The most connected societies aren’t the major sources of growth of the Internet economy, said a report (www.xrl.us/bgymnd) Monday by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation on the growth and future of the 25-year-old .com domain. The media fixation on social networking has obscured much more important growth mechanisms whose success can’t be reduced to universal broadband, foundation President Robert Atkinson told reporters Monday. “It’s a mistake to put so much emphasis on broadband” and less on the applications that make the Internet useful, as the FCC seems to be doing, he said.
Of the 96.5 million Americans who planned to shop on Cyber Monday -- up from 85 million in 2008 -- 3.8 percent said they would shop from a mobile device like an iPhone or a BlackBerry, said Shop.org, the National Retail Federation’s online division. TheFind.com said searches from mobile devices increased from about 5,000 on Black Friday 2008 to about 200,000 this time. EBay said a “deals” app that it released right before Black Friday, has been used more than 50,000 times. The application provides a stream of offers from the site’s millions of listings. Black Friday mobile payments on PayPal were 140 percent higher than average for Fridays, said Beth Strobel, a director at the company. More than 500,000 transactions have been done on PayPal mobile since Nov. 16, she said. Some mobile marketers are promoting Mobile Tuesday.
With review of the Verizon’s access line spinoff to Frontier pending, regulators are watching the escalation of financial woes at FairPoint Communications, government officials said. A year and a half after regulators cleared the spinoff of Verizon’s New England wireline operations to FairPoint, FairPoint is close to filing for bankruptcy (CD Oct 2 p14). Competitive local exchange carriers opposing Verizon’s proposed $8.6 billion sale of 4.8 million access lines to Frontier say the deal looks a lot like Verizon’s $2.7 billion sale of 1.5 million lines to FairPoint. Frontier argues its deal is different. Some regulators agree.
Bandwidth, spectrum management and net neutrality are key to application and device development, panelists said at the FCC broadband workshop Thursday. They urged government funding for broadband projects in small cities and communities.
Telecom equipment vendors “must have traction in emerging markets to avoid being left behind by their competitors in 2009,” Ovum analyst John Lively wrote in a note Thursday. Emerging telecom markets outperformed mature ones in revenue and capital spending growth Q1, he said. In South America, China, and India, capital spending increased at rates of 55 to 75 percent, he said. Meanwhile, changes in spending by operators in North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific ran from a 6 percent increase to a 22 percent decrease, he said. North America was hurt most by the recession in the quarter, Lively said. Wireline revenue fell 7.4 percent, cable TV grew 3.8 percent and wireless grew 3.1 percent, he said. The figures are eight to 10 percentage points below rates before the recession, he said. Capital spending fell 22 percent in wireline, 14.6 percent in cable and 12.2 percent in wireless from a year earlier. India was the fastest-growing market, with wireline revenue up 16.4 percent year to year and mobile climbing 27.5 percent, Lively said. Capital spending was up about 60 percent for both fixed and mobile operators, he said.
Experts see uncertainties in completing the Verizon- Frontier $8.6 billion landline deal, but executives from both companies underlined their confidence about receiving all regulatory approvals in a year. Verizon also expects no impact on its forbearance case pending in federal court, it said. Verizon agreed to sell 4.8 million access lines in 14 states to Frontier, tripling Frontier’s size.
CSG’s Q1 sales rose 8.8 percent from a year earlier to $123.5 million as the billing services provider expanded agreements with cable-operator customers. Net income fell 3.8 percent to $12.9 million. The company forecast 2009 revenue as high as $498 million. That would be a 5.5 percent increase from last year’s.
About 610,000 TV homes got ready in March for the DTV switchover, Nielsen said. That left about 3.8 million, or 3.4 percent of U.S. TV homes, “completely unready” for the switch, meaning they would at least briefly lose TV service if the transition were to happen today. The unready rate is higher among young people, African Americans, Hispanics and Asians, Nielsen said. Among those older than 55, 1.8 percent remain completely unready, while 6.3 percent of those younger than 35 fall in that category. Meanwhile, DTV converter box coupon redemptions have rebounded somewhat, averaging about 426,000 a week over the last two weeks, up from 347,000 over three weeks prior, NTIA data show.
Leap Wireless widened its loss in Q4, hurt by higher operating expenses. The company posted a loss of $54.8 million, compared to $18.1 million in the year-ago period. Operating expenses increased by 26 percent. But net customer additions jumped 153 percent over the year-ago quarter to 385,292. At the end of December, the carrier had 3.84 million customers, up 34.3 percent year-over-year. The company expects to add more than 1.5 million customers in 2009. Churn was 3.8 percent, down from 4.2 percent in the year-earlier period. The carrier expects capital expenditures of between $625 million and $725 million this year, CEO Doug Hutcheson said on a conference call late Thursday.
Growth in Norsat International’s satellite business offset declines in its microwave business, Norsat CEO Aimee Chan said. Norsat is seeing particular growth in demand for portable satellite systems, Chan said. The Canadian government put $5.97 million into Norsat through the Canadian Government’s Strategic Aerospace and Defense Initiative, Norsat said. The company will use the funds for research and development activities, Chan said. The money must be repaid with interest in 15 years. Norsat revenue grew to $4.9 million from $3.8 million for the same quarter in 2007, Norsat said.