Recently in cellular Category

Telecomweb has an interesting set of stats:

Last year, U.S. wireless subscribers burned through 2.2 trillion minutes and 1 trillion worth of SMS. As such, mobile data accounts for 25 percent of a carrier's revenues, and all that from 270 million users.

Indeed these are huge numbers. No wonder AT&T says its a wireless company. TDM LD must be shrinking by the minute

I spent a couple of hours at VoiceCon in the exhibit hall yesterday. The biggest surprise was VZB and Sprint. Especially Sprint. They are pimping the Wireline / Fiber with mobile integration. They had lots of new handsets. (So again they can't even have a whole booth about the wireline product).

Here's a tweet from FierceVoIP: "Sprint tightens bonds with cable; offering enhanced VoIP services to basic VoIP offerings - Cable needs Sprint = Sprint needs Cable."

When Sprint chose Dan Hesse to be CEO in 2007, I was against it. He was a Bell-head who had huge opportunity at Embarq that he wasted. What do I mean? Sprint announced its intention to spin-off its wireline business into a separate company at the end of 2005. Dan Hesse was named CEO a full five months before Embarq was formed in May of 2006. Plus any new CEO has 4 to 6 months of a honeymoon period. Hesse had at least 9 months to come up with a plan to do something with Embarq, and did nothing. He cost cut, laid people off, and litigated with the pensioners. That's wonderful.

Then Sprint gets into trouble and brings Hesse  back as CEO of Sprint-Nextel. WHAT? So he lays off tons of folks. Maybe cuts some costs, but does NOTHING remarkable. In fact, since Hesse became Sprint's leader in late 2007, the company has gone on to lose 4.6M customers.

Did Sprint get the iPhone? No. The Android phone? No. Any new and exciting handset? No. WHy not? Handsets drive sales in mobility.

Do people realize that Sprint still has a fiber network? Not even the folks at Sprint can talk about their MPLS or IP offerings for more than 22 minutes without jumping back to the not-so-shiny gadgets.

Remember when Sprint used to try stuff? The pin-drop ads because they had the first all fiber network. The failed ION project. But still they tried.

Now we see that Hesse raked in $15.5M in compensation in 2008. Let's recap:

• stock lost 70% of its value in 2008
• company wrote off billions
• lost $2.8B
• people thought it would go into bankruptcy.
• CEO gets $2.6M bonus on top of his $1.2M salary

This is what's wrong with Corporate America and the Boards of Directors! You wonder why Main Street is fed up. Why consumers don't want to feed the beast any more. Why would I want to spend any more money with Sprint if its all going into the CEO's pocket? And I have to assume that the Directors and other Executives also pocketed some healthy bonus money as well. What a joke.

The CLEC show, COMPTEL, is in Dallas this week. Stupidly, COMPTEL had their show overlap the Channel Partners Expo. Hello! Same exhibitors and people can't be in 2 places at once.  But it's this exact kind of planning that has led to the troubles that the CLEC's are experiencing.

Has COMPTEL ever won a major battle at the FCC? Nope.

Yet COMPTEL is a lobbying organization. And its insulated. Where's the outreach?

Anyway... COMPTEL never pushed their members to cooperate in the marketplace even after the TRRO ruling went against them. By now, CLEC's should primarily buying transport and transit from other CLEC's. There should be a COMPTEL database of lit buildings, of fiber routes, and of central office collocation, so that members can easily propose solutions and wholesale to other CLEC's.

At the fall 2009 show, Verizon, Level3 and XO didn't exhibit. (I didn't attend but this is what I was told). That means that two of your vendors don't care that much about you - Level3 who many buy transit from and VZ who with AT&T and Qwest make up the bulk of the cost of services to COMPTEL.

As Tara Seals writes here, lines are moving to VoIP and cellular. While CLEC's are moving to SIP trunking, the majority have no cellular component. Why hasn't that been a priority for COMPTEL? Did they think that cellular was a fad that would fade?

There isn't much reason for the CLEC's to start screaming SIP because in the majority of cases, SIP Trunking is just a PRI replacement - and while the marketing is about cost savings, there is any cost savings to the CLEC. Net sum is that SIP Trunking means less revenue and lower margin.

The MVNO model has proven itself to a road to failure. Maybe Verizon's Wholesale Partner plan for Mobility will work. (But I wouldn't bet on it).

Landline replacement to cellular has been increasing with the market dip. That will likely continue, especially with T-Mobile's new $50 plan as well as the Sprint Everything Plan at $99. Garrett Smith thinks this will kill VoIP. WIthout fiber and without cellular, CLEC's are stuck as a NxT1 pipe pusher.

Where's the innovation?  CableLabs and AT&T Labs pumped out some good stuff like DOCSIS, cablecard and DSL. Where's the COMPTEL Lab or at least the COMPTEL Think Tank?

