On Rad's Radar? - economy Archives

Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry & Monopoly Power

2012-12-31T19:53:50Z

Susan Crawford is a telecom lawyer, professor and activist (among other things). Her book about the last ten years of the telecom industry is out by Yale Press, titled "Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age". She recaps the book in this hour long video.

Topics she discusses include a short history of telecom; the lack of competition; the politics of the Duopoly; and the resulting Digital Divide.

Three Quick Thoughts on the Economy

2012-12-31T17:12:46Z

Fiscal Cliff (or whatever dreaded scenario that Congress is creating to profit from personally) is just one more emergency to keep the American public in check panic mode. Meanwhile, Congress got a raise.

This brings me to point 2: the top earners keep earning more money but the middle class remains flat.

Recently, I was part of a group in Tampa opposing tax dollars to bring in another big box retailer. The jobs promised changed over a year of opposition - from 400 to 230; however, net new jobs would be a lot less as many other retailers would be closing or laying off. The new jobs would not produce much economic development. Retail positions don't pay enough money to cause a ripple effect in our service-oriented economy. How does someone making less than $25K per year spend enough in the community to float the other retail businesses?

Simply put, point 3, the middle class is getting stomped. Middle manager position went away due to automation, business cost cutting and outsourcing. As the middle class struggles, so does our economy. Again, our economy is based on service businesses. These businesses require a lot of VISA transactions per week to remain open and employing people. As Rich points out, brick-and-mortar are getting beat by mobile. Malls are getting hit too.

Our industry has laid off hundreds of thousands in the last 7 years (mainly due to M&A). These were all really good paying jobs too. Many didn't get a replacement gig, but a position that paid less. There is a ripple effect to this. Less taxes - income and sales - is just one ripple. More than 60% live paycheck to paycheck. And this is just ONE industry.

The jobs available today are either in sales or require skills that did not exist even 8 years ago. That has an effect on unemployment, but it also has an effect on business growth. See the cycle? I'm not the brightest guy when it comes to finance and economics (just check my college grades in those subjects), but I see how all this ties together - How come the highest paid CEO's don't? Or the Wall Street geniuses?

Maybe it's just that they don't give a hoot.

How Much Does the Average Federal Employee Make Now?

"2,035,000 federal employees making an average of close to $75,000 – not including benefits which would have bumped the figure to more than $100,000," according to Forbes.

Another example of crazy compensation HERE.

Another interesting read:

5 reasons that Americans hate the stock market.

Predictions for 2013

2012-12-19T19:15:00Z

CenturyLink Biz has an ebook out with predictions for 2013 and beyond. M2M, mobility, cloud - all just mind blowing stuff . It's prediction time obviously. Let me say that 2013 can go a couple of ways - DC gets its collective act together to improve the financial situation or it doesn't. The economy will swing with either path - good or bad. We have already seen layoffs and threats of more. The only positive I see is bankers actually being penalize for fraud. That said what is in store for 2013?

Well, the FCC's pace for any case is slow and slower, so they will likely not get to the copper clipping and IP transition until 3Q2013 at the earliest. meanwhile, CLEC's have to be vigilante to document cases of copper clipping, because all the money that they - Integra, Megapath, TelePacific, XO, Windstream - have invested in EoC doesn't work without said copper. I think they will be fine until 2014 on this.

That said, CLEC's have to accelerate their plans for OTT services like cloud and Managed IT. When the copper plant disappears, wholesale (from fiber providers and cablecos) will get expensive. The money will be in Layer 7. I have often said that it was going to be Layer 1 or Layer 7. Without a network that you own, it will be a fight for apps and services. Everything will look like Office 365 - where 42,000 Microsoft partners are selling it for very little margin.

Here's the thing: more businesses are moving to the cloud for so many reasons - mobility just being one of them. Some CLEC's, VARs and even Agents will migrate to a cloud services brokerage model. That will work for slinging Hosted Exchange, SharePoint, CRM, simple backup, even VPS. Network will become a separate sale and negotiation.

