Chile’s Congress has passed the region’s first Net Neutrality law and the bill only awaits presidential ratification. Perhaps northern countries would find this pretty ho-hum stuff but few countries in Latin America even have this on the agenda.

Chile has always been the most advanced LA country in telecom starting with being the first market to introduce long distance competition back in the nineties. Technologically Chile was the first to have MPLS and Entel PCS has always been to first to launch advanced mobile services from EDGE to HSPA. The company is strongly touted to be first out of the gate with LTE as well, perhaps before the end of this year.

Net Neutrality raises passions both from users and operators.

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20 db attenuation from a hand touching an antenna? Demand a recall! File a class action lawsuit!! Off with their heads!!!

Readers of tech news know that I’m talking about the Apple iPhone antenna firestorm, whose flames were fanned by Consumer Reports retracting its recommendation of the iPhone 4. The blog notes the following:

It’s official. Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone’s lower left side—an easy thing, especially for lefties—the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.

We reached this conclusion after testing all three of our iPhone 4s (purchased at three separate retailers in the New York area) in the controlled environment of CU’s radio frequency (RF) isolation chamber. In this room, which is impervious to outside radio signals, our test engineers connected the phones to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates carrier cell towers (see video: IPhone 4 Design Defect Confirmed). We also tested several other AT&T phones the same way, including the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.

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Oracle’s recent x86 server announcement included new 10GbE networking products. It’s interesting to see that Oracle remains committed to x86 servers even as they promote their new “Software. Hardware. Complete.” tagline. Recall that Larry Ellison rationalized his purchase of Sun by claiming Oracle is the only vendor that can deliver a complete solution including servers, storage, OS, management, applications and networking. But do the new networking products fit the billing?

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At least it does in San Francisco!

This is a photo of a couple of San Francisco taxis taken back in late April. I hadn’t processed them until now. I’m a little puzzled about the advertising efficiency of such a campaign even though I understand that the B2B market is significant for Citrix, and that this is San Francisco and maybe wouldn’t even be attempted elsewhere.

Still, there it is: mainstream virtualization.

For more than 10 years followers of the telecom industry, and I include myself in this illustrious group, have been writing the obituary for set-top boxes (STBs). Inevitably, we said, this anachronistic product will die a slow death and ultimately be phased out. STBs are single-purpose products that service providers want off the books, the FCC dislikes and frankly are ugly. Surely a Blu-ray player, video game console or next-generation TV could handle the simple task of tuning to the correct channel and passing through some audio.

Yet here we are more than 14 years after the last Telecom Act, which created the CableCard and the presumed beginning of the end, and STBs have become like the increasingly popular zombie. They just won’t die. Far from it, in fact. Both Cisco and Motorola, the two heavyweights in the STB world, have been reporting over the last several quarters that shipments of STBs are holding steady or increasing.
Over the course of the last six weeks, I’ve taken part in analyst tours of a Verizon FiOS lab and an AT&T U-Verse lab. Both events were meant to show analyst what was coming from the respective companies in the way of video product. Both score high marks on the wow factor–especially the augmented reality demo that AT&T was showing off. A more complete report also is forthcoming for Yankee Group clients.
What immediately struck me after seeing both labs though is the role that STBs will play in the future of both companies’ video products. I was fully prepared to write that the final nail was about to put in the coffin of the STB. Instead of being buried thoug, STBs may end up playing a bigger role for AT&T and Verizon…and ever other cable MSO for that matter. To be sure, we anticipate that some functions of the STB will migrate to other products that are better equipped and more consumer friendly. This is particularly true of gaming consoles as Dmitriy Molchanov predicted in a February report.

But like a middleweight putting on muscle to move up to light heavyweight, STBs are beefing up with ever greater processing power and memory to handle high-end video and other applications. Just as important, they’re shedding unnecessary accoutrements like FireWire interfaces that cost service providers $1 billion according to Cisco, but are used by a miniscule number of users.
For those of us that have been writing the obituary for STBs, it’s time to admit that we were wrong. Like zombies, STBs may be ugly but they simply won’t die.

