Wireless Now 42% of Linear Video Accounts; OTT Twice as Big as Linear; Mobile Will Change Even More

Two satellite providers and two cable TV providers now supply 86 percent of all linear video accounts in the U.S. linear entertainment video business.

By platform, fixed networks have about 58 percent of the accounts, while satellite delivery claims about 42 percent share.

AT&T has both landline and satellite assets, including perhaps six million U-verse video accounts and some 20 million satellite customers.

Of 93.8 million U.S. linear TV accounts in service, just four firms have 86 percent of all accounts. AT&T, perhaps surprisingly for some, is the largest video supplier, followed by Comcast, Charter Communications and Dish Network.

AT&T has 26 million video accounts, Comcast has 22.4 million, Charter Communications 18.4 million, Dish Network 13.9 million, Verizon 4.7 million accounts.

The big question is what happens as consumers shift even more activity from fixed to mobile usage, and as consumption continues to evolve towards over-the-top consumption as a primary mode. There are by some estimates more than 181 million OTT video accounts in use in the United States, roughly double the number of linear accounts.

As usage shifts to mobile devices, wireless platforms are widely expected to become widespread, likely eclipsing fixed network access. Though usage is not the same as revenue, the center of gravity should shift in the direction of mobile, further complicating any enumeration of accounts.

Rank	Provider	Total Subscribers
1	AT&T	26,000,000
2	Comcast Cable	22,400,000
3	Charter Communications	18,421,145
4	Dish Network	13,909,000
5	Verizon	4,700,000
6	Cox Communications	4,540,280
7	Altice USA	3,948,000
8	Frontier Communications	1,700,000
9	Mediacom	862,000
10	WOW! (f.k.a. WideOpenWest)	702,101
11	Cable One	451,000
12	TPG	377,000
13	Windstream	359,000
14	CenturyLink	311,000
15	Atlantic Broadband Group, LLC	246,000
16	Midcontinent Communications	236,250
17	Armstrong Cable Services	234,573
18	Service Electric Cable TV Incorporated	213,058
19	Metrocast	164,921
20	Blue Ridge Communications	164,796
21	WaveDivision Holdings, LLC	152,975
22	General Communications	140,000
23	Buckeye Broadband	130,954
24	Consolidated Communications	117,882
25	Google Fiber	68,715
26	TDS Telecom	41,200
26	Hawaiian Telcom	32,000

Source: Wikipedia

Egyptian Mobile Operators Again Refuse to Bid on 4G Licenses

As essential as licensed spectrum might be for mobile operators, price and quantity still matter. Consider a recent Egyptian government offer to license 4G spectrum available in 2.5-MHz and 5-MHz blocks.

None of the three Egyptian mobile operators placed a bid, suggesting both that the price was too high, and the amount of spectrum too low.

On the other hand, Telecom Egypt, the state-run fixed-line provider, did buy a 4G license, allowing it to enter the mobile market for the first time as a facilities-based provider.

The National Telecom Regulatory Authority now says it will consider options for offering the new licenses to new international operators.

Vodafone Egypt Telecommunications, Orange Egypt and Etisalat Misr all have twice declined to submit bids.

The GSMA has called for boosting the amount of spectrum available, arguing that the total amount of spectrum assigned to each operator for 4G needs to be in the range of 2x30MHz to 2x60MHz, across a range of coverage and capacity bands, with a minimum contiguous bandwidth of 2x10MHz in each band.

In contrast, only 2×2.5MHz to 2x5MHz were proposed to mobile operators by the Egyptian authorities.

GSMA also argues that the proposed prices were too high as well.

We Have Reached "Peak" Smartphone

Things change fast in the telecom business. According to analysts at Deloitte, we already are at the peak of the smartphone era. In fact, 2016 “will likely mark the end of the smartphone growth era, and the start of its consolidation,” Deloitte argues. “A mere nine years after the launch of the first full touchscreen smartphone, adoption is nearing a plateau, at 81 per cent of UK adults, and 91 per cent of 18–44 year olds.”

