core fails as a growth strategy.

WFH Might Not be as Productive as You Think

Knowledge worker productivity is notoriously hard to measure, so we might as well admit we are only guessing about the impact of widespread work from home on productivity. WFH might not have affected productivity too much: boosting results for some but arguably having no impact or possibly even negative impact on others. 

On the other hand, there is growing evidence that longer term issues could be occurring. Respondents to a Plugable survey show that non-work-related activities during work hours were fairly common. About 33 percent reported they binge watched netflix during working hours in January 2021. 

source: Plugable 

But there also are other indicators that productivity might have suffered. About 34 percent of respondents say they lacked a "productive space for work." So 59 percent of WFH respondents "typically spend their time working somewhere other than a home office," Plugable says. 

Fully a third of respondents reported technical issues such as internet access interruptions. Nearly three quarters of respondents said their partner or spouse distracts them and 64 percent said working with their significant other causes them to feel less productive and have difficulty focusing, Plugable notes. 

During Pandemic, Video Conferencing Data Consumption was Up 5%; Video Up As Much as 40%, Gaming Up as Much as 80%

Not that it matters--a bit is a bit--but Comcast reports that during the Covid-19 lockdowns and social distancing, content consumption grew dramatically. Gaming downloads grew 20 percent to 80 percent in four months, while entertainment video demand grew 20 percent to 40 percent as well. 

source: Comcast 

One might think the demand was driven by people working or learning at home. It was not. You might think all of us using videoconferencing for work and learning drove consumption. It did not. All video conferencing usage represented less than five percent of data consumption. 

We were watching streaming services. 

source: Comcast 

It appears that with other recreational pursuits unavailable (movie theaters, concert venues, restaurants, bars, museums, sports arenas, parks, swimming pools, recreation centers), and with “stay at home” rules in place,  people were left to watch TV. 

Up Next: Mobile Substitution for Fixed Internet Access

Mobile substitution has been a huge driver of revenue, market share and profit margin change in the consumer connectivity industry. Long distance revenues, voice revenues have been the big obvious examples. 

The next areas to watch are video entertainment and internet access. 

Parks Associates, for example, reports more than 12 million U.S. households have cancelled their home broadband service and use only mobile broadband for internet access.

That equates to more than 15 million households using mobile broadband service exclusively. Some three million of those households that have never had a home internet subscription, and have been mobile-only from the start. 

Other estimates of mobile-only internet access support that observation. As much as 20 percent of U.S. households were mobile only for internet access in 2017, Deloitte estimated, with take rates correlating with household income. Mobile-only behavior occurred in 15 percent of richer homes and 20 percent in poorer households. 

The new wrinkle is 5G for fixed wireless, which some proponents suggest could add another 15 percent to 20 percent market share for mobile operators, with share taken directly from fixed network suppliers.  

Over the top application substitution has been the other big driver of revenue and profit margin change, diminishing service provider revenues and profits from text messaging, long distance calling and voice calling. 

In the connectivity business, the "mobile substitution" trend has occurred in phases, and affected a wider range of products over time.

Mobile voice supplanted fixed voice as the preferred consumer use case. "Mobile substitution" for voice has been a global trend since the advent of 2G networks. In fact, mobile is the only sort of ubiquitous network in most parts of the world. But that now might become an issue for internet access as well.

“I will say over time--a three to five year time horizon--unequivocally 5G will serve as a broadband, a fixed broadband replacement product,” former AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said. “I am very convinced that that will be the case.”

“Back in the 90s everybody was saying wireless would never serve as a substitute for fixed line voice because there wasn't sufficient capacity,” Stephenson said. “Well it is a substitute for voice.”

Mobile messaging displaced voice. Mobile social media displaced fixed modes. Mobile turn-by-turn navigation displaced dedicated GPS devices and maps.

Mobile phones displaced watches, cameras, music players and flashlights. Mobile entertainment video is encroaching on fixed modes of viewing (TV sets, PC or tablet screens).

Mobile internet access, which began to find niches in the 3G era, found many more use cases in the 4G era (both for home broadband replacement and on-the-go access). In developing regions, mobile internet access is the preferred form of access.

In the 5G era, we will see a big test of fixed wireless and mobile wireless as a substitute for fixed network access in a wider range of settings. No later than 6G, we might routinely be using mobile access as a substitute for home broadband. The key enabling trends are higher routine speeds and some shifts of pricing plans and consumer behavior.

source: Parks Associates 

Cost and speed are cited by cord cutters as reasons for ditching fixed network internet access. Obviously that behavior could change if cabled network speeds are upgraded and cost becomes more appealing. 

At least initially, it can be hypothesized that mobile substitution will be most appealing for households with modest bandwidth requirements, as that is where the best match of fixed wireless speeds and pricing with customer demand. 

If the average U.S. household consumes 269 GB per month, according to OpenVault, and the average number of people per household is 2.5, than per-user consumption is about 108 GB per month.  

If a typical household spends $66 for fixed internet and between $40 and $60 a month for mobile data, we can roughly estimate the breakeven point where going all-mobile for internet access costs no more than what already is spent for mobile and fixed internet access, ignoring a bit of hassle factor for doing so.

Assume per-user mobile data costs $50 a month, while per-household fixed data costs $70 a month, and about $28 per user in each household. For a multi-user household of an average 2.5 users, that implies something like $78 per user for an all-mobile approach.

It’s a rough estimate, but that implies usage allowances currently set at about 110 GB, priced at about $80, would be competitive offers for many users, and allow substitution for fixed internet access.