AT&T (formerly SBC) is slated to announce tomorrow that it will offer a DSL service priced at $12.99/mo., a new low for high-speed service. The tier, called DSL Express, will offer download speeds of up to 1.5 Mbps and will be available to only new customers — and that bottom-scraping price will be good for only one year. After that, the price reverts to $29.99/mo.
AT&T will also launch a “pro” tier promotion, extending a 1.5 to 3.0 Mbps service for only $17.99/mo., another new low given the 3 meg speed. That price is only good for a year too.
This pricing gambit by AT&T is clearly an effort to spur DSL growth among the broadband late-bloomers, which is pretty much the only new customers that broadband service providers have left. It could also be a reflection of new pricing pressure being put on the market by AOL’s new broadband options.
AOL announced another broadband partner today — Charter Communications. The online giant is teaming with cable and DSL providers to offer an AOL-branded broadband service priced at $24.95/mo., lower than the typical $29.99/mo. service offered by SBC and Verizon, the two telcos that kicked off the broadband price war two years ago.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:01 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Municipal Wi-Fi projects are sprouting up all across the country, but one in Cambridge, MA is, I believe, the only muni-Wi-Fi project that will be headed by a university —- MIT. The city of Cambridge has partnered with MIT to roll out a mesh Wi-Fi network by this summer.
The joint effort was originally formed to bring free or low-cost broadband to low-income areas, but now has been expanded to a city-wide effort. Another Cambridge institution of higher learning, Harvard University, may also join the project.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:52 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Today is a net-neutrality kind of day — media activist Jeff Chester sent me a link to his piece in The Nation entitled “End of the Internet?” And while it’s arguably a worthy contribution to the net neutrality debate, I would caution advocates of this notion to not overstate their case, as Jeff does.
For example, Jeff contends that all kinds of ills will befall society if some form of two-tiered Internet evolves, including, and I kid you not, harm to the environment, civil rights, our political system and more.
Without proactive intervention, the values and issues that we care about—civil rights, economic justice, the environment and fair elections—will be further threatened by this push for corporate control.
This is just not credible.
Later, he posits a scenario that seems to suggest that a two-tiered Internet will allow cable companies and telcos to “spy” on its customers. Selectively quoting from a Cisco white paper on deep packet inspection, which allows network providers to distinguish among the kinds of packets flowing over their networks, Chester says
Such tracking and billing is made possible because they will know “the identity and profile of the individual subscriber,” “what the subscriber is doing” and “where the subscriber resides.”
He doesn’t come out and say it, but the implication is: If we don’t get net neutrality, your broadband company will know what you are doing at all times. Please. As if they don’t already have that capability today.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:29 AM | Print | Comments (1)
Comcast issued its Q4 05 earnings this morning showing strong growth in all new services and a reversal in its basic customer loss. Total revenue generating units climbed to 41.1 mil., up from 40.2 mil. in Q3 05 and 38.4 mil. in Q4 04, thanks to healthy growth across the board in video, high-speed and, to a lesser degree, voice customers (during much of 2005 Comcast was eliminating its circuit-switched voice business as it geared up for VoIP).
During the earnings call, President Steve Burke focused only on Comcast’s imminent massive VoIP launches. During late-2005, Comcast launched 26 markets with VoIP services — toward the tail-end of the year Comcast was adding 10,000 new voice customers per week and during the first few weeks of 2006 that run-rate ramped up to 14,000 to 15,000 new voice customers per week. While the big campaign to roll out VoIP didn’t really start until late in the year, Comcast added 79K net new VoIP customers during Q4 05, a growth rate that towers over the 12K it added in Q3 05 and the 10K added in Q4 04. (See table at end).
“In 2005 we really laid the foundation for the growth we’ll experience in 2006,” Burke said. “We’re ready now to concentrate on the phone roll out.”
Comcast has so many competitive advantages over its rivals, Burke stressed, with the company able to offer triple-play services to 25 million homes. Telcos can only reach 1% of Comcast’s customer base with triple-play offerings, according to company estimates.
The goal is to sell voice-video-data packages to the twenty million homes in Comcast’s territory that don’t buy anything from the company. Therefore, Comcast will be targeting a $99/month (at least for one year) package to non-subscribing homes as it rolls out triple-play services.
Indeed, Comcast seems to be aiming for a lot of growth in non-subscribing or low-end homes generally. CEO Brian Roberts said during the call that Comcast’s “enhanced basic” push, which gives a low-end digital box to all customers regardless of whether they buy digital service or not, will get services such as VOD into homes that don’t buy a lot of services from Comcast.
