Much has been made of Apple’s pervasive industry influence, accomplished without actually participating at the in-person events that make up the annual tech sector calendar. But here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, Google has been the largest presence without a presence.

“What will Google do next (to us)?” has been the prevailing question in virtually every executive conversation I’ve had. It’s safe to say the industry fears Google’s brand, cash, capabilities, and perhaps most of all, sheer audacity. I suspect if Google announced plans to put a new data center on the moon, the network community would nod sagely and say, “Sure; it was only a matter of time.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt keynoting the 2010 Mobile World Congress (c) Monty Metzger

Tuesday night, Google CEO Eric Schmidt entered a packed auditorium, nominally to give a conference keynote. What he really did was subject himself to the Spanish Inquisition. He did offer some formal remarks, but following that, with poise a politician would envy, he fielded questions from attendees for close to 45 minutes.

Diplomacy was the order of the hour; he took pains to talk about how honored he was to attend, how Barcelona is now “the place to be” for the computing industry, and how the enormous success of the mobile sector to date is due to the community gathered here this week.

Some highlights:

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Today’s NYT has the story: putting a mobile router in school buses to offset the sometimes long commutes kids have. The students can do homework and chat online with teachers while they cover the miles to and from school and sporting events.

Yet another example of the gradual expansion of the Anywhere Network.  It’s a natural hole to fill in the network fabric.

Here’s another one: Eurostar. I was stunned a few months ago when, after settling into my seat and carefully arranging my work things around me, I discovered that the train — a bastion of regular London-Paris commuters — was completely network-free.

Given that Google seems to be inclined to make large gestures to try to stimulate the behavior of others in the marketplace, perhaps its holiday-time free airport Wi-Fi should be followed up by free Eurostar Wi-Fi — perhaps during Roland Garros?

To be sure, the school students may not be using the access for schoolwork only. But the point is this: eventually we will find it incredibly anomalous to be offline. And talk of “going online” will feel just as incredibly dated. All of the things we will want to do while we’re moving around on public transporation — including the things that the providers of that transportation want us to do, like read their safety instructions and absorb advertising for their on-board food and drink — will require the network.

In a scenario that seems destine for a made for TV movie, Motorola reportedly is contemplating a new version of its spin off plan. The Wall Street Journal reported today that instead of spinning off the Home and Networks Mobility division from its handset group, the company is looking at continuing the auction of its wireless networks lines while creating a new publicly traded entity comprised of handsets and set-top boxes.
On the face of it, the combination of set-tops and handsets seems almost nonsensical. The former exists as a cozy effective duopoly with Cisco Systems–at least in the U.S.–is largely proprietary to every cable operator’s specifications, tends to stay in place for years and is as sexy as vanilla ice cream. Handsets are squarely in the consumer electronics camp where design and looks plays major roles.
But putting set-tops and handsets in the same group absolutely makes sense when we look to the future and in particular the future of the set-top. Set-top boxes are under increased pressure to start looking and acting like CE devices. And indeed many have been writing the obituary for the old cable converter for the better part of a decade.
I don’t necessarily believe the set-top is near extinction. However, its greatest threat is in fact coming from the CE community. While one can debate the relevance of stand alone devices such as a Roku or forthcoming Boxee box, increasingly gaming consoles and Blue-Ray players are taking on the same functionality as set-tops. Additionally, connected TVs have the same potential through are not being initially positioned as such. Regardless of the product, the end result is likely to force set-top box vendors to start thinking like CE vendors.

Today’s announcement by Google that it is exploring deploying an experimental 1 Gbps fiber to the home service in a small number of communities sounds like crazy talk (see Benoit Felten’s analysis for his view on this announcement). Could Google really believe that it could run an fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service akin to Verizon’s FiOS as a side business? However as I reflected on the announcement and my recent reading of Ken Auletta’s book, Googled, I find myself thinking that this is anything but a side business. I think that this project is Google executing on a key element of its BHAG.

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I got a rude awakening early this morning: the ice and snowstorm that blew through Massachusetts last night knocked out our power. That meant we had no lights, no heat, and no running water (darn those electric well pumps!).

But, like in Emerging Anywhere countries, even though we didn’t have power, we did have Internet access via our mobile phones. And that strange disparity—the ability to call people and access information from the rest of the world when we didn’t have basic infrastructure services—provided personal emphasis to stories I’d recently read in the news over the weekend.

