Broadband's free ride?
It seems we haven't learned our lesson from municipal Wi-Fi. City after city in the U.S. has proved that “free broadband for all” schemes don't work....
Fixed voice providers: Surrender
T-Mobile's entry into the landline voice-over-IP business last week was the latest accelerant of the trend toward voice as an application owned predominantly...
Am I missing something here?
At something called the Personal Democracy Forum held this week in New York, Columbia Law Professor Tim Yu expressed his support for a national broadband policy by decrying what he called the high price of broadband in the U.S. ...
Experiential services offer variety of revenue opportunities
Facing new market realities, service providers understand growth will not come from adding subscribers, but from finding new ways to monetize existing relationships...
Open wide and say, “uh, no”
Paired with recent a recent demonstration of Google’s Android platform at its I/O Conference, one could assume we’re on the verge of who new world of openness where networks and devices are no longer joined at the hip and applications roam free like the deer and antelope of yore. Then again, one would be wrong....
Marching toward the inevitable
There is no doubt in my mind that, over the next year or possibly two, broadband service providers will begin offering service options based not only on bandwidth but on quality of service...
Riding the FMC hype cycle
Fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) is another telecom victim of the hype cycle. The technology gets promoted, marketed and heralded as game changing; the buzz wears off; the benefits emerge followed quickly by the return of a second wave of hype; reality sets in and the hype dies down yet again...
The numbers don't lie
Earnings reports are a study in spin -- read a press release announcing even the most dire earnings, and you'll be hard-pressed to find the gloom and doom among the highlighted statistics...
Net ushers in experiential TV
The past five years have presented major changes in the TV industry such as extensive, free video-on-demand catalogs and time-shifting with digital video recorders...
MDU Odd Couples
Remember the opening to the Odd Couple TV show, which asked whether two divorced men could share an apartment without driving each other crazy? Here at the Broadband Properties Summit in Dallas today, I heard a building owner basically paraphrase that line, talking about telecom providers competing for customers in the same multidwelling unit...
Who needs Washington?
A nuclear bomb set off in our nation's capital could instantly eradicate our federal government. Generations of Americans have accepted that fact and lived with the threat -- maybe in part because an alternative wasn't easily imaginable...
Meeting the market
Inside the telecom industry, we tend to focus on big technology trends and innovations that ultimately have little relevance in the consumer or business worlds...
Green packets and broadband
Five global forces drive growth and transformation. They are at work everywhere, albeit at varying levels of intensity, and they will change the telecommunications world...
Shoe on the other foot
When the cable companies decided to get into VoIP, they didn’t go into the marketplace touting the new technology they’d discovered and trying to attract new customers that way. Instead, they called it “digital phone service” and focused on its low cost, a long list of features and reliability. The approach paid off...
The bandwidth requirement conundrum
Bandwidth prognostications today focus on only the stream side of the equation -- adding up the total bandwidth requirements of all streams concurrently supported by the multi-service experience delivered. What these prognosticators forget, however, is that files are another matter...
Craig McCaw lifts off
In about 2001, I pretty much excised the satellite communications industry from my beat. Except for the sporadic bankruptcy update and the occasionally sensational story about Iridium satellites potentially crashing down to earth, there wasn’t much left to beat out of that particular sector of telecom. Now, I’ll have to rethink that decision...
Find the buried treasure hidden within your network
In an ideal world, telecoms should already have achieved an efficient and lean operational model by now, especially after years of M&As, spin-offs and transformational levers such as re-engineering, outsourcing and even offshoring...
Serving the underserved
Over the course of my 23 years of covering the telecom market, I have probably written some variation of the words "the underserved small- to medium-sized business market" hundreds of times...
Knight Rider, ad writer
The latest “Battle for the American Couch Potato” report reiterates in its conclusions the same dire warning that’s been rung out in recent years regarding the future of video advertising: It’s got to get sneakier, it’s got to blur the line between advertising and programming, it’s got to insinuate itself ever more intimately into video content so that we can’t fast-forward through commercials anymore...
The big bandwidth lie
Perhaps it all started with Brian Roberts. Standing on the stage on a balmy Las Vegas morning, Roberts wowed the bleary eyed crowd by downloading a 4 gigabit collection of encyclopedias and dictionaries in just a shade under four minutes...