I'm still shocked that no one has rolled out vertically based integrated bundles yet.

So mobility will still be huge in 2013, but with the new shared data plans, the monthly bill will be increasing, so businesses (and consumers) will be looking for alternatives. Wi-fi will be significant. When you add in mobile data caps and consumer cable caps - and metering - there will be a net effect on cloud services and OTT services.

When you examine the backlash yesterday on the Instagram privacy gaff (right after Facebook finished acquiring them for $715M), you have to wonder how much longer the online phenomenon continues. Privacy is non-existent. You have to be off-the-grid and paying with cash to be beyond corporate and government spying. I think we will see a little more backlash in 2013 - enough that FB and other companies see a dip in usage and corresponding advertising sales. Have FB and twitter peaked?

The companies to watch in 2013:

RIM and Alcatel because they are re-inventing;
Avaya because of its crushing debt;
Bright House due to its Telovations acquisition and to see if it is the first cableco to chase business outside of its region;
8x8 and similar OTT Hosted PBX players like FreedomIQ;
the Cloud Communications Alliance, especially the members who have not been acquired yet. If Hosted PBX doesn't explode in 2013, it never will;
Sprint because Clearwire+DISH+Softbank = a big ugly mess with Hesse;
Verizon but specifically its OTT hosted PBX service, VCE;
Dell as it continues its shift to cloud services from hardware;
Tech Data - between TDmobility and the Microcorp deal - 2013 will be telling;
AirWatch since MDM is huge and they are being sued;
Master Agencies that have to figure out relevancy in 2013.

For Agents and VARs, 2013 is the year they have to put a plan together. No more waiting. Too many VAR's are already jumping on the telecom/network bandwagon and not nearly enough Agents are jumping into the Managed Services and Cloud space. For Agents, 2 resolutions for 2013 would be (1) partner with a VAR or two; and (2) cross-sell services to grab more of the total wallet share of your customers. Look to revenue per customer and lifetime value of each customer as the most important metrics. (Mainly because they are.)

For VAR's, they have seen some big changes from Microsoft - Small Business Server's end of life as well as the way Office 365 was sold. VAR's also witnessed CLEC's - like Cbeyond and EarthLink - make a big splash in launching managed services and cloud offerings. In 2013, VARs will need network/telecom to make up for the revenue dips. Locally in Tampa, we have seen some Microsoft partners go to programming and integration services in place of the old model of SBS and Exchange. For all of cloud adoption, Integration is the key to any business process outcomes. There aren't nearly enough programmers to do all the necessary integration.

In the Google world, there are companies making money supporting and integrating Google Apps. Backupify, Batchbook, Insightly are just 3 companies that integrate with Google Apps for CRM and backup. As this ecosystem becomes more complete, Microcorp's deal with NeoNova could prove brilliant.

It is this type of package or bundle that most businesses want. Do they want stand-alone Hosted Exchange? Notsomuch. They want a complete package of inter-working software - the Hosted PBX integrated with Outlook and the browser - like they have on their smartphone!! It confuses me that the smartphone is more integrated than a laptop, Mac or desktop.

They want their CRM to integrate with all of it too. If Xobni can pull in all that social data, why can't a plug-in for CRM?

It's this complete solution that is needed. No idea what company will roll it out first or if it will be in 2013.

The $14 Billion Dollar Announcement

2012-12-03T18:09:34Z

While I don't agree with everything that Bruce writes here about AT&T's $14 Billion network spend in the next 3 years, there were a few take aways.

The big one is that the ILEC's have been getting rate hikes for years to pay for fiber that most customers are not receiving. FiOS is where it is - and that's the end of that project. U-Verse is fiber to the node and that isn't deployed everywhere either.

Mike Powell, former FCC Chair and now CEO of NCTA, has often gotten in woefully wrong in presenting the state of telecom. You can talk about top speeds all day long, but that isn't what the Majority of US addresses have access to nor is it the top speed broadband even remotely affordable for consumers - and even some small businesses (at $300 per month). The average US broadband speed is 6.6 Mbps. And if you don't bundle that broadband, it costs a lot.