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Happy New Year from Las Vegas!

Andy Castonguay, Dmitriy Molchanov, and I will be covering the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show all week from this city in the desert, trying to keep up with the tsunami of news and announcements from the show. You can follow our updates here at blogs.yankeegroup.com. If you want a more real-time set of updates, you can follow me on Twitter at @cdhowe or check Yankee Group tweets at #YankeeGroup.

On the agenda today is the “pre-show” activity when most companies try to beat the rush of press releases through the rest of the week. Notable today in the pre-dawn hours was an announcement of D-Link’s Boxee Box for streaming Internet audio and video to your TV. Seemlingly purpose-built to cause heartburn for cable TV executives, it’s the harbinger of many more Internet TV boxes to be showcased this week. That said, the idea that you can now buy an off-the-shelf device that for Boxee is a big deal; heretofore, consumers have had to install their own software on a PC or Apple TV.

All that said, two big stories today are our of Silicon Valley instead of Las Vegas. Specifically,

• Google announces its Nexus One phone this morning. Google will be hosting a press conference in Mountain View today to provide first looks and details on its HTC-built, Android-powered Nexus One mobile phone. Google employees received their own Nexus One’s as holiday gifts at the end of the year, but today will be the first time the general public gets an official look at the specifications and terms of sales. My view of the Nexus One is that it is an buying alternative for people who want an iPhone experience, but don’t want to buy into the Apple business model or the AT&T network. And Google does appear willing to sell it unlocked, thereby teasing us with the possibility that it is network neutral phone.
• Apple is building buzz toward its as-yet-unannounced tablet.. Apple announced today that iPhone and iPod touch users have now downloaded a total of 3 billion apps from the iTunes App Store. That totals more than 10.2 million downloads per day. This momentum is fueling a media frenzy headlined by the Wall Street Journal regarding Apple’s likely announcement of a tablet computer on January 27 in San Francisco. Stay tuned for more on that one; there are very few actual facts available as of yet. However, this story could become a CES show-stealer equivalent to Apple’s iPhone announcement in 2007 if some facts do get out.

Look for more info as we get our badges and the show really gets going.

The economic crisis proved a major obstacle for consumers, enterprises and network builders, and each has had to evolve to survive. The changes from 2009 will create new opportunities in the Anywhere ecosystem, especially in the areas of cord-cutting, devices, cloud computing and network innovation.

Earlier today, I was joined by my colleagues Jon Paisner, Camille Mendler and Josh Holbrook to unveil Yankee Group’s top predictions for the 2010 communications industry. We discussed six of our eleven published predictions and took questions live from the audience. Check out the webinar replay below. You can also register as a Guest on the Yankee Group Web site to get the full report for free.

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

Not satisfied with Verizon’s recent launch of its Android-powered Droid phones, Techcrunch.com is now agog with rumors of Google launching its own phone. What’s unanswered in the post, though, is an important question: Why?

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Vodafone announced its half-year results today. Wait, don’t go, they were interesting.

I’ll spare you the financial details. Ok I can’t resist. Overall there were no big surprises. Organic revenues were down 3% yoy and group EBITDA declined by almost 8%. Full-year guidance was reiterated.

The headlines were uninspiring, but this morning’s results presentation, hosted by Chief Executive Vittorio Colao, threw up a few interesting snippets regarding the company’s operational performance. They provide a useful snapshot of what’s going on at Vodafone, but they also have implications for other players. Hope you like numbers:

• Average price per minute down 10%. Ouch! Definitely some price plan optimization going on there – that’s operator speak for consumers using every last voice minute and text message in their price plan bundles.
• Roaming revenue down 14% – that’s businesses cutting costs during the recession – by happy coincidence Vodafone’s own travel expenses are also down 14%.
• Enterprise revenues down 5% – more cost-cutting. See the trend?
• Fixed broadband up 9% – that’s Vodafone playing catch up with other more established converged service providers like Orange.
• PC connectivity revenues up 21% and consumer mobile Internet revenues up 30% (with a whopping 73% increase in the UK – just wait ‘til Vodafone’s UK customers get the iPhone).
• 30% of Vodafone’s active customers use data services (at least monthly), but only 10% subscribe to a data plan (see the opportunity?)
• 20% of Vodafone’s new handset sales in Europe are Smartphones. It expects this to increase to 30-40% next year (it’s already approximately 40% in the U.S.). Wow – the U.S. leading Europe on a key mobile market metric – stop the presses.
• Here’s one for the engineers among you – only 5% of Vodafone’s cell sites are operating at more than 90% of capacity during busy hours. The company believes HSPA+ will meet its needs for the next 2-3 years. It will also achieve better capital efficiency through cost savings – 55% of new sites in Europe are already shared. So, no rush to LTE then?
• Let’s finish with a big number. Vodafone also announced today that it’s targeting £1bn in additional cost savings by March 2012.

