Cost matters, and nowhere is that more true than in telecom, and in mobile broadband in particular. Operators are trying to manage what’s clearly a decisive shift of their own revenue/profit potential from wireline to mobile, and to manage the cost of creating and sustaining customers and ARPU. One of the key elements in this…
There are some new indications that the momentum of the web is shifting more decisively toward content, but not in the simplistic “content is king” sense. What’s happening is a combination of fairly complicated and interrelated shifts, and these are gradually changing the way the online business model works. How that will impact the online…
One of the issues that now face the networking market is the fate of Nokia, the once-giant smartphone and networking company that has seemed to stumble in every market race for the last couple of years. There have been all manner of analyses of why this has happened, but they’ve all (in my opinion at…
News Corp has finally launched it’s iPad-paper, The Daily, but it’s obviously way too soon to know whether the experiment in a newspaper that’s neither printed nor online, but instead is appliance-targeted, will work. The price is lower than that of print news to be sure, but at $40 a year it’s still more than…
There’s a mixed bag of news for Google to confront their new CEO, and it’s mixed in multiple dimensions. Android and the basic business of search are showing a combination of positive and negative signs, and confusion is never a good thing. On the Android side, there’s excitement over the new Honeycomb version for tablets,…
FCC has filed a response to two provider lawsuits on net neutrality (one by Verizon), saying that because the order has not yet been published in the Federal Registry it’s not technically in effect and cannot yet be challenged in court. That seems a rather lame move, but as I noted last week the current…
LinkedIn, not consumer-directed sort-of-rival Facebook, is filing for an IPO. The move may be a sign of confidence in the markets for early 2011, a sign of lessening confidence beyond the first half, or simply another indication the financial markets are eager to make a quick buck. One interesting thing about the move is that…
AT&T’s report on earnings reinforced some structural changes in the industry that Verizon’s report had already suggested. One basic truth is that mobile services are more profitable and more fertile areas for growth than wireline. Another is that mobile service gains and ARPU both depend substantially on broadband and smartphones rather than on voice services. …
Earnings season is underway, and I think it’s clear that the results are generally positive and probably more so than expected. That raises again the possibility that the recovery is proceeding more quickly than economists expected, and another sign that may be true is that the major parties in the US now seem to be…
The shape of the networking industry has long been determined by forces on the outside in what could be called the “on-net” space, and two powerful players there are undergoing management transitions. Apple is losing (at least temporarily, though we hear management expects Jobs’ departure to be permanent) its charismatic CEO and Google is switching…