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Sprint seemed awfully clever when it navigated a public safety deal and gained new spectrum as part of its acquisition of Nextel: That’s all unraveling now. The FCC and the courts are saying that a 26-June-2008 deadline for vacating its 800 MHz holdings in favor of public safety groups would hold even if the new users weren’t on the band. The delays for new users getting on the band are reportedly Sprint’s, given that it had the responsibility for this migration.
Nextel had splintered holdings in the 800 MHz band that were difficult to administer, and caused verifiable interference with (and vice versa) splintered public safety spectrum in that band. Sprint agreed to pay the estimated multi-billion-dollar cost of getting new equipment to public safety agencies in exchange for a hunk of spectrum that they wouldn’t have to buy at auction from the FCC. The cost for a whole set of swaps, migrations, and givebacks was $4.8b, but there was technically no limit on how much Sprint would have to pay for public safety migration—as much as it cost is the true limit.
Last August, the Wall Street Journal did a lengthy update of the 2005 deal, explaining that the effort was vastly behind schedule, and was vastly underbudgeted, too. One county in Pennsylvania estimated that its costs could run $18.5m to $150m, with the low number far above Sprint’s own estimates.
It would be seemingly unfair to allow Sprint’s delays in moving fire, police, and first responders off the band to also delay Sprint’s requirement in vacating the band. We’ll see how the FCC chooses to respond. It could cost Sprint billions and further accelerate the loss of Nextel customers, because Sprint would lose a number of active iDEN sites.
They have no one to blame but themselves. Sprint’s management has blundered through this merger for years. They kept separate Kansas and Virginia headquarters, failed to produce high-quality dual-network devices, gave few incentives for Nextel customers to move to Sprint’s dominant CDMA network, bled employees, and botched this migration.
Now Sprint did have the problem of needing to help move incumbents in the 1.9 GHz spectrum it received and the 800 MHz spectrum it was giving up. The articles on this court decision don’t note whether Sprint’s 1.9 GHz network is free and clear, nor whether Sprint had been working for the last three years to get its Nextel users to get dual-band handsets that would work with the new frequency.
With the WiMax plan also on the table, Sprint was basically committed to building or rebuilding and supporting four network architectures: CDMA (for 2G), EVDO (for 3G), WiMax (for 4G), and iDEN (for 2G).
Sprint is in the position where it may variously be sold (to Deutsche Telekom to merge with its T-Mobile USA division, which would add both GSM and UMTS/HSPA to the mix!), sell off its Nextel division (to a public safety venture headed by Cyren Call), and/or spin off its WiMax division or form a broad venture with Clearwire to build and market it.
Update: Oh, yeah, and Qwest walks away from Sprint partnership, switching to Verizon Wireless as its partner. Qwest spun off its cell division years ago, and has no overlap in its wireline territory with Verizon.
Posted by Glennf at 2:25 PM | Comments (0)
Even the losers win in this auction: The gag order from the FCC over the bidding and results of the 700 MHz spectrum auction were lifted yesterday, and everyone is jabbering. Verizon and AT&T have announced they’ll build LTE (Long Term Evolution) cell data networks, a GSM standard, in the 700 MHz band. AT&T says their network will come online starting in 2012; Verizon, 2010.
Google posted on their own blog and told the New York Times that they were happy enough losing, even though they bid to win…sort of. They raised their own bids a few times to keep interest from other players, but were relieved when another bidder topped them. That turned out to be Verizon Wireless. Google managed to get a few types of openness encoded into the band, and they think (rightly so) that it made a difference. An economist notes in the Times article that Google now only has to spend “$1 million a year on a law firm to ensure Verizon lives up to the openness requirements.”
AT&T didn’t bid on the C Block that Google was discussing, a set of licenses that provide national coverage in a few easy pieces. Rather, they focused on acquiring 700 MHz spectrum before the auction from Aloha Partners (from the previous 700 MHz auction), and spending billions on smaller licenses all over the country that they can pin together. Those licenses are unencumbered by open device, application, and service provisions, so AT&T thinks they got the better deal. A good summary is at Phone Mag.
Verizon for its part said it was pleased with its national-scope licenses. Despite AT&T acquiring lots of spectrum, it’s going to be far easier for Verizon to use these nationally defined bands, with consistent performance across all their networks.
