Telecom and internet regulators often create policies that have effects opposite of what they intended. They want more competition and then create policies that lead to less competition. They want more investment in next-generation networks and produce less. Good intentions produce harmful [...]

Privacy rules might well affect how much mobile service providers can monetize customer behavior. People tend to understand that mobile and other service providers have mined their data to improve operations. Perhaps the bigger question is where, and whether, they can leverage customer data to [...]

Reliance Jio was the big winner, and Vodafone Idea the big loser for net account additions in India’s mobile services market in October 2018, according to TRAI. Though the industry gained a net 725,000 accounts, virtually all the gains were made by Reliance Jio. BSNL got a small percentage of [...]

The digital footprint any mobile user leaves can equal or exceed the information content of credit bureau scores, a team of researchers claims. In other words, it is possible to determine creditworthiness. The issue is the extent to which mobile service providers or their partners have in their [...]

The satellite services industry faces challenges similar to those faced by other connectivity providers, namely a shift of demand. In 2017, 75 percent of service provider revenues were generated by delivering video entertainment (television). To the extent that video distribution is moving [...]

Reliance Jio was the big winner, and Vodafone Idea the big loser for net account additions in India’s mobile services market in October 2018, according to TRAI. Though the industry gained a net 725,000 accounts, virtually all the gains were made by Reliance Jio. BSNL got a small percentage of [...]

Among the bigger questions for 5G service providers is whether the business model is going to be better than 4G and 3G, or worse. Perhaps that should not be a key question, but global service provider business models arguably have been getting more difficult, compared to 2G. In brief, here is [...]

Mobile networks always have been lower cost platforms, in terms of capital investment, compared to either telco or cable TV hybrid fiber coax networks. Just how big a difference is illustrated by new data issued by the Canadian CRTC. Capital investment by Canadian mobile operators is about nine [...]

Low-cost bandwidth has become a strategic imperative for mobile networks for several reasons, including the primary need to support video entertainment. Indeed, it would not be unfair to argue that advanced mobile networks are designed precisely with video bandwidth as the primary driver of [...]

Many discussions of the value of 5G, and of 5G bandwidth are a matter of rhetorical overkill. Observers complain about “fake 5G” that really is 4G Advanced, fixed wireless using 5G or non-standard deployments. Pundits might care about that sort of thing; consumers do not. In the U.S. [...]

A recent report by the Ireland Commission for Communications Regulation  finds that the use of modern building materials,windows, block materials and roofing can have an extraordinarily detrimental effect on the propagation of radio waves into buildings constructed using these materials, [...]

Steve Jobs  might have wanted the early iPhones to rely extensively on cloud computing, which would have helped increase the utility and power of an iPhone without requiring all the computing and storage to be resident on the device. But it was simply too early in 2007. The networks were not [...]