According to analyst firm Strategy Analytics, Comcast’s announcement of its “High-Speed 2go” service, which bundles Clearwire’s WiMax service with its own broadband products, will put new pressure on competitors AT&T and Verizon. The service, set to launch in Portland, OR, offers 4G mobile broadband and high-speed home Internet for $50 a month. Neither AT&T nor Verizon is currently marketing a similar bundle.
Comcast's success, however, will hinge largely on its ability to market the service and gain traction with customers before the top two wireless companies come back with similar offerings and the weight of their combined mobile customer base, which numbers around 165 million subscribers. A key step for Comcast will be to offer compelling services, on top of the WiMAX platform, that really build on its position providing video entertainment in the home, according to Strategy Analytics.
A multi-country study released today by Lightspeed Research, an online market research company, shows the increasingly prominent role mobile phones are taking in our lives. With ownership of mobile phones so high and so many different functions now available on them, it is increasingly important to understand how people are using their mobile phones and what future opportunities there might be for new mobile applications.
Of the four countries surveyed (the US, France, Germany and the UK) it was Americans (49%) and Britons (30%) who were most likely to agree that their mobile phone was now an essential part of their daily life and they’d be lost without it. By comparison, only 13% of French and 12% of German respondents agreed, with the vast majority in both countries saying their mobile was a useful tool they carried with them most of the time. In fact, 56% of respondents in the US leave their phone on 24 hours a day.
Best Buy Mobile commissioned a survey revealing that a large portion of adults in America plan to buy a smartphone in the next 12 months. However, many barriers stand in their way, including confusion about the technology, the shopping experience and price. The poll of 1,000 Americans, half men and half women all over the age of 18, was conducted by telephone May 29-31 by GfK Roper, a division of GfK Custom Research North America, to obtain a snapshot of current habits, preferences and purchase intentions among today’s mobile phone users.
The category of smartphones – mobile devices with computer functionality - has become a cornerstone for Best Buy Mobile, now in 1,067 U.S. locations both within traditional Best Buy stores as well as in standalone units. The GfK survey demonstrates many of the drivers and barriers to Americans’ smartphone purchases.
According to a new report from telecom consultants Juniper Research, the number of Smartphones shipped with open source operating systems (OS) will increase from 106 million this year to 223 million by 2014.
The Open Source OS research found that operating systems and the applications are playing an increasingly important role in the differentiation of new smartphones and a key factor in the choice of which handset to choose from by users.
The last three years has seen a revolution in the OS market with market leader Symbian moving to open source and Apple leading the way in the distribution of Applications through their innovative, but now widely copied, AppStore approach.
According to a research study by Strategy Analytics, 48% of Americans would drop their mobile data plan completely, faced with the need to reduce household expenditures. Only 10% would drop their home broadband subscription.
“Given the extraordinary importance consumers place on home broadband, we fully expected broadband to have a high ‘keep rate,’” said Ben Piper, Director of the Strategy Analytics Multiplay Market Dynamics Service. “What surprised us was the vulnerability of mobile services.”
Under the same scenario, 12% of Americans said they would drop their pay-tv service completely, while 41% indicated they would scale service back to a lower tier. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they would make no changes to their home fixed voice service, compared to 51% for mobile voice.
According to Juniper Research, ad-funded MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) revenues are set to take-off over the next five years with annual growth rates reaching 94%, with SMS and mobile email continuing to dominate the person-to-person (p2p) mobile messaging market.
Mobile messaging research from Juniper Research, 'Mobile Messaging & IP Evolution', found that the Far East & China would lead the global ad-funded MMS market by a considerable margin, followed by North America and Western Europe.
The number of brands using MMS as an advertising medium is growing rapidly, with push MMS and SMS being employed to great effect in both mature and emerging markets. Crucially, this has enabled network operators to support ad-funded voice and SMS tariffs, and combat falling ARPU, while providing brands with new advertising channels.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is recommending repealing the law that will tax personal usage of business cell phones. Yesterday, IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman asked Congress to clarify that businesses and employees will not need to pay taxes on personal use of cell phones provided by their employers. The IRS believes this complicated tax law will be a burden on employers and employees. For more information visit Yahoo Tech.