Posted by Glennf at 11:45 AM | Comments (1)
Air France starts allowing phone calls in flight: Air France’s single OnAir-equipped A318 has entered its next phase. Passengers can place and receive voice calls during flights. The first three months of this test involved only text messaging and mobile email; this phase will last three months, although earlier, both OnAir (the satellite-backed provider offering the service) and Air France said they’d pull the plug if calling were a problem.
Rates were not disclosed, but have been estimated at about US$2.50 per minute before the recent steep decline in the dollar. Carriers set the price; OnAir sets the wholesale rate.
Posted by Glennf at 1:32 PM | Comments (0)
Ofcom, Britain’s communications regulator, allows use of phones in the air: Ofcom, in conjunction with other EU nations, will allow the use of mobile phones on UK-registered aircraft. The use of the phones over various airspaces is separately regulated by Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority, the European Aviation Safety Agency, and a variety of national aviation agencies. They will separately issue airworthiness approval. The Ofcom portion of this deals with whether the mobile phones and on-board picocells would interfere with other uses of spectrum. The agency will extend existing airline licenses for 2G purposes, with 3G possible in the future.
Air rage is mentioned in the executive summary of the approval; the issue of passengers getting angry about other people talking (or texting) on phones is left to airlines to manage. The regulator already “requires that airlines have appropriate procedures to deal with disruptive passenger events and further requires that such events are notified through the formal reporting system.” Ofcom is also concerned about the fees charged and that “consumers will receive unexpectedly high bills.” Steps will be taken to make sure callers are informed of the high tariffs, which are expected to run about US$2.50 a minute—but that was in 2007 US dollars.
OnAir, the in-flight operator that’s been waiting for years for this and other rulings, issued a statement that they’ll be proceeding with all due haste to obtain licenses. Their equipment is already EU certified as airworthy.
Posted by Glennf at 9:18 AM | Comments (0)
Emirates airline says they’re the first commercial airline to allow in-flight calls: An A340 in Emirates fleet is hooked up with Aeromobile’s technology—an on-board picocell—that places calls via satellite backhaul at a hefty rate. The estimate was $2.50 to $3.50 per minute last year, although it depends on the carrier used. Carriers set the ultimate rate; Aeromobile, just the wholesale rate. Text messaging is supported. As with all such systems, flight crew can pull a switch to disable mobile use; and there will be quiet periods, typically at night. Emirates uniquely had existing demand for seat-back phones-Arab News says 7,000 calls per month are made—which makes sense given their demographic. They’ll add GPRS data later in the year.
The BBC article describes Aeromobile’s satellite and picocell kit as “a system which stops mobiles from interfering with a plane’s electronics,” which is mistaken. Rather, a picocell ensures that any potential, not yet seen possibility of out-of-band emissions from mobile devices causing interference would be mitigated, because the picocell allows a cell phone to use the lowest possible signal power.
The system will cost $27m to deploy across the fleet. A second plane, this one a Boeing 777-300, is already retrofitted and will be up and running soon.
Posted by Glennf at 1:47 PM | Comments (0)
Some thoughts about backhaul, cell networks, and the future of hotspots: Do hotspots whither and die when everyone has mobile broadband? Only if everyone—not just teenagers—is writing email while walking down the street, driving with one hand and watching movies with another, and conducting all phone calls in motion. Fixed locations can provide higher bandwidth to a small number with lower costs.
Posted by Glennf at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
The chief marketing office of Ericsson, a handset maker, says that Wi-Fi hotspots will be increasingly irrelevant: This story has some legs because it’s so outrageous. But let’s examine what John Bergendahl means.
From a handset perspective, the increasing availability of 3G, its ever-faster speeds, the roadmap for 3G’s evolution and 4G services, the capabilities of handsets, and the services that people actually want on handsets (viewing movies, streaming video from YouTube, taking and sending high-quality photos) are all factors that make Wi-Fi less relevant.
In Europe, Asia, and America, there’s enough capacity and enough advanced devices to do interesting things now, but usage hasn’t grown fast enough—partly due to excessive pricing—to drive aggregate speeds down for users except in the most congested areas. I’ve heard scattered reports of people seeing 3G slowdowns at conferences and so forth. The 2.5G EDGE network basically failed at Macworld Expo last January because of the thousands of iPhones all trying to grab a slice of limited spectrum in San Francisco.
