The FCC has posed a number of provocative questions to AT&T regarding the fact that iPhone subscribers cannot download and use the Google Voice application. AT&T should stifle every motivation to play cute or clever with the FCC. Apple adopted such a strategy when it suggested to the Library of Congress and others that it would be curtains for the free world if iPhone owners could hack, jailbreak, tether, and otherwise use their handsets without fear of violating the prohibition on circumventing copyright laws contained in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. more
Google has undertaken a beta-test of a telephony platform that includes the opportunity to route incoming calls to multiple devices and telephone numbers as well as free domestic long distance service. Google offers a service that fits somewhere between computer-to-computer, Internet telephony and Voice over the Internet Protocol telephony with access to and from the public switched telephone network. These service categories present polar opposites for U.S. regulatory purposes... more
On Friday, the decision to deregulate "special access" circuits was upheld. The case had been brought by the Ad Hoc Committee, a long standing body of large business users, one of the main categories of buyers of high capacity leased lines to interconnect business premises. more
A web-based poll on the Mobile Broadband Genie site had participants 1160 who were asked: "Is your mobile broadband fast enough?" 133 yes; 740 no; 287 don't know. Perceptions of the term "mobile broadband" appear to far exceed what is being delivered. While operators have been competing to offer cross-subsidized laptop and netbook deals with higher usage caps and ever cheaper mobile Internet deals, they seem to have overlooked the quality of the service. more
The story of the growth of pre-paid mobile voice and SMS in Africa and the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council is well known. The challenge is to move to mobile broadband, which is seen as having potentially explosive growth. Operators will need to create new value propositions, they face significant internal challenges and risk being displaced by rivals moving faster or better able to understand and meet the needs of customers... more
Our world finds itself at a critical juncture. Both trillions of dollars and the future of human communications including fundamental access to it are at stake. For telecom operators and media outlets there is not a migratory way from where we are to the future. There is a clear consumer shift underway that runs in the opposite direction to that of telecom and media incumbents; emergent social practice is increasingly clashing with the very structure and desires of incumbent players... It was for these reasons that one of the six keynote speakers invited to Spring 2009 Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco was Richard Whitt, Google's Washington Telecom and Media Counsel. His keynote was entitled, Tinkering without Tampering: Wrestling with Convergence and Communications Policy... more
Who would dare to predict the year the Internet will reach 50 billion addressable devices? Thomas Noren, head of LTE product development at Ericsson sees one day 50 billion devices shouldered by LTE. He sees LTE as the truly global standard putting to rest the long and acrimonious rivalry between CDMA and GSM protagonists and even sees the Chinese third way with their TD-SCDMA aligned on LTE. Mobile WiMax is, in his mind, already relegated to the dustbin of history... more
It was interesting to see that in New Zealand Vodafone had second thoughts and decided to come up with its own proposal of forming a consortium of network operators, rather than simply supporting the government's announcement of its FttH plans. Our analysis of this change of mind is that mobile operators increasingly need fibre networks to sustain the enormous growth in mobile broadband. Most mobile stations around the world are not connected to a fibre network. more
It's official. A team of market analysts from Oppenheimer are saying [PDF] what I've been saying since 1997, that the apps are separating from the network, and this is driving a wave of "explosive innovation." more
Cell phone carriers have seen a huge growth in wireless data usage. The iPhone is selling like hotcakes, and its users generate large amounts of traffic. Not surprisingly, as cellular providers deploy faster network technologies, users generate even more data... more
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