|
Keith Willetts' Blog
-
If service providers aren’t quick to grab onto new business models and start monetizing them, they may get overrun by the over-the-top guys who will find ways of circumventing them and leaving them to pick up the pieces. What a busy industry we work in. The range of hot topics keep surfacing like cloud services, smart phones, net neutrality, mobile app stores and over-the-top services as well as continued buzz from LTE and WiMax keeps on coming. Of course, these are increasingly facets of the same...
-
The communications services, data and devices of the not-so-distantfuture are relying on us today to make wise choices that won’t have tobe undone and unlegislated just a few years down the road. We’re very literally at a crossroads in the communications andtechnology worlds today with the coming together of three major piecesof enabling technology: 4G broadband wireless networks; cloud-basedapplications, processing and storage; and ever smarter devices. Whileit’s easy to view any of these pieces...
-
I see that the FCC reads our blogs! A couple of weeks ago I bemoaned the naked commercial tactics of Apple blocking Google Voice from its App store ( What’s good for the goose is good for the gander ) and hey presto, the FCC pops up and calls in the case ( read more ). Perhaps this issue has opened the FCC’s eyes to that fact if we’re going to have a debate about an open mobile web; it’s not just the mobile service providers who need to be bound up with net neutrality legislation...
-
3G promised us the mobile Internet but, as ever, the hype got ahead of reality. To be fair, by the time that 3G was finally agreed upon and rolled out, the speeds it offered seemed rather pedestrian, and most industry watchers are now waiting on a 4G world for a truly global, mobile Internet with access speeds capable of supporting the kinds of applications and services that the iPhone is letting us glimpse. And that might happen faster than we think. The 1.5 billion app downloads on iPhone –...
-
If there is one metric that the mobile industry reveres it is Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). It’s always foxed me why this should be a meaningful measure. After all, mobile markets started with relatively few international business customers at exorbitant tariffs, so as the market moved to more and more of the general population using mobile, ARPU was bound to fall as people paying with their own hard earned cash are likely to be more price conscious. So ARPU is bound to fall where the uptake...
-
The news that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has resigned from the board of Apple Inc is generating a lot of headlines. Maybe Apple’s action in blocking access to Google Voice on its app store last week was the straw that broke the camel’s back. But then Apple has form in this area – last month the Palm Pre also got ‘disconnected’ from Apple’s iTunes store. We also heard this week that Skype, now the world’s largest international phone company with 40+ million...
-
It’s a little known fact that Verizon Wireless used the Beatles song All Together Now in commercials in 2002. So it was interesting to read the words of a current Verizon executive, Jeannie Diefenderfer, vice president of global network operations (NYSE: VZ) in Telephony Online this week talking about “coopetition” – or cooperation among competitors – as a key attribute for successful telecom operations. “ I believe in today’s world, and more so going forward...
-
Just when you thought it was safe to stream all the video you want and download all the huge files your heart desires, pay-as-you-go charging models are back stalking the land and pressurizing “all-you-can-eat” flat-rate plans. In April, Time Warner started billing some customers based on how much bandwidth they used. As you can imagine, customers were unhappy when it was announced that the company would expand the trial run of this new billing system. The company relented, but not before...
-
Not sure if you’ve seen Gartner’s technology adoption curve, but it’s a great model for how we treat technological innovations. It describes a ‘peak of inflated expectations’ followed by a ‘trough of disillusionment’ and finally a ‘plateau of productivity’. It’s a good lens to look at what has happened to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). I first experienced VoIP back in the mid ‘90’s and as the dot-com bubble expanded, VoIP...
-
OK, so I really am the last person on the planet to get an iPhone. Didn't need one you see - had this HTC/ Microsoft brick that had everything that an iPhone had but it had 3G. OK, so the 3G iPhone has been out for a while, but well, what was the compelling reason to change? Never been an Apple aficionado, so apart from my 2 iPods, never had much to do with their products. But I have to say, what a gizmo! From the super cool packaging to the super cool look feel and the super cool user interface...
|
|
|
 |
| Copyright © 1988-2009, TeleManagement Forum. All Rights Reserved |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|