Bergendahl sees the challenges as coverage, availability, and price. That’s all true, and in Europe more so than in the U.S. Europe has better coverage and availability, but the price for roaming outside one’s home country or network is extraordinarily high. Some voluntary efforts to drop roaming prices are underway to forestall 3G data price regulation by the European Commission, such as went into effect 25-June-2007 for voice roaming.
The problem is that he is thinking as a handset maker: he’s thinking about capabilities, selling more handsets, and overall revenue from value-added services that he can make sure his devices deliver. This is fine. But it’s not how carriers think. There’s a growing disconnect between capabilities built into handsets and those offered by carriers. Nokia’s insistence on building somewhat open-platform phones with Wi-Fi and video capabilities have hardly been leapt on by European carriers, and those devices aren’t sold at all in the U.S.
Really, Wi-Fi is a heat-sink, a complement to 3G. It’s a way to inject bandwidth into a network at fixed locations where someone might sit to watch a video or carry out some task that involves being static. You can make phone calls in motion, but you’re rarely jogging or driving while watching a video or composing email. (Okay, studies show lots of emails written by drivers. Still.)
Wi-Fi can be fed through direct wired network connections, allowing carriers to offload bandwidth-intensive tasks without disallowing them. Apple, for instance, only allows its iTunes Store to be used over Wi-Fi on an iPhone or iPod touch—as the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store—rather than stress the EDGE network’s low capacity.
You can see how T-Mobile and BT are pairing Wi-Fi and voice, and building networks that allow them to compete for the best cellular customers, letting those customers talk longer but use a much cheaper medium over which calls are placed. AT&T hasn’t gotten the religion yet about pairing Wi-Fi and cellular plans, but that’s clearly coming, and with a 17,000-plus hotspot U.S. market, we’re going to see some new ideas from them, too.
Really, 3G doesn’t compete against Wi-Fi because the same operators that run 3G networks can benefit directly from Wi-Fi networks. Until 4G networks are built, Wi-Fi’s local network speed and its typical backhaul speed will far outpace what cellular can deliver, and occupying cellular frequencies with big downloads is a poor use of scarce frequency over which other revenue can be better extracted.
Posted by Glennf at 2:48 PM | Comments (2)
Apple adds enterprise features to the iPhone, including 802.1X, and opens it to developers: Today’s announcement from Steve Jobs was full of surprises, including the fact that Apple licensed Microsoft’s ActiveSync for full Exchange support, and the level at which developers will have access to iPhone hardware and information.
The 2.0 software, free to all current owners of iPhone, will be available in June, which kind of tips the hand as to when we’ll see a 3G iPhone, too, I imagine. iPod touch owners will pay a “nominal” upgrade fee, as Apple books iPhone revenue over 24 months and iPod revenue as units are sold.
Apple will pile in all the stuff that enterprises demanded from Research in Motion in the Blackberry platform—and that RIM built in—including support for 802.1X (including WPA2 Enterprise) for authenticated Wi-Fi login, two-factor authentication, certificates, and additional VPN types. They’re also adding “remote bricking,” a critical feature that allows a stolen or misused phone to be remotely and securely wiped.
On the developer side, Apple is opening up the whole puppy in a way that I didn’t expect. I assumed the firm would put limits on whether the cell data connection could be used by apps, but not restrict the Wi-Fi side. The announcement puts nothing off limits except VoIP over cell data, although there’s a list of characteristics that software can’t contain, such as being malicious or a bandwidth hog. All software is distributed and installed via App Store, available on an iPhone or in iTunes for synchronization. This includes free software. Apple will therefore vet, and ostensibly be able to halt use of programs that exhibit behavior they deem bad. Jobs said, “We can turn off the spigot if we need to.” Every app will be signed by a developer certificate.
Developers can have access to location information provided by Google (cell towers) and Skyhook (Wi-Fi) for use in their programs. No mention was made of privacy settings for such. Skyhook’s Loki toolbar requires that you grant permission to Web sites that want to obtain your location details; I expect a system-wide approach to that, too.
No mention was made today of a few particular problems with iPhone security, such as the ability to tunnel and traverse a VPN across multiple network media, such as using an iPhone for a secure connection while you travel from work, across the EDGE network, and to hotspots. This likely could be built on top of the enterprise features. You’d also need policy management, such as disallowing certain kinds of connections without a VPN being active or over non-trusted Wi-Fi networks.