“Our strategy is to take that product [digital] through the enhanced cable and make some version of it available to most of our 22 million customers,” he said. But, the company is also poised to push services to non-subscribing homes. “We hope the power of that bundle will allow us to extend our relationships into more of those homes [non-Comcast customers] in the years ahead,” Roberts said.
| Comcast Voice Service Metrics (000) | |||||
| 4Q04 | 1Q05 | 2Q05 | 3Q05 | 4Q05 | |
| Marketable Homes Passed | 10,437 | 11,277 | 12,227 | 16,524 | 21,378 |
| Subscribers | 1,223 | 1,228 | 1,230 | 1,242 | 1,321 |
| Penetration | 11.7% | 10.9% | 10.1% | 7.5% | 6.2% |
| Quarterly Net Sub. Additions | 10 | 4 | 3 | 12 | 79 |
| Monthly Average Rev./Customer | $47.30 | $47.07 | $46.06 | $46.03 | $45.19 |
| Emerging Media Dynamics analysis of company data © 2006. | |||||
| *includes legacy circuit-switched and new VoIP services. | |||||
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:39 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Comcast issued its Q4 05 earnings today and during the analysts call (replay should be available here), CEO Brian Roberts said the company hasn’t held any discussions with content providers about charging “two-tiered” Internet access fees.
We have not had any discussions with content providers related to any charges directly from such providers.
To be clear, Comcast doesn’t like the whole net neutrality push, and Roberts said that he wants to make sure that Comcast will always have the right to manage its network in the way that it deems best. But, “We continue to believe that proponents of net neutrality are seeking a solution in search of a problem,” Roberts said. “We don’t believe this is the right policy.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:33 AM | Print | Comments (1)It seems that the blogosphere, the press and the Internet cognescenti can’t seem to agree whether an Internet “boom” is underway. Some days the pack sways in favor of a boom and other days opinion shifts against a boom.
USA Today’s Matt Krantz has this article today suggesting that investors are far more sober than they were during the craziness of 1999 and that no real boom is taking place.
Outside of Google and a few other choice names, it’s hard to find an Internet company that gets investors’ juices flowing — let alone gets them to pull out their wallets. From a technological standpoint, the Internet has lived up to and even surpassed its wildest expectations. But investment-wise, the recent results have been a disappointment at best.
The focus now is on building solid businesses that actually make profits, although Internet titans are buying out the successful newbies as the industry consolidates, according to the article. But, because more stable Internet businesses are evolving, look for a boom-let of IPOs in late 2007, Mitch Rubin, portfolio manager of the Baron iOpportunity fund says in the piece.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:20 AM | Print | Comments (0)In this interview with Business Week’s Roger O. Crockett, AT&T CFO Randall Stephenson says that the telco/soon-to-be-IPTV provider plans to launch in Q2 its HomeZone product, a new service called which integrates the Internet with the TV set via a DSL-enabled set-top box.
We will be announcing what we call Home Zone. This changes how you think about broadband and TV. I have a beta version of it in my house right now. It’s a set-top box. They removed my old Dish Network satellite set-top and replaced it with this one. It’s connected to my TV and stereo, and it has DSL connectivity on it. I can now get Movielink (a Web site where full-length movies can be downloaded to a PC) coming into my TV set via DSL. I also can sit back and look at all my digital photos on my TV. I can listen on my stereo to the music library on my PC. I can sit back using my TV remote control and access my music library on my PC. Were going out and working on a lot of content relationships to take advantage of this. We’ll be bringing this to market in the second quarter.
HomeZone is sort of an interim step toward full-fledged IPTV and is aimed at AT&T’s Dish Network customers. Customers who subscribe to both AT&T and Dish will be able to combine video services with Internet functionality and do such things as get caller i.d. on the TV set, view web-delivered video content and access online music services.
As far as the true IPTV offering, Stephenson says it’s still on track and that the telco will be rolling it out “in very measured terms” during the May-June time frame. He also notes that they still haven’t mastered HDTV in the test-run, but that HD will be part of the commercial roll-out (I’m very leery of how successful AT&T can be until they get HDTV incorporated into the IPTV offering).
Stephenson also says that AT&T will roll out “in mass” the Yahoo Go phone in Q2, which interconnects Yahoo services via mobile phone and Internet-enabled TV.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:56 AM | Print | Comments (0)Cathering Yang has this piece in today’s Business Week online that contends Verizon plans to reserve 80% of its Internet capacity for itself, leaving only 20% for everybody else, a notion that fits right in with the fears of net neutrality advocates.
Now, Cerf [Internet pioneer Vint Cerf who now works for Google] and his Net compatriots have new ammunition to back up their fears. Documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission show that Verizon Communications (VZ) is setting aside a wide lane on its fiber-optic network for delivering its own television service. According to Marvin Sirbu, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who examined the documents, more than 80% of Verizon’s current capacity is earmarked for carrying its service, while all other traffic jostles in the remainder.
Silicon Valley companies plan to raise a stink about this network configuration at a February 7 Congressional hearing. I wonder (but don’t know) if this allegation isn’t just a bit distorted and a bit unfair. I suspect that Verizon’s capacity allocation plans are for Verizon’s fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) networks, which the telco plans to use to deliver multichannel video, high-def television and so forth.
If that’s the case, even 20% of the FTTP networks is probably a heck of a lot more capacity than users get today with only DSL. So it’s not like Verizon will be squeezing anybody out. Using an imperfect analogy, cable operators today probably reserve 99% of their networks’ capacities for themselves and not the open Internet.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:41 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
