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@ CTIA: T-Mobile USA Details Dev Program; Android, Sidekick Not In Plans At Start
Truly Ubiquitous Broadband is Getting Closer
Elektrobit is showing off its reference design for a multimode 3G and satellite handset phone at the CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment show this week in San Francisco, and it’s a far cry from the clunky satellite phones of yore. It first unveiled the phone in April, during the larger CTIA Wireless show. At that time Elektrobit said TerreStar, a network that plans to operate a combined terrestrial and satellite network, would use the phone, but since Terrestar was experiencing financial and management problems, few industry watchers got excited.
However in the five months since, TerreStar has signed an agreement with AT&T that allows for seamless hand-offs between AT&T’s 3G network and TerreStar’s satellite network. So a truly worldwide 3G phone (AT&T operates a GSM network) is getting closer, although it still relies on TerreStar launching its satellite next year. The deal with AT&T has me thinking that TerreStar is focusing less on the terrestrial aspects of its planned satellite and terrestrial network, which would lower its costs of building out a network and possibly keep the satellite company in the game.
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It’s a Wrap: CTIA Review
Now that the haze of exhaustion has worn off, I’m reviewing my notes from CTIA. Our cheat sheet was spot on — with the exception of an Android phone, that is. The same prototypes were available that folks saw in February at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, but there was no actual handset there with which to muck around.
Another disappointment was Sprint’s delay of the launch of Xohm until later this summer. Yet even despite the sense that LTE has gained the upper hand with existing carriers, plenty of vendors were showing WiMAX products. But really, the real news at CTIA this year was around the services that can be delivered over a mobile phone, not the phones or the networks on which those services will be accessed.
I left the mobile TV news to NewTeeVee. On the handset side, touch phones reigned, but there was little else to get excited about. Speech recognition, however, has really gained credibility as a navigation tool with a product launch by Yahoo of its speech-powered oneSearch product and several announcements from Nuance Communications, ranging from voicemail to text to a navigation partnership with TeleNav.
Which brings me to the space that I believe will have the most impact on my life in the near term — Internet-connected navigation services. Om has covered the Dash Express, which is designed for the car, but CTIA made me rethink my plans for a Dash and refocus on my phone.
In June, the Samsung Instinct will combine voice, turn-by-turn directions and an unlimited data plan to produce the BLT of personal nav devices. Allowing voice input and output without forcing me to pay an extra $10 a month to access the service makes me consider changing carriers. I also learned about Dial Directions, a voice-activated search service accessed by calling DIR-ECT-IONS. Simply state your current location and where you want to go, and the service will text you turn-by-turn directions. Some of the navigation options from Wayfinder were useful as well.
Indeed, this year the excitement centered on mobile phone services rather than the phones themselves. For carriers worried about, in the words of Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, becoming mere “bitpipes,” such an emphasis represents both a worry and an opportunity.
Help: We Need Tips to Lighten Our Load
After lugging my laptop, camera, tape recorder, sundry cords, a phone and notepads around the Las Vegas Convention Center for CTIA, I feel like a packhorse rather than a blogger. This got me thinking about how to lighten my load.
Ideally I want to be able to travel with a laptop (MacBook) and a phone. Thanks to Internet radio and Hulu, I’ve eliminated a lot of of my entertainment gadgets, but I’m still packing a lot everything listed above.
Plus, I have enough cords to restrain a linebacker. I would love to hear what tools you guys use, especially when it comes to eliminating cameras, cords and maybe the external 3G card. I’m especially curious how many people have given up a laptop for short trips and instead travel with a mini keyboard and a smart phone. Bueller? Anyone? Anyone?
US Wireless Biz: By The Numbers
Some fun facts from CTIA’s mid-year 2007 survey results (Download PDF):
- At the end of first half of 2007, there were 243.4 million subscribers or about 10.4M net new additions. UBS Research estimates that number works out to about 80% penetration of the U.S. population, versus 77% at year-end 2006 and 73% at mid-year 2006.
- For the first half of 2007, CTIA survey pegged wireless revenues at $68.7 billion up 12% from last year.
- Data revenues continued to show robust growth of 63% and contributed roughly 15% to total revenues.
- Average revenue per user (ARPU) was $49.94.
- Minutes of use (MOU) per subscriber were 732. It all added up to 1.1 trillion minutes of talk. That’s a lot of yakking!
- In 1H 2007, the average local call’s length was 3.13 minutes.