Certainly, this is a big step forward for corporate users, mobile applications, and consumer ease on the iPhone platform. The beta is available today to developers; you can become a developer for $99. Amazingly, Apple’s developer site crashed and is still unavailable two hours after the press conference ended.
Posted by Glennf at 1:05 PM | Comments (0)
While driving by the Fremont Troll, I explain the new flat-rate paradigm of carriers, driven by competition from Wi-Fi, Skype, and other factors
Posted by Glennf at 7:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
T-Mobile rolls out its latest HotSpot@Home offering, Talk Forever Home Service, in Seattle and Dallas: The service, launching in those two markets on 21-Feb-2008, uses a new Linksys router that has two integral RJ11 phone jacks, and accepts SIM cell authentication modules for each line. T-Mobile can port your home numbers to the built-in lines, which also have 911 location information encoded based on your address.
The fee is just $10 per line per month for unlimited domestic calls—you can choose one or two lines—and includes all the features found on cell phones, such as Caller ID, 3-way conferencing, call forwarding, and others. The router costs $49 with a two-year commitment, and the service requires a broadband connection. (This router was spotted on the FCC’s site in August 2007, so this isn’t much of a surprise; it’s all in the timing.)
This new service works alongside the existing HotSpot@Home offering, which allows converged Wi-Fi and cell calling using one of four handset/smartphone models that T-Mobile offers. Pricing was recently lowered for this service to $10 per month for unlimited domestic calling on up to 4 cell phones, making it an easier win for family plans. You can choose either or both the mobile or landline-replacmenent services, but the newer router is required for landline calling.
T-Mobile will still suffer from the same ills that befall standard VoIP (voice over IP) systems like Vonage, because they can’t guarantee the transit of data reliably between their supplied router over the customer’s broadband connection to their voice gateway. But unlike Vonage, they control a lot of network components, and are less beholden to third parties. And as part of Deutsche Telekom, they’re in a better position to complain and see it through if they’re discriminated against by competitors.
Both HotSpot@Home and Talk Forever Home require a minimum $40 per month voice calling plan. That means if you sign up for both the mobile and fixed plans, you spend a total of $60 for unlimited home calling on a single line; unlimited weekend and evening calling; either 300 minutes with a MyFaves package (unlimited calls to 5 other domestic numbers of any type) or 1,000 minutes with a current standard individual plan promotion; and unlimited mobile calls originating on Wi-Fi, whether at home or in hotspots. (T-Mobile has a 5-year deal in place with AT&T to cover Starbucks locations as AT&T takes over operations this year of the coffeeshop’s Wi-Fi.)
Joe Sims, T-Mobile’s broadband products vice president and general manager, said in an interview that they were looking to “address the remaining reasons people were reluctant to cut the cord” and ditch their home wireline service. They found that 50 percent of those signing up for HotSpot@Home are new customers to T-Mobile, and were happy with the service’s general uptake, but wanted to remove the last stumbling block to bring landline customers (of other telecoms) over to the service. One in 8 households have cell-only service, Sims said.
Sims noted that this is the “very first T-Mobile product with a dial tone.” He also said that the company would have a total of 10 handset models by the time school starts this fall, up from 4 models currently. The World Mobile Congress last week in Barcelona saw the introduction and demonstration of piles of dual-mode cell/Wi-Fi phones, some of which include UMA (unlicensed mobile access), which is the specific technology T-Mobile deployed.
The home line service rolled out to Dallas and Seattle—my home town—can’t handle fax machines or alarm systems yet, which is an important proviso. Electronic fax services like Maxemail can more cheaply replace a dedicated fax line, however, and newer alarm systems can be fitted with cellular calling. If you cut your monthly landline bill by $40 per month or more with this service and your long-distance bill by $20 to $40 per month, you might have the money to shift over to the alarm system.
Sims also commented on the Starbucks deal, noting it was critical to T-Mobile that “our customer experience didn’t change.” I asked if T-Mobile, now having consummated a real roaming relationship—it had some roaming deals for airports and international networks before—might consider other partners, given that their HotSpot@Home service would benefit from a greater number of locations for placing calls. He said, “Going forward, we are looking at other roaming partners. It’s less about the footprint and more about the service.”
