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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: axial who wrote (26253)	4/19/2008 1:12:21 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

This is almost too uncanny, Jim. While you were posting your last message that spoke to the benefits of deriving two or more ARPUs for the cost of delivering one, I was simultaneously posting the following message to Cybertelecom.com concerning the potential of double-dipping taking place in FMC space: -- Subject: Cross subsidies of another kind Sat Apr 19 13:02 (EDT) I've been reading increasingly about the ways in which incumbents plan to offload a major portion of their wireless backhaul burdens onto their existing customers' (already-paid for) "broadband" wireline services (CM, DSL, FTTx, etc.) Dubbed Fixed Mobile Convergence, or FMC, incumbents are now fronting these capabilities as an economical means to extend cellular wireless services to the residence through the use of femtocells. Aside from the potential conflicts that are left open to chance in terms of competing multimedia traffic flows being pulled down simultaneouly by both the cablemodem/dsl/ftth wireline and the wireless application, am I the only one who is viewing this as a means towards double dipping? I recently commented on this on my forum (slightly edited): From: tinyurl.com "As I noted in the last paragraph of tinyurl.com , here again we see how carriers are motivated to double-dip from their local wireline access lines (cable, dsl, fttx, etc.) by offloading their growing backhual burdens onto facilities that end users are already paying for. And you can pretty much rest assured that the SPs have no intentions to use real-time rating and billing adjustments (capabilities that are held in reserve in other next gen applications for special application "dips" and/or peak periods of use, when momentary increases in rates are reasoned to be justified) to reflect the decreased performance of the wireline services during periods when the wireless component is being used to download videos." If not double-dipping in the classic sense, then leaving open the chance of diluting the value of the original wireline service by degrading its performance while continuing to bill for both the wireline and the new FMC cellular service at both of their published rates. -- An excerpt from a recent article in Telephonyonline.com: Mobile backhaul's true bottleneck Apr 10, 2008 12:45 PM, By Sarah Reedy telephonyonline.com "Closer to the user, wireless carriers must get users off wireless spectrum and onto an IP-based backbone as quickly as possible, via femtocells and other edge devices. "If you can limit public air interfaces to 10 to 50 feet, and from there on in it's a VoIP call, that gives carriers almost free incremental minutes to play with," Ryan said. "It's all a part of the flattening of the [wireless] network." I'm not questioning the validity of the technology. I actually think it's apropos of the need to optimize plant in many ways. Nor do I question it's potential for delivering benefits in the larger context of networking. I am, however, questioning the manner in which such converged services will be administered and billed. I'd gladly have someone correct me for my suspicions here, although I won't be holding my breath for very long. ------