Shorter, Fewer Calls Shows Shift of Communications

According to Nielsen, the average number of mobile phone calls we make is dropping every year, after hitting a peak in 2007.

And our calls are getting shorter: In 2005 they averaged three minutes in length; now they’re almost half that.

We’re moving, in other words, toward a fascinating cultural transition: the death of the telephone call, says Wired magazine.

This shift is particularly stark among the young. Some college students I know go days without talking into their smartphones at all. I was recently hanging out with a twentysomething entrepreneur who fumbled around for 30 seconds trying to find the option that actually let him dial someone.

This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging.

Clive Thompson on the Death of the Phone Call

Is U.S. Broadband Really "Deplorable"?

Some observers, apparently without reading the actual detail of a recent Federal Communications Commission report on the state of U.S. broadband access, have deplored the woeful state of broadband in the United States.

But they miss the many nuggets buried in the report, or the subtlety and complexity of assessing where broadband now stands.

Some readers will miss a major definitional change made in the report, which redefines broadband as a downstream speed of 4 Mbps or more.
Click on the image for a larger view.

There is in one sense no particular reason to quarrel with any particular set of figures for the broadband threshold. Some figure of merit has to be used. But the FCC rather significantly redefined the standard from the old "200 kbps" figure of merit to 4 Mbps. That has the effect of dramatically expanding the ranks of users who today do not have broadband today, but did yesterday.

That makes comparisons over time more difficult. But the FCC has made other changes as well, such as including mobile broadband in the survey.

The chart shows how this affects the results. For starters, lower-speed mobile connections have value that goes beyond mere downlink speed, namely mobility. In other words, mobile broadband is valuable, even when it offers less downstream bandwidth, because it is mobile and can be used mostly anywhere the mobile network will work.

The same sort of issue exists with mobile voice, compared to fixed voice. Mobile voice might be more expensive, on a per-call or some other metric, but most users would agree that it also offers more value. It is untethered, and also supports texting, music playing, email and Web access, for example, plus personalization.

The data might indicate there are lots of 3 Mbps or slower connections, but a great percentage of them are wireless broadband connections whose "value" is not captured if one only looks at download speeds or bandwidth.

More bandwidth is better, and bandwidth tends to double about every four years in the U.S. fixed broadband access market. But fixation on bandwidth alone does not make sense when wireless services are included in the same index as fixed broadband. That is akin to comparing the value of mobile voice and fixed voice looking simply at prices per call, price per month or subjective measures.

Nook Drives 21% Increase in Revenue for Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble has reported a loss of $62.5 million for its first fiscal quarter ending July 31, compared to a profit of $12.3 million the year before, and despite a 21 percent increase in year-over-year revenue to $1.4 billion.

Sales at Barnes & Noble retail locations continued to decline (by 0.9 percent), while online sales jumped 42 percent to $145 million year-over-year, exceeding the company’s own expectations.

The company cited sales of its e-reading device, the Nook, as the driving force behind the increase in online revenue.

Nook Drives 21% Increase in Revenue for Barnes & Noble

Apple Loses 16% Mobile Web Market Share While Android Volume Increases 400%

Android continues its surge in mobile Web browsing market share at the expense of Apple, who’s seen its share decrease by over 16 percent between the first and second quarters of 2010, according to mobile analytics firm Bango.

Apple showed the slowest quarterly volume growth of just 13 percent, while the volume of mobile web browsing from Android phones in the US grew by 400 percent for the same period.

On the device front, HTC and Sony Ericsson showed the largest volume growth of mobile web visits in the US with an increase of 162 percent and 148 percent respectively. This represented a growth in market share between quarters of 94 percent and 84 percent.

Apple Loses 16% Mobile Web Market Share While Android Volume Increases 400%

300 Million LTE Subscribers by 2015

There will be 300 million Long Term Evolution subscribers by 2015, Juniper Research now forecasts.

Bacteria rush in to gobble up oil plumes from Deepwater

Researchers have discovered a large contingent of silent partners in the Deepwater oil spill cleanup—bacteria. Two samples of a deep-sea oil plume show that a high number of microbes have populated the oily area and are hacking away at the hydrocarbon concentration.

The bacteria also seem to be using relatively little oxygen to metabolize parts of the oil, minimizing their own environmental impact.

One doesn't have to agree about how well the containment or clean-up efforts were handled to note that large, complex systems sometimes can heal themselves rather well, despite our human failures.

Bacteria rush in to gobble up oil plumes from Deepwater

$4B Cut in Verizon, AT&T Wireline Spending

Analyst Dan Burstein is a smart guy. He's taken a look at Verizon and AT&T capital spending and finds Verizon's wireline capital spending in the first six months of 2010 was $3.35 billion, down nearly $1billion from last year.

The numbers at AT&T are similar, he guesses. AT&T cut U-Verse spending by a third last year.

Dan says lots of carriers reduced capital investment in hopes the broadband stimulus funds could be used, instead of their own capital. That's undoubtedly true in many cases, but likely not for AT&T and Verizon, neither of which, as far as I can tell, applied for any funds.

Some of us might suggest other, entirely rational reasons for why that lower rate of investment might be happening.

A rational executive looking at where growth prospects are highest would logically conclude it lies in wireless, not wireline services. A rational investor might argue the returns are higher overseas than in the U.S. market.

A rational executive might conclude that users screaming for better mobile coverage for their iPhones have a valid point, and that investment has to be targeted in better facilities where those congestion problems are occurring.

Investment analysts for years have been pointing out that financial returns from fiber-to-customer investments do not appear high enough to justify too much investment. Analysts have pounded cable executives for years on that score, frowned on Verizon's fiber-to-home approach and generally have concluded that a less-intensive investment approach makes more sense.

One might argue that reasons such as those are substantial enough for prudence on the wireline investment front, without any need for nefarious motives.

One might also reasonably conclude that firms such as Verizon have concluded the financial return from such upgrades will in fact not provide a payback that is reasonable, leading to divestiture of rural lines and customers.

All of that lies within the realm of a normal strategic review of expected financial returns from capital investments, not to mention the need to raise cash for spectrum acquisitions and then construction of new fourth-generation networks.

Nobody has abundant and extra capital laying around, these days. Hard choices have to be made, and who could fault an executive for concluding their firms would do better shifting capital into the wireless network and services?

We might all agree on the facts, though we might disagree on how to explain the facts. 

$4B Cut in Verizon, AT&T Fiber DSL Spending