Posted by Glennf at 9:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted by Glennf at 9:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
It would be inappropriate to let Monday’s sunset pass by: The early analog phone system, the 1G (first generation) that defined what followed, is shutting down. AT&T and Verizon will turn off their networks on Monday, and AT&T will shut down its original digital network that used TDMA. The big problem here isn’t cell users, which the cell companies track directly, and which have been getting outreach for some time to get swapped off analog-only phones. Rather, it’s alarm and automotive users.
This issue was overlooked until a few years ago, when an industry group took a survey, discovered 1m of 30m monitored alarm systems used analog cell connections (850,000 of those just as a backup, in the very real case when a phone line was cut). As of six months ago, the number is believed to be under 400,000. Smaller alarm system operators are probably the root here, where they haven’t aggressively upgraded their customers. (Customers might not want to pay several hundreds and higher recurring monthly fees, either, but the alternative is nothing.)
GM had about 500,000 of its 5m customers using analog services with OnStar, and shut down the analog offering on January 1. There’s a lawsuit underway about the failure to offer an upgrade.
Posted by Glennf at 2:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The FCC has received a “provisional” winning bid for the national “C Block” licenses in the 700 MHz auction underway: The C Block, a national set of about 20 MHz of prime frequency real estate, has received a bid crossing the minimum $4.6 reserve price: $4,713,823,000 to be precise. The overall auction now stands at $13.7b after 18 rounds. This pretty much ensures that the open access, open device rules so fought over and then acquiesced to by major carriers will be enforced, and it’s likely to push more openness into existing U.S. cell markets.
Posted by Glennf at 9:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
I’m trying to wrap my head around the series of announcements and developments this last week that will change the face of cell service, and notably wireless broadband in the U.S.: In short succession, you have:
Yes, it’s Google, Google, Google all over. While Google’s Android platform might not take off, it’s pretty clear that the disruptive influence of Google combined with the WiMax direction chosen by Sprint Nextel are reforming the future of the industry. But WiMax might get left out of the dance.
You see, with Forsee out of Sprint and Zander out of Motorola, you have two major firms that were committed to WiMax looking for leaders who will come in and not continue doing precisely what lead to their predecessors being forced out. Which means WiMax will be on the chopping block. Motorola could write down its Clearwire investment and spin off its Expedience division bought from that company, while refocusing on 3G and 4G cell. Sprint could decide to deploy something entirely different in 2.5 GHz, even if that delayed network buildout, rather than investing billions in something that they’re now not clear they want to move on.
On the consumer side, things are brighter. It’s likely that by 2009, we will see substantial competition among devices—think about the diversity of digital cameras available in sizes, formats, and features—where we might pick a device first and then choose a carrier. Android could be part of that mix, but the FCC’s pressure combined with market changes seem to be leading to cell networks in which you won’t have the same kind of lock-in and commitment—it’ll be more like Europe is but with greater competition reducing the cost of devices.
This openness could, in turn, supplant some of Wi-Fi’s forward momentum as the de facto wireless technology to build into portable devices. Wi-Fi is a best effort technology, which means that it’s not reliable. It’s a contention medium and there’s no company offering ubiquitous coverage—aggregators offer national and international subscriptions, but that’s not the same thing. If the cost of making and certifying devices to use on a cellular network drops precipitously, and volume of chips sold would be one of those factors, it wouldn’t be weird to buy a really good camera that has a 3G or 4G cell chip installed that you could use on a pay-as-you-go basis or as an add-on to an existing cell account you might have.
None of the cell carriers is particularly eager to allow more competition as that reduces margin, increases customer churn, and makes their returns more dependent on their short-term actions as people migrate around. But the fact that so many carriers are now promoting actions that will make life harder on them and their shareholders means clearly that the momentum is there for this change to sink in.
Google could sit back and do nothing, and they’ve already forced change. Sprint can’t sit back and do nothing—but there’s speculation Google might simply purchase them to pursue its goals. I doubt it, but Sprint will be a very different company within a year.
Posted by Glennf at 10:24 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
After Verizon’s recent settlement with New York State over its BroadbandAccess service’s limits, I’ve been watching its terms of service (TOS) change: I’ve written about Verizon Wireless’s TOS for cell data for a few years, because it’s the most restrictive and most ridiculous in the industry. No longer. Partly as a result of the settlement with Andrew Cuomo’s office in New York, and I think partly due to the competitive nature of services that don’t impose the same limits, the TOS has morphed into something that offers relatively decent disclosure and full limits.