Despite the promises and the rate hikes, telcos have invested $249 per person on average for broadband per year. Consumers spend on average $529 on broadband annually. At a retail job at $10 per hour that is one week's pay. Unsustainable!

62% of Americans buy broadband. That is all. Period. The market is flat.

Verizon and AT&T have a plan to disconnect the copper plant. VZ has already done so in the shade of Storm Sandy at the battery Park CO. All the CLEC customers out of the CO are out of luck, time and competition.

Telcos are basically unregulated at the state level - and the FCC is useless when it comes to enforcement and competition.

The point that everyone misses is this: our economy in America is service based. It is broadband fueled too - ask Apple or Amazon or Google.

Without cheap, fast Internet everywhere, what happens to that economy?

Clipping copper is detrimental to not only the CLEC's but to the majority of small businesses in the US. Ethernet-over-copper is quick to deploy and gives a great MB for the buck. EoC is the last stand against the cableco becoming the ILEC and the ILEC becoming irrelevant. (I laugh when the stock pickers only point to the dividend as if that was somehow any indication if a telco will tank or not.)

Promises from the RBOCs - Verizon and AT&T - for rate hikes or mergers have largely gone unenforced. The $14B announcement was just PR - spin. Nothing either company does is good for the economy, it is just good for them - for now.

How will Cloud services take off if the broadband is too expensive, unreliable or unavailable?

How will the Internet-centric economy stay competitive in that same environment? How does any of that withstand broadband caps and metering? How do corporations have more tele-workers in that same scenario?

Promises Broken and Unenforced

2012-11-19T02:21:06Z

When SBC went to buy BellSouth in 2006, then CEO Whiteacre assured Congress that the merger would be good for consumers and broadband. [HuffPro has a good story about it]

This has been the trouble with the FCC: the FCC has a poor record of merger conditions enforcement.

If this was the EPA, we would have pollution. If this was the FDA, we would have drugs killing people. Oh, wait.

Anyway...

We have a failed policy of competition that comes straight from the FCC. Granted that is a political organization with a change in thought every election. But when you consider the billions in Universal Service, RUS loans and grants, and the BIP and BTOP spent on telecom, especially rural telecom, why isn't creating a competitive environment Job 1?

Meanwhile, TheVerge is reporting that due to Storm Sandy, Verizon is taking the opportunity to cut whole copper lines. That's right, CLEC's out of that Central Office are now effectively screwed -- and so are their customers. Verizon's Executive Director of Operations, Christopher D. "Levendos says it's "far too tedious, time consuming, and not effective of a process to try and put this infrastructure back together," so Verizon's taking the opportunity to rewire with fiber optics instead."

Failed Policy.

CLEC's like TelePacific, MegaPath, integra and XO have spent tens of millions on EoC equipment from ADTRAN and Overture to provide mid-band Ethernet to the SMB marketplace nationwide. That investment is in jeopardy. The ripple effect of consolidation, lack of competition, and copper clipping will lead to many more layoffs, lost market and investment value, even less competition and the loss of hardware vendors as well.

Despite the RBOCs saying they are spending billions to build out fiber to replace copper, are they really doing it? Not really. With a contract in place, they will take 90-180 days to build out fiber to a customer. But overbuilding of copper stopped with the FiOS project.

This hurts the economy and competition. And it actually hurts the RBOCs. More CLEC's means more revenue (in wholesale dollars) and more feet selling against cable, who until recently were the enemy. Now, however, VZW and the MSO's are co-marketing!!! The FCC has basically punted on their responsibility. Nice job Julius, Kevin, and Michael.

It's All Just Shifting

2012-10-26T21:52:09Z

"Ovum, in a latest research report, has warned that OTT VoIP will cost the global telecoms industry $479 billion in lost cumulative revenues by 2020, which represents 6.9 percent of cumulative total voice revenues," according to reports. Notice that it says Over-the-Top VoIP, not VoIP the way cellcos, FiOS and cablecos deliver it. I think it is a wild guess.

