The impact of Anywhere–when a single powerful, pervasive digital network can connect all people, at anytime, in any place–will fundamentally change the consumer ecosystem. Communications will offer more intelligent, contextual services that facilitate richer experiences. Consumption of information will change, ridding consumers of information overload and giving them control over when, where and how they access content. And media will also change, releasing consumers from today’s restrictive choices and scheduling.

When Anywhere is fully realized, today’s inflexible models will give way to more personalized media experiences, where user choice and control are paramount. Network builders hold the keys to this revolution. To open their businesses to Anywhere, they must master new service innovation models and pursue alternative monetization strategies.

Earlier this week, I hosted a webinar focused around the Yankee Group Framework Report, “Transforming Anywhere.” I discussed the emergence of access to the Anywhere web, how it’s being driven by consumer behavior and expectations and how the evolution of Anywhere, in turn, is transforming the consumer.

The webinar runs about an hour:  audio (mp3) and slides (pdf).

As a long-time watcher of the global communications industry I’ve never before seen such a golden opportunity for policy reform as now. In the U.S. there’s finally a political commitment to national broadband policy. This is a first. And, it’s a milestone when also combined with recognition that broadband has a role in economy-wide recovery.

The U.S. can always do better on any broadband scale. Our view at Yankee Group is that it won’t make progress without a national policy. And it won’t set a realistic policy without a clearer picture of the nation’s broadband market and its users. The economic stimulus plan gets it – it tasks the Federal Communications Commission with the development of a national policy and it allocates dollars to build a national broadband map.

It’s time for the U.S. to put the horse before the cart—while all of the buzz and hype is around the stimulus package, it’s secondary and will have far less impact than will a longer term approach. This is just the beginning of a long journey as the U.S. contemplates its future. Broadband deployment and use is an often overlooked piece of the puzzle; its part can be significant in the nation’s overall progress if policy is framed and implemented effectively.

There’s no single solution or right or wrong way for the U.S. to approach NBP development or its implementation. Yankee Group argues that there are some fundamental guiding posts to lead the way though. It’s an incremental process. It’s also an extremely opportunistic juncture for the US, one which Yankee Group itself welcomes the opportunity to contribute to as the debate and policy development progresses.

To this end, today we published a report titled What the U.S. Must Do for Broadband. Shortly we’ll also publish a report dedicated to broadband and the economic stimulus plan. We argue that President Obama’s plan to pair technology with economic recovery will fall short without a national broadband policy. A policy that must be vendor, operator and technology agnostic and one that acknowledges local needs.

“Broadband for all” is a catchy banner, but making broadband available is only part of the equation. Making it affordable must also be addressed. The current broadband stimulus proposals won’t solve these challenges. A broader long term national strategy is critical to the U.S.’s progress to officially become a nation where the Anywhere Network thrives.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that the $7 billion-plus of government money dedicated to improving broadband in the U.S. will NOT radically improve broadband penetration rates in the country.

Much of the disbursement of funds will be dependent on determining what areas are “unserved” or “underserved.” There’s plenty of argument going on over the exact definition of that right now. But for expediency, let’s assume unserved means areas where consumers are unable to get any broadband connection greater than 500 kbps and underserved means those unable to get anything beyond 3 Mbps. Generous with my latter definition? Perhaps, but I’m thinking future applications. Let’s leave actual throughput questions for later, as well.

In technology terms that’s effectively no wireline broadband and perhaps only low-tier wireless. Who doesn’t have wireline broadband? Likely it’s those living in the most rural markets. But if we take the admittedly unscientific surveys from those representing rural service providers, it soon becomes clear that rural providers are doing a decent job of getting broadband out to their largely rural constituents. In the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association annual survey, 83% of customers served by members could get at 768 kbp-1.5 Mbps service. That puts then in “underserved” but clearly not “unserved.”

Compare that number to Verizon, which has publicly stated that about 20% of its local wireline territory can’t get broadband and Qwest, says it’s at 15% unserved. No one on the cable side is talking but having visited many rural telcos over the years, I can say that cable is often non-existent or limited to the cluster of homes that serve as the population base for small towns.

