2-15-2008 Communications Week in Review
Posted on February 15, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under Commentary, Industry News
Some of this weeks top stories: Microsoft leaps into the low end cell phone market, as the Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona. Vonage gains some market share while VoIP Inc. sues for patent infringement and the WiMax forum comes clean about its FDD plans. Also, an awful lot about Comcast in the news this week.
Mobile World Congress 2008
The MWG got underway this week in Barcelona with handset makers showing their wares, and WiMax edging in on LTE turf. The Congress attracts a lot of Asian participants, where mobile technology is more advanced than elsewhere, and will highlight new innovations evolving as the industry shifts from 3rd to 4th Generation technologies.
Microsoft Buys Danger
Software king Microsoft announced its intention to buy Danger, maker of the T-Mobile Sidekick cell phone. The Sidekick has its own mobile OS, and its form and function is popular with low end cell phone users (i.e. kids).
Unclear is what they plan to do with the company, and how this will affect their high end Windows Mobile OS (i.e. business users).
Pure Play Vonage improves to Stable
Vonage posted a 19.3% Q4 increase in revenue over last years fourth, and said it added 56,000 new customers, gaining back some market share lost in a not so good year. Losses were only $11.1 million, a vast improvement over last year’s quarter loss of $117 million.
Not out of the woods yet, Vonage has $250 million in short term debt coming due at the end of the year. Analysts are skeptical that they will be able to refinance that debt in a staggering economy.
At least the bleeding has stopped, for now.
Former Pure Play Ready to Sue
VoIP Inc., who abruptly pulled a SunRocket last week, claimed that its click to call patent is worth $1.25 billion, and has hired a law firm to go after 100 companies it claims are infringing on the patent.
Undisclosed was how they came up with that figure. Good luck with that!
Wimax Goes After 700MHz
The WiMax Forum announced at the Mobile World Congress that it is indeed working on an FDD profile, and with the increased interest in the 700MHz band, they want a piece of it, globally.
Additionally, the Forum announced that 28 products for the 2.3 and 2.5GHz range have been accepted for testing in their certification labs, and are expected to be ready to market later this year. Over 260 Wimax deployments have been rolled out worldwide to date.
Lions and Tigers and Comcast, Oh My!
Comcast announced a 54% increase of $600.2 million in net income for Q4, and declared a 6.25 cents per share dividend. 73% of the increase is attributed to its digital phone service, and 14% to high speed Internet.
Along with Time Warner and Bright House Networks, Comcast filed a complaint against Verizon with the FCC, alleging unfair retention practices. Apparently, the cellular giant has been offering deals on pricing and gift cards to convince customers not to churn. The FCC has banned carriers from trying to persuade customers not to switch.
In another filing with the FCC, Comcast fesses up and defends its bandwidth throttling practices, urging the Agency to declare their traffic management techniques reasonable.
And oh yea, another noteworthy news morsel: The House now has a net neutrality bill in front of them, as they ponder the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008. For those of you who read my last post, I guess you know what I think about that!
That’s the way it is.
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