So, what do all these numbers mean? Here’s one interpretation. There’s no voice revenue growth in mature markets (I guess we knew that). Data is where it’s at (knew that too?). The pipes must get fatter and more efficient (Mr Colao’s term – not mine) to cope with future smart-phone-driven data demand. Operators (well, Vodafone anyway) are still operating well under capacity. No data crunch coming? Operators can sell lots more data plans to consumers, which means it will be several years before the data business goes ex-growth – by which time Vittorio will be sipping on something pleasant on a Mediterranean beach. Before then, he’ll take great pleasure in cutting Vodafone’s costs to the bone. That’s what I think the numbers say. What do you think?

Earlier this week, French regulator ARCEP released the most recent NGA numbers it has collected from the various players in the market. France currently has 50.000 homes subscribing to FTTH services and 180.000 homes subscribing to a HFC cable offer. The progression from six months ago is not insignificant, but the success rate compared to the announced 650.000 homes passed for FTTH alone is not good, to say the least.

There is, however an ambiguity in this homes passed figure. The French terminology in the ARCEP report (foyers raccordables) suggests that these homes can subscribe to the service when in fact, for the most part, they can’t. This is due to the way the service providers report these figures, describing not the homes they have physically connected but the buildings they pass. This, at least, is what the service providers themselves tell me.

The issue that remains crucial in the French market is therefore that of fibering up the buildings, and while the regulatory framework for that has been laid out for comment by ARCEP and recently endorsed by the competition authorities, France Telecom had, until recently, protested that this framework killed their business model and seemed to be lobbying strongly against it, having even threatened to pull out of fiber deployment altogether. But it looks now like their official position at least is changing. It looks like the way is paved for a law to now be passed making that framework official (meanwhile, France Telecom is protesting about the deployment model for Tier 2 cities, but that’s a story for another day).

Right now though, what we are looking at is a very low take-up rate for deployed infrastructure as a consequence of this issue with in-building deployment. The disagreements on the legal framework may in part explain this slowness, but I’m convinced that it’s not by far the only reason.

The main issue in my opinion is that FTTH operators have seen landlords and building managers (syndics) as a hurdle, not as part of the ecosystem.

When I was in Sweden last week, the vital role of landlord associations in shaping the FTTH market struck me once again. More than perhaps any other player in the market, regulator and service providers included, they were instrumental in establishing the service delivery model. They did this by understanding the benefits they would derive from fiber deployment (avoiding customer lock-in, higher rents, building management opportunities…) and by acting collectively. They decided to take some of the costs of vertical deployment upon themselves in exchange for an increased control on shaping the service delivery model (and avoiding a legacy model that had caused them only pain…)

The landlords and building managers in France are a lot less united, that’s for sure. But they also haven’t been addressed by service providers as entities who could benefit from the fiber deployment, just as someone who needed to give their go-ahead (and perhaps would ask for a well-padded envelope in exchange.)

As a consequence, I’m not convinced that the new legal framework will really accelerate things unless Orange is serious about its change of minds on the framework. Orange, like all incumbents, has a clear advantage in dealing with in-building issues: they have been delivering copper services to these buildings forever. They know who the decision makers are, they probably have huge databases of buildings in France and who you need to speak to to get things done.

If they act upon it, then all three operators could be present in Paris quite fast. If they don’t, Free and SFR are going to struggle in clearing this jungle for a good while before anything happens. Unless they can come up with something that the landlords and building managers want.

More generally, I see very few service providers taking an ecosystem view to their deployments and trying to understand what the benefits are to all of the players involved and not just to themselves and the end-customer. I think if FTTH is going to accelerate its deployment, this 360 view needs to happen, and it needs to happen fast.

This post has been cross-posted to www.fiberevolution.com.