The rub here is that because these funds are being filtered through both NTIA and RUS the assumption is that most will go to smaller providers, not Verizon, AT&T and Qwest, which happen to cover about 90% of U.S. households. So where does that leave those in the 15%-20% of customers whose local provider is one of those three but still can’t get a broadband connection?

Who’s driving communications policy – enterprises or consumers? Judging by the heated debate at the CMA’s annual conference, UK enterprises still feel short changed by politicians chasing votes – and globally they’re not alone.

The UK’s Communications Management Association (CMA) knows what it’s talking about. That’s because it represents £15 billion ($21 billion) of annual enterprise expenditure on communications.

It all kicked off in my session on how to navigate the economic downturn. Nick White, a career CIO at multinationals including Reuters and Unilever, led the assault. He argued that regulation focuses on consumer, not business needs. Although the ICT industry typically contributes 2% of a developed country’s GDP, policymakers need to understand that in excess of 35% of GDP depends on business supply chains in which ICT is critical.

For enterprises, making 2Mbps access a baseline requirement for universal service – as the UK government’s recent Digital Britain action plan suggests – doesn’t cut much ice. It just isn’t enough, agreed the audience.

So what should policymakers do? Carolyn Kimber, the CMA’s feisty chairman, outlined a 5-point manifesto of what needs to be fixed in the UK. In large part, the manifesto echoes Yankee Group’s warnings about how economies can quickly fall behind without robust and consistent technology policies. High on the must have list are converged regulation and infrastructure sharing argue Dianne Northfield and I in a recent report.

It was good to meet Colette Bowe, the incoming chairman at UK regulator Ofcom. She said she’d be listening more to enterprise needs – a promise we’ll have to revisit when she officially takes office. But she had little to say except what we already know: Funding and incentives are needed to upgrade networks. Allowing BT’s Openreach division to make more profits from delivering VDSL was on the list. This was good for Fergus Crockett, Openreach’s director of products, to hear in person. But still no firm answers for UK enterprises.

Today’s announcement by Visto to acquire Good Technology is the latest sad chapter for both Good and Motorola, which acquired the mobile email provider just two years ago for over $400 million.  For Motorola  it represents another failed attempt at integrating a potentially complementary technology to re-invent its ailing handset business.  For Good Technology, its analgous to the baseball slugger who showed early promise, only to fade into obscurity after it was traded to a bigger and better team.  At this point, the parting of ways is best for both sides.  And while terms were undisclosed, it’s likely a cheap(er) acquisition for Visto, that surprisingly scrappy survivor in the wireless email market.

For those of you who haven’t followed the mobile email market as painfully closely as I have for the past 8+ years, Good Technology was once a legitimate threat to RIM Blackberry in enterprise email.  The company was the first real behind-the-firewall wireless email server option for companies looking to deploy mobile email to devices other than Blackberries.  Good hitched its wagon (perhaps too closely) to Handspring’s, and then Palm’s Treo, which if we can all remember back a few years, was the first “It” device for integrated voice and data.  With the rise of Windows Mobile OS and Active Sync, and the faltering of Palm to evolve Treo, Good’s value proposition began to rapidly fade, along with its fortunes. 

But Good’s wireless email platform was still sound, and with Motorola sensing competitors such as RIM targeting the consumer market with lower-end integrated devices (e.g. the Blackberry Pearl) that came ready with consumer email a few easy set-up clicks away, the Motorola-Good marriage appeared to make some sense.  In fact, it could have worked: Good Technology first found itself positioned within Moto’s mobile handset group. The natural synergy would have had Motorola embed a Good mobile email client on every handset that shipped, allowing the company to leverage the Good NOC to deliver consumer email to compete with RIM.  But timing was bad, as Motorola’s sales slipped drastically after the success of Razor, and Good was shifted into Motorola’s Enterprise group. There, in theory, the enterprise email platform could be sold as a software option for Motorola’s (and the former Symbol) ruggedized devices.  It wasn’t a strong fit, however, as the value-proposition for mobile email wasn’t nearly as compelling among the vertical segments and mobile worker categories for which Moto’s enterprise devices were designed.  A late re-positioning of the Good technology assets as a mobile security and device management platform never had a chance to flourish before today’s sale to Visto.

