Steve Blum's Blog
AT&T seems comfortable feeding a lot of bandwidth to its unregulated Uverse customers. Research done by Broadband DSL Reports indicates AT&T isn’t enforcing the 250 GB monthly data cap it tells Uverse customers to expect.
On the other hand, heavy users of traditional DSL service – tied to the regulated side of the business – are being throttled if they exceed monthly caps as low as 150 GB, according to the newsletter.… More
Sharp consumers can sometimes save hundreds of dollars a year by negotiating with cable and telephone companies, according to a recent study by Consumer Reports. But few people are even giving it a try.
Only a third of the triple/quad play subscribers surveyed said they tried to bargain for a better deal for Internet, television and telephone service. And the people responding were subscribers to Consumer Reports, who aren’t exactly passive shoppers.… More
Blackberry surprised the financial community by reporting a profit of 22 cents a share for its fiscal quarter that ended earlier this month. Expectations were for a loss of about that size, not a gain.
It certainly is good news for Blackberry. It looks more like the result of tighter management than anything else, but there’s nothing wrong with that. So long as market success follows.
The big problem is in the subscriber numbers, which fell by about 3 million.… More
Bada is Samsung’s in-house operating system for low cost smartphones, but its days might be numbered. Tizen 2.0 has been released to developers, with a consumer version likely to be available on phones in the fall.
This Linux-based, open source operating system is also backed by Samsung, along with other major technology players. And that’s the key difference. The burden is distributed across many companies and individual developers who, for one reason or another, invest their time in developing Tizen source code and writing apps to run on it.… More
AT&T’s public WiFi network is not the offload destination of choice for its smart phone customers, according to usage data from January 2013. Instead, customers prefer to log onto randomly available hotspots where ever they might be – home, work or in a pub.
In the U.S., only 3% of a typical smart phone user’s WiFi traffic goes via a WiFi access point managed by his or her’s primary mobile carrier.… More
Dell’s fourth quarter 2012 financial results show a rapidly deteriorating presence in the consumer sector specifically and personal devices generally. Released this afternoon after Wall Street trading had closed for the day, the figures show a 24% decline in Dell’s consumer business and an overall decline of 20% in desktop and mobile device sales.
On the plus side, Dell says its networking sales are up 42%, its enterprise services business grew 6% and it’s seeing better PC results from large accounts – those numbers only dropped 7%.… More
New Zealand is a relatively costly place to do Internet-related business. There’s only one underseas cable linking it to the outside world, the Southern Cross, which goes from Australia to California via New Zealand.
That’s two paths in and out of the country, but one owner. It’s not a competitive market. According to Market Clarity, an Australian telecoms research company, Kiwis pay 5.8 times more than Aussies for a gigabyte .… More
Four times as much traffic goes via WiFi as on mobile data connections, when users’ Android smart phones and tablets have the capability to do both. A recent mobile data study by Cisco showed that, worldwide, the average Android owner sent 55.4 MB of data on WiFi connections and only 13.9 MB via mobile data networks on the average day in December 2012.
Cisco’s conclusion is that tablet and smart phone customers are using WiFi as a way of “staying within the limits of their cellular data plans”.… More
Three years ago, unlimited data plans accounted for 81% of monthly mobile subscriptions worldwide. Now, only 45% are unlimited, according to research conducted by Cisco.
With or without monthly caps, the growth in mobile data traffic is booming, but Cisco’s white papers shows a change in usage patterns corresponding to this business model shift.
Unlimited plans still generate more traffic per user, with an average of 1.3 GB per month versus 922 MB for tiered subscribers.… More
Golden Bear Broadband wants $119 million from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to build 1,000 miles of fiber backbone and lease 1,200 miles more in 16 northern California counties. That’s the real Northern California, (mostly) beyond the urban reach of the Bay Area and Sacramento region.
It’s not crazy talk. The Digital 395 project in eastern California, paid for by the federal stimulus program and CASF, is similar in size, cost and population density.… More