Product Substitution is Among Biggest Problems for Access Providers

It has been the case for a decade that access provider executives believe they compete with Google even more than with other service providers, as a 2011 survey of telco executives found.

That thesis will be tested as the U.S. Department of Justice evaluates the AT&T acquisition of
Time Warner. Not only is the acquisition a vertical merger, but the larger marketplace battle is between firms such as AT&T and application providers.

source: STL Partners

One argument AT&T makes is that the video entertainment business now operates

globally. Where Netflix has 100 million accounts globally, AT&T might have about 24.4 million U.S. subscribers and about 12.45 million video subs in Latin America.

Beyond that, the linear video business  is shrinking, replaced by growing over the top alternatives. There already are about 194 million over the top video subscriptions in service in the U.S. market.

source: eMarketer

The point is that consumer markets are changing fast, with new internet-delivered products displacing traditional linear TV.

Though most of the competition involves product substitution--over the top displacing carrier services--Google has become an actual internet service provider and mobile services provider.

source: Vision Mobile

The big change, though, is the shift in value from vertically-integrated carrier services--voice, messaging, linear video--to over the top applications that work on any access connection.

The business implications are stark: access providers increasingly become “dumb pipes” offering lowish value, where differentiation is quite difficult, unless mobile carrier access can be recrafted as an application platform. That is easy to say, hard to achieve.

That shift is illustrated by revenue composition at AT&T’s landline business, where it comes to consumer revenue. About 72 percent of that revenue now is earned supplying video entertainment (an app), just about 15 percent selling internet access (the “dumb pipe”).

source: Business Insider

AT&T Defends Time Warner Acquisition Effort

AT&T defense of Time Warner acquisition. 

Verizon to Launch 5G Fixed Wireless in 2018

Verizon Communication says it will launch fixed wireless residential broadband services in three to five U.S. markets in 2018, starting with Sacramento, Calif. That move is the among the first of an expected wave of fixed wireless deployments to use 5G platforms (or, perhaps properly, pre-5G platforms).

Importantly, the commercial rollout will, Verizon hopes, demonstrate the cost advantage of using 5G fixed wireless instead of fiber to the home to provide internet access at speeds up to a gigabit per second.

By some estimates, fixed wireless access networks feature capital investment about half that of fiber to the home, and perhaps less than half the cost of a connected location.

That is crucial, if U.S. telcos are to reverse a decade-long erosion of internet access market share to cable TV companies. Not since about 2007 have telcos had more internet access market share than cable companies

A reasonable goal might be to boost market share from about 40 percent to 50 percent. Fixed wireless might be a key part of that effort.

Data Consumption Grows 100 Times, Access Revenue Doubles

One clear danger for mobile service providers is the gap between increased investment in network capacity and revenue earned when supplying that additional capacity. By some estimates, as data consumption grows 100 times, revenue merely doubles.  

Unlimited data plans do not help, either, since, by definition, such plans do not allow incremental revenue to be earned when incremental usage happens.

Consumption of video is a prime driver of increased consumption and therefore a driver of network investment. Not only does video drive overall traffic consumption, but video standards are pushing to high-definition and ultra-definition versions that consume even more bandwidth than standard-definition video.

source: Openwave Mobility

How Can an ISP Create a "Fast Lane" if the Internet Already is Dark?

With the anticipated and breathless worries about the coming of “internet fast lanes” if common carrier regulation of internet access services are removed, it might be helpful to remember that the technical ability to create quality of service tiers of service, (the dreaded internet fast lanes) extending all the way to end users, might not actually exist.

The reason is encryption. To do anything on a selective basis to a packet, an ISP essentially needs the ability to identify the owner of a packet and the media type of a packet.

With so much traffic already encrypted, that is impossible at least 70 percent of the time, already. According to Openwave Mobility, about 75 percent of traffic already is encrypted.  

By perhaps 2018, 90 percent or more of all packets will be encrypted, Openwave predicts.