And Visto?  So far the company has fallen far short of its vision to create a mass-market white-label email solution for both consumers and businesses.  However, Visto has been a survivor, largely through aggressive technology acquisitions and patent litigation.  Winding the way-back machine to look at a wireless email report I wrote in February 2003, it’s interesting to see the companies listed: Visto, ViAir, SEVEN, RIM, Wireless Knowledge, JP Mobile, Synchrologic, Pumatech.  Heard of any of these? Synchrologic and Pumatech became Intellisync (now Nokia), and the rest with the exception of RIM and SEVEN are dead or acquired.   Visto has used its capital to continuously acquire mobile email technology assets, and more importantly, patents, which it continues to aggressively defend.  The question of course, is whether Visto will eventually succeed as a mobile email software company or as an IP shop. 

The sale of Good was no surprise given Motorola’s financial position. The acquisition is good for Visto, and good/bad for Moto. And maybe bad for IBM: in this May 2008 research note I recommended that a Good Technology acquisition could be a solid fit for them.  But it appears IBM has missed another chance at a cheap acquisition to bolster its mobile email positioning for its Lotus suite.

Now that the U.S. stimulus bill has been signed, sending private-sector America into a right tizzy to get all that money, media outlets are talking about ’shovel-ready’ projects. Referring, I presume, to construction-type spending with designs, plans, and permits all tied up with a nice ribbon.

Sigh.  All these U.S. history lessons lately are going to our heads. Yes, FDR’s New Deal helped pull us out of the Depression in part by investing in physical infrastructure the country needed, simultaneously creating jobs for workers needed to clear brush, dig ditches, build walls, and more.

But the U.S. is no longer just a physical economy. We have many more jobs dealing with electrons than atoms. We are a nation in transition to a digital economy. And long-term job creation is about bit-moving, not earth-moving.

So yes, infrastructure investment helped the economy recover from the Great Depression. But what we need is the 21st century equivalent of that: the Anywhere Network. What we need aren’t shovel-ready projects, but a network highway system that is digital-worker-ready. A network that reaches everyone who’s looking for a job, with a government that ensures that they have the means and skills to use it.

The recovery bill projects that we’re going to remember most twenty years from now aren’t the ones that require shovels. They’ll be the ones that let us get more bits, more places, to and from more people all of whom know how to participate in that. Less than 1% of the $787B package is for broadband–but I will bet there will be far, far greater leverage achieved from those investments than many of the others.

The recent Pew report that suggests that many of the Americans who don’t have broadband, don’t want it reminds me of common attitudes to lots of other things that could be good for us: eating enough dietary fiber, learning long division. Just because people don’t think they want it, isn’t an excuse to be satisfied with that. It took me years to understand why I should eat breakfast every day; I’m glad no one wrote me off before then. Leadership isn’t avoiding forcing something on people that say they don’t want it, but rather having the vision to see what’s needed, convincing them, and making it happen.

This application turned every iPhone that downloaded it into an Obama phone bank.

Edelman’s Digital Public Affairs team has put together a fascinating analysis of how President Obama used and continues to use social media and Anywhere connectivity. We’ve discussed the techniques used previously by his presidential campaign here at the Yankee Group Blog, but in their 10 lessons learned, the Edelman analysis notes the cost saved from the campaign’s mobile Anywhere strategy:

Mobilizing supporters through mobile devices – Ninety percent of Americans are within three feet of their cell phones 24 hours a day. People still read more than 90 percent of their text messages, while pages of e-mails sit unopened in inboxes. Text messaging and the mobile Web offers an opportunity to reach supporters directly anywhere they are, any time of the day. It also is a much more cost effective way to mobilize voters. A 2006 study by the New Voters Project found that text-message reminders helped increase turnout by four percent at a cost of only $1.56 per vote, much cheaper than the cost of door-to-door canvassing or phone banking, at a cost of $20 to $30 per vote.

