Global smartphone shipments are expected to grow 32.7 percent year-over-year in 2013, to 958.8 million units, IDC predicted Tuesday. That means this will be the first year in which smartphone shipments exceed those of feature phones, with smartphones expected to be 52.2 percent of all mobile phone shipments globally, the research company said. The trend will “continue for years to come as demand for mobile data and handheld computing spreads across both developed and emerging markets,” it predicted. Emerging markets will make up 64.8 percent of all smartphones shipped in 2013, up from 43.1 percent in 2010, it said. Driving the smartphone growth has been “a perfect combination of strong demand from end users, greater emphasis by both carriers and vendors, and a deep selection of devices available at multiple price points,” it said. Many mobile phone makers have “not only successfully transitioned their product portfolios to highlight smartphones, but smartphones have become their primary value proposition going forward,” said Ramon Llamas, IDC research manager-mobile phones program, in a news release. “In some cases, smartphones have accounted for well over 50% of their quarterly shipment volume,” he said, predicting “the gulf” between smartphones and features phones will “grow ever wider.” Smartphone demand has also “quickly spread from developed markets to emerging markets,” said IDC. As a result, smartphone average selling prices (ASPs) have decreased to $372 in 2013, from $407 in 2012 and $443 in 2011, it said. It predicted smartphone ASPs will drop as low as $309 by 2017, with “emerging market demand the main catalyst” for that change. A way in which vendors have been able to keep costs down is by continuing to produce 3G smartphones alongside faster 4G smartphones, it said. IDC predicted 3G smartphones will represent 70.9 percent of all smartphones shipped in 2013 and 50.1 percent of smartphones shipped in 2017.
Cox Communications’ Virginia systems joined the Connect2Compete (C2C) nonprofit initiative of cable ISPs selling broadband for reduced prices to poor families with kids. The product will cost $9.95 monthly and include a free modem and professional installation, said Cox, which in 2002 started a similar program in Santa Barbara, Calif., on which C2C is modeled. FCC acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn, C2C CEO Zach Leverenz and other municipal and nonprofit officials were at a ribbon-cutting for Cox’s Virginia C2C product, said a company news release Monday (http://bit.ly/11CjrvN).
The Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast projected global IP traffic will triple between 2012 and 2017 (http://bit.ly/18usc3Q). By 2017, the annual global IP traffic will reach 1.4 zettabytes, and more traffic will access the global networks in 2017 than all prior Internet years combined, from 1984 through 2012. Almost half of all IP traffic will originate with non-PC devices, including tablets, smartphones and televisions. The Asia Pacific region will continue to generate the most IP traffic by 2017 and the Middle East and Africa continue to be the fastest-growing IP traffic region from 2012-2017. The U.S. and China will be the highest traffic-generating countries by 2017. The number of Internet video users will double in 2017 from 1 billion to 2 billion. “Cisco’s VNI Forecast once again showcases the seemingly insatiable demand for bandwidth across the globe,” said Doug Webster, Cisco vice president-product and solutions marketing. The report projects increases in users in 2017 by 25 percent in residential Internet, 19.6 percent in mobile consumers and 28.4 percent in business Internet.
Former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh endorsed a controversial Department of Justice report on spectrum aggregation and competition (CD April 15 p7), in a letter filed at the FCC by Sprint Nextel. “After reviewing the Department’s Ex Parte in this proceeding, I believe it is fully consistent with its longstanding approach to competition policy under Republican and Democratic administrations alike,” Thornburgh wrote. He was attorney general under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. “The DOJ filing properly draws upon decades of its antitrust policies and precedents in offering its comments,” he said (http://bit.ly/11fLSzO). “For the last 40 years, the Department has consistently supported public policies that promote competition and innovation in the telecommunications industry -- from the breakup of the Bell System in 1984 during the Reagan administration, to the allocation of new broadband PCS spectrum as competition to the old analog cellular duopoly during the George H.W. Bush administration, to challenges to proposed telecommunications mergers under the George W. Bush administration, to the Department’s exercise of its case-by-case merger review authority.” T-Mobile Vice President Kathleen Ham also defended the DOJ filing in a Tuesday blog post. “Importantly, DOJ did not argue that AT&T and Verizon be barred from the upcoming auction or that they be denied a chance to add to their low-band spectrum cache,” she said (http://bit.ly/17lFu2q). “T-Mobile, likewise, has made clear that its proposed spectrum aggregation rule would contain an exception allowing the dominant carriers to purchase 600 MHz licenses in every market even if their spectrum holdings are already in excess of the established cap in particular geographic areas.” That hasn’t stopped AT&T from going on the attack, Ham wrote. “AT&T nevertheless has begun an all-out campaign to quash any limits whatsoever on its self-perceived right to acquire any and all licenses so long as it has the money and power to do so, at the expense of competition and future innovation in the wireless industry,” she said. “At the same time, AT&T contends that the 600 MHz spectrum is really nothing special, and regulators have no need to worry about excessive concentration of the low-frequency licenses in its hands.”
The Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period in connection with Dish Network’s offer to buy Sprint Nextel expired Monday, Dish said in a press release (http://bit.ly/15y9QL7). Dish offered $25.5 billion to buy the wireless company (CD April 16 p1).
