Technik

Brian Roberts Comes to Sand Hill Road

The general view in the venture community is that it is very difficult to make money on cable technologies.  Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast and son of its founder, came to the center of the venture capital business on Sand Hill Road to inspire venture investment in cable.  Brian is a very accomplished person and has managed Comcast to king of the cable hill.  The cable industry was created by true cowboys, a colorful lot who wheeled and dealed, bluffed and stuffed their way to sizable franchises.   Brian was the only guy in the room with a tie, which shows how the industry has matured.  He was quite engaging, albeit in some cases he gave with one hand then pulled back with the other.  His core message is that competition and consolidation have changed the prior dynamics of dealing with the cable cowboys.  Did he make his case? 

VOIP Will Do What Regulation Failed To Do - Restructure The Phone Industry

AT&T spends $11B per year on local access. With VOIP, they can reduce that at least in half - access is paid at both ends of a call, and their VOIP customer will be one end or the other - and beyond as both ends become VOIP. As long as the broadband pipe is deregulated as an information service (no access fees) but constrained to allow third-party VOIP to flow over the DSL or cable modem service, AT&T can achieve much faster and cheaper what they once spent $99B on (and sold for $50B) when they bought cable assets - bypassing the local phone companies to reach the customer. Their VOIP service is the first step towards a potentially massive restructuring of the phone industry.

VOIP could succeed where Congress and the FCC failed: create a truly competitive phone industry.

mMode = Prodigy

The proponents of 3G for data have some convincing to do. In Japan, iMode was all the rage, but it appears that the peculiar passions of teenage girls in Tokyo do not translate to business elsewhere. In the US, ATTW mMode is being pushed hard. In my experience, too hard. When I switched to GSM from TDMA, around $17 of extra charges magically appeared on my bill for mMode services I cared a whit about. Took a few calls to remove them and get credit. Worse, my daughter had earlier switched to GSM, and she too had the magic charges. She had no clue what they were for. At first ATTW would only stop billing them, not give a credit for past bills, even though there was no usage of these services at all. After a few more calls, this got fixed. Then I got one of those evening-time ATT phone calls that are so constantly annoying. In this case, it was a satisfaction survey of my mMode experience. This was a survey I participated in, although I am unsure how well to hapless college student on the other end survived it.

Carriers in Europe and Asia have been able to offer point services that appeal - ringtones, SMS, cellcams. But the broader opportunity for a World Wide Wireless Web is eluding their grasp. In the US the Blackberry (aka Crackberry) is another point solution, albeit operating largely off the 2.5G networks. T-Mobile has offered the Danger device (a Blackberry for tweens) on their GPRS network, but to very underwhelming success.

Why aren't the dogs eating this dogfood?

SIP = MP3

Web 2.0 is emerging as quite an interesting collection of technologies: WiFi, IM, blog, RSS, social networks .. and now SIP:

An Internet pioneer has started a Web phone company. Michael Robertson is marketing a device he says connects to broadband connections and lets users send and receive calls to other such phones around the world at no charge. "Today few people know about this," he said. "But it will fundamentally change the telephone business, just as MP3 has done with the music industry." Robertson founded MP3.com, one of the Web's first file-sharing sites. He is taking on Bill Gates through his next company, Lindows, which makes a Linux based windows OS. His new company, SIPphone Inc., is taking orders via its Web site for the devices, priced at $129.95 for a pair, but it shows no pictures of them.

Notes from the Front: WiFi Voice

I am at the VON conference in San Jose. Listening to a voice-over-WiFi panel. Vocera has a new device which is like a WiFi cordless phone but acts as a pager/walkie-talkie as well. Very useful in a hospital, for example, where it can be carried around like a cell phone and doctors & nurses can find each other and talk wherever they are. Telesym has a similar system where the device is a laptop or PDA with special software. The panel is well-attended, people stacked out into the hall. This shows how robust the WiFi ecosystem is becoming. Expect to see low-power WiFi chips embedded in cell phones next year. Then this market takes off, as the cell phone becomes useful inside as well as outside. The battle will then shift to outside networks - will VoWiFi traffic be captured by the existing carriers or will new voice-over-IP (VoIP) carriers use the Internet to bypass the pulic switched phone systems worldwide.