We need an Anywhere policy in America to raise the standard of living for our citizens and improve our 19th place ranking with the OECD in world broadband penetration. It’s nice to know that some in our government knows how to use Anywhere technology to communicate more cheaply in the bargain.

Now the stands are all empty / Let the roadies take the hall / Pack it up and tear it down / They’re the first to come and last to leave / Working for that minimum wage / They’ll set it up for another fair. (With apologies to Jackson Browne, The Load Out)

There is always something sad about Thursday afternoon at the Mobile World Congress. Many of the Europeans have already left so they can sleep in their own beds and a lot of non-Europeans flew home in the morning. The big parties are on Wednesday night and so there is much water and aspirin consumption on Thursday morning. The crowds thin out. Meetings are more subject to last minute cancelations. Everyone complains of sore feet and even the CBOSS dancing girls seem dispirited, overtired or both.

Like Jackson Browne’s song the mood is wistful and becomes reflective: What did we learn? Where is the industry going? Where did I leave my best scarf?

Phil Marshall has already given his take so I’ll pick up some different themes.

Although the stands were still big and shiny, Nokia still had its party and top restaurants couldn’t be had without a reservation, the recession is biting and could bite very deep. We asked vendors what they were hearing about CAPEX budgets and the range was wide but universally scary. Nokia Siemens says revenues will be down 10% in 2009 but since about 40% of their revenues come from relatively stable services, equipment will drop a lot more. There were a cluster of forecasts around 15% lower CAPEX than 2008 (consistent with NSN) but another cluster around 30 to 50% lower budgets. Yankee Group lowered our subscriber growth forecasts by an average of 50% and so growth-oriented CAPEX might also drop in that range.

But not all CAPEX categories will be affected equally. Short-term payoff investments like capacity or coverage might still make it past the sharp-pencil brigade. But despite the optimism of application platform vendors, I think boards will be very skeptical of the promise of future revenues and be focused on the reality of current cost cutting and hoarding cash.

More scary news comes from dramatic reports of data traffic growth from mobile broadband. Normally, increasing data traffic is thought to be a good thing, but traffic is growing very much faster than revenues. Flat-rate plans and – for some operators – the misguided pursuit of fixed broadband subscribers are pressuring profits and cash. The industry doesn’t need new mobile broadband customers to get turned off by lousy service quality, shareholders can’t fund capacity expansion indefinitely and peer-to-peer users would probably fill in the new capacity anyway. Regulators stand by to close off solutions like choking back on throughput or capping downloads. This paragraph does not end with “Fortunately the solution is …” because frankly, the industry is only just starting to recognize and define the problem.

Still there was some positive news especially for emerging markets. Vendors are putting the unique characteristics of these high-growth but low-ARPU markets front and center with targeted solutions like low-power base stations which – oh, by the way – also happen to be appealing to cost-cutting developed-market operators.

I heard the usual “There’s nothing new!” complaints about devices but haven’t we done all the variations of slide/flip/rounded-corners-on-candy-bars that we can? I saw innovative software and chipsets that will bring the mobile internet experience a lot closer to the fixed internet experience. And I saw attempts to solve the “Poor Man’s PC” problem that show great promise.

Although there were visibly (and at times thankfully) fewer attendees (officially 47,000), vendors reported much more productive meetings meaning that the decision-makers came and the mere gawkers stayed home.

More good news: A nasty rumor that the MWC was moving back to Cannes (NO!!!) from beautiful and accessible Barcelona proved to be false, at least for 2010.

AND I found my good scarf at the bottom of my brief case under a bunch of glossy handouts from the mobile multimedia companies in Hall 7.

