In response to Google's petition to the FCC asking that further conditions be placed on Verizon Wireless to ensure that it follow the open access rules for the C Block spectrum it won in the 700 Mhz auction, Verizon Wireless has posted a statement. Spokesperson Jim Gerace says that despite Google's contention that Verizon might wiggle out of those rules for the handsets it provides to customers, it is Google itself that is trying to play games.
It's really no surprise that despite not winning spectrum, they continue to try to change the rules and further their own business interests through the regulatory process. We expect to file at the Federal Communications Commission within the next several days on this matter.
Gerace says that Google's filing has no "legal basis" (in contrast to what a Verizon spokesperson told me yesterday which is that Google has no "legal standing," a big difference). Promising that Google will abide by the open access rules, Gerace says that "if Google or anybody else has evidence that we aren't playing by the rules," there are legitimate ways to address that problem presumably aside from attaching further conditions to Verizon's licenses.
Verizon will file more detailed comments at the FCC within the next several days.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:45 PM | Print | Comments (0)Now that Qwest has weighed in with its Q1 08 earnings results, it's time to once again take a broader look at how well the incumbent telcos are doing in the video business. Based on our analysis, the top four incumbent telcos (AT&T, Verizon, Qwest and Embarq) accelerated their growth in the multichannel video business during the quarter, adding a collective net new 651,000 video customers during the quarter, up 31% over the net adds for Q1 07 and up 19% over the net adds for Q4 07.
At the end of the quarter the telcos served a combined total of 5.7 million video customers (either through fiber-based service such as AT&T's Uverse or Verizon's FiOS or through DBS partnerships), 70% more than they served at the end of Q1 07.
Of course AT&T and Verizon dominate this market with the two major phone companies accounting for 84% of the total. But even Qwest, a distant third in the video game (and the telco game for that matter) posted healthy gains on the video front during the quarter even as it lost access lines and wireless customers and saw its broadband customer growth continue to decline.
To download data on Qwest's Q1 07 financial and operating data, or to download our spreadsheet that spells out the telcos' video customer growth history over the past several years, visit here. The data is free although registration is required.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:40 PM | Print | Comments (0)The WSJ is reporting that the much-rumored monster WiMax venture with U.S. cable operators will be announced tomorrow. Breathing much life into the almost-dead broadband WiMax technology, the venture calls for Sprint to merge its broadband wireless unit with Kirkland, WA-based broadband wireless pioneer Clearwire.
The U.S. cable industry has been behind this new venture for a while and is backing it up with a lot of bucks -- $1.05 billion from Comcast, $550 million from Time Warner and $100 million from Brighthouse Networks. WiMax proponent Intel is putting in another $1 billion and, very interestingly, Google is slugging in $500 million of its cash. At one point, Best Buy was a party to the venture, until the negotiations among the mighty communications titans got too complex. The WSJ says that the venture is worth $12 billion altogether.
The new venture will be called Clearwire. Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff will be CEO of the new venture, while Craig McCaw, wireless pioneer and founder of Clearwire (and a long-time friend to the cable industry) will be Chairman.
Details are scarce -- the official announcement comes tomorrow. But, the paper says that the cable operators hope to resell co-branded wireless service from the new venture. Let's hope the ops add more interesting color tomorrow, such as the introduction of portable broadband video or Internet access. The co-branded thing was the kind of arrangement that these companies had with Sprint when they sold the now-defunct and ultimately unsuccessful Pivot co-branded wireless voice service.
Google is the most interesting company in the bunch. The search giant has invested heavily in its Android mobile system and has pushed (and pushed again) to make sure some of the 700 MHz spectrum recently sold via auction remain open to third parties.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:36 PM | Print | Comments (0)Scott Karp has this excellent post today in which he highlights an overwhelming problem plaguing the Internet: news overkill. He uses as a case in point the recent, insane and largely redundant flood of news about Microsoft's decision to abandon its buyout bid for Yahoo.
Google News is tracking 2,000 stories about the high-profile tent-folding and that, presumably, doesn't even include the thousands of bloggers who felt obligated to cover this (fundamentally predictable -- more on that below) development. Scott sums it up: "So while there's more content on the web, there may be less news."
I couldn't agree more and I hesitate to even write this post because I don't want to add to the growing level of news noise. Lately it seems that every publication and blog feels obligated to chime in on the developments of the day, to the point that it's becoming almost impossible for me to find original content anymore.
Not that original content doesn't exist but that it's hard to find when I have to sift through 2,000 articles that on the surface seem the same. As Scott puts it, each version of a story "reduces that marginal economic value of all the others."
Sure, we all have something to say and I sometimes fail to restrain myself from weighing in on a subject. But lately I've made a concerted effort to not write about the hot topics because I don't want to contribute to the content pollution exemplified by the incredible overkill coverage of this M&A disaster.
As Scott advises all journalists and bloggers: "Don’t contribute to the commodification of news on the web."
As an aside, the whole Microsoft-Yahoo episode was truly an intense waste of journalistic resources even if it made for great theater. Not only would a merger of the two companies have yielded little in the way of innovation, but also the outcome seemed fated almost from the outset. Back in February I wrote:
Microsoft, then, might be Yahoo!'s last best chance to get out of its declining business before it's too late. The worst-case scenario for Yahoo! now: no other bidder comes along and Microsoft doesn't up the offer enough for Yahoo! to save face. If Microsoft decides that a brutal shareholder fight isn't worth it (one very real possibility according to the executive leading Microsoft's hostile bid), then Yahoo! will be left alone to face a future of dwindling revenues, profits and relevance.
At that point, a $44.6 billion offer would, in retrospect, look pretty good to Yahoo! and its shareholders and they might seek to get a buyout deal going again. But like home owners that price their houses too high for sale, Yahoo! might end up "chasing the bottom" and ironically wind up with far less than the company is truly worth, an outcome that Yahoo! claims it is avoiding by rejecting Microsoft's bid.
Sure enough, that's what has happened. Microsoft walked away from a deal and now Yahoo wishes it hadn't held out for more because now it will likely end up with far less.
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