What's the Advantage of Combining Chrome and Android?

Others of you can probably think of many other reasons why a single operating system blending Chrome and Android would be helpful, such as making tablets that work as notebooks, or notebooks that act like tablets.

Personally, this is the biggest obvious attraction: using the smartphone as the processor, docked to an external monitor or other tablet-sized screen.

For some applications, including content production, keyboards are a necessity and bigger screens very helpful. Sure, you could carry a tablet and external keyboard. You could carry a tablet and a PC, plus your smartphone. Many of us do.

But maybe having less to carry would be very useful.

source: Android Central

Will DirecTV Now be AT&T's Primary Video Platform in 2021?

AT&T’s new online streaming video service, DirecTV Now, will become the company’s primary video platform in three to five years, some inside AT&T apparently now predict. The speed of that change--and its implications--show just how much change might be expected in the entertainment video business and the service provider business model.

By switching to over-the-top delivery, AT&T in principle could avoid truck rolls, marketing, in-home capital and other fulfillment cost. DirecTV Now, though primarily aimed mostly at attracting new subscribers among the ranks of consumers disenchanted with linear services, might also eventually appeal even to consumers of facilities-based services that require a physical connection (satellite dish installation or installation of cables and set-tops.

Eliminating a truck roll and customer premises equipment could eliminate several hundreds of dollars of cost whenever a new customer is signed up and activated.

DirecTV Now, set to be introduced by the end of 2016, appears aimed at about 20 million households that have no cable or satellite service, competing with services such as Sling by Dish.

One might argue that DirecTV Now is worth doing if the “unconnected” were the only target. But the benefits might also extend to other consumers who already buy either a fixed network or satellite-delivered linear service.

For AT&T there are trade-offs in other areas, particularly the need to ensure that its access bandwidth assets are plentiful enough to support the big upsurge in bandwidth consumption on mobile and fixed networks.

Linear Subscription TV Continues Slow Subscriber Decline

Though linear subscription TV is a mature business, indeed likely a product in the declining phase of its product cycle, it is not yet a business in sharp decline. Instead, it continues to decline very slowly, in terms of subscribers, while average revenue per account keeps climbing.

Some 82 percent of U.S. TV households (there are more homes than “TV homes”) subscribe to some form of linear TV service, according to Leichtman Research Group.

The percentage of TV households subscribing to such services is down from 87 percent in 2011,

Among TV households that do not currently subscribe to a subscription service, 14 percent reported they had paid for a service in the past year.

Overall, about 2.6 percent  of TV households bought linear TV service in the past year, but currently do not, compared to 2.5 percent in 2015 and three percent in 2014.

Average (“mean”)  reported monthly spending on such services is $103.10 -- an increase of four percent in the past year. Though the lowest annual increase in five years, that rate continues to remain above the average rate of price increases elsewhere in the economy.

How much longer account revenue can grow at that rate also is an issue, as average household incomes are not increasing, in inflation-adjusted terms. As a result, the percentage of household income spent for linear video is rising.

That is among the reasons for new emphasis on "skinny bundles" featuring a menu of fewer channels, sold at a lower price.

That percentage can continue to rise if consumers reduce spending elsewhere in their budgets, as they have done with spending on mobile services. But even those increases have come at the cost of reduced spending on fixed network services.

The big unknown is whether the rate of decline remains linear, or becomes non-linear at some point in the future, and when that could happen.

source: IHS

source: nScreen Media

source: BLS

source: IHS

Comcast to Sell Business 100 Gbps Ethernet in Annapolis, Md.

Comcast is going to sell business customers 100-Gbps Ethernet in Annapolis, Md., illustrating once again that it is cable TV operators who now set the standards for much of the U.S. Internet and data communications market, consumer, small business or enterprise.

Such speeds would not be unheard of in the long haul network, but are rare in metro access markets.

You would think speed leadership would come from Verizon's fiber to the home network, but cable TV operators such as Comcast have matched and now are eclipsing Verizon FTTH speeds at the top end, and have been leading telcos in "average" speeds since before 2004, with big increases since 2006.

So far, Google Fiber has few enough customers that it does not factor into the national picture, even if Google Fiber can be credited with launching the latest round of upgrades to gigabit speeds.

Nokia already has demonstrated 10 Gbps symmetrical speeds on hybrid fiber coax, supporting the CableLabs “full duplex” version of DOCSIS 3.1. Full duplex uses time division rather than frequency division.



source: FCC National Broadband Plan

20% of T-Mobile US Binge On Users bought Data Plan Upgrades

The T-Mobile US “Binge On“ program that zero rates streaming video has gotten a 99-percent satisfaction rating in a study of consumers produced by Strategy Analytics.

