Thursday, August 02, 2012

Links

republic wireless Further Disrupts Wireless Market. "republic wireless, a division of Bandwidth, and the nation’s first Wi-Fi-centric mobile operator, today reopened its $19/month unlimited Beta to new customers, offering an all-new handset, the Motorola DEFY XT." This only disrupts if people use the wi-fi twice the amount they use the cell network AND if they get scale - more than half a million paying customers. The other MVNO's couldn't break 500K. In fact, of the Top 12 US cell carriers, the bottom 4 are under 1M - C Spire (900K), ATN (579K), CinBell (446K) and Ntelos (421k). Helio had approximately 170,000 subscribers when Virgin Mobile bought them in 2008.

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Net Neutrality: Is Verizon's Fine a Hint of Things to Come?

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Google Fiber: Why Meaningful Broadband Competition Is So Hard. "This lowering of the price to the competitive level is good for consumers, but it means the new entrant isn't going to be able to earn a profitable return on his investment in network infrastructure. Which is precisely why companies don't invest in this," from Slate article. I'm not sure how I feel about this statement: "As a country, meanwhile, if we want better broadband we really need a different policy approach that doesn't rely on the implausible idea of the private sector building and maintaining multiple separate overlapping sets of fiber-optic cables."

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The Cablecos are metering. Many WISP's meter. Cellular is all metereing and caps. How Internet metering changes everything. "The fact is that metered Internet service has very little to do with conserving bandwidth. .... In truth, most of the big ISPs have figured out that they don't want to be just ISPs anymore. ...They also want to be content providers and get paid all the way around, much to the detriment of everyone." It is about not being a dumb pipe and conserving the TV status quo.

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No Future in UC for HP. What happened to HP? It used to be about Innovation. Now it is about: What are we doing? HUH? Not sure they know how to choose a CEO either.

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