Google QUIC and Facebook Zero Protocol (0-RTT), for example,  represent 27 percent of the traffic in mobile data networks already.

source: Openwave Mobility

Additionally, new protocols such as Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) intrinsically include security protection equivalent to TLS/SSL, along with reduced connection, transport latency and bandwidth estimation in each direction to avoid congestion.

QUIC also provides mechanisms for congestion avoidance algorithms, putting control into application space at both endpoints. In other words, the app provider can supply its own congestion control, and does not need to rely on a transport or access provider to do so, to obtain the benefits of congestion control.

source: Openwave Mobility

The ability to create “internet fast lanes” requires visibility at the packet level, a condition that largely does not exist. So when the consumer internet already has “gone dark,” ISP fiddling with packets is not possible.

Therefore, no ability to create a new consumer quality of service tier actually exists, no matter what many argue is the new danger if common carrier regulation of internet access is dropped.

Fixed Networks Becoming Unsustainable

It is becoming clearer that the fixed network telecom business is losing its ability to sustain itself, as it becomes harder to generate core revenue.   

In other words, one might argue, the core business model is failing. That is why firms such as Frontier Communications now are in danger of bankruptcy, and why the Indian mobile business is rapidly consolidating.

A difficult business model is why Verizon and AT&T (and other telcos and internet service providers) are looking to fixed wireless as an alternative to fiber to the home.

Observers now speculate on whether Windstream and its facilities unit Uniti might also face bankruptcy.

The task for regulators therefore is what to do: encouraging investment at a time when that investment is growing difficult, while not placing new and unnecessary barriers on the industry, even while, by traditional antitrust metrics, industry concentration is high.

The problem is that if industry revenue and profitability continues to drop, more concentration is among the necessary steps to reshape the industry for survival.

That will require balancing the principle of maintaining competition with the need to manage industry decline (encouraging investment where that is possible).

To be sure, market share concentration is far from unusual in the U.S. market.

Also, concentration levels seen in the internet industry are far higher than what is seen in the access provider business. Internet search, for example, has an Heffindahl-Hirshman Index (HHI) score in the 7400 range.

The mobile industry, for example, has an HHI score in the neighborhood of 2500.

The HHI is a standard measure of industry concentration used by antitrust officials.

Revenues in nearly all markets are declining and profit margins are going negative. Mobile is faring better, but big risks still lie ahead as the 5G era arrives.

At the same time, revenue per bit is dropping as well, as transport and access providers earn less revenue despite higher capital investment. In some markets, facilities-based competition dramatically raises business risk, as well.  

To the extent that executives question the financial return from robust investment in access facilities, at least part of the challenge is that potential returns are paltry, especially in the fixed networks segment of the business.

That business model challenge can be seen in revenue trends. In 2018, global telecom revenue is expected to fall, especially in the fixed networks business, which will decline nearly 12 percent.  

The point is that in addition to the steps industry executives might take, regulators will have to adjust to creating policies appropriate for an industry about to consolidate, and is growth challenged at best. At worst, the global industry is going to massively consolidate over the next decade or so.  

That poses different challenges than would be the case for an industry that is rapidly growing. “Regulating for decline” perhaps is too strong, but “regulating to allow restructuring” is probably more apt.  

Global Telecom Revenue to Shrink 2% in 2018

Global  telecom revenue in the 60 biggest markets will fall by two percent  in US dollar terms, to US$1.2 trillion, in 2018, despite account growth, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Average revenue per user (ARPU) will fall by 2.3 percent for mobile operators, and by 11.5 percent for fixed line providers.

At the same time, operator investment will grow three percent.

Regional variations will mask the global trend.

In Latin America, total revenue in U.S. dollar terms for both fixed and mobile telecom will fall, despite mobile subscription and penetration rate growth. In other words, subscription growth no longer automatically grows revenue.

The clear exceptions will be Asia and Africa where subscription growth will be robust enough to compensate for lower ARPU. Across the Middle East and Africa, the mobile penetration rate will increase from 111 per 100 in 2017 to 115 in 2018, while in Asia it will rise from 101 to 104, the Economist predicts.