arpu – Steve Blum's Blog

Qualcomm's consumer services business going to the dogs

15 October 2012 by Steve Blum
arpu, business model, churn, consumer electronics, ctia, mobile, mobile broadband, pepcom, qualcomm, retailing, revenue, snaptracs

Tagg is a mobile pet tracker and promising veterinary diagnostic tool, offered by Snaptracs, a Qualcomm subsidiary. The hardware costs $100, with ongoing service at $8 per month for the first pet and and $1 for each additional one.

That eight bucks gets you a text message whenever your dog strays from home, with GPS feeds to help you find him. Or your cat, if it’s one of the few big enough to handle the weight and tolerant enough to wear it.… More

A brief postmortem on the wireless Internet utility

14 November 2008 by Steve Blum
arpu, Barcelona, churn, community networks, municipal wireless, operating cost, subscriber acquisition cost, WiFi, wireless broadband business model, WISP

Nearly all of the city-scale, mainly WiFi-based wireless ISPs of the past three years are dead. Some, like Philadelphia, lumber on as zombie ventures. A few small town systems will continue to operate as long as the social and political consensus supports the subsidy required. And there are a couple of big city projects that haven’t burned through their initial operating capital yet.

But the rest are dead. The disease that killed them was cash flow hemorrhage, brought on by virulent churn.… More