Employee emails banning vacation from June to July. Reneged Wi-Fi support. Rumors of subsidies and out of stock handsets. As we grow closer to the one-year anniversary of the launch of Apple’s iPhone, the shady dealings around the handset have grown omnipotent.
No less a source than Mark Cuban is pointing out the current fallacies of the Internet video model, although he is using Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research to do it. Moffett has become the industry’s supreme number-cruncher, a guy willing to look past the spin to what quarterly earnings and federal regulatory reports actually tell us. He’s the canary in the coal mine about recent access line losses, among other things.
This time, though, Moffett, and now Cuban, are taking on the reality of advertising support for video and how Internet video is undermining the current market, while priming a new audience of viewers to expect to not only get video content for free, without ads, but to also get only the best of what content creators have to offer.
T-Mobile reported 981,000 new net subscribers for the 1st quarter bringing its total up to 30.8 million. T-Mobile continues to make the transition from the tiny Tier I to a large operator in its own right. It was helped along by its the closing of its acquisition of SunCom Mobile in February, which added another 1.1 million subscribers (not included in the net adds) to its roles. Still, T-Mobile has a long way to go to catch up to the big three. AT&T ended the quarter with 71.4 million subs, and Verizon Wireless with 67.2 million. Sprint, the No. 3 and most struggling operator, still hasn’t reported its Q1 results (coming Monday), but it had 54 million customers at the end of 2007. Of course, T-Mobile may being doing a lot better in the customer count in the next few quarters if any of the swirling rumors about Deutsche Telekom buying Sprint prove true–operationally, that would be another story.
Is Sprint finally giving up on Nextel? After three years of trying to integrate the iDEN network operator into its business, it looks like it may be throwing in the towel–at least according to the Wall Street Journal. more…
This morning I saw some AT&T technicians installing fiber in a large sidewalk cabinet in my neighborhood, a centrally located historic district in Little Rock, Ark.
When I asked, they confirmed they were making U-Verse upgrades and added that the service is scheduled to launch locally on September 2, in competition with Comcast’s existing bundle.
AT&T wouldn’t confirm or deny that date. The company has had permission from the city to roll out U-Verse here for almost two years.
“I can’t wait,” the technician told me.
Robert Burst took over as Sprint’s chief financial officer today, and I’m sure he’s had better first days on the job. If Standard & Poor’s cutting Sprint’s credit rating to junk status wasn’t enough, a federal appeals court sided with the FCC, requiring Sprint switch off its iDEN network in 800 MHz in all markets by June 26, regardless of whether the public safety agencies occupying its replacement spectrum are ready to leave. more…
In Dallas this week for the Broadband Properties Summit, I ran into someone who had signed up the broadband-over-powerline service that DirecTV had been trialing there in partnership with Current Communications. (That is, until that trial “collapsed” yesterday, according to the Dallas Morning News.)
more…
BT was an early supporter of Cisco’s TelePresence capabilities and today the company announced it had demonstrated the ability to support intercompany TelePresence connections, regardless of who the service provider is. According to BT and Cisco, the capability will be commercially available later this year.
This is obviously the next step in the process of making telepresence more viable for a broader range of customers. It comes on the heels of AT&T’s announcement last week of its network-based telepresence offering.
The momentum is clearly building here, but I think it’s also important to remember that Cisco is not the only player in this space. As my colleague Dawn Bushaus noted earlier this year, there are a number of companies active in this space who are eager to work with service providers.
When I wrote about AT&T and Cisco, and the ability to interconnect TelePresence sites in the network, without dedicated connections, I immediately heard from Teliris, which has been providing its customers with a fully-managed, end-to-end service since 2001, and according to the company, guaranteeing 99% reliability that ensure each meeting takes place on time and for the length of time that is needed.
The point here is that we are seeing momentum building in the telepresence space and while Cisco is driving a lot of that momentum, it is not the only horse in the race. Smaller service providers have options as well.
And for this market to truly take off, there will need to be interoperability among equipment providers. That’s a thornier issue for companies such as Cisco and HP, who believe in their own ability to dominate a market. As Dawn writes today, however, there are market forces pushing in this direction yet many challenges lie ahead.
From the service providers’ standpoint, lack of interoperability means hitching your star to one vendors’ platform for a managed in-network service, and that carries its own risk, particularly for smaller service providers who may not be able to attract the attention of very large vendors .
Consumers clearly still have mixed feelings about watching full-length features films on their mobile handsets, but the market for using the mobile handset as a universal remote to search for and buy that movie has yet to really be explored. A partnership between CinemaNow and uVuMobile, announced today, aims to change that. The combination of the digital entertainment company and a mobility software and services company will bring about a WAP service allowing consumers to view movie trailers and remotely download the full-length movie to the PC or TV back home. more…
Alltel continues to surprise. On the two-year anniversary of My Circle, Alltel introduced what amounts to the first loyalty program in wireless. If you remain on the My Circle program for two years you get to add another contact to your plan. Those who signed up for the plan two years ago get an 11th number to which they can make unlimited calls. Those who stick around for another 2 years, get a 12th, etc. more…
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