The Wall Street Journal revealed this morning that the US government is launching the “Perfect Citizen” program to help detect cyber attacks against critical infrastructure.  The system will reportedly be based on network sensors which the National Security Agency (NSA) will monitor for suspicious activity.  (I couldn’t help but chuckle that an “NSA spokeswoman said the agency had no information to provide on the program.”  I suppose the WSJ had to ask and report that it do so, but is this response news to anyone?)

Does "Perfect Citizen" = Big Brother?

Many bits will be transmitted about the potential Big Brother aspects of this program. This is healthy.  Though for a program at this early stage – reportedly just starting with utilities and with only loosely defined expansion beyond that – I suspect it is far to early to draw conclusions.

What I think is interesting and highly appropriate about this program, however, is its focus on critical infrastructure.  If there is any area the federal government should be focused on relative to IT security, critical infrastructure is it.  Partly this is true simply because the consequences are dire.  I’ll leave the gory details of what could happen if one took control over parts of the electric grid or nuclear power plants to others.  Let’s just agree it would be a whole lot worse that e-mail being unavailable  to sort out the latest malware.  This focus is also appropriate because of the distributed nature of this infrastructure.  While each power plant, utility, service provider, etc. has a responsibility and a role to play, they can’t solve the problem on their own.

This is particularly true for attacks against our communications infrastructure.  Distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), DNS attacks, or BGP hijacking can not be thoroughly addressed by any one entity.  Attacks against these components on one provider ripple and affect others – potentially putting the entire infrastructure at risk.  That’s not Anywhere, it’s Nowhere.

These threats can’t be addressed by the US Fed alone.  Global cooperation is required to communicate threats, share intelligence, and troubleshoot response.  For example, if a U.S. carrier wants relief from a DDoS attack whose source is largely in eastern Europe, it needs to not only communicate with the appropriate provider(s) there, but share traffic characteristics to help identify and ultimately shutdown the flood.  In this role, the government has an absolutely critical role to play even if it is simply fostering relationships and information sharing.

In the homeland, that responsibility is greater, particularly for critical infrastructure like utilities.  Doing this effectively, may indeed require the government to collect data as Perfect Citizen intends to do.  But is there a line to be drawn between the provider and the government?  What can industry, communications providers in particular, do to avoid unproductive government involvement?

Google’s Andy Rubin was recently quoted as saying that Google is currently activating 160,000 Android phones each day. That’s a pretty amazing number — if Android adoption continues at that rate, it implies that Google is on track to activate more than 58 million phones this year, which is quite a staggering number.

But HTC’s latest quarterly report makes me wonder who is building those phones. HTC, one of the big Android ODMs and maker of the Verizon’s Droid Incredible and Sprint’s EVO, reported record revenues of $1.8 billion last quarter. At an average OEM price of $500, that accounts for at most 3.6 million Android phones in the quarter, assuming that HTC only sells Android phones. The reality, of course, is that HTC makes many different types of phones, including those for Windows Mobile, so that number is likely to be more like 2.5 or 3 million Android phones out of the mix. Motorola, LG, and Samsung all also sell Android phones, but they are both later to the party than HTC and haven’t built up as large volumes yet. But for the sake of fairness, let’s assume all four manufacturers are shipping a million Android phones a month. That still leaves us at 48 million phones for the year, 10 million short from the 58 million that Google is citing.

We predicted that Android would be the next breakout mobile app platform in the report, “The Mobile App Gold Rush Speeds Up” earlier this year, and we’re pleased to see Google confirm this fact. But Google’s activation count implies that Android phones are being activated by Google that aren’t being reported by the major manufacturers. The open question is, who is making more Android phones than HTC? And is there a mystery manufacturer that we can’t see? We don’t have answers, but we’d be happy to pass on any suggestions readers may have.

More likely is the fact that the 160,000 Android activations a day was not an average, but a peak activation rate. But we’ll know more as we head into the holiday buying season and get further numbers.