Is Integrated T1 it? Now to be replaced with SIP Trunk? Wow! Unified communications didn't come out of the CLEC world either. Re-invent or die.

There are so many applications that you can add to cell phones to allow for some form of calling. For the life of me, I can't figure out how these would be mainstream - and how there could be a demand for hundreds of them.

Are people now trading in all of their calling cards for an app? All the penny pinchers that were using calling cards have a data plan on their phone that allows them to make VoIP calls?

I get that landline usage is way down as folks move to not only cellular only, but pre-paid cellular. But how much International dialing is being done on cell phones? Wouldn't the majority be migrating to Skype?

Even look at that market: the PC-to-PSTN market. Pulver's FWD was in the marketplace first (and won an FCC ruling with his name on it). Yet it seems that only Skype is left.

Leads me to think that when these mobile VoIP apps are being marketed, you need to be very specific about what the benefit is. And you need to make it stupid easy.

AT&T and Dell and ASUS have brought you the subsidized 3G networks. According to DSLReports.com, Dell is offering the Inspiron Mini 9 for $99 With 2 Year Ma Bell Contract.

"Acer is offering an Aspire One for $99 (normally $500) to users willing to sign a two year contract for any AT&T data plan of $60/month or higher. Now, rather unsurprisingly, Dell is also offering their new Inspiron Mini 9 netbook for $99 (after $350 mail in rebate) if you sign up for the same AT&T plan

Will mini PC's replace Smart phones? Why didn't PC makers add a 3G chipset to laptops so a similar subsidy? Why isn't Sprint all over this?

FreedomVoice is still awaiting approval from Apple on their Newber app for the iPhone, a location based  there's a counter on MyNewber.com. DS Media is also still waiting for its approval. (I noticed that DS Media's front web page changed to Coming Soon. DS Media was a sponsor of BarCampTampaBay).

What's up with Apple any way? Like the company deciding they will not be attending MacWorld (or any other big conferences) starting in 2009.

The FCC voted today too. They took the Inter-Carrier Compensation and USF off the agenda, much to Martin's dismay.

"Federal regulators have approved a plan to open up unused, unlicensed portions of the television airwaves known as "white spaces" to deliver wireless broadband service." [Y! news] [fcc.gov]

FCC approved, with conditions, the mergers of Sprint-Nextel/Clearwire and  Alltel-Verizon. [fcc.gov]

FCC opened an investigation into the pricing policies of major cable operators and Verizon. "The agency wants to ensure the companies' customers are getting treated fairly, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said in an interview with The Associated Press." [Y! news]

In its latest financial filing AT&T claims that they sold 6.9M iPhones and added 1M new cellular customers in the quarter due to the iPhone 3G. (Apple says that 39% of quarterly revenues were due to pushing out 200M iPhones so far.)  Here's the funny part: Agents can't sell the iPhone. Agents can sell Blackberries and other phones but not the iPhone.

Once again AT&T spends money to create a "Solution Provider" Alliance Channel that demonstrates preferences to AT&T sales employees over its Channel agents. On its Alliance website, AT&T writes "Targeted customer sets to minimize channel conflicts" That's some messaging there.

Speaking to the Channel Champions, more than one is worried about what the new year will bring. One never knows what the RBOC Channel will look like year to year.

Not being able to sell the hottest phone to business execs is just one example of how the direct side is treated preferentially over the Indirect Channel. Another is on pricing. Last week, I received a phone call from AT&T about my posting pricing to my client blog. They wanted it removed immediately. Well, I am a sub-agent of a Solutions Provider; I am not direct. (Been there done that; have the scars to prove it). But the pricing did not come from an AT&T website. The pricing came from one of my customers who got it from his account exec. At that point, it's public domain. Just another example of AT&T and its control issues.

AT&T is a wireless company. If that was really true, agents would be able to sell all of its wireless products.

According to Businessweek, telecom could get squeezed by the credit crunch - and Sprint could get hurt the most."To start with, rising capital costs are likely to take a bite out of earnings. In addition, the softening economy will probably crimp demand for such telecom services as land lines, cell phones, and Internet connections."

AT&T sounded the first warning signal in late September, when CEO Randall Stephenson said the telecom giant was unable to sell commercial paper for terms longer than overnight. AT"T is the industry's biggest user of commercial paper, with about $8.5 billion in paper outstanding at the end of June.

Although Verizon is not a big player in the commercial paper market, it does have $7 billion of debt coming up for renewal in 2009. The company also needs to borrow another $22 billion to pay for its acquisition of wireless carrier Alltel Wireless....

Sprint is the most leveraged carrier. It holds a junk bond rating and its ratio of debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (or EBITDA) is expected to reach 3.2, Bernstein's Moffett says.

And again, these companies building out 3G and 4G networks with massive backhauls at a huge cost while revenues are dipping. How does that math work?