Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Time to Cut AT&T Some Slack, iPhone Users?
Since 2008, AT&T’s network in and around San Francisco has experienced an increase in 3G data traffic of 2,000 percent. If you find this metric as astonishing as I do, consider this: The increase in Bay Area data traffic is actually below the national average–significantly below. According to AT&T CTO John Donovan, 3G data traffic on the company’s wireless network has risen nearly 5,000 percent nationally in the past 12 quarters.
After nearly three years of rumor and speculation, Dell is finally entering the smartphone market–in China and Brazil. Later this month, China Mobile and Brazil’s Claro will begin selling the company’s Mini 3, a handset designed around Google’s Android mobile OS. 
Verizon posted a decent third quarter this morning, besting consensus estimates. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had been expecting earnings of 59 cents on revenue of $27.17 billion. Excluding one-time costs, Verizon reported a profit of 60 cents a share on revenue of $27.3 billion. 
Should Google be able to offer voice services unfettered by regulations that apply to broadband carriers simply because Google Voice is a free Internet application? AT&T certainly doesn’t think so, and it seems at least a few Congressional representatives agree.
Some 740 billion text messages were sent in the first half of 2009 in the U.S. This according to the CTIA’s semiannual wireless industry survey, which helpfully breaks down that astonishing figure to an even more astonishing 4.1 billion texts per day. That’s about double the number sent during the same period last year. 
Get ready for metered broadband. Speaking at the FTTH Conference and Expo in Houston Tuesday, Verizon Communications CTO Richard Lynch said the broadband industry is headed toward a pricing paradigm shift that will see it embrace the usage-based pricing common to the wireless broadband industry.
Google is violating the Net neutrality principles it so strongly advocates–according to AT&T, anyway. In a letter to the head of the Federal Communications Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau Friday, the telephone company described Google as “one of the most noisome trumpeters of so-called net-neutrality” and asked the FCC to order it to “play by the same rules as its competitors.”
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski this morning proposed broad new rules prohibiting Internet providers–both wireless and wireline–from selectively blocking or slowing Internet traffic. “It is vital that we safeguard the free and open Internet,” Genachowski said during at event at the Brookings Institute. After the jump, Genachowski’s speech in full.
In South Korea, the average broadband download speed is 20.4 megabits per second. In Japan, it is 15.8 mbps. In Sweden, it’s 12.8 mbps. In The Netherlands, it’s 11 mbps.
Before the Federal Communications Commission begins doling out the $7.4 billion in federal grants up for grabs through national broadband stimulus programs, the agency must answer an important question: What is broadband? And so, in a public notice issued today, the Commission is requesting “tailored” public comment on what the definition of broadband should be.
The U.S. government broadband stimulus program couldn’t have come along at a better time. Leichtman Research Group said Monday that the country’s 19 largest cable and telephone providers added a net 634,000 broadband subscribers during the second quarter of 2009. That’s 29 percent fewer than were added in the same period a year ago and the lowest number of net additions of any quarter in the last eight years.
Nearly half–48 percent–of Americans would drop their mobile data service completely if they were driven to it by the souring economy. That’s the conclusion of a new study by Strategy Analytics, which found that consumers are not so taken with mobile connectivity that they’ve completely lost site of household budgetary constraints. 
