Fixed mobile convergence makes global progress

T-Mobile is launching its broadband voice @Home service throughout the US, which prepares them for an agressive FMC position. French telecom carriers are also expected to push harder on FMC and wireline broadband expansion as the consolidation in the market finally draws to a close, but that we believe is mirroring a worldwide trend.

Consolidation hasn’t been holding other projects back, it’s simply been a safer early response to declining revenue per bit. We believe that operators worldwide are preparing for a “transformation test” around FMC, broadband services, partnerships with Internet companies and developers, and other new areas. They’ll fund what works and cease funding what does not, and this could result in some pockets of spending and reductions as everyone takes the measure of their market. We think the situation will be more predictable in 2009 than in 2010 through 2012, when only some successful revenue initiatives will drive spending growth in service provider infrastructure.

Cox cable considers FTTH model

Cox Cable has issued an RFI that includes requests for PON/RF distribution with high-speed broadband, very similar to the FiOS model of Verizon. The RFI leaked last week at NXTcomm but had been rumored even before that show.  It is apparently a true RFI, meaning that there is no immediate expectation of an equipment order. We hear that Cox is simply preparing an internal position paper on alternatives for plant modernization, given the current war between cable and telcos that provide video.

The question cable operators must answer is not only whether they can deploy FTTH, but how widespread telco FTTH could become. A cable industry study previously showed that the cable plant, even DOCSIS 3.0, could not compete with full FTTH should it be deployed. Our own modeling shows that Verizon could expect to reach about 70% of its customers with FTTH, that AT&T could reach perhaps 26%, and that Qwest could reach only 11% without significant shortfalls in ROI or significant improvements in cost or revenue.

Vendors showing up for Carrier Ethernet

NXTcomm 08 was an interesting show, something a lot better than some of the disasters that followed the breakup of the SuperComm partnership, but far less than SuperComm in its prime.

<p>We believe this is due not as much to the show as to the industry; infrastructure doesn’t have buzz any more. In the heyday of the older show, the bubble was in bloom and there was a lot of trade press action around it. Today, publication coverage of infrastructure issues is down because the buyers are all big telcos who don’t do things interesting enough to make the press happy. The big news in the show was the substantial vendor presence in Carrier Ethernet.

 <p>While most of the companies that showed products were objectively doing less than half of what the market would require in terms of features, there was enough support to make it clear that despite the PBT announcement by BT, this technology isn’t going away. We believe, in fact, that the major deployments will begin to roll in 2H09 and that most of the opponents of PBT will end up quietly supporting it by then.

<p>We had 10 interviews with vendors and carriers on our ExperiaSphere initiative and we were thus able to exceed our own objectives for the show. Service management issues and their relationship to standards and to network resources are a key part of the Ethernet picture, and also key for IP/MPLS in any form. In fact, a report we are publishing in the July issue of Newatcher, our newsletter, shows that service and operations management issues with both Ethernet and IP/MPLS result in more swing in total cost of ownership than technology issues do.

Verizon ups FiOS speed across footprint

Verizon says it will make its top-tier FiOS service, a 50/20Mbps pipe available over its whole footprint, which would make Verizon users some of the most empowered in the western world. The move comes as cable MSOs prepare an assault on DSL in further commercials.

<p>The combination of all of this puts enormous pressure on AT&T, which has no fiber offering.  But it also pressures Verizon to improve DSL services. Verizon reports DSL has tapered down as customers wait for FiOS, and we believe that Verizon will be offering incentives for users to adopt DSL to hold them over until FiOS is available in their area.

ALU must differentiate itself from Huawei

Huawei may have a reputation for being just a price leader, but that’s enough to propel significant growth outside China and pull it into the DSL port shipment lead over Alcatel-Lucent. We believe that Huawei is not so much a competitor as a fall-back when there is no real “competition”, meaning where vendors fail to generate any meaningful differentiation. Price then decides, and Huawei wins.