- CTIA says wireless carriers added 14,747 cell sites in 1H07 which still doesn’t explain why call quality continues to suck on pretty much every network.
CTIA 2007: How far behind is the U.S. vs. Europe?
This week, San Francisco will play host to the CTIA’s Wireless I.T. & Entertainment convention, an annual gathering of those intimately involved with the U.S. mobile industry — from tiny startups to corporate giants such as Verizon (VZ), Qualcomm (QCOM), Nokia (NOK) and AT&T (T).
Many will talk about their vision of the future, and at some point will undoubtedly lament over how far we lag behind Europe. With the help of analyst Chetan Sharma, I decided to pull together a small comparison chart that gives you a sense of what’s fact and what’s fiction.
I would like to point out that the above numbers are subscriptions and not the actual number of subscribers — often a point of contention. It’s also worth nothing that a lot of folks in Europe are pre-paid customers and that people have a habit of carrying more than one SIM card. Lastly, the comparison between the U.S. and Western Europe is going to get more interesting once we have complete information for 2007.
Update: As many of you have noted in comments, subscribers in Europe do not pay for incoming calls. However, the carriers do collect incoming calls revenue form other carriers through settlement procedure. The ARPU calculations include total revenue (subs + settlement) divided by subs. The US settlement regime is based on bill and keep (subs pays for both) and no carrier settlements for incoming calls. Hope this helps!
Data is good, but not without voice
RANT: The U.S. wireless industry’s annual fiesta, CTIA 2007, is finally wrapping up. By all means it looks like a successful show, capped by a news release from CTIA that boasts that data revenues of the industry jumped 77% in 2006 to $15.2 billion, representing about 13% of the total wireless industry revenues, currently pegged at about $125 billion.
Thanks to all those newfangled services – music, videos, television and even the web – the mobile data revenues will increase next year. But that is not a reason for the industry dons to forget what puts gas in their Cadillacs: Voice.
In 2006, voice brought in about $110 billion, and that is such a large amount of money that the U.S. wireless providers should cringe at the fact that they have to use advertising tag lines such as “fewest dropped calls” or ask people to come and try their service for 30 days or switch back for free.
No self-respecting descendant of Ma Bell should be able to sleep at night till they fix the voice network. After all Europeans have managed to lick the dropped call problem, by putting decent enough quality in place. Even the Chinese and Indian carriers with their microscopic ARPU manage to complete calls pretty much everywhere.
What brings on the rant today? How about the for past three days I have been unable to retrieve voicemails, or calls have dropped in mid-sentence, leading to a string of profanities and hence dirty looks from nice old ladies.
Frankly we all suffer this ignominy on a daily basis.
Ask anyone in America – and I do mean anyone – and they will be quick to express their dissatisfaction with their wireless phone company - regardless of carrier. Despite the presence of four large national mobile carriers, the voice network problems are almost universal.
Even those endorsed by industry ranking services are not exactly paragons of quality for there have been instances when their own phones don’t work in their company stores.
Voice is more critical to these mobile carriers than they realize. If the phone doesn’t work, we switch to another one with fewer headaches and buy our data plans from them instead … and the music and the TV and the videos! It’s that basic.
The problem is that FCC and others who are supposed to watch out for the consumer don’t really do their job and make voice call coverage mandatory. Just like they made wireless e911 mandatory! How about a QoS guarantee for the consumers?
Don’t the big phone and telecom operators sign service level agreements with big customers? Why not a similar agreement with the consumers – who frankly spend more money on their telecom services, at least in aggregate. So before they try and bring down Google, it is time for wireless carriers to tend to their own yard. Can you hear me now? Probably not, if I’m calling on a wireless phone.
@ CTIA: Interview: Philippe Dauman, President & CEO, Viacom: The C Word
I interviewed Philippe Dauman, president and CEO of Viacom, following his CTIA keynote this morning. We talked as we walked through the convention hall (hence some of the subtle background noise) making the most of a crowded schedule during his whirlwind trip to Orlando. We talked about how important wireless is to Viacom’s future, the company’s current and future plans, and spent a few minutes on the C word—copyright. We also talked a bit about the NBCU-News Corp. JV. You can download the mp3 or listen to it online .
Some excerpts about copyright below; excerpts about wireless are on our sister site mocoNews.net.
During a video intro to the keynote, Jon Stewart joked about Viacom’s lawsuit against Google and YouTube, suggesting that the video of his comments would be on YouTube then quickly adding,” I kid! I kid! I can think of a billion reasons why no one would do that.”