Social media lets customers communicate with companies to get updates before, during and after natural disasters and other emergencies, executives said at a congressional hearing and in follow-up interviews Tuesday. They said that through crowdsourcing, people are able to get information about resources in their communities and get messages to first responders, people they know and the utilities and other companies they patronize. Such collaboration is done with online crisis maps and social media including Facebook and Twitter, and websites like Airbnb.com, said executives from Google and Public Service Electric and Gas Co. (PSE&G) and Internet Association CEO Michael Beckerman. With each natural disaster, the public and the private sector collaborate to further their technologies, said Beckerman, who also testified at a House Emergency Preparedness Subcommittee hearing Tuesday, in a follow-up interview. After the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, Facebook created a disaster relief page, and this technology became ongoing protocol for every disaster since then, he said. “In 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, social media did not exist and only 50 percent of users were online.” There are pre-disaster, during disaster and aftermath protocols when it comes to social media, he said. “We have an ongoing response with FEMA and the Red Cross and we are improving public private partnerships on a real-time basis.” Crowdsourcing played a major role in preparing for storms and organizing resources after storms have passed, said Matthew Stepka, Google vice president, at the hearing. Four days before Superstorm Sandy hit, the company created alerts for search terms related to the storm, with a warning from the National Weather Service, he said. “Through user-generated content in Crisis Maps during Hurricane Sandy, we were able to share better updates than those we got only from official sources.” Through Crisis Maps, people are able to look at all of the data in a central place, said Stepka. “We are currently working with official U.S. agencies, such as the National Weather Service and the Geological Survey, to show relevant alerts to Google users, and we welcome partnerships with other agencies who publish authoritative alerts.” Jason Payne, Palantir Technologies philanthropy engineering team lead, said FirstNet “is going to be used for emergency personnel to have access to LTE data.” It “should also be allocated in small amounts to the Red Cross” and others to perform their missions, he told us. “If people were able to put up a quick Facebook message, it would put the minds of their friends and family at ease, because they would know that they are safe.” Palantir is working with the Clinton Global Initiative to scale up the initiative’s disaster relief and make better decisions. The company and its partners “need to know how to allocate personnel to meet needs,” said Payne. New Jersey utility PSE&G used Twitter to connect with customers during and after Sandy, testified Jorge Cardenas, vice president-asset management and centralized services. “We used Twitter to send word about the daily locations of our giant tents and generators. … We sent more than 9,000 messages and saw some 90,000 directed at us.” PSE&G plans to teach people in neighboring states the company’s methods to engage with customers, said Cardenas. There’s a need to have accurate and plentiful information during emergencies, when it comes to crowdsourcing, witnesses testified. “With more data, you can fuse together the best information that you can build,” said Payne. People need to be connected, especially in times of emergency, where they cannot get information from regular broadcast channels, said Cardenas. “We need to talk with people, and not to people.”
The National Transportation Safety Board warned against the potential risks to public safety of allowing Wi-Fi use of the 5850-5925 MHz band on a secondary basis, because the spectrum is set aside for a national vehicle-to-vehicle warning system. Last week, the automotive industry also opposed the proposal unveiled in January by former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at CES (CD May 31 p4). “The implementation of this technological opportunity to improve transportation safety so significantly must not be compromised by issues associated with interference on the 5 GHz band,” the NTSB said (http://bit.ly/ZLt3KH). “The NTSB is not opposed to spectrum sharing in principle, but the security of preestablished communication frequencies related to transportation safety must first be ensured. Spectrum sharing could put the frequencies at risk of dangerous interference, and much is still unknown about frequency interference when it comes to vast numbers of connected vehicles in motion.” NTSB has advocated intelligent vehicle technologies “since the mid-1990s,” the filing said. “The NTSB first addressed collision avoidance during its investigation of a 1995 multivehicle collision in Menifee, Arkansas, in which a commercial vehicle entered dense fog, slowed from 65 mph to between 35 and 40 mph, and was then struck from behind. Subsequent collisions occurred as vehicles drove into the wreckage. ... Even then, before today’s wirelessly connected world existed, the need to establish dedicated communication airwaves for technologies that could prevent such collisions was recognized."
Cox Communications began a cloud-based credit card processing service, making it the first cable operator to offer a managed payment solution, Cox said in a news release Tuesday (bit.ly/19G4fpb). It said PayLeap, via a partnership with Acculynk, will give small- and medium-sized businesses the ability to process payments in one managed service, with Acculynk providing a platform of secure payment solutions to protect online transactions. The service will be available to all of Cox Communications’ more than 300,000 business customers later this year.
Traditional video-on-demand vendors will see less than 30 percent growth in the next five years, ABI Research said in a Tuesday release (http://bit.ly/19FFlWG). Equipment and system vendors will lose ground to cloud-oriented companies and content management system vendors, it said. Traditional VOD vendors “have failed to adapt to syndicated workflows,” said ABI Research practice director Sam Rosen.
More than 25,000 songwriters and composers formed an independent advocacy network for music creators, industry representatives said in a Tuesday release (http://bit.ly/19FExkO). “Its immediate goal will be the championing of a set of Fair Trade Music Principles designed to ensure transparency, fair compensation, and autonomy for music creators in an increasingly complex and non-transparent music business landscape,” the group said. Founding members include the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance,Music Creators North America, International Council of Creators of Music, Pan African Composers and Songwriters Alliance, and Alliance of Latin American Creators of Music.