With the publication of the Latin American Mobile Carrier Monitor for this quarter, some clients have asked why there is no data for Iusacell. The answer is really very simple. The company – part of Ricardo Salinas’ varied conglomerate – hasn’t issued its first quarter report. We have estimated Iusacell’s subscribers but we have no solid basis on which to estimate their financial results.

The obvious second question – when will they publish their first quarter report – has a much more complex answer, but my assumption is “never”.

Like a wayward teenager, Iusacell drifts in and out of trouble with its creditors and with stock market authorities. Again, like a teenager, its response to criticism is usually petulance and a door-slamming refusal to talk to anyone. It has already de-listed from the US stock exchanges because of the cost of financial reporting – or perhaps the need to report more than the company cared to report – and now the Mexican stock exchange (the BMV) has suspended the company for failing to provide an explanation of the missing 1Q 2010 report.

Earlier, another part of the Salinas empire, Banco Azteca, announced a takeover bid for the troubled operator which would essentially take the company private. Private companies have no need to file elaborate financial documents in public. Iusacell would disappear from the scrutiny of investors and telecom analysts.

This marks the second time in my industry analyst career that I find myself explaining an Iusacell near-death experience. Then as now, the issue is why does Iusacell fail to grow and thus teeter continuously on the edge of bankruptcy if Latin American mobile telephony – and the Mexican market in particular – have been on an incredible growth curve in the last decade?

Part of the blame may well lie with original owner Verizon and an ill-starred decision to adopt CDMA. Iusacell is the last company “south of the Rio Grande” trying to survive as an exclusively-CDMA operator. It may be hard to remember that not so long ago not just Verizon but the leading operator in the region, the BellSouth group, was committed to CDMA. When Telefonica bought BellSouth’s Latin American assets, it eventually converted all to GSM. America Movil immediately switched to GSM when it bought CDMA-based networks from Puerto Rico to Chile. The savings in handsets more than compensated for the cost of the network swap. Whatever benefits CDMA might have technologically over GSM, whatever benefits scale in China and India may have brought to CDMA handset prices, they are still more expensive than GSM. While Verizon (and Sprint) may be able to tolerate those differences in the US where ARPUs are over US$50, Iusacell could not tolerate that in Mexico where ARPUs struggle to reach US$15.

But Iusacell might have survived if the company had translated its high share in the corporate segment – a key strength bequeathed by Verizon – into a sustainable market position. Instead it merged with another Salinas company – low-end prepaid CDMA operator Unefon – and failed to maintain customer service levels with corporate customers. Nextel Mexico – an enterprise market specialist – is now larger than Iusacell. (We think. Iusacell rarely lets down its guard and publishes subscriber numbers.)

The company could have invested in a GSM swap but it is too small to attract big discounts from the equipment vendors, Iusacell is not a priority within the Salinas group and anyway, it is too busy fighting with its creditors.

Maybe it could have been sold at one time, but the incumbents are not interested: America Movil’s Telcel wouldn’t be permitted to do so for market-concentration reasons and Telefonica seems content to expand organically. Few outside investors want to become collateral damage in the battle to the death between these two regional giants.

All of the twists and turns of Iusacell could fill a novel and the denouement hasn’t been written yet.

All we can say for certain is that Iusacell failed to publish its 1Q 2010 results. My prediction is that we will never see another report from Iusacell again.

On Tuesday the 29^th at this years “Cisco Live,” Cisco unveiled its latest collaboration tool–an Android based tablet called “Cius” (which coincidentally rhymes with Zeus!).  I’ve seen many people tweet and blog about how Cisco is trying to take on Apple’s iPad but based on my conversations with Cisco people here at Cisco Live, I can say that’s definitely not the case.

The Cius is a tablet computer, there’s no doubt about that, but that’s probably the only commonality with the iPad.  The Cius is meant to dock into the base of a phone and makes a video phone.  The device can then be undocked and carried around as tablet.

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