If you believe that tablets and smartphones will replace desktops and PC's, then OTT VoIP will be a good part of that.

If the nature of the brick-and-mortar office is shrinking and more and more workers are remote and virtual, then that will have an affect.

If everything is just apps on a network - if everything is just riding on top of the Internet - then that number gets bigger.

The carriers are facing a huge problem: you can't sell as many devices now because everyone has more than enough devices.

As cable steals the small business market, the ILEC's worry but not nearly as much as the CLEC's.

As TV cord cutting picks up pace, cablecos are looking to SMB to replace that revenue. Which will happen faster - SMB sales or cord cutting?

The mounting debt, the expense for interest, the flat revenue, the rising cost of customer acquisition will factor into the future of many carriers. Some will be able to buy their way out of trouble by buying new revenue, new services, maybe new markets. Others won't be able to.

After a few bad earnings, we see that companies are laying off. They are laying off their own consumers. So where does that leave them in a few years? Companies forget that Henry Ford paid his employees a huge wage so that they could buy his cars. The bad economy is as much a function of bad business management as it is Congress.

We have this stupid assumption that everything should grow, always. How is that possible? There are so many factors that are fixed and finite - like the number of customers and how much they can spend.

At BoB, larger VAR's like Dimension Data (owned by NTT), mentioned that customer retention would become more important than customer acquisition (due to cost of acquisition), but total wallet share will also be a factor in success.

What metric are you looking at? What expectation are you setting to your stakeholders? Are you preparing for the shift?

The New Job Marketplace

2012-10-16T00:25:47Z

Jobvite has a slide deck about the future of work. Bigger companies are not creating the same amount of jobs - or the same kind of jobs. Technology replaced a lot of workers, even some salespeople.

The 3 C's - Consolidation, Cloud, (global) Competition - are eliminating jobs by the tens of thousands - ask CenturyLink, Verizon, Cisco, HP.

Think about Apple with its 43,000 employees. It has created how many jobs in its ecosystem, though? For iOS developers, Apple accessories, iPhone repair and factory workers in China.

Many jobs today weren't even around ten years ago. Think SEO, social media and even RubyonRails programmers.

Technology is replacing some jobs and creating others.

More and more people are turning freelance. How do I know? Personal experience. Quite a few folks laid off in Tampa Bay turned to freelance work. vCoder, PeoplePerHour, guru.com, eLance, etsy and so many other sites that are marketplaces for people to sell their skills. I'm not saying that is a reason for the low unemployment numbers, but I know quite a few folks that had to hang a shingle to eat. Add to that more anecdotal evidence in my talk on Advice for Freelancers at BarCamp Tampa Bay on Saturday. Quite a few in the audience are just starting to go freelance from a W-2 employment.

TechCrunch has an article about the new jobs in the new economy. So the Internet (and the technology surrounding it) disrupts newspapers, magazines, book publishing, music, movies, and more, but we didn't think that it would also disrupt hiring, jobs, and how people make a living as well?

What Will Happen to the Gear Vendors?

2012-08-07T18:15:29Z

There used to be a class 4 switch called Coppercom. It was a decent switch and reasonably priced. The company couldn't make a go of it because the ISP and CLEC market was shrinking at the time.

Yesterday there was an announcemnet that telecom CAPEX (capital expenditures) have shrunk. Credit Suisse says the two remaining RBOC's account for nearly 60% of U.S. telecom gear spending. Both companies have diminished spending, especially on the copper plant and DSL. VZ isn't rolling out any more DSL or FiOS - instead they are co-marketing cable!

Ripples in the pond or butterfly wings - no matter how you want to look at it. What will happen to the gear vendors? Tellabs, Ditech Networks, Sonus Networks, Ciena, Adtran, Alcatel-Lucent, Westell Technologies, and Acme Packet are all exposed to the CAPEX plans of the RBOCs.

I see four factors exacerbating this situation:

ZTE and Huawei are creeping in to the US market either.
Consolidation results in less customers for these vendors.
With 60+% of RBOC revenue from cellular, spending will lean to wireless, backhaul.
The move to cloud services means CAPEX is going to a new set of vendors.

