The Bleeding Edge

By Daniel Briere Patrick Hurley

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Briere is CEO and Hurley is the director of research at TeleChoice, the strategic catalyst for the telecom industry. E-mail them.

Disruptive approaches to telecom problems: 10/03/06; We design solutions to problems every day. These problems can be pretty sticky, and they can seem insurmountable. But we usually find crafty ways to solve the issues at hand and move on.
Verizon's managed TEM services monetizes wireless/wireline complexity: 09/11/06; Don’t look now, but Verizon's got your number…and the bills and contracts that go along with it.
Alerts can be big business: 08/22/06; There are a lot of trends coming together that make alerts and the networks that might support them into an opportunity. We should start off by trying to put our arms around the category alerts – because actually it’s a quite broad category. At the most “serious” or “official” level alerts could include the Department of Homeland Security/FEMA’s recently proposed new national security alerting system which will utilize public television, SMS and other means to rapidly get broad scale alerts out to the public quickly during times of natural disaster, terrorist attack or other national security events.
What Vonage should be doing: 07/11/06; A few months back, we were asked by a company sitting on the Vonage IPO what we thought of the company’s strategy. Our thoughts at the time (and they haven’t really changed) were that it was a very tough investment – Vonage has had an early mover advantage, but no real ongoing technical or other differentiation.
MVNOs need to do more than just branding: 05/16/06; Mobile Virtual Network Operators continue to sprout up left and right, building on the success of Virgin Mobile (the progenitor of the MVNO craze) and more recent offerings like ESPN Mobile. Perhaps the biggest name to get in the game recently – not unexpectedly considering it shares corporate ties with ESPN – is Disney and their new Disney Mobile offering.
Are your bandwidth usage models wrong?: 03/28/06; As service providers plan their networks and make strategic technology choices – like fiber to the home vs. fiber to the node vs. enhanced CO DSL – they rely upon certain assumptions about how customers will want to use bandwidth, and what sorts of bandwidth requirements customers will have, and – most importantly – what minimum requirements users will seek from their provider (or go to another provider for).
IPTV TV distribution development keeps going: 02/21/06; It’s not news that the distribution of IPTV content within the home is, for many carriers, as big a challenge as getting the signal to the home in the first place. Early IPTV providers in the U.S. (folks like SureWest ) have often had to add hundreds of dollars (multiple hundreds, as much as $400 or $500) to their customer acquisition costs in order to run Category 5 cabling to remote set top box locations within the home.
Losing your brand in your services mix: 01/24/06; At CES 2006, AT&T was quick to show off a highlight of its exhibit, the Yahoo!-enabled Nokia 6682 phone. The Nokia phone has all this sexy functionality – it can do all of the standard “smartphone” organizer/calendar functions, acts as an MP3 music player and even shoots video. And on top of this we could scroll around the Yahoo! interface and do all sorts of things we could do on Yahoo!’s Web site. Equally impressed. But the ebullient AT&T product manager was flummoxed when I asked why he was not concerned about the branding on the product. “This is a Yahoo! phone really, not a Cingular Phone,” I said.
Retail products on demand will drive extra IPTV revenue: 01/10/06; We’ve all heard about Video on Demand for years, and services revenue attributable to VoD are a core part of all service providers’ business cases. But new technology from Scientific-Atlanta is allowing service providers to step beyond just the transmission of content and start creating actual retail products for sale to customers – right at the set top box.
Give your customers a mobility roadmap – They need it!: 12/20/05; In the news this week was an exciting (and long-awaited) item: the IEEE has approved the standard for mobile WiMAX, 802.16e. This standard gives vendors, chipmakers and carriers something to aim at, and gives groups like the WiMAX Forum the ability to start developing interoperability standards, testing procedures and certifications for mobile WiMAX – just as last year’s 802.16d-2004 fixed WiMAX standard has provided some stability in the non-mobile arena.
Debunking the set-top box safety net – “Entertainment Bypass” will rule: 12/06/05; The set-top box is becoming less important. That’s right, less important. Wow, how can you say that? Cisco just paid bazillions for Scientific Atlanta. Microsoft is plowing money into its IPTV set-top box-driven initiative. No doubt you are shaking your head at this statement and thinking: You’re NUTS!
