Spectrum of Greed

In a detailed industry report on the global and US wireless economy, Chetan Sharma points out many positive things about the wireless industries ability to generate revenue in even these difficult economic times.  Reading between the lines of the many industry sound bites provides an interesting set of facts related to mobile broadband.  The mobile equivalent of broadband today is the flat rate data plan.  By anyone’s measure, this is a poor substitute for land line broadband, but in our inbred wireless economy, this is as good as it gets.  As of the 3rd quarter of 2008, how many subscribers have a flat rate data plan you ask?  Why a whopping 13%.  Verizon has finally broken the barrier for data revenue exceeding 25% of their total revenue stream.  Of course, 40 to 50% of that revenue is generated from messaging related services, the fastest growing portion of the data market.  (continue reading…)

As recently as a few months ago, CDMA was being touted as a “CDMA ecosystem”, to a group of developers for their BREW software at a product conference in San Diego.  That CDMA has been one of the underlying technologies responsible for Sprint and Verizon’s mobile networks is beyond dispute.  That those networks are incredible revenue creation machines and that those companies provide thousands of jobs is also indisputable.  The future of the technology is where I beg to differ with Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcom.  The vast majority of the world is on GSM, with WiMax being a second rapidly growing networking technology that will rapidly dwarf CDMA in all but those markets in which massive investments in the technology have already been made.  There, a return on investment must be wrung out of the technology before a replacement can even be considered.

Which brings me to the inbreeding point.  (continue reading…)

Open markets, regulated markets, telecom, oh my!  There are lots of variations on the debate, but in the end, you have one side saying that it is broken, so it must be regulated to fix it, and the other side saying it is too regulated, and therefore broken, so deregulate further to fix it.  I have to call bullshit.

There is a great term I saw over on Big Picture, called agnotology.  It fits the broadband industry perfectly.  The definition of agnotology goes like this:  Culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth. If I hadn’t seen the word before the definition, I would have thought it was meant as a functional description of the FCC. (continue reading…)

There are lots of opinions flying around about delaying the final cut over to digital TV on February 17.  Many, including President-elect Obama suggest a 3 month extension would be prudent, citing a backlog of 2 million people that requested but didn’t receive set top box coupons and more people leaving cable and satellite TV with our economic downturn that will now go without television if additional steps aren’t taken.

Not to take anything away from the politicians, bloggers and reporters that are lamenting the stories of those who will no longer be able to watch Opera, Jerry Springer or Geraldo, but I do not share the opinion that life is not worth living with out TV.  In fact, I would be willing to bet that many in this country today would prefer a faster internet connection to TV if given the choice.  While I realize that a younger generation has been at least partially snared by Lost, 24, and other tv programming, they also use Tivo to watch it when it is convenient to them, or even find the sessions on disk or online. (continue reading…)