Every month, throngs of people are connecting to the Internet via broadband for the first time ever. And according to Dave Caputo, CEO of Sandvine, about half of them call their provider that first month to report that their connection “seems slow.” Providers don’t know what to tell them, Caputo said at a panel discussion this week. It’s a subjective assessment, perhaps fueled by advertising that promises lightning-fast speeds sure to blow consumers away. But problems like these linger in part because consumers lack an adequate vocabulary to describe the increasing diversity of broadband offerings. (How fast is fast?)

And the problem is going to get worse.
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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.

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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

The former CEO of a struggling operator is now taking over the board of a struggling vendor. It’s probably crossed more than a few of your minds that Dave Dorman played none too small a role in SBC’s acquisition of AT&T, which eventually took his former company’s venerable moniker before he retired. Now as chairman of Motorola, he’ll oversee Moto’s split into two entities: one focused solely on handsets and the other on a diverse array of carrier, enterprise, government and consumer equipment. more

LAS VEGAS–Qualcomm isn’t just about phones anymore. It’s also powering the radio connections of future laptops. According to the chipset maker, “several” laptop makers, including Dell, are incorporating Qualcomm’s data device UMTS and EV-DO radio chips into their PCs and plan to ship them in 2008. What’s more T-Mobile International, Verizon Wireless , Vodafone and Telefonica have either certified said laptops or will complete certification this month.  more

If Sprint were a celebrity it would be a regular feature on Entertainment Tonight: the ruffled carrier in and out of rehab that is constantly seen gallivanting with the industry’s biggest stars. First it was Verizon, then it was T-Mobile, and the constant rumors of an Intel tie-up with Clearwire and Sprint never seem to go away. The Wall Street Journal now has Time Warner Cable and Comcast pegged as Sprint’s latest partners, and this time it might be right. more

The FCC closed the seemingly endless Auction 73 late this afternoon after no bids were submitted in Round 261. The Auction raised $19.592 billion in 28 days, but the winners of the 700 MHz licenses still remain a mystery. The FCC said it expects to reveal the secret identities of the high bidders in the next 10 days. There’s still no word on the fate of the D-block shared public safety/commercial license, which failed to reach its minimum reserve price. (See story to follow.)

Anyone who thought the current sorry state of economic affairs in the U.S. would produce an equally sorry Auction 73 can toss those doubts outside. Though all excitement surrounding the auction dissipated weeks ago, it’s kept chugging along, entering its 210th round today, raising $19.6 billion, and beating 2006’s AWS auction handily on both counts. Auction 66 raised $13.9 billion and went 161 rounds. Despite the 700 MHz auction’s longevity, it’s bound to wrap up soon (you’ve heard us say that before…).  more

It was Comcast on the podium defending itself from charges of P2P blocking this week, but it was service providers of all shapes and sizes left wondering if the FCC and Congress would soon be telling them how to manage their networks. more

If you listened to my podcast yesterday with Mark McElroy of Connected Nation about their study on the economic impact of pushing broadband into underserved areas of the U.S., you might have been impressed by a big number — $134 billion. That’s the potential economic impact of national deployment of what Connected Nation, a not-for-profit group, has done in Kentucky, with the ConnectKentucky project.

In talking with McElroy, however, I was even more impressed by two other numbers. more