The success recently may be due in small part to economic conditions, but we believe the largest part is due to equipment vendors ceding key strategic issues in service creation and management to partners. That being done, the equipment is just plumbing and the partner solutions can be applied over Huawei. We believe ALU sees this, and that it was a motivation behind its purchase of subscriber management specialist firm Motive.

Nortel’s Verizon PBT contract sheds light on Ethernet market

Nortel has announced a PBB win at Verizon, the same provider who reportedly said it would not be using PBT. SInce PBT is officially PBB-TE and is a simple upgrade from PBB, we believe the sequence of events here shows the overall lack of media sanity on key technology issues.

First, Verizon’s selection of VPLS over PBT, as reported, was a core network decision not metro, where most of Verizon’s dollars are spent. Second, the “decision” had never been in doubt, as we reported when it was first announced, since Verizon’s core network isn’t even a candidate for Ethernet deployment.

In any event, there is no problem in the Carrier Ethernet market, and IP players may be looking wistfully at the opportunity there before long. Metro buildout is clearly on a faster pace worldwide than core build-out for revenue reasons.

Apple MobileMe as major competitor?

Apple’s MobileMe may be more than an “Exchange Killer” (or at least a competitor); it may be the beginning of Apple’s challenge to Microsoft’s Connected Services Framework (CSF) and also a challenge to network operators. Finally, it may be a boon to Cisco. The reason is that MobileMe is an example of an over-the-top application of advanced service features, and thus a step in further disintermediating operators that might want to offer similar services themselves.

That’s what Microsoft has been doing, but more in partnership with operators than as a competitor.  But it’s pretty much what Cisco had hoped to do (and presumably still hopes to do) with WebEx Connect. In all, we think MobileMe may be the most important thing about the latest iPhone announcement because it may be setting off a new industry trend. We also think that MobileMe is the revenue kicker that Steve Jobs sees in his new iPhone deals with providers, which eliminate the Apple cut of future service revenues in favor of a one-time subsidy.

Report on IP traffic growth greatly exaggerated?

UBS has released a sector report on telecom that suggests that the slowing IP traffic growth will threaten router vendors. While the firm has long taken a rather bearish stance on the industry, this seems more alarming and less justified than most positions.

We know of no credible reports of slowing IP traffic growth; in fact, the increased deployment of high-speed broadband seems to promise the opposite. However, beneath its questionable main thesis is an essential truth, which is that while IP traffic growth may not be slowing, the IP revenue ramp is definitely slowing. Service providers, like everyone else, invest for profits, and revenue per bit has been declining.

We have seen pitch after pitch from the service providers talking about their strategies for transformation, but we have also heard these same providers tell us that their barrier today is equipment vendors that have not followed up on operators’ published strategies. The trend toward usage pricing and caps, and traffic metering, are all related to the need to curtail costs to match revenue potential. If equipment vendors want to continue to sell gear, they need to step up in the NGN revenue game, not just push boxes.

WiMAX consortium getting serious

WiMAX companies are proposing a patent pool to create a stable and reasonable royalty picture for the technology, hopefully stemming any loss of interest due to perceived risk in patent payments to third parties. Intel, Cisco, Sprint, Clearwire and Alcatel-Lucent are all involved. WiMAX, a new service framework likely dependent on wide acceptance by portable device vendors, poses greater risk than something like 3G, whose market is already established. The move is seen as a way to encourage participation by equipment vendors. This shows that the Clearwire WiMAX consortium formed here earlier is likely serious about trying to make WiMAX work.

Router sales up…an IP economic indicator

Infonetics reports that router sales in the first quarter rose sharply, further validating the notion that the IP infrastructure market is more immune to economic problems than the enterprise. Both Juniper and Cisco gained market share, apparently in part at the expense of Alcatel-Lucent, whose IPTV position had previously been gaining it traction. We have long believed that IPTV would not be the silver bullet for ALU; too few regions meet the very special economic demographic requirements to make the strategy optimal.