Control without freezing out the users: I asked how Viacom protects its copyright without a chilling effect. Dauman: “We are making our content available to all comers. We’ve been enriching all of our sites; we’ve been building the functionality. Our viewership and user numbers are growing dramatically and we are going to continue to roll out new features. We have embeddable servers that people can take from our sites and put on their own sites—so we are all about making content available but we think we should be the ones who decide how its made available.” I pointed out that the lawsuit seems to be obscuring that message by sending attention to Google and YouTube instead of Viacom’s own sites. Dauman: “I think we’re getting that attention back every day through what we’re doing. I think the consumers will ultimately decide.”
The lawsuit: “I didn’t want to get to the point we got to with Google and YouTube. I think it;s their now outlier point of view that resulted in our having no choice—because we were the leading provider of content against our wishes on YouTube. .... Where we had a problem was when Google was taking our content, building value for itself, monetizing it for their benefit without compensation to us who have to invest a lot of money to do it.”
Google: Dauman: When they were bidding to provide search services to our sites they didn;t say to us, ‘We’ll give it to you for nothing, take it. They asked us for compensation. They zealously guard their own intellectual property; they should respect other people’s.” Dauman suggested with a smile he might consider a trade. “If they make their search engine freely available to Yahoo, Microsoft, Philippe and Co. , and say ‘go to it, you can have it’—then I might rethink my position. I don’t see them doing that.”
Joost: “You know what I love about it—it’s not just the terms of the deal, what I love about it is the technology’s so great. Our content appears in a very rich way. We care about that. That’s important to us. ... It’s not all about money. .. We like the model. We like the vision of the founders.” He also gets a kick out of the founders of Joost being the founders of Kazaa—and choosing to work with the content creators first. “You know what? It will work for them because they are going to get a better experience for their customers because we are working hand in glove with them. We understand content in a way a technology company doesn’t, they understand technology in a way we never will. ... It’s a marriage—it can’t be an abduction.”
EMI CEO: Mobile can learn from Apple
CTIA 2007 — Eric Nicoli, CEO of the EMI Group told the attendees of the mobile convention this morning that the industry should take a cue from Apple and make mobile products and services more attractive to customers.
Apple listens to what consumers want — this should not be their unique privilege, he said. Anyone who has tried to download music on their phones, or even tried to accomplish basic tasks, can understand why the mobile industry needs to start paying attention to their peeps.
Nicoli listed a 3-step test that all consumer products should be able to pass, and that he thought was lacking in the wireless world:
- Give them something that is good value for money
- Make something that is functional and works on practical level
- Make something that is simple to use and easy to understand
YouTube to launch mobile website soon
CTIA 2007 — YouTube will launch its mobile website in June 2007 for U.S. users, according to a spokesperson. The mobile YouTube site will go live once the exclusivity clause on the company’s mobile video deal with Verizon Wireless expires. The service will be live for European users in May. YouTube has been already working closely with mobile carriers, and handset makers such as Nokia on the mobile version of their video service.
In response to my question if YouTube is developing a mobile client, the spokesperson said that the company had been talking about it, but had no information to share at this time. Check out a preview of the blocked mobile site or this demo site: http://m.youtube.com/?client=ytdemo which you can see from some mobile phones (let us know if your phone can access it).
The mobile site when it goes live will have around 800 “editorial picks” of videos to choose from. It’s kind of an experiment to see how well things go and how good of a response the company gets, the spokesperson explained to us. Though, the end goal is to create a truly mobile YouTube experience with eventual access to the entire video catalog.
Helio’s Ocean Surfaces
CTIA 2007, Orlando: Helio announced the Ocean, a seriously slick looking messaging phone. It’s a dual slider with separate QWERTY and numeric key pads, and a comprehensive messaging interface — we’ll have to check this one out on the floor. It’s manufactured by Pantech, designed by Helio, and will be available in the Spring for $295.
Microsoft’s ZenZui for Mobile Widgets
CTIA 2007: From Alltel’s Celltop to Nokia’s WidSets, mobile widgets are becoming increasingly popular, and becoming a preferred way to consume web services on handheld devices. ZenZui is the latest to jump onto the bandwagon. The startup is being officially spun out of Microsoft as a separate company and is coming out stealth mode this week.
