Search Results for: affordable

Blogging may be spotty this week – I am on a road trip with limited on-line access (anyone able to catch the connection to the graphic on this page?). So far, we have covered 2100 miles, en route to Caltech, which we should reach late in the week.

Most interesting is that we have maintained continuous cell phone coverage, throughout the desert in New Mexico, even when AM radio was pretty spotty. 3G is spotty, but EDGE has been almost continuously strong.

Now that the airlines are outfitting seats with internet in the air, maybe car rental companies will consider offering affordable pay-as-you-go mobile broadband.

When I was at a recent analyst conference, I spoke with some people who have deployed HSPA as a mobile internet access system to be offered to passengers in airport taxis.

Domestic networks are making mobile broadband data affordable for most applications; the affordability of international roaming is a continued challenge (and high roaming charges isn’t just a Canadian issue).

There are ways to manage your international voice calling with prepaid SIM cards. What are your experiences with data access while travelling?

Keep those cards and letters coming. And yes, we did make a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Call me next week and I can tell you all about it!

Technorati Tags:
Animal House

At a family function this past weekend, I saw some friends for the first time in 30 years. We had a chance to speak about the challenges of staying in touch in the good old days.

There was a time, in the not so distant past, that long distance calls were a ‘big deal.’ Sunday afternoons included the weekly ritual of phone calls to our grandparents on the east coast. Play time was punctuated by shouting to come in quickly: “It’s long distance.”

In my college days, calls to/from home were timed for 11:01 pm – those big discount periods were worth waiting for. And international long distance? You would have to choose between a nice dinner and a 3 minute call to Europe.

Now, we pick up the phone and call when we want. Most countries in the world are less than a nickel a minute, any time of day. In our house, we don’t stop to think about making a long distance call from a wired phone, especially when you consider that an hour long call is about the same price as a cup of coffee.

I wrote yesterday of the continued trend for people to cancel their residential phone service. For mobile to be a complete substitute, there is still work to be done. Most service providers offer North America calling, sold in buckets of minutes. But absent a monthly plan, mobile long distance calling in Canada or the US attracts rates reminiscent of the wired world of 20 years ago. And overseas? Don’t think about it.

This is not just a Canadian phenomenon. My US cell phone charges 5 times as much to call Canada compared to US nationwide rates. As a result, mobile phones preserve a profitable business for prepaid calling cards.

Which mobile carriers will be first to recognize the opportunity of enabling 10-10 dial access? With growing adoption of mobile substitution for residential phone service, will incumbents wait for the new mobile entrants or try a preemptive launch of more affordable global calling?

At Ericsson’s analyst conference, Lenovo spoke of various PC manufacturers rolling out $200-250 ‘netbook’ computers, equipped with 7-10″ screens, high speed wireless and optimized for mobile internet centric applications with long battery life.

You may not load a full version of Microsoft Office onto these machines for content creation, but the idea is to create a cross-over device – a bigger screen than smart phones.

We recently saw that Portugal is placing 500,000 such devices into its schools. Will commercial netbooks such as these supplant or supplement the one-laptop per child project?

Users may not want to activate a monthly HSPA service plan but might be interested in daily rates when travelling. Will HSPA service providers offer pay-as-you-go pricing (per day, per hour) to leverage the trend toward pervasive embedded wireless modules?

And while we are looking at alternate business models for mobile broadband, you might ponder if affordable mobile data pricing might lead to consumer electronics companies installing mobile gaming and streaming video in the backseats of our family fun wagons. Does DAVE’s affiliation with XM Canada give it a leg up in automotive distribution models?

Back in January, I wrote a piece that spoke of the simple words: cell phones save lives.

I caught a press release from the folks at “411 on Wireless” that talked about an event held yesterday to promote increased accessibility to prepaid phones as an affordable choice for a “cell phone security blanket” for the elderly.

We have seen various prepaid plans that target our teens; the youth market is sexy and fun and predisposed to try out lots of high margin discretionary services.

While the elderly are among those most likely to benefit from access to a mobile device, they are also among the age groups least likely to have one.

The question is whether service providers will look at special packages for seniors’ emergency access?

The internet is a shared resource. Different access providers begin mixing traffic at different places, but sooner or later, my internet gets mixed into yours.

The CAIP application to the CRTC seems to acknowledge this shared nature with its reference (at paragraph 50 of its application) to the description of the Gateway Access Service its members resell, a description complete with a graphic of a cloud – a sign that the resource is being shared.

Cloud, network, virtual channel. All of these are distinct from terms like private, dedicated or other ways to denote an unblocking and congestion-free connection. A private circuit is expensive but can be more susceptible to network failures; shared, switched or virtual circuits are more affordable and can often allow for routing around blockages.

In CAIP’s application to the CRTC, I noticed that it couldn’t resist the common fallacy of misquoting from the Report of the Telecom Policy Review Panel. [I pointed out this common problem in a blog posting more than a year ago.]

The CAIP application (paragraph 91) quoted the report as recommending that the Telecom Act should be amended

to confirm the right of Canadian consumers to access publicly available Internet applications and content of their choice by means of all public telecommunications networks providing access to the Internet.

But CAIP neglected to complete that passage, which was in fact one of the formal recommendations from the TPRP. Recommendation 6-5 continues with

This amendment should

(a) authorize the CRTC to administer and enforce these consumer access rights,
(b) take into account any reasonable technical constraints and efficiency considerations related to providing such access, and
(c) be subject to legal constraints on such access, such as those established in criminal, copyright and broadcasting laws.

Part (b) seems to be designed to take into account the technical realities of the internet as a shared network resource – even for the Gateway Access Service used by CAIP members to resell Bell internet.

Different applications place different demands on network capacity. Some have no tolerance for latency (delay) in delivery of messages. Two-way interactive applications like voice and gaming are examples of applications that need low latency. Others, like streaming video or music, use buffering to self-manage a certain amount of latency: the application can stockpile the next few seconds of media content in order to absorb the effects of some of the latency in the delivery from the source. For other applications, such as file transfer and email, latency can cause frustration but not loss of functionality because the data transfer requirements are not real-time in nature.

If customers want to be able to make VoIP phone calls, play network games, watch streaming video, listen to internet radio and capacity is running short, what do you do? Do we think the balance of convenience should put these applications at risk in order to shave some time off bulk file transfers?

Treating all bits the same means that real-time applications will become non-functional in times of peak traffic.

What kinds of technical constraints are reasonable in managing shared resources?

A commenter asked if The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit will explore the use of P2P technology for legitimate and productive purposes. We have a panel planned for June 16 examining Entertainment and Content over Broadband, including speakers from CBC, the NHL, MTV and Bell Sympatico. Given the events of the past few weeks, it should be an interesting discussion.