It has been a little more than a month since Satyam’s founder, B. Ramalinga Raju declared he falsified profits for years and had inflated Satyam’s balance sheet by more than one billion dollars, leaving the company struggling for survival.

Being one of those that has watched India’s progress in the IT space with a sense of pride, this shocking news filled me with a sense of being let down. The awesome progress India has made in the last few years with IT services leading the way has opened my horizons as well; so I do feel a part of all the good things it stands for. It also had remarkable success adopting the Anywhere revolution with millions of subscribers still joining communication network every month proving that  ubiquitous connectivity can have deep and wide economic and social impacts.

One of the downsides of the flat world is that greed is global too and does not make any distinction of geography.Excessive greed and the lack of comprehensive oversight can spell disaster in emerging as well as mature economies. However, the silver lining is that it seems this racket was conducted by one corrupt individual (happened to be the CEO) and his cronies. It certainly has impacted Satyam, but by and large the international business community has had a measured response. Hewitt associates reports that over 60% of the  companies in that region are still hiring and seeing modest growth as well. Satyam could be doing much worse so the talk of a strategic buyer to infuse the much needed capital into the company and the few new deals coming into the door must be relief to the rank and file who work there.

Drawing on a theme from President Obama’s chief of staff that a crisis cannot be wasted, India Inc. should seize this opportunity to send a clear message that it will reform the laws as necessary, provide a transparency and set the benchmark for corporate governance. In the coming months, we must see that the rule of law prevails and an example is made out of these white collar thugs- there is a price to pay for breaking the law, in India, despite one’s personal wealth and political clout. This will be tough to do, especially in an election season.

The  business world is watching more than ever before to see if India Inc. handles the crisis with decisiveness and openess. It will certainly influence their investment decisions in the years to come.

We’re all economists now.

We’ve learnt painfully that in the world we’ve created almost everything depends on a viable financial system. Before we became economists, we didn’t notice the utter necessity of money flows and lending. So when these dried up we suddenly had a credit-crunch, and the pipes are proving difficult to unblock.

Like cash and credit today, in future almost everything will depend on connectivity. Truly ubiquitous fast broadband is coming. We will use a wide variety of beautiful and beguiling devices to stay connected to everything and everyone. We will use connectivity with the same level of dependency – and occasional recklessness – we used credit cards during the past 15 years. We will get hooked. Like credit, connectivity will enable new businesses to flourish, improve consumers’ lifestyles, and allow governments to achieve major societal improvements. Life will seem wonderful.

But this dependency creates risk. What happens if there’s a crunch? What happens if there is massive failure in the supply of connectivity? I’m not talking here about occasional local network failure or software glitches. I’m talking about the systematic withdrawal on a global basis of the connectivity that will have become our lifeblood.

Surely this can’t happen I hear you say. I hope not, but some of the things I experienced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week have given me cause for concern.

I lost count of the number of demos I struggled through in Barcelona that showed me how network operators will be able to control/restrict/moderate connectivity in future. Horrible antagonistic words are used to describe these solutions – “throttling” has to be the worst – always gets me thinking about baby seals.

From the dismal business of trying to create any meaningful data traffic, it seems that almost overnight the wireless industry has become preoccupied with restricting usage. Customers, we are told, will have to learn to ration their use of the network, or else they will be throttled, or perhaps have their fingernails removed.

I know. I know. Network operators believe they must control usage to guarantee network performance, make some money, and remain viable in the long-run.

Banks are restricting lending today to try to repair their balance sheets. I’m worried network operators will restrict the supply of connectivity in future – on a large scale – for similar reasons.

This raises numerous big questions about ecosystems, open access, regulatory policies, spectrum licensing, nationalizing the networks (surely not?). This is the kind of stuff Yankee Group will be all over during 2009.

Let’s have this debate. But let’s do it in the knowledge that almost total dependence on fast ubiquitous broadband will create a potential connectivity-crunch with massive knock-on effects on economies, businesses, and everyday lives. We have to find a way to prevent our connectivity pipes going the same way as our credit pipes. We can’t blame the banks next time.