Also, some 20 percent of Binge On users traded up from a lower tier T-Mobile US price plan to get Binge On’s benefits, so the program arguably is paying off for T-Mobile US.

All of that arguably also helps video packagers who have gotten more viewers and engagement.

The survey also found 68 percent of customers of rival mobile networks indicated either strong or moderate interest un-metered video streaming over the mobile network in exchange for streaming limited to DVD quality.

Also, some 14 percent of users reported they were either “very interested” or “extremely interested” in switching to T-Mobile to get zero-rated video.

That would explain why both AT&T--and Verizon to some extent--now have responded with similar offers.

Digital Realty Launches Service Exchange

Digital Realty is launching a cloud connectivity platform, The Digital Realty Service Exchange, which will provide private, direct connections between enterprise data centers and the public clouds of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM SoftLayer, and Microsoft Azure, in addition to other clouds.

Service Exchange will provide more-flexible and scalable interconnection services, with bandwidth-on-demand features, creating wide area connections that are virtually the same as if co-located partners were inside a single data center, and are managed with a single interface.

The service also provides redundancy across the whole network as though clouds were cross-connected inside a single data center, and allows customers to instantly self-provision extra bandwidth on demand.

The service will be available later this year--as early as November 2016--in 24 data centers and 15 markets, using software defined network capabilities provided by Megaport. “Traditionally, interconnection was a very physical operation and arcane,” said Eric Troyer, Megaport CMO. “We abstract all that.”

Essentially, Service Exchange gives even small customers the same capabilities as once possessed only by large carriers.

Service Exchange also should allow more customers to create express, point-to-point connections between their various data centers and apps, reducing latency by reducing unnecessary traverses of the WAN.

Among other advantages are better ability to move workloads across all available data center assets, easily and rapidly. In that sense, the new service makes all resources “local,” even when physically separated.

It might go without saying that the new features will make Digital Realty a more-capable alternative to similar services offered by Equinix.

Will Oligopoly Still be the Outcome, As New Platforms Emerge?

Capital-intensive industries tend to produce oligopoly market structures. Even some industries that are scale-intensive or moderately capital intensive also tend to do so, it seems. Look at Apple’s market share , for example.

So one reasonable question in the global access business is to ask whether technology platform advances can reduce capital investment hurdles enough to break the “oligopoly” market structure.

If so, then a wider new competitors might expect to break into the top ranks. If not, then only big firms can hope to do so.

At the moment, in several markets, it appears the latter thesis will be tested. In India, the entry of Reliance Jio already is rearranging market structure, forcing consolidation. In the U.S. market, Comcast and Charter Communications are getting ready to enter the market. In Myanmar and Singapore,  new competitors are being authorized.

So far, no breakthroughs in platform cost have occurred that could challenge oligopoly structures, though. In other words, the zero sum game continues to prevail, and one contestant’s gains will come at another’s expense.

It is unknown how much new fixed wireless and mobile platforms might change possibilities for non-oligopolistic market structures, on a marketwide basis. But it might be reasonable to suggest that the new platforms will lower provider cost, but not enough to overcome oligopoly assumptions.

That is not to underplay the potential importance of several new platforms, as well as continued advances by hybrid fiber coax networks. Lower platform costs are helpful in increasingly-competitive markets where capital and operating costs must be lowered.

Lower costs are required to serve rural customers as well. But, at least so far, none of the platforms seemed poised to break the background setting that business models assume costs high enough that oligopoly is the outcome.

In addition to devices, oligopoly also seems to prevail in the consumer applications market.

According to comScore, in the United States, the top seven apps, and eight of the top nine apps are owned by Facebook or Google.

Indeed, one might ask whether it is possible for any new apps providers to displace Google and Facebook, either.

Some might argue that stable oligopolies are possible somewhere between two and four providers, with many arguing three strong contestants is the optimal sustainable outcome. That four or more providers exist in many markets is considered by many a “problem” in that regard, generally called the rule of three.

Most big markets eventually take a rather stable shape where a few firms at the top are difficult to dislodge.

Some call that the rule of three or four. Others think telecom markets could be stable, long term, with just three leading providers. The reasons are very simple.

In most cases, an industry structure becomes stable when three firms dominate a market, and when the market share pattern reaches a ratio of approximately 4:2:1.

A stable competitive market never has more than three significant competitors, the largest of which has no more than four times the market share of the smallest, according to the rule of three.

In other words, the market share of each contestant is half that of the next-largest provider, according to Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

Those ratios also have been seen in a wide variety of industries tracked by the Marketing Science Institute and Profit Impact of Market Strategies (PIMS) database.