Smartphone penetration in the United Kingdom grew from 52 percent to 81 percent of the population in the four years to May 2016.

But smartphone penetration rose by a modest seven percent in 2016 (so far). Deloitte anticipates  two to four percentage points of additional growth over the next year.

A couple of observations: the “end of the smartphone era” also implies the end of the period where smartphones and mobile data plans drive revenue growth. If you want to know why mobile executives are focused on all manner of Internet of Things opportunities, the end of smartphone-led growth is the reasons.

To be sure, those trends are now paramount in all markets. In many nations, subscriber account growth remains a key opportunity, as does mobile data revenue. But we already can see the need for the next revenue model, as mobile data growth becomes challenged.

Among the other changes is declining reliance on voice calls. By mid-2016, 31 percent of respondents in the Deloitte survey claimed not to make any standard voice calls in a given week.

In 2015, about 25 percent said they did not make a call in a week. As recently as 2012, as few as four percent of phone owners said they had not made any calls in a week. On the other hand, use of almost all other media types continues to grow.

source: Deloitte

Google Station: Platform for Venue Wi-Fi

It is harder than ever these days to determine, in any precise setting, whether Wi-Fi is a network access technology (connection to the public Internet) or an in-building local area network (where a user creates a private network to re-distribute a public connection resource to local assets and users).

Use of Wi-Fi hotspots and homespots to directly connect mobile and other devices provides one example of Wi-Fi used as an “access” technology. And Google wants to make Wi-Fi more prevalent as an access technology.

Google Station, a suite of tools designed to make creating and maintaining public Wi-Fi easy, is being offered to partners including Internet service providers, large venues (cafes and shopping malls) and network infrastructure companies.

“If you’re a large venue or organization, network operator, fiber provider, system integrator or infrastructure company, we want to work with you to bring fast Wi-Fi to more locations,” says the Google Station website.

As part of the suite of tools, Google will handle login info for the different hotspots, with users having a single username and password.

Google also will help Wi-Fi hosts to monetize their connections, perhaps by handling payments for “for fee” access.

Caesar Sengupta, VP of Google’s Next Billion Plan said the company is opening the platform to anyone and everyone who has a good internet connection.

The platform seems an outgrowth of work with Indian Railways to provide free Wi-Fi services at railway stations in India.

source: Google

Ericsson Intros First 5G-NR Radio System

Ericsson We now is introducing what it calls the industry’s first “5G NR-capable radio,” called Ericsson AIR 6468. 5G New Radio (NR) is the name chosen by 3GPP, the organization defining the global 5G standard, for the specification of a new 5G wireless air interface.

The new radios will have to support a very-wide range of frequencies, multiple waveforms and access methods. The new radios also will be designed to support higher throughput and higher spectral efficiency.

Wide area IoT, potentially supporting a massive number of low-power small data-burst devices with limited link budgets also must be supported by 5G NR.

At the same time, higher-reliability services with extremely lower latency also must be supported, with minimized signaling and control overhead.

The Ericsson system features 64 transmit and 64 receive antennas (massive MIMO) and also supports 4G.

In Consumer IoT Business, Consumers Probably Cannot Tell You What They Want

As Steve Jobs insisted, and Netflix executives also believe, consumers cannot tell you what new products they want, or would love, because they actually do not know what they want, in advance of seeing and using the products.

In the consumer parts of the Internet of Things market, that seems abundantly true. One cannot predict the ultimate consumer demand for most coming IoT services and products because people simply have not experienced them.

The few consumer products often considered part of the broad IoT market that consumers actually have used in some numbers include game consoles and smart TVs. Other proposed IoT products, such as smart lighting, heating and cooling and smart home, simply have not been used enough for people to discover whether those products are transformative.

source: Deloitte

Will Comcast Succeed in Mobile?

It is a fair question to ask how whether Comcast mobile market success is likely or unlikely, as it is similarly fair to ask how well telcos will do in the new endeavors they are making, and will make, in new lines of business.

A reasonable person would caution that it always is challenging when firms in one business enter new lines of business where they do not necessarily have core competencies. But cable companies and telcos have shown ability to do so, in a growing number of instances, despite some failures.