ZenZui’s mobile widget technology was developed by Microsoft’s Research lab, patented by Microsoft and Microsoft also helped the group raise funding and acquire technology to become a separate startup. The company raised a Series-A financing round of $12 million from Oak Investment Partners and Hunt Ventures. We will catch up with their executives later today, and will bring you more details then. Meanwhile, you can see their YouTube demo of their interface here.
Top 5 Trends to Expect at CTIA
CTIA 2007 PREVIEW: While you’re checking out this 5 points user guide to the CTIA convention – the Super Bowl of mobile conferences – I’m likely trying to find a comfortable position on a redeye headed for hot Orlando. Hopefully it’s not too bumpy.
Like Helio’s ads “Don’t call us a phone company,” the rest of the mobile industry will try to rally the market around mobile data — mobile TV, cell phone entertainment, mobile social networking, and mobile ads - at CTIA which opens in a few hours from now.
Too bad, as analysts at Informa Telecoms & Media point out: “the vast majority of revenue growth – both for the operator and vendor communities - is coming out of developing markets where mobile is fulfilling a basic need for voice and text-based communications.” Yeah, but that’s not as much fun to show off in a demo booth. Anyway, on to the top 5 trends:
1) Mobile TV – Qualcomm’s broadcast mobile TV network is finally live in the U.S. and mobile TV vendors and video content companies now have a working platform to tout their efforts. Chip companies will showcase mobile TV chips, while media companies will announce new video content.
Verizon Wireless is the first US carrier to sell the service, and Cingular will follow soon. Hopefully AT&T COO Randall Stephenson will give us an update on the status of the rollout. Monday morning we’re picking up one of the handsets used for Verizon Wireless’ VCAST Mobile TV service. Yay.
2) Mobile Ads – Declining future voice revenues are forcing the mobile business to look at mobile ads as a way to give the bottom line a quick boost. Informa predicts mobile advertising will be around $11.3 billion by 2011. Which means, an announcement overload.
AdMob, a San Mateo, Calif.-based company will announce that it has raised $15 million in fresh funding in a round led by Accel Partners. Other startups like Xipto are showing new mobile ad-driven services like their endorsement-driven mobile advertising platform, and Millenial Media announced some new technology for rich media mobile ad campaigns.
3) iPhone and mobile UI:– We’ll see if the iPhone makes an actual appearance (or an update from AT&T’s COO), but its presence will no doubt be felt on the UI front. We should expect more companies to showcase the fluid user interface and prototypes of touch screen phones. It looks like the much awaited iPhone and the LG Prada phone will have some new competiton.
4) Lack of compelling new handsets: Moto CEO decided to cancel his keynote, a sign that Moto’s having an uh-oh moment! But is also is indicative of how quickly winds change in the handset business. Cell phone makers can’t rest on the laurels of big hits like the RAZR for too long and are trying create the new hits of 2007.
We’ll search for innovation, but we’re not too optimistic. For some reason Chinese handset maker TCL thinks Alcatel-branded handsets are a good idea and Sprint’s getting a new music phone from Samsung, the m620 or UpStage. Though Helio’s Ocean does look like a pretty nice messaging device.
5) Mobile User Generated Content – There is going to be a lot of buzz around mobile services that help subscribers create and share mobile content. StreamVerse is talking about Mojo, a service for creating mobile content that it hopes will help wireless carriers make money. Mobidia is announcing its mobile application called CUBuddy that lets users create video calls between cell phones. This is actually one part of the mobile ecosystem which could turn casual data users into 3G customers, and help goose up the carrier ARPU.
GigaCal: Taking the Show on the Road
Take your pick, which conversation do you want to join? The GigaTeam will be at some of the following notable events.
- The Startup Epicenter Program from March 27-29 in Mountain View, CA aims to create a truly really “hands-on” program for entrepreneurs. The event gives founders an opportunity to learn from each other and share those startup battle stories.
- The mobile world will be descending on CTIA, one of the largest technology events dedicated exclusively to wireless, broadband convergence. GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher will be attending in Orlando, FL from March 27-29.
- O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference from March 26-29 in San Diego, CA will examine the “magic” that is driving technological changes we see in our lives.
- If you have that itch to work on your own startup idea, Women 2.0 is holding the Women 2.0 Napkin Business Challenge. Submit your business idea on a paper napkin no larger than 7×7 inches by March 30. Winners get meetings with Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson or Michael Moritz of Sequoia.
Have an event we should know about? Send it to Joey Wan at joey@gigaom.com