Telecom is looking gloomy not cloudy.

Is Cloud Just Hype?

2012-07-23T21:26:15Z

A short conversation with the CEO of VAR Dynamics, an MSP Enabler, about white-label and the hype around cloud. We also talk briefly about cloud and the economy.

Have you read is our first interview with Tony Francisco?

A Parable about Outsourcing

2012-07-16T14:29:12Z

Good Washington Post article that talks about Outsourcing.

Outsourcing works because the firms pay less and don't have to deal with unions or pension plans.

"Simply by having more experience, a specialty contractor is also more likely to hit upon the most efficient and effective ways of doing things and can quickly adopt those improvements throughout its operations." [in theory]

"The second big advantage that outsourcing firms enjoy is the economies of scale." - due to Specialization.

The disadvantage to Outsourcing is poor management. This is due to a couple of things. Outsourcers just hire Cogs for the Wheel of Industry - no outside thinking involved. Paying less means you get what you pay for. In some cases, bad management, which also comes from hiring cogs.

This might explain why customer service is so awful in the telecommunications industry.

Crazy News Today

2012-06-14T18:23:34Z

Nokia To Slash 10,000 Jobs, Shut Several Manufacturing Sites.

Report: Microsoft Negotiating To Buy Yammer For $1 Billion-Plus! Can you say Bubble? Yammer is a private social network for business execs. I get invited to a private social network for business execs every month. Who has time to spend on yet another social site? I have blogs, RSS, email, twitter, FB, LinkedIn and news to read and stay current on.

Analysts that cover telecom should actually know something about telecom. In this article about Windstream expanding into Las Vegas, the writer goofs a lot and drops some buzz words like cloud but misses the mark by this much! One big gaff: Cox is the cableco in Vegas, not Comcast. The only way VZ competes in Vegas is in MPLS and wireless. If anything, the analyst should have just said, "Hey, WIND is slashing 400 managers! Big win for stock holders!" And expansion into Vegas for cloud doesn't require infrastructure or a CO build out, but whatever.

Federal money for broadband - "More than half that money is going to Frontier and CenturyLink, which have until July 24 to tell the FCC what they would do with the money," according to this article. WOW! $90M for C-Link and $72M for Frontier out of the federal silo of $300M. Not for nothing, but these companies should have rolled out Broadband at 4MBx1MB speeds just as conditions for mergers! Instead I get to pay for it - and they get to reap the revenue.

Union Reacts to AT&T Layoffs

2012-02-14T14:59:35Z

Not my usual topic, but I thought I would point out the following, from Rebuild the Dream:

"AT&T recently announced the "surplus" of 740 union AT&T jobs despite their revenues soaring to $126.7 billion and a CEO that made over $27 million in 2011." Nice!

Yesterday, 2/13/12, "30 activists just entered the AT&T Atlanta headquarters and are refusing to leave until every single greedy layoff is rescinded. Simultaneously, an occupation with tents is being set up outside of the building. Watch the Occupation of AT&T now: http://livestream.com/occupyAtlanta

Privacy versus Security

2012-01-25T20:51:22Z

"Concerned about privacy? Maybe you should be concerned about the economy instead. That was the subtext of a keynote speech by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, at a technology conference in the heart of Europe." [Benton]

Not to get political, but privacy is a ship that has sailed. Google, Facebook and other sites track online activities. Credit card companies and Paypal can track both offline and online activities. CarrierIQ software on cell phones is able to see every keystroke. GPS tracking on devices, including your TomTom. Cellphone and Internet logging by ISP's for government agencies track you.

I'm not suggesting we just give up on privacy. I am suggesting that we take the advice of Sandberg and start focusing on the important stuff. Maybe Security is the Important stuff.

When Wikipedia went dark in the face of SOPA and PIPA bills, it caused many supporters in DC to publicly back away. Privately, however, they will back TransPacific Partnership, ACTA and other bills. Why? Hollywood and content companies want it. Just another example of industry influence over voters or common sense in DC.

