Ofcom consultation on BT's NGN

This report is very interesting. In it, the UK regulator OFCOM responds to changes in BT's investment plans in its network upgrade. In the process, the consultation does a good job in laying out the technology and regulatory implications not just for consumers but also for competitors. It is a bit technical but well worth the read if you're interested in NGNs.

Miscellaneous topics ...

I had a few items that I wanted to blog about over the past couple of weeks. So, in an effort to clear out my backlog, let me summarize them here.

• The US GAO published this report, which is fairly critical of the US FCC and other agencies with regard to the upcoming conversion to digital television. The "switch off" is just over one year away, and consumer education has been basically non-existent.
  

  Update (2008-01-03): The FCC published their Third Periodic Review of the digital TV transition. No mention of the GAO report that I could find ...



• On a similar note, the UK regulator Ofcom issued this report that examines alternatives for using the "digital dividend", which arises from the sale of the spectrum formerly used by analog television.


• Changing gears a bit ... this article in BusinessWeek gives hope to the fans of Municipal Wireless. The Spanish WiFi operator FON seems poised to enter the void that Earthlink is leaving after it reevaluated its participation in this market. They have a different business model. Will they find more success?


• There are a couple of interesting items on the international front.
  
  
  
  • Take a look at this (from Swivel, one of my favorite sites), which shows the dominance of prepaid wireless in China's market.
  
  
  • Gordon Cook unearthed a fascinating, detailed report on providing wireless to Nepal. See Gordon's post here. I have been unable to locate it on the World Bank's website.
  
  
  • In this article, the possibility of a "natural limit" to Kenya's mobile market is raised. I am always suspicious of these kinds of projections, because they normally assume that the future will be driven by forces similar to those driving the markets today. History has shown us the disruptive power of wireless technology, after all ...
  
  
• Speaking of natural limits, I have been interested in the pending conversion to IPv6, which has been prophesized for several years already but which has not yet happened. This article over at CircleID provides more grist for this mill. Is it different this time, or should we expect more of the same?

Happy New Year, dear readers!

2007 OFCOM Communications Review

The British regulator OFCOM released its 2007 review. The report is worth reading ... here are a few of the report's key points:

• The availability of broadband to more than half of UK households has driven the development of converged services and devices.
• Convergence has opened up major revenue opportunities for the producers of many content types. Over the first half of 2007 90% of UK singles sales by volume came from digital downloads to the computer or a mobile handset. The market for computer game playing has also been transformed, with millions of consumers worldwide now engaging in shared online gaming experiences.
• Audiovisual content, by contrast, continues to be largely broadcaster-funded, although independent producer revenue from new media rights more than doubled to £42m in 2006.
• The traditional advertiser-funded model of broadcast audiovisual output faces pressures both from the growing popularity of online advertising (it rose by nearly half in 2006 to £2bn) and from the multichannels (which attracted advertising revenue of over £1bn in 2006).
• Increasingly sophisticated devices are beginning to influence consumer behaviour. Fifteen percent of individuals now have a digital video recorder (DVR) and up to 78% of adults who own them say they always, or almost always, fast-forward through the adverts when watching recorded programmes.
• Bundled communications services are increasingly popular with consumers, with 40% of households now taking more than one communications service from the same provider (up a third on last year). A majority of broadband customers take it as part of a bundle.
• Each person now consumes more than seven hours of media and communications services cumulatively per day. However, the tendency to consume some media simultaneously means that the actual time spent on media is likely to be less than this.
• Digital television penetration broke through the 80% barrier in Q1 2007, taking the total number of homes with multichannel television to 20.4 million (80.5% of the total).
• Radio reach has been stable over the last five years at around 90%. However, total listening hours fell by 1.4% in the year to Q1 2007, and are down 4.0% on five years ago. Listening hours have fallen furthest among 25-34 year olds, down by 17.3% over five years, and among children, down 8.7%. However, the over-55’s are now listening to more radio, with hours up by 5.5%.
• Some 58% of listeners say they have accessed radio through one of the digital platforms (up seven percentage points on last year); 41% have listened via DTV, 24% over the internet, and 8% via mobile phone. Twenty seven per cent of UK adults now own an MP3 player, with 5% using them to listen to radio podcasts.
• Average household spend on telecoms services fell by nearly a pound in 2006 to £64.73 per month. For the first time, average mobile spend fell (by 70p to £31.72) as falling prices more than compensated for an increase in the total number of connections and in the average number of voice calls and text messages per subscriber. Like-for-like prices (based on a basket of services with average usage at 2006 levels) fell by nearly 9%.
• Total industry revenue in 2006 was £47.0bn, of which £38.5bn was retail revenue (i.e. revenue from end-users). This was an increase of 1.4% on 2005 but represents significantly slower growth than the previous five years as fixed-line revenues declined and growth in mobile and broadband revenues slowed.
• More than half of UK households had broadband by March 2007. The average (blended) headline speed in June 2007 was 4.6Mbit/s, although actual speeds experienced are often considerably lower, varying according to the quality and length of line from premises to exchange and the number of simultaneous users.
• Households with a mobile connection (93%) exceeded households with a fixed connection (90%) for the first time in 2006. Average calls per mobile connection rose above 100 minutes a month for the first time, while average calls per fixed-line connection fell below 300 minutes.
• Local loop unbundling accelerated through 2006 so that by the end of March 2007, 72% of UK premises were connected to an unbundled exchange (an increase from 45% in March 2006). The proportion of premises in unbundled areas taking LLU services rose from 3% in March 2006 to 9% in March 2007.
  
• Analysis of time spent online reveals that Britain is a nation of shoppers and social networkers. More time was spent on eBay than on any other web site, and social networking sites Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are all in the top ten sites by time spent.
• Women aged 25-34 spend over 20% more time online than their male counterparts. ‘Silver surfers’ also account for an increasing amount of internet use with nearly 30% of total time spent on the internet accounted for by over-50s (although, as over-50s account for 41% of the UK population, their internet usage remains significantly lower than average).

How many of these facts and trends are unique to the UK? What are the implications of these trends for regulatory policy and the strategies of the firms in the marketplace? Are consumers better or worse off, on balance? Are social goals (eg. universal service) being met?

Ofcom report on wireless in the last mile

I'm back in business after getting the "powder flu" (see this for causes of this disease ... it looks like I may get a relapse!).

One of the discussion points in the literature is whether wireless (eg. municipal wireless systems) can serve as an effective "third pipe" to help reduce the concerns about implicit collusion between service providers. This report from the UK regulator Ofcom sheds light on this question. The report's author notes:

One obvious question then arises - can wireless address the needs of Broadband 2.0? It would have to do so at a competitive cost, which means preferring self install indoor systems and minimising base station numbers, perhaps by working at the lower frequencies of the UHF band. But before evaluating specific wireless technology approaches, benchmarking against access technologies in other countries was performed, with the following results

1. It was quickly apparent that countries leading on bandwidth to the home are all using some form of fibre system. Whilst Japan/Korea are doing this with government sponsorship, Verizon and AT&T in the US have recently begun fibre roll-outs on a purely commercial basis. This is a watershed development for fibre in the local loop.
   
2. Interest in fibre is high in the EU too, but some operators have halted their roll-out plans due to the absence of an FCC-style forbearance on fibre unbundling within the EU.
   
3. Benchmarking against upcoming wireless standards showed these were biased towards
   small screen mobile content delivery, i.e. they are not attempting to address the challenge of the Broadband 2.0 requirements for delivery of HD services to the home.