Broadband Commentary Archive
:: Broadband Commentary Archive ::
The numbers don't lie
By: By Carol Wilson
Earnings reports are a study in spin -- read a press release announcing even the most dire earnings, and you'll be hard-pressed to find the gloom and doom among the highlighted statistics...
Net ushers in experiential TV
By: By Maribel D. Lopez
The past five years have presented major changes in the TV industry such as extensive, free video-on-demand catalogs and time-shifting with digital video recorders...
MDU Odd Couples
By: By Ed Gubbins
Remember the opening to the Odd Couple TV show, which asked whether two divorced men could share an apartment without driving each other crazy? Here at the Broadband Properties Summit in Dallas today, I heard a building owner basically paraphrase that line, talking about telecom providers competing for customers in the same multidwelling unit...
Meeting the market
By: By Carol Wilson
Inside the telecom industry, we tend to focus on big technology trends and innovations that ultimately have little relevance in the consumer or business worlds...
Green packets and broadband
By: By Kermit Ross
Five global forces drive growth and transformation. They are at work everywhere, albeit at varying levels of intensity, and they will change the telecommunications world...
Who needs Washington?
By: By Ed Gubbins
A nuclear bomb set off in our nation's capital could instantly eradicate our federal government. Generations of Americans have accepted that fact and lived with the threat -- maybe in part because an alternative wasn't easily imaginable...
Shoe on the other foot
By: By Carol Wilson
When the cable companies decided to get into VoIP, they didn’t go into the marketplace touting the new technology they’d discovered and trying to attract new customers that way. Instead, they called it “digital phone service” and focused on its low cost, a long list of features and reliability. The approach paid off...
The bandwidth requirement conundrum
By: By Geoff Burke, Calix
Bandwidth prognostications today focus on only the stream side of the equation -- adding up the total bandwidth requirements of all streams concurrently supported by the multi-service experience delivered. What these prognosticators forget, however, is that files are another matter...
Craig McCaw lifts off
By: By Kevin Fitchard
In about 2001, I pretty much excised the satellite communications industry from my beat. Except for the sporadic bankruptcy update and the occasionally sensational story about Iridium satellites potentially crashing down to earth, there wasn’t much left to beat out of that particular sector of telecom. Now, I’ll have to rethink that decision...
Find the buried treasure hidden within your network
By: By Augusto Morais, A.T. Kearney
In an ideal world, telecoms should already have achieved an efficient and lean operational model by now, especially after years of M&As, spin-offs and transformational levers such as re-engineering, outsourcing and even offshoring...
Serving the underserved
By: By Carol Wilson
Over the course of my 23 years of covering the telecom market, I have probably written some variation of the words "the underserved small- to medium-sized business market" hundreds of times...
Knight Rider, ad writer
By: By Ed Gubbins
The latest “Battle for the American Couch Potato” report reiterates in its conclusions the same dire warning that’s been rung out in recent years regarding the future of video advertising: It’s got to get sneakier, it’s got to blur the line between advertising and programming, it’s got to insinuate itself ever more intimately into video content so that we can’t fast-forward through commercials anymore...
The big bandwidth lie
By: By Vince Vittore, Yankee Group
Perhaps it all started with Brian Roberts. Standing on the stage on a balmy Las Vegas morning, Roberts wowed the bleary eyed crowd by downloading a 4 gigabit collection of encyclopedias and dictionaries in just a shade under four minutes...
Power crisis looming?
By: By John M. Celentano, Skyline Marketing Group
Telecom power is a little like Rodney Dangerfield … it gets no respect! Well, not really. But, DC power is one of the last elements to be designed into a telecom network, after the packet-this and optical-that systems are selected...
The Google factor
By: By Carol Wilson
There's a certain paranoia in the telecom industry when it comes to Google. At one point, there was a similar paranoia about Microsoft, but that has been displaced by a mutual reliance the software giant works closely with the telecom industry on multiple fronts, and if the two also sometimes compete, so it goes...
Observations on the unified communications market
By: By Matthias Machowinski, Infonetics Research
We recently conducted research on the Unified Communications (UC) market, and encountered some interesting results that run against prevailing wisdom...
The economics of SMB go-to-market strategy
By: By David Waite, Altman Vilandrie & Co.
Talk to almost any communications executive today and they will tell you that small and medium businesses (SMBs), or companies with fewer than 500 employees, are viewed as an increasingly important market segment...
The case for videoconferencing
By: By Carol Wilson
As someone who has recycled diligently for the past 15 years and rides public transportation to work even during Chicago's brutal winters -- and this has been one of those -- I was feeling a little smug when I logged onto a Web site promising to determine my carbon footprint...
Net neutrality: Here we go again
By: By Carol Wilson
Congress is once again threatening to implement Net neutrality in order to prevent service providers from offering tiered content distributions services...
What’s wrong with one damn-good open network?
By: By Carol Wilson
It’s generally frustrating to listen to all the reasons why our government sometimes can’t seem to get anything done, but it’s specifically frustrating to listen to all the reasons why the U.S. can’t have a broadband policy that guarantees access in areas there are underserved today...
Survival of the fittest -- Carriers need partners not vendors
By: By Robert W. Pullen, Tellabs
Providers need more today than just high-quality infrastructure. In today’s climate of “what have you done for me lately,” the litmus test for choosing an infrastructure vendor is not only equipment, but also services that deliver quantifiable benefits to the top and bottom lines...
Converging on an opportunity
By: By Paul Mankiewich, Alcatel-Lucent
As an industry, we see signs that the convergence of the Web, wireline and wireless networks is well underway. The next logical step is the delivery of content to all three screens – TV, PC and mobile device. What will this mean for the people who will use the services?...
Privacy, what privacy?
By: By Carol Wilson
Use an automated toll payment device such as an E-ZPass, and the state knows where you've been. Travel public transportation using a smart-card payment device, and your transit agency knows where you've been. Of course, with GPS devices on many cell phones, almost anybody can find you. For convenience, we surrender privacy...
Microsoft, Yahoo! and the myth of the dumb pipe
By: By Rich Karpinski
So where’s the service provider bid for Yahoo! now that it’s on the market? Obviously, it’s nowhere to be seen. And that’s a good, sensible thing...
The next beachfront property
By: By Alex Liu, A.T. Kearney
Like sand on the beach, profitability in telecommunications is shifting from the subscription-based cableco/telco world of pipes to the advertising-based Internet world of portals, and the “beachfront property” in these sectors is all in play...