In the midst of the privacy talk, why isn't there more talk about security? The latest breach at Zappos affected 24 million. Laptops and cellphones are lost daily. Experts agree that mobile threats and breaches are inevitable. We don't need more rules or laws, we have plenty now, including HIPAA and PCI DSS. We need enforcement and monitoring - or really big fines.

There are simple methods for security available, it might be time to do so. "

""I am angry. There are real problems facing the world, and we, as a society, are not doing enough to address them in the right ways, not the ways we know are possible. The old way isn't working, and we know it." This is the opening paragraph to a new ChangeThis manifesto titled Shift & Reset by Brian Reich. "What might be possible if we were really committed, as individuals and as a society?"

From another ChangeThis manifesto, "The real business opportunity is to become more relevant and meaningful to customers in ways that create sales."

The Whole Content System

2012-01-09T21:10:16Z

Yes the whole content system is a mess. Newspapers, magazines, book publishing, music, movies and now TV - all are old school content business models that are in a state of upheaval. Unfortunately, the people in charge of these content systems are fighting the change that is happening - happening in large part because of the Internet - instead of trying to start making changes NOW.

The Arab Spring of 2011 was a similar model: change was coming in the form of popular protests, furthered by social networks and the Internet, fought bitterly and fatally by the regimes in place, but to what end? Many dead and injured BUT CHANGE HAPPENED ANYWAY!

Many thought that after Napster, the music industry would stop being stupid and embrace the new music distribution models evolving. The Industry didn't, but the artists who did - like OAR, Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam (to name a few of my favorites) - have been hugely successful and profitable.

Why can't the rest of the Industry see that?

Radio is one way to listen to music, but let's face it, listening to the same 100 songs plus the syndicated DJ's is annoying. Because of consolidation in radio station ownership, the powers that be can only look at the bottom line. Wrong place to look. **Successful businesses think about Employees and Customers **(in that order). From that viewpoint can a successful business model is executed.

Albert Einstein said, "Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value." I take that to mean, "Give Value First and Foremost." All else flows from that.

With SOPA and ProtectIP, the RIAA and the MPAA hope to legislate morals nd protections. Why? Why not just give your customers what they want, the way they want it? Isn't that what a vendor is supposed to do?

After Napster, there were numerous other P2P sites like Limewire that popped up. Then a number of online radio sites, like Pandora, Grooveshark, Spotify, Rdio, and more. All have had some fight with the RIAA over licensing. Now we have Google Music, Amazon Cloud Player and Apple's iCloud, too. Do you see a pattern here? People want to listen to what they want, when they want, where they want, on the device of their choosing.

My buddy suggested that their be a website to donate directly to an artist. For example, you downloaded - legally or illegally - a song or album that you liked so much, you wanted to give some money to the artist. That's not a bad way to do it.

One comedian, Louis CK, who is maybe a B list-er, just made over $1 million in revenue on a comedy show, Live at the Beacon, that he produced and distributed himself online at $5 per copy.

The Internet works as a model for distribution. The content is key. CK proved that. So do many authors who self-produce on Lulu and Kindle. [Maybe the key is micro-payments, which I will define here as anything under $6.]

TechDirt is probably the one website that I read that is on top of the copyright-distribution-legislation issues. In a recent article, TechDirt kind of sums up the consumer thinking that WB (and others in the Netflix fight) don't understand: "It appears that WB is implicitly admitting that the strategy of delaying the rental period of a movie by 28 days has been a total failure, in the decision to increase the delay to 56 days. They're basically admitting that not enough people were "buying" in those 28 days... so they somehow think that doubling the wait will increase the purchases. It won't. If people really want to pay the extra money to buy the DVD, they're likely to do so pretty early on. It's not like they're waiting 50 days in and then saying "gee, I can't rent the movie, so I'll just pay a lot more money than necessary to own an obsolete piece of plastic." " BINGO!