Generally speaking, telcos have not so fared well in the information technology and computing businesses they have tried to enter for the past several decades (dating back to the 1980s). Few have had much success creating mass market over the top voice or messaging services, while efforts in the data center business also are mixed.

But one might also say fixed network telcos managed to learn what they needed to enter the mobility, video entertainment and even Internet access businesses, none of which were core competencies, originally.

Neither voice nor Internet access was an issue for cable in the consumer markets.

Some might initially have dismissed cable efforts to enter business markets for voice and data. But cable has done so, tapping first the small business segment, moving into the mid-market, and now starting to target enterprise services.

Earlier, some might have dismissed cable’s ability to scale its hybrid fiber coax network enough to keep pace with new quality and bandwidth demands, but they have done so.

So some of us would argue cable understands the stakes and the difficulties of becoming major players in the mobile market. While “necessity” is no guarantee of success, the cable industry has shown an ability to methodically enter new markets and gain significant share.

Some of us also would argue that it is inevitable that cable will want to shift even further in the direction of owning its own network assets. In the mobile context, that means access to spectrum (licensed, unlicensed and shared) plus transmission assets under its full control.

That means an ultimate shift to ownership of mobile infrastructure, beyond spectrum rights. That is partly a matter of industry culture, and partly a matter of maintaining profit margins.

Also, cable will scale its efforts gradually, as it has already learned to do entering business markets. Even if it initially focuses on services for its existing customers, that is only the first step.

Eventually, cable will emerge as a national competitor, for a number of reasons including the fact that mobility increasingly is a national and scale business. Though the greatest value might come as the industry is able to build quadruple-play packages of fixed and mobile services, greater scale will be necessary.

And Comcast’s service territory only reaches about 30 percent of U.S. households. Some of us might be wrong, but would bet on Comcast (and Charter, ultimately) succeeding in the mobile business.

The business will evolve, with cable gaining confidence in smaller matters before tackling bigger matters.

CableLabs Joins Shared Spectrum Groups

CableLabs, the U.S. cable TV research and development organization, is taking some steps that

Indicate how U.S. cable operators will approach acquisition and use of mobile spectrum.

Liberty Global and CableLabs have joined the MulteFire Alliance, an independent consortium dedicated to developing standards  to ensure that next-generation LTE mobile standards are compatible with shared and unlicensed spectrum, including Wi-Fi, important to cable operators who will use hotspots to support their mobile services..

“This step will arm the cable industry with a new wireless technology that builds on our success in providing Wi-Fi and mobile services,” said Ralph Brown, CTO of CableLabs.

MulteFire will operate entirely in unlicensed or shared spectrum, so that cable operators without licensed mobile spectrum can use Wu-Fi to support mobile network services and access.

“By joining the MulteFire Alliance, we are driving the future of wireless for our customers,” said said Balan Nair, CTO of Liberty Global.

Currently, the MulteFire Alliance is working to adapt 3GPP-based mobile wireless standards for shared and unlicensed spectrum so that the technology is broadly available and fairly coexists with Wi-Fi and other technologies.

Significantly, MulteFire does not require users to own licensed spectrum at all. The advantages are obvious for any mobile service provider hoping to use a “Wi-Fi-first” access method.

With a big footprint of hotspots, a mobile service provider using wholesale mobile network access could save money by directly reducing the amount of wholesale bandwidth it has to purchase.

Also, CableLabs has joined the CBRS Alliance founded by Google, Qualcomm, Intel, Nokia, Ruckus and Federated Wireless.

The Citizens’ Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) represents the shared use of 150 MHz of spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band (3.55-3.7 GHz).

CableLabs is clear about the advantages it sees: “With up to 150 MHz of free spectrum available, cable operators can deploy LTE (Long Term Evolution)based solutions for the first time without having to acquire mobile spectrum,” said Pete Smyth, CableLabs VP.

The CBRS Alliance believes that LTE-based solutions in the CBRS band, utilizing shared spectrum, can enable both in-building and outdoor coverage and capacity expansion at massive scale.