I used the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive to examine previous TOS’s to compare. Back in January, the TOS had the terms I have poked fun at for years: unlimited service can only be used for Internet browser, email, and intranet access. Explicitly prohibited uses include running servers; continuous uploading or streaming of audio, video, or game content; and using the service in place of a dedicated line, like a DSL connection. Peer-to-peer uses were banned, too.
This TOS has the incorrect example that someone would use “more than 5 GBs in a month” if they used the service continuously for 10 hours a day, seven days a week. Actually, that would be more like 50 GB. Using the service at full capacity for an hour a day would hit 5 GB, so it’s a very low limit. This TOS had the egregiously offensive line, “Anyone using more than 5 GB per line in a given month is presumed to be using the service in a manner prohibited above,” which is part of what got them in trouble in New York.
(I had thought that Verizon barred VoIP, but a check with the company confirmed that that restriction was dropped by 2006.)
These TOS terms didn’t change through August, when the Wayback Machine loses track, but they did change after the New York settlement. When I wrote about the New York settlement on 23-Oct-2007, the bad calculation was still in place. Two weeks late, on 05-Nov-2007, language about throttling appeared. When I checked a few days ago, it had changed even further: the bad calculation was gone as was a threat of cancellation. Gone, too, is the restriction about streaming, uploading, or downloading. They still treat the line as not a fixed broadband replacement, and they added descriptions of disruptive network activities that aren’t allowed, even though one would expect that those would already be a problem.
In terms of excessive use, they simply state now that using more 5 GB per billing period (which lasts a month) could result in them throttling your maximum download speed to 200 Kbps. They also provide reporting of your current usage, so you can see where you’re at.
Now, as a consumer, you can read this and decided whether paying $60 to $80 per month for unlimited service is what you need. Sprint Nextel and AT&T both have less restrictive language, and apparently a lower level of enforcement. T-Mobile, with its 2.5G EDGE network, has generated no complaints I’m aware of from customers accused of misuse of the 100 to 200 Kbps unlimited service.
Part of my interest with mobile WiMax is whether restrictions are lifted on even more categories of use. Clearwire intends their service to be used as a wired broadband replacement—that’s been their model all along. If WiMax costs the same, has faster speeds (as I found in my testing this last week with the Clearwire PC Card), and fewer restrictions than cell data, there’s an audience that might make an informed decision about which network to choose.
Posted by Glennf at 10:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Haw haw: Verizon Wireless agrees that advertising what I have called its “unmetered” cell data plans as “unlimited” is not the right term, and will change it due to action by the New York State Attorney General’s office. The company will refund $1m to customers and pay $150,000 in penalties and costs to the state. They didn’t admit any wrongdoing. The investigation found that 13,000 people nationally had their accounts canceled between 2004 and April 2007 for excessive use. In April, Verizon agreed to stop canceling accounts, and allow “common Internet uses.”
I’ve been writing about this issue for years and years. Read this BoingBoing post in which I chimed in back Nov. 2005, for one instance. A service advertised as unlimited, but which is actually limited, is not unlimited. NY AG Andrew Cuomo said in the press release, “When consumers are promised an ‘unlimited’ service, they do not expect the promise to be broken by hidden limitations.”
Their revised terms of service spell more out about what a reasonable limit is, including actual numbers, as well as providing examples of what they allow and don’t allow. The word unlimited has disappeared.
But they do the math wrong, as I’ve noted before. They note, “A person engaged in prohibited uses continuously for one hour could typically use 100 to 200 MB, or, if engaged in prohibited uses for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, could use more than 5 GB in a month.” No. That’s one hour a day, seven days a week—not 10 hours a day—to reach 5 GB. 10 hours a day would hit 50 GB. Technically, “more than 5 GB” is accurate, but it’s about as accurate “unlimited” was in the past.
Update, 05-Nov-07: Verizon updated its TOS again to note that if you exceed 5 GB per month, they could throttle you to 200 Kbps. They could still cancel your account but at least they’re spelling out penalties, and providing the potential of continuous service even if they have a bone to pick with you.
Getting closer to actually serving the customer. They better watch out: they might actually do something in our best interests.
Posted by Glennf at 10:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
As part of EarthLink’s effort to shed enormously costly projects with no near-term return, they aren’t putting more money in Helio right now: The mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which buys minutes and data at wholesale from Sprint (and possibly Verizon), was founded to bring cool South Korean phones and interesting services to youth and young adults in the U.S. It’s taken hundreds of millions of dollars to reach a point where it’s future isn’t well predicted. Few MVNOs make it.