According to market research and consultancy In-Stat, despite the buzz about LTE, only 11% of total cellular subscriptions worldwide are 3G, By 2013, the percentage will rise to 28%. Meanwhile, LTE is moving beyond talk and into real contract awards.
HSPA is the main beneficiary of the drive to 3G as it leads both new deployments and contract awards so far in 2009. Ericsson and Huawei led the infrastructure providers in new contract awards for HSPA. The new, high-profile contract awards in 3G included China Unicom, Telecom Italia and Telefonica.
According to a report from the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, prolonged cell phone usage may cause aching, burning, numbness, or tingling in the ulnar forearm and hand. These symptoms, called “cell phone elbow” is known medically as cubital tunnel syndrome, which is the second most common nerve compression syndrome in the upper extremities after carpal tunnel syndrome.
In many cases, treatment consists of simply modifying the activity and avoiding activities that aggravate the symptoms. It's suggested that switching hands frequently while talking on the phone or using a hands-free headset will help.
Other daily activities that produce cubital tunnel syndrome include leaning on an elbow while driving or working, and sitting at a computer workstation that requires elbow flexion greater than 90 degrees. Making ergonomic adjustments to these activities is beneficial.
Kroger and i-wireless LLC will be soon launching a national promotion offering customers who use the KrogerPlus card the chance to earn free cell phone minutes on i-wireless phones sold at Kroger supermarkets. The promotion should be live in all of Kroger's 2,300-plus supermarkets in 31 states by the end of June, with the exception of its Food 4 Less chain.
Kroger shoppers will receive 20 free minutes for every $100 spent per month while using their KrogerPlus loyalty card, with a cap of $1,500 per month. Customers using their Kroger MasterCard will receive 30 minutes per $100 spent. i-wireless runs off of the Sprint PCS network.
According to IDS, during the first quarter of 2009 (1Q09), the top 10 carriers in the United States added just under 3.5 million retail net subscribers. Out of these retail net subscribers, 75% were prepaid users. Over 20 million gross retail subscribers were added for the top 10 carriers during the quarter. The total market for the quarter closed at just over 274 million retail wireless subscribers in the United States. Data revenue now accounts for 25% of total retail service revenue.
In terms of retail postpaid net additions, Verizon Wireless closed the quarter at 1 million net additions, while AT&T finished with 875,000. On the prepaid side, MetroPCS finished with 687,000 net additions and TracFone ended the quarter with 567,000 net additions. Leap Wireless also finished with strong net adds for the quarter, totaling 492,000.
According to Reuters, Cell phone manufacturer INQ Mobile will launch a Twitter phone the end of this year in time for Christmas. INQ is hoping to capitalize off the surging interest in Twitter; the micro-blogging service. The cell phone will feature an Internet based Twitter client and will cost operators less that $140. The twitter phone will use Internet connections to send the 140-character messages, called Tweets, not text messages as in Twitter's own service.
Twitter has experienced explosive growth in recent months. In addition to the Twitter phone, INQ plans to launch another new model in-time for Christmas. INQ is currently benefiting from offering reasonably priced phones for connecting people to social networks and the Internet, however, large cell phone manufacturers such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson are following suit.
LiMo Foundation, a global consortium of mobile leaders delivering an open handset platform for the whole mobile industry, today announced the completion of specifications for the second release of the LiMo Platform (R2). R2 will be at the heart of next-generation LiMo handsets that will reach market starting Q4 2009.
Included within R2 is integrated support for OMTP’s BONDI v1.0 specification, which standardizes a set of device interfaces for Web applications and widgets. The BONDI specification and framework enables developers to use common web authoring tools to create richly featured web applications and widgets that will run across all LiMo R2 handsets that support web runtimes. LiMo Platform is the first industry handset platform to provide explicit support for BONDI technologies.
The R2 platform also includes enhancements to the existing R1 framework as well as a series of robust new frameworks contributed by both LiMo members and/or derived from Open Source communities with the aim of delivering state-of-the-art LiMo devices with next-generation functionalities.