People want to stream their content - video, music, TV, movies, etc. - through whatever device they have - blu-ray, xbox, PS3, Roku, GoogleTV, AppleTV, laptop, tablet, etc. [Same holds true for blogs, magazines, and books.]

TechDirt goes on to explain, "I do believe that [MPAA and RIAA] current strategies of alienating their best customers, relying on government protection, and pretending this is some sort of epic battle between good and evil aren't just doomed to fail, they're actively making things worse for themselves." [Sounds a lot like telco doesn't it?]

I'm not encouraging piracy. I actually despise it. We live in an immediate gratification culture. Vendors have to accept that.

We also live in an age where people expect a lot for free. Facebook is free, but people still bitch about it. So's this blog and same thing. Our Culture has a high expectation. It's about perceived value.

Content is really important. Government has to keep the masses entertained or they will revolt.

However, we have a spiraling problem: content costs a lot to make, while disposable income in America is declining. That combination is a disaster waiting to happen.

Let's look at the NFL. They just raised their fees to the TV channels that carry them by 60-70%! [Alan Quayle has a good piece on it.] So ESPN, which is already the most expensive TV channel for service providers to deal with, will be raising its rates to cover this cost. Even the extra $3.50 is just for one channel. What about all the other channels?

I have a rant about ESPN in general anyway. Are they really a sports channel??? Besides college bowl games and some college basketball, the only sport it televises is Monday Night Football, which had bad games all year. This creates a brand issue for them. PBA, Poker and other non-sport stuff is cheap to produce but it is just filler, since they can't run talk-shows and Sportscenter all day (just most of it). ESPN has the same issue as the music and movie industry: too much looking at profit, not enough good content to warrant the money.

We are seeing cord cutting, because the consumer dollars are decreasing -- and they would rather give up TV than cellphones. Cellphone bills average more than residential line bills used to. For a family of 4, it is easily 4 times what the home phone used to cost. Granted you can do more with it, but dollars are dollars. And with 16% of the population at poverty level start thinking what that means for the service economy engine - and all types of businesses.

You have economic and technological forces working to breakdown old school content systems. It will be interesting to see if any lessons are learned and applied in 2012. I highly doubt it because:

Mergers Cost Jobs

2011-12-07T16:25:29Z

In the wake of AT&T getting caught misleading the federal agencies about the benefits of its merger with T-Mobile (FCC report here), we see that the merger of PAETEC and Windstream has already resulted in job losses.

Windstream cuts 58 jobs at Palm Harbor office is just the start of at least 280 jobs being cut from its combined workforce of 14,500. Synergies require job cuts. Richmond is losing 70. Even Rochester is losing 52 jobs, according to 13 WHAM TV.

Mergers can't work without job losses, office closings, and other economic detriment. It is what it is, but don't put lipstick on it and try to sell the pig as a boon to anyone but your shareholders. And I think that means short term shareholders, because mounting debt combined with flat markets and more competition in a climate of stagnate job growth means the long term picture is worse than the pig.

Now the ILEC mouthpieces are writing about how unfair the FCC report was. Really? Because the FCC staff had 2 million pages of documents from AT&T and T-Mobile to sift through, including the "smoking gun memo" that said AT&T didn't need to buy T-Mobile, it could spend one-tenth the $39B price tag to build out the network itself. AT&T also admitted to Congress that it mismanaged its network. They all have spectrum. Or be like VZW and buy it from Leap and SpectrumCo - or LightSquared or DISH et al.

And let's not forget one big thing: both cellcos have lousy customer service records. That HARMS consumers. The FTC, DOJ and FCC were established to protect CONSUMERS, not other companies (Sprint) or shareholders. We have very little (real) competition in telecom.

Final thought: Most mergers fail!

It isn't about bigger. It's about Better. Zappos grew to a $1B with great culture and customer service. Say that about a telco.

It isn't about bigger. Ask Intermedia (ICI, the first billion dollar CLEC that had to sell to MCI) or PAETEC (the company that Arunas Chesonis said needed to be a billion dollar company. For what?). It's about Innovation. Ask a company in the Duopoly about Innovation.