SK Telecom has been EarthLink’s 50-50 partner, and EarthLink and Boingo Wireless founder Sky Dayton has headed up the effort. The initial investment was $220m from each firm. SK Telecom just put $270m more into the venture, and IDG News Service reports that it may assume majority ownership, too. If I read the report correctly, EarthLink has put $250m in so far and SK Telecom has now put in $590m.
Helio has just 130,000 subscribers, a tiny drop in the buckets compared to over 100m cell subscribers in the US. They’re aiming for 200,000 to 250,000 subscribers by the end of 2007 with revenue of $140m to $170m.
Posted by Glennf at 12:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Unlimited means unlimited, except in the cell world: Apple signed on to the embarrassing doublespeak of the cellular telephone industry yesterday in its launch with UK cell carrier O2 of the iPhone in Britain. O2 added Wi-Fi to the mix via The Cloud’s 7,500 locations as part of the included price in any of three reported plans for service, which start at £35 for 200 minutes of calls and 200 SMS messages. The data plans for EDGE and Wi-Fi are “unlimited” not unlimited. The footnote on O2’s information page says that unlimited “fair usage” is included. But that’s just garbage.
Just like Verizon’s definition of “unlimited BroadbandAccess” meaning “about 5 GB a month regardless of your use, and we’ll pretend you’re using it illegitimately if you exceed that amount even if you’re using it for purposes we define,” O2 is playing games. It’s not unlimited. It’s a limited, unmetered service. You are not paying per byte, but they have a number in their systems, which the company head defined at a press event yesterday as “no more than 1,400 Web page downloads” per day.
Examining O2’s site, I can find no specific mention as to what fair usage constitutes for an iPhone. The BlackBerry plan includes just 75 MB per month as part of unlimited fair usage. A special “1024” plan includes 1 GB per month in that definition
The lack of a definition, and the weasel-like nature of redefining a perfectly straightforward word to create market confusion and deception, in which customers are incapable of knowing what’s meant even after they sign up for service, is despicable.
Apple should know better.
I would like to call for a set of consumer complaints against the misuse of this term. Any time you see the word “unlimited” used with a proviso or asterisk, write your national regulator or advertising standards board and complain. There’s misuse of unlimited privileges, which I can understand: someone using a service in contravention of reasonable terms. But that’s not what cell companies mean. They mean, whatever you’re doing, however reasonable, we set the limit in unlimited.
Bah.
Posted by Glennf at 7:52 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack
AT&T is getting a clue on its understanding of Wi-Fi. Okay, that’s an overstatement: In the press release for the Blackberry 8820, the first cell plus Wi-Fi model of the handheld communicator, AT&T mentions the existence of hotspot networks. “Individual customers can use it in their homes and, for an additional charge, at thousands of Wi-Fi locations* throughout the U.S., including any of the 10,000 AT&T-owned or branded hot spot locations in the U.S. Users can also take advantage of tens of thousands of hot spots around the globe through such services as AT&T Wi-Fi roaming.”
So far so good, right? Well that asterisk refers to this statement: “*Access charges from individual Wi-Fi hot spot operators may apply.” And if you read through the pricing listed in the release, there’s no mention of anything to do with AT&T and Wi-Fi.
Also, the link in the release to what supposedly is AT&T’s own page with more information about the 8820 model—is dead. No such page. Great launch, guys.
AT&T’s 10,000 hotspots are 8,000-plus McDonald’s and a handful of other locations, including Barnes and Noble, a few hotels, a few airports, and a small coffeeshop chain.
Posted by Glennf at 7:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
On my bike ride home from the office Friday, I spotted a COLT: That’s a cell-tower on light truck. I stopped to ask one of the technicians why they were deploying a COLT—a category of COW, cell on wheels—in the parking lot of the market that sits at a major highway junction. He said that the big game—Huskies v Buckeyes—required more cell access, in this case from Verizon. The market has a bully pulpit for a cell tower, which was expanded a few years ago. They run cabling from the cell tower to the COLT, which provides more available frequencies and signal strength, I’d wager.
