For much of 2011 and 2012, it looked like mobile carriers were just the utility companies for the Web 2.0 economy. Apple with Siri, Google with its mapping and search capabilities, Facebook with its social networking clout… but we are now starting to see carriers fight back. The first time I started to hear about this possible reality was from the CEO of Korea’s Uplus 4G mobile carrier, Sangchui LEE, who talked about 4G enabling “rich media mash-ups” in mid-2012. More recently, AT&T held a Developer Summit at CES and it certainly seems AT&T is keen to get to that new rich media mash-up reality.

The embers of the heated WCIT ITR negotiation last month have barely cooled and yet they are being fanned once more with anti-ITU sentiment. I came across the De-fund the ITU campaign, accompanied by a US petition to reduce USG direct funding of the ITU from $11M to $22k. Far be it from me to deny William EW’s right to petition his government, or the US’s to adjust funding as it sees fit, but some of the statements in his campaign’s website are so misguided that US readers would be ill-advised to sign this petition without doing some further research into the allegations.

DISH Network Corporation, the North American direct satellite broadcaster, has put a recent spanner (“wrench” in American English) in the works for Sprint's acquisition of the remaining 49.6% of Clearwire, the U.S. wholesale 4G LTE and retail WiMAX service provider. Will it succeed?

My Contactless Experience Thus Far

In the input market, mobile network operators demand spectrum, which is essentially a factor of production; in the output market, they supply cellular services. One can imagine how the market structure in the former influences that in the latter. The controversy surrounding the spectrum screen review in the United States presents a case in point. While Republican commissioners worried that any tightening of the screen could dampen participation and hence competition and revenue in an upcoming auction (the input market), the Competitive Carriers Association feared that not doing so would reduce competition in the output market.

PA Consulting Group develops Time And Relative Dimension In Space, fits a 30ft base station into a 3 inch Raspberry Pi.  As for the Pi, a BBC fan would tell you, “It’s bigger on the inside!” 

The impact of WhatsApp, and other “Over The Top” messaging clients such as Viber, have been stark. In Western Europe, for example, while mobile data usage is gathering pace, a number of other metrics are very much in retreat. In most countries around Europe, minutes of use has contracted up to 4.5% quarter on quarter. Similarly text messaging was down between -0.5% and -7.8% for those countries QoQ. As ABI Research’s Mobile ARPU Market Data has shown, monthly average revenue for Western Europe continued to decline in 3Q-2012.

Imagine it is Dec-2007, and you are in Kenya, and you heard on the television news that the government made a commitment to assure 100% internet penetration by 2017. Would you bet for or against that commitment?

Most Holiday Cards are - well - Holiday Cards.  I've recevied cards with company history (Ericsson: http://www.ericsson.com/seasonsgreetings), a donation to Second Harvest Food Bank (Cisco), and the Like.

Reading through some of the cyber trends forecasted for the next year/decade/millennia, I get the feeling that there are two very diverging paths. Either I embark immediately on the construction of a space-capable, self-supporting, eco-something survival pod or I do nothing and just give up now on ever seeing HAL 9000 pitted against ENCOM’s Master Control Program for the domination of the planet.  Science fiction too often proposes the apocalyptic vision of mankind’s doom should the machines ever rise against us. Are we headed for disaster or will things remain decidedly uneventful?