Editor’s Note: RCR Wireless News goes all in for “Throwback Thursdays,” tapping into our archives to resuscitate the top headlines from the past. Fire up the time machine, put on those sepia-tinted shades, set the date for #TBT and enjoy the memories!
FCC considers rules on signal boosters
The Federal Communications Commission is considering implementing a law that would make cellphone boosters illegal unless they are deployed by a wireless operator or with the consent of a wireless operator, a move that could impact thousands of end users already owning such devices. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking before the FCC addresses an ongoing controversy within the wireless industry and could impact devices like MagicJack and other femtocell solutions, as well as local and state governments that want to be able to use cellphone jammers to prevent prisoners from unauthorized use of cellphones. Depending on whose argument you believe, the eventual ruling could even have an impact on net neutrality rules. One proponent of signal boosters and jammers said that making boosters illegal won’t address the products already in the market, nor will it stop the sale of signal boosters. Wireless industry trade association CTIA in 2007 filed a petition for declaratory ruling at the FCC, asking that it outlaw the sale and use of any device that can enhance or impair cellphone calls. The petition was a surprise to some third-party retailers, who called RCR Wireless News at the time and thought the story had to be wrong. Therein lies the crux of the problem: a cellphone booster can enhance coverage for a customer, but also has the potential to interfere with someone else’s signal. Yet, cellphone boosters have been marketed to carriers and end users alike as a way to improve the cellular signal in areas where coverage is less than satisfactory – and the reality remains that cellphone coverage in some locations is spotty. … Read more
Staking a claim in the tower gold rush
Many talk about cellular towers as if each of them were equivalent to a claim for gold or oil. But in reality, towers are even better than gold (the black and gooey kind or shiny and gold kind). For all intents and purposes, the ability for wireless towers to multiply from sea to shining sea isn’t at all hindered by the same resource requirements. In other words, a natural resource like gold isn’t finite in the same way space and the need for wireless towers flourishes – indeed their growth is only kept in check by man-made forces. For the past 10 to 15 years, the tower industry has gone through waves of consolidation, periods of rampant growth and buildouts that were followed by equally rapid down turns. Generally, the cycle repeats. Working behind the scenes tirelessly and with much less fanfare are the small tower owners that may own a single tower or a portfolio of 15. Marc Ganzi, CEO of Global Tower Partners and chairman of PCIA, calls small-tower owners the “heart and soul of the industry.” The small mom-and-pop operations that build these towers keep the industry going, he added. Collectively, small tower companies comprise around 28% of the entire tower landscape, but pinning down anything resembling solid data on tower counts is almost impossible. … Read more
Carriers will have to increase revenues from existing customers: Report
According to a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, mobile carriers will have to find ways to milk more revenues from existing customers rather than relying on revenues from new subscribers to support profitability. The report, “Change is on the Air: 2009 North American Wireless Industry Survey,” noted that customer retention efforts are becoming critical for carriers as the pool of new customers has dwindled and the cost of customer retention efforts increased more than 50% from 2007 to 2008 and came in at more than $160 per subscriber in 2009. The report also noted that the economic downturn has resulted in an increase in prepaid usage by wireless consumers with prepaid minutes surging more than 147% over the past four years. “The U.S. mobile market is entering an era during which margins and profitability will trump penetration and volume. Where customer experience had been the focus, the emphasis is now shifting to price, across range of customers – including premium users, value-oriented family plans, and the pre-pay market,” said Pierre-Alain Sur, U.S. wireless industry leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Now, mobile carriers must dive deeply into the profitability profiles of all their existing customer categories. And with today’s enhanced visibility, carriers have a far more robust set of tools to increase their bottom lines across every kind of customer interaction.” One way to increase revenues from current subscribers is to increase penetration of smartphone devices that PricewaterhouseCoopers said result in $20 per month in extra revenues per subscribers compared to non-smartphone subscribers. This result is backed by recent changes made by the nation’s two largest wireless operators, Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility, requiring smartphone users to sign up for a $30 per month data package. … Read more
Making money on mobile music
BARCELONA – “Any piece of content should be playable within five seconds.” That’s the goal Spotify is after with its hugely popular music service that barely anyone outside of Europe has ever heard of, CEO and Founder Daniel Ek said during a keynote. In his elevator pitch, Ek described Spotify as an iTunes-like experience that allows users to access all of the world’s music. The two-tiered platform is broken up into a free, ad-supported model and a premium model that allows users to access and cache their entire music library on their mobile device. Based on the latest exchange rates, the premium service costs $13.60 in Spain, France, Sweden, Norway and Finland; and $15.68 in the United Kingdom. For that price, users can download as many songs as they want every month. “People often think about the Internet as something that’s linear,” Ek said, but Spotify has proven the value of speed, social outlets, sharing and discovery simply through its exponential growth. “The average Spotify user today has 15,000 tracks in their library,” he said. “We want to enable all of that content on a mobile device.” So far, the service has attracted 7 million users who have collectively created more than 100 million playlists already, he added. Moreover, Spotify is not driven by hits. “The people in Spotify are discovering the back catalog of the artist,” he said. “When we do a new release, the new release gets very popular for the first two days then people start digging into the back catalog.” As for upsell to the mobile community, Ek is convinced Spotify has the same appeal for a carrier as iTunes. “We’re taking what’s already there on the desktop and enabling it on the mobile phone,” he concluded. … Read more
Google talks mobile at MWC
BARCELONA – As the second day of Mobile World Congress came to a close, the chairman and CEO of the seemingly dark horse not-so-long ago, Google, presented his thesis for why he thinks the ecosystem supporting mobility is coalescing around a point that will be “fundamental to human existence.” Eric Schmidt outlined three factors – computing, connectivity and the cloud – that will be paramount to delivering a richer, more dynamic and personally fulfilling experience on mobile. “It’s like magic. All of a sudden there are things you can do that you never thought were possible,” he said. With low-power high performance chipsets on the burner, mobile players throughout the ecosystem will soon “have all the wonderful properties that we’ve seen in the computer industry,” he added. Connectivity, which has already proven to be a bottleneck problem for a variety of operators and their users, is the second “tremendous wave” that’s hit the industry, but Schmidt said he’s hopeful about solutions that are already in the wings. “The story is LTE,” he said. Seeing as how the United States has historically lagged behind Europe, South Korea and Japan in commercially deploying next generations of wireless technology he “was shocked to discover that the United States might actually deploy LTE soon.” Cloud computing, the third wave, is already allowing share-intensive applications and sophisticated information to be leveraged in impressive ways, he added. … Read more
Check out the RCR Wireless News Archives for more stories from the past.