Alvarion Ltd., a provider of WiMAX and wireless broadband solutions, today announced substantial growth of its WiMAX network deployments globally. Five years after being introduced, Alvarion’s WiMAX platform continues to be deployed by service providers as the foundation of their next generation broadband wireless networks. Driven by the demand of broadband around the globe, Alvarion’s overall cumulative WiMAX shipments have now reached more than $500 million. The company continues its leading position as the preferred WiMAX vendor through its innovative Open WiMAX business model that continues to grow the ecosystem. Facing the market’s growing demand for broadband services, Alvarion enjoys a steady increase in WiMAX customer deployments.
Alvarion’s impressive list of WiMAX deployments continues to grow with over 40 commercial WiMAX networks in Latin America, over 60 in Africa, over 25 in North America, over 35 in Western Europe, over 60 in Eastern Europe and over 30 in Asia.
Himfr.com, one of China's B2B search platforms with more than 30 B2B industry websites to its name, reports that the mobile phone components market is booming. With the 3G-era in the offing, the mobile phone market in China breeds new opportunity for development.
According to Himfr's market research reports, which indicate that the first quarter of 2009 saw mobile phone shipments for the same period of last year decline by about 15.8 percent, output levels dropped three percent. And in terms of the opportunities for the development of 3G, this data does not have any impact on the industry's confidence in China's mobile phone industry. China's mobile phone industry faces new opportunities. 3G users in China are expected to grow from the second half of this year, bringing with it a rapid sales increase that will prompt the mobile phone industry in China to enter a new rapid growth period.
The CDMA Development Group (CDG) has announced that there are now more than 100 million CDMA subscribers in India, making it the world’s second-largest CDMA market. Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices are placed among the top five CDMA operators globally, ranking second and fourth, respectively. The rapid growth of CDMA users in India is attributed to a wide selection of affordable devices – ranging from entry level handsets to feature-rich smartphones – and the introduction of CDMA2000 voice and data services into urban and rural areas, helping to reshape the communications culture of India.
Since CDMA mobile services were introduced in December 2002, the cellular landscape in India changed rapidly. Efforts led by CDMA operators, device manufacturers, technology enablers and the CDG introduced an array of entry-level handsets to the market while tariffs dropped by more than 40 percent. As a result, CDMA reached 50 million subscribers in India twice as fast as any competing cellular technology, and at the same time greatly increased voice telephony and wireless Internet connectivity in India. Now, recently-introduced CDMA mobile broadband solutions are poised to have a similar significant impact on increasing broadband penetration in the country.
NTT DOCOMO, INC. announced today its lineup of 18 new handsets for launch on or after May 22 (varies by model). The lineup includes models in DOCOMO's four main series of FOMA 3G handsets - docomo STYLE series, docomo PRIME series, docomo SMART series and docomo PRO series - and the new Evangelion Phone based on an upcoming anime film.
The new models and their planned launches are as follows:
A new study from Juniper Research concluded that Mobile WiMAX networks are being rolled out more slowly than expected, meaning that service revenues will grow more slowly than forecast a year ago.
The WiMAX broadband report found that revenues from WiMAX 802.16e broadband subscribers will exceed $15 billion globally by 2014. WiMAX will provide an improved experience for broadband customers who are receiving low speed DSL or cable modem services, or at the limit of DSL coverage.
For the first time, the number of U.S. households using only cell phones has surpassed those that just use traditional landlines. (See video to the right)
According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey recently released, 20% of households only used cell phone during the last half of 2008, while, 17% of households only used land line. This is the largest six-month increase since the government started gathering such data in 2003. In 2003 4% of households only used cell phone, while, 42% of households only used land line. Sixty percent of U.S. households have both wireless and landline phones.
The growing number of cell-phone-only households is believed to be due to the recession which forced many families to lower their budgets. People who live in households only using wireless service tend to be disproportionately low-income, young, renters and Hispanics.
According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped a total of 244.8 million units in the first quarter of 2009 (1Q09), approximately 15.8% lower than the 290.8 million units shipped during 1Q08. The worldwide mobile phone market began 2009 with an expected sequential downturn, exacerbated by the challenges of the ongoing worldwide recession.
The first quarter of a new year is typically characterized by seasonally lower shipment volumes following a busy holiday quarter with channels clearing out excess inventory. But the 1Q09 decline was especially sharp due to weak end-user demand, currency volatility, and lack of credit for merchants as consumers and the supply chain adapt to the recession.
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