Are your telecom services under the Christmas tree?: 11/22/05; It’s an amazing world when the toymakers stop making toys for Christmas. But that’s what’s happening. This Christmas, if the NY Toy Fair is any indication, is going to be the first one where the toy industry has pretty much thrown in the towel and agreed that kids want bandwidth not Barbie dolls.
Making VoIP and Wi-Fi work together - securely: 11/08/05; Broadband service providers of all types have begun to roll their VoIP services out to a wider audience within their customer base – providing services to both residential and business customers. This isn’t big news – VoIP , of course, has been happening for several years – but the big players (RBOCs, cable MSOs and other national service providers) are moving ahead at a rapid pace these days.
Wireless EV-DO on board: 10/25/05; Coming soon to a computer store near you: little yellow traffic signs that say “EV-DO On Board”
IPTV? Of course, but don’t forget RFTV: 10/11/05; We’ve spent some time this month at the FTTH Conference and Expo in Las Vegas, and we’ve, as always, been keeping an eye on the news related to telco TV strategies and access trends.
Extending Ethernet with copper is gaining steam: 09/27/05; Vendors have been offering products that use bonding or VDSL-like techniques to provide copper extensions to high-speed data services for years. In some markets outside of the U.S. these services are quite popular (using VDSL coding to provide fiber extension), but in the U.S. they’ve always been a bit of a slow starter.
Voice just keeps getting worse at filling the coffers: 09/13/05; In this day and age of "unlimited" local and LD services, of multi-1000 minute cellular plans and rollover minutes, it's hard to get too excited about the prospects of new voice and triple or even quadruple play services as a big driver of service provider revenue.
It’s time for XML (and more!) in your network: 08/30/05; As you have no doubt been hearing (at least in bits and pieces), there’s a big move within the networks of your enterprise customers towards application-aware switching and networking. Application switching is not happening as one big paradigm-shifting overnight revolution, but it is revolutionary, and it is coming towards as a series of smaller steps forward.
Making the leap to cheap VoIP?: 08/16/05; We are sure you take it as a matter of course that the whole world is going to IP and that VoIP is "the future." Of course it is! Whether you're talking about residential users migrating to Vonage and the like, large enterprises moving call centers and PBXs to IP, or carriers moving to VoIP in their core networks, the move is in progress and inevitable.
Playing the CPE game: 08/02/05; Service providers are seeing CPE plays from all sorts of vendors these days – not just traditional "telco" vendors. There’s convergence afoot with the traditional "retail" networking vendors making a move into service provider territory while the “modem” vendors add more and more networking and gateway functionality into their devices.
Finally, a low cost high quality home network for carriers: 07/19/05; We're stubborn. We admit it. In the face of repeated and consistent pleas about how wireless is going to take over the world, we still see a strong role for wireline technologies.
WiMAX inside the house: 07/05/05; We've all heard the ebb and flow of WiMAX enthusiasm – ranging from "it'll take over the world" hype to "it's already a bust" anti-hype, and everywhere in between. What's for sure is that a LOT of companies, ranging from start-ups to (most famously) Intel, have bet a lot on the future of WiMAX.
ADSL, VDSL, Plus, 2: What do consumers really need?: 06/21/05; The VDSL2 standards process is making progress - as of late May, the standard was "consented," meaning that there is a technical freeze and six months to cross all the 't's and dot all the 'i's. The number of carriers committed to deploying VDSL2 systems is growing. And there’s a fair amount of worldwide momentum behind VDSL in general - the folks at Ikanos tell us deployments have grown from 2 million to 6 million ports in just a bit more than a year.
Bandwidth begins at home: 06/07/05; Cart, horse – who knows which comes first any more. That’s how bandwidth demand works in the digital home.
A disruptive change of face for IPTV: 05/24/05; So by now, a very large audience of carriers has determined that IPTV is the way to go as they move towards a fully converged network of offerings. The pace of development has been furious, with most deployments focused on plain vanilla TV service, possibly with a little spice of interactivity thrown in.