Posted by Glennf at 1:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Moovera releases a Wi-Fi metro-scale node with 3g, WiMax backhaul: While this might seem like a specialized item, the folks a Moovera assure me that there are many markets in which conventional mesh (sharing frequencies to move packets around a set of nodes) and point-to-multipoint backhaul just won’t work. 3G and WiMax are increasingly available, and thus reasonable options for a freestanding node or set of nodes. The Moovbox F100 has dual-band Wi-Fi, and can support all major flavors of 3G as well as mobile WiMax. The node pricing starts $1,200.
Posted by Glennf at 2:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Apple introduces the iPhone without the iPhone: The company announced the iPod Touch this morning, including the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. The new iPod includes Wi-Fi but not EDGE (it’s not a cell phone, after all), and lists for $299 for an 8 GB model and $399 for a 16 GB model. There’s a Safari browser and some widgets, but no email client. Apple rates the player at 22 hours of audio and 5 hours of video playback per charge. The device will be launched worldwide, shipping in September, CEO Steve Jobs said.
Apple also introduced the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, which will be rolled out later this month to iPhones and iPod touch models. The store will sell music only over Wi-Fi, as you might have guessed. This prevents iPhone users from overloading the EDGE network. The limit of music and not video likewise prevents iPhone users from drowning hotspots with multi-gigabyte TV and movie purchases. The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store allows music previews and purchase. Songs purchased on the iPod Touch are synchronized back to your computer the next time you dock the iPod touch or iPhone. (Apple dropped the iPhone price to $399 for an 8 GB model, a $200 reduction. They eliminated the 4 GB model.)
In a neat bit of co-marketing, if you carry an iPod Touch, iPhone, or a computer with iTunes installed into a Starbucks with T-Mobile HotSpot service, the music player will join a music-purchase-only network that allows you to buy the song you’re listening to with a single click. The Starbucks option starts in Seattle and New York in 600 stores Oct. 2, and rolls out from November to March in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, before spreading to other metro areas and all 5,800 Wi-Fi-equipped Starbucks by 2009. The Starbucks button also lets you see the last 10 songs played, and purchase other music from the Wi-Fi store.
It’s a good win for Starbucks, because people with iPods and iPhones don’t take up as much real estate as a laptop toter. They also probably don’t stay as long, and they’re almost certainly more likely to have more hands free to buy drinks and food. I expect that Starbucks will see a real uptick in sales at their initial stores when this features launches. For Apple, the company gets to add out-of-the-home distribution points with no real cost entailed. They’ll give a piece of the sale to Starbucks (who will ostensibly give some money to T-Mobile, too). iPod and iPhone owners without home broadband or with slow broadband now have a reason to go to Starbucks.
My prediction has long been that Starbucks and T-Mobile will put in media servers in the stores themselves. Starbucks has tried this before with on-demand disc cutting, and such, but I’m talking about an edge media server that lives in the store and has the few terabytes of most popular music and video. An iPhone or iPod user would make the purchase in the store and receive files at 802.11g speeds (roughly 20 to 25 Mbps), making a 1 GB movie transfer in less than 10 minutes or an album in less than 30 seconds.
Posted by Glennf at 11:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The FCC has voted on the auction rules for the valuable 700 MHz band’s upper reaches: The rules set for the 20 MHz hunk of spectrum that could be won by a bidder on a national basis will require that the winner allow any device and any service on the network. In practice, however, that won’t be as interesting as it sounds. If the FCC had applied those rules retroactively to current spectrum holdings by cell providers, it would be easier to find and use advanced phones from Europe and Asia for both GSM and CDMA networks. Verizon’s tetchy terms of services that prohibit anything but email, Web surfing, and corporate applications wouldn’t be allowed, either.
But this is a new band that isn’t used by any other countries worldwide for this purpose. It’s possible an ecosystem of devices will spring up for the U.S. market, especially if 700 MHz radios turn out to be relatively easy and cheap to make. But the failure to require the winning bidder to resell access on a wholesale basis means the winning bidder gets to set the prices it wants.
Two of three Republican FCC commissioners—oddly, not the chair Kevin Martin—thought open access and open devices were added regulation. I disagree. There is just as strong a regulatory hand involved when you tell carriers that don’t have to resell access as when you tell them they do. That’s a regulatory choice that impairs non-incumbents in the same way that the converse impairs new entrants.
It’s business as usual, folks, just a little more open.
Posted by Glennf at 1:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack