Yuilop Calling/Texting App Launches in U.S.

Yuilop, a cloud-based communications app popular in Europe, has launched in the U.S. market, offering unlimited, national calls and text messages in the domestic U.S. market, and no incremental charge international calling (you need to earn credits to do so), even to friends and family who don’t have the app.

Yuilop’s business model based on use of a virtual currency that is earned when users talk to to non-Yuilop users  or convince them to join the network. Credits also are earned when talking with another Yuilop user, using the app, or engaging with promotions such as sponsored content or ads.

Yuilop has not yet gone with a “freemium” model that would allow users to buy credits, but that certainly is within the realm of possibility and logic.

In the United States, Germany and Spain, yuilop provides users with a free unique yuilop mobile number called yuilop.me. Having a number enables users to receive credit for most inbound calls and SMS and reduces or eliminates the need for credit for makes outbound calls or SMS. Currently, SMS from Germany and Spain to the United States, and text messages sent within the United States are free.

Yuilop says it has “built the whole architecture on open standards” such as xmpp and the mobile number (MSISDN).

That means Yuilop users can call and message non-Yuilop users at no incremental charge.

Yuilop  is available for download for iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone.

Spectrum Sharing or Not in 1755 MHz to 1780 Mhz Band?

Spectrum sharing is a relatively new concept in the licensed spectrum arena, and we might soon get a glimpse of how well it works if U.S. mobile operators and government users wind up sharing access to the 1755 MHz to 1780 Mhz band, as its current users say they are willing to do.

Mobile operators would prefer exclusive access, as usual, but the more interesting scenario would be sharing. If it works, it would then be more feasible to consider sharing of spectrum across other frequency bands, between current non-profit users and commercial operations.

As always, spectrum clearing costs are an issue. The U.S. Department of Defense estimates it will cost $3.5 billion to retrofit radios within the 25 MHz of shared spectrum.

But such costs always come into play when existing users have to move out of a band.

Fiber to Home Grows 15%, Mobile Broadband 14% in 2012

Fixed wired broadband subscriptions reached 321 million in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development area in June 2012, for an average penetration of 26 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants, a 1.4 percent increase over the previous six months.

Fiber to the home subscriptions also now represent 14.9 percent (48.7 million) of total fixed network connections. Fiber to home deployments grew by 12.7 percent in 2012, four times as much as fixed broadband at 3.27 percent.

Luxembourg (324 percent), Austria (193.9 percent), United Kingdom (169.9 percent) and Switzerland (149.6 percent) had the strongest annual growth in fiber connections, while seven countries had growth rates above 100 percent year over year and 11 countries grew fiber connections more than 50 percent.

Throughout the OECD, there also are about five million fixed wireless connections.

Mobile broadband increased by 13.8 percent year over year and reached a penetration of 62.75 lines per 100 inhabitants, up from 58.6 in June 2012.

The total number of mobile broadband subscriptions in the OECD area is just above 780 million. Finland (106.5), Sweden (104.8), Australia (103.4) and Korea (103.0) have over one subscriber per capita, the OECD says.

OneGigabit in Vancouver, B.C.

OneGigabit in Vancouver, BC is the latest ISP to announce it is going to provide 1-Gbps Internet access connections, focusing as many other ISPs are on targeted deployments.

OneGigabit plans to provide service on a wholesale basis only (no direct retail sales) to apartments, condominiums and office buildings throughout the Vancouver metro area, using a combination of optical fiber and microwave radio operating in the 24, 38 and 80 GHz frequency bands.

Also, as many other ISPs are doing, OneGigabit is partnering to build its network, in this case doing wholesale deals with building owners.

The 1 Gbps FTTH service is available for apartment and condominium buildings located within 20 kilometers of downtown, with pre-existing Ethernet cable from each suite to a basement wiring demarcation point.

OneGigabit also assists property owners with the process and costs involved in upgrading a building’s premises wiring for optical fiber access throughout the building. OneGigabit also works with new building owners to install optical distribution networks within the structures.

OneGigabit's plan is to negotiate with real estate owners, managers and developers and hook up entire small and medium-sized apartments, condominiums and office buildings that don't currently have an optical fiber connection.

Where that is not possible, OneGigabit is planning to use microwave radio as an alternative, using Ubiquiti “AirFiber” systems.

“Even if your building is located too far from the nearest source of underground fiber to make a fiber-optic connection economical, OneGigabit's rooftop mounted high-capacity microwave systems can provide access at 2 Gbps speeds at any location within a 15 kilometer to 20 km radius of the downtown core,” the company says.

According to OneGigabit, the wireless network can transmit data at up to two gigabits per second over distances of up to eight kilometers.

The firm basically has a “fiber to the basement” or “fiber to the building” business plan, and apparently will try to share access costs with building owners.

Shared Internet Access Important Even for Developing Nation Users with Access at Home

It appears that access speed might be a major reason large number of developing market public access users use shared computing services, even when they also have computers and Internet connections at home, a study suggests.

In Brazil, home Internet penetration at home among shared venue users was 40 percent, compared with the 24 percent national average. In other words, a significant percentage of people with at-home connections still use shared Internet access centers.

In Chile, 33 percent of public access users had Internet connections at home, as did about 25 percent of users in Ghana and the Philippines.

Users said “better equipment,” “faster connections,” and availability of “help” were key reasons for using a shared center.

To be sure, at-home Internet access varies. Of eight countries in the Global Impact Study of Public Access to Information & Communication Technologies study , home access ranges from a low of three percent to a high of 62 percent.

In Bangladesh, Botswana, and Ghana, about three percent to six percent of people say they have Internet access at home. In Lithuania, Chile, and Brazil, 38 percent to 62 percent have at-home Internet access).

In the middle are people in the Philippines and South Africa, where 10 percent to 15 percent of people say they have at-home Internet access.

Some 70 percent to 80 percent of the world’s poor now live in middle income countries such as theses (with the exception of Bangladesh, which is not classed as a middle income country).

Though fixed network at-home Internet access is an important indicator of the level of Internet access, it is not the only indicator. Mobile access already is becoming the primary way most people use the Internet, even when it is not the “only” way people do so.

That points up the importance of shared forms of access, ranging from libraries and  telecenters to cybercafés, the study authors maintain. In many cases, the shared access is provided by entrepreneurs, in other cases by government-related organizations.

One way of quantifying the perceived value of such access is to measure the amount of money people spend to get to a shared Internet access location. In purchasing power parity terms, this amount ranges from annual expenditures of $15 in Ghana to $83 in Brazil.

Android 4.3 Apparently Will Dramatically Boost Battery Life 500%

Android 4.3 might boost battery life as much as 500 percent, if results experienced by tester Joe Levi are repeatable.

"On Android 4.2 I can typically expect four to six hours of use before I need to recharge," Levi says. "On Android 4.3, without changing my usage habits, I was surprised to see the phone last all day, all evening, and still had charge enough to get me to work the next morning. I was able to eek out 25 hours."

Europe Telco Revenue Decline is Momentarily Unstoppable

Global telecom revenue growth has been slowing for some time, in most markets other than emerging countries, it is safe to say.

It also is safe to say the worst-hit region globally is Europe, where service providers with significant exposure to Europe reported worse results in 2012 than they did in 2011, according to Ovum analyst Adaora Okeleke.

In fact, “the primary goal of Europe’s telcos is to stabilize their performance,” said Steven Hartley, Ovum telco strategy analyst. As is the case for other service providers facing maturing legacy revenue streams, European service providers face the challenge of growing new revenues in emerging markets faster than revenues decline in their core European markets.

And the problem there is that average revenue per user will be lower in the new markets. So European carriers are losing high gross revenue and higher margin customers while trying to gain lower gross revenue, lower margin customers.

“The overall revenues of European telcos were substantially lower, and growth in their emerging market operations was not enough to offset the losses in their domestic markets,” says Okeleke.

Even efforts to gain greater scale could backfire, though. European regulators and service provider executives also favor consolidation in Europe as one way of boosting performance. That’s logical.

Telecom is a scale business, so additional scale should help. The emphasis, Ovum might say, has to be placed on the word “should.”

Scale strongly correlates with net debt, number of employees, revenues, capital employed, and EBITDA, says Emeka Obiodu, Ovum principal analyst. That’s just another way of saying that bigger operators are larger, quantitatively, on every financial or operating dimension other than profit margin, return on capital or earnings per share, for example.

But that’s the problem. Ovum analysis suggests scale is not directly correlated to better financial performance on the profit margin, return on capital, earnings per share or

net debt as a percentage of EBITDA.

Ovum forecasts that telco revenue growth will slow to a compound annual growth rate of two percent between 2012 and 2018. Most of the actual growth will happen in emerging markets, while revenue is likely to stay stuck in a declining mode in Europe.

The growth that does occur will largely come from emerging markets, with China playing a major role, Ovum says. Mobile services, and especially mobile data, are key as well.

Telcos in the Asia-Pacific region and emerging markets experienced some growth but at a slower rate than in 2011, Ovum says. The exceptions were China Telecom and China Mobile, which both reported significant revenue uplifts in 2012.

Service providers in Japan, North America, and South Korea also fared better than their counterparts in Europe, though the revenue growth rates are expected to slow until at least 2018.

The conventional wisdom for most telcos is that they must develop new revenues while becoming much more operationally lean. It’s hard to disagree. But it also is hard to envision that telcos can do what some suggest, namely becoming as efficient as application providers.

“Telcos could feasibly play a role as service enablers, but they first need to adopt the leaner structures of over-the-top players such as Google.” says Okeleke.  

One might say that is virtually impossible. A more reasonable goal would be to operate a high-bandwidth access network as efficiently as a cable operator does.