When Technology Contributes to Decreased Productivity…Or Not

We all did it in throughout our school years, as did many of our parents in the ’40s and ’50s.  Nothing stood in the way of us (primarily the guys at the time) keeping up on the day’s sports action.  All that’s changed in the media we’ve used to stay up on latest score.  Through the early 1970s, kids stealthly listened to World Series games (played during the day) over transistor radios, which subsequently gave way the next decade to those ridiculously small 3” TVs used to watch March Madness.  These now ancient devices have long bit the dust and have been replaced by PC monitors fed by high-speed circuits (wired or wireless) giving us all access to the goings-on in the  world outside the classroom or office cube.

This week marks the annual tradition of the mass media’s rather disingenuous handwringing over  the decreased worker productivity that takes place during this first week of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.  By some measures, the Big Dance will cost employers roughly $175 million in lost productivity.  I’m not going to doubt the validity of these numbers since I’m confident that those who make up the workforce were the same who tried to watch the games during chemistry lab, picturing ourselves as some sort of undercover agent sneaking a peek at our hidden screens.  The real question comes down to this:  Can we really check our broader social interests at the workplace door?

Your office may well have an NCAA office pool running that most likely increases employee morale and gives people something to jabber about throughout the day.  And break rooms will have TV’s  showing these same games.  And as the Web’s matured, these games have become available online and can now be continuously monitored allowing workers to break down the tournament’s progress and assess how a mid-major could beat a BCS school in the same way a marketing strategy could be debated.

No one would advocate a complete office shut down during this “holy week” of the college basketball season.  However, there can be a fine balance between getting work done and enjoying the work day.  In the end, shouldn’t getting the day’s work done be the most important factor to any of us.  If work takes a two-hour siesta while several watch how a directional school could possibly stay with one of college basketball’s blue bloods, will this really disappoint stockholders?  Heck, even the President of the United States has let it be known that he’ll be watching the tournament (especially when it can double as a fundraising tool)!

So during the last two days of this week, as we endure the popular press trotting out the tired horses of “lost productivity” and whether employers should cut-off access to cbssports.com or espn.com, another question can be pondered…did you really want to wait until the next morning’s paper to see if Mickey Mantle hit a home run in the Fall Classic…or was it better to hear it live?  And ultimately, does it matter in the bigger scheme of things if technology makes it so much easier for all of us to glance at social happenings throughout the day…

In-Flight Connectivity

The web connecting our communications fabric continues to expand and, for better or worse, there are fewer times during which we’re truly out of reach.  While Internet access technologies has been available for commercial airliners for some time now (the first time I accessed the Internet during a flight was  about five years ago while travelling 30,000 feet above the Atlantic on SAS Airlines), actual deployment was spotty at best.  The tide is now changing and US-based airlines are beginning to understand social trend towards always being connected – even in the air – and the opportunity it brings.  How large this opportunity ends up being depends on service delivery and performance..

During today’s trip out to Denver for Level 3′s Analyst Roundtable, the flight included WiFi-based Internet connectivity.  And while I look forward to the couple of hours of uninterrupted reading time – time I don’t have to feel compelled to monitor my email – the call of playing with a relatively new toy was too loud to ignore.

 

To be fair, a coach seat on a crowded jet is less than ideal for getting anything truly productive done on a laptop, but the periodic connection drops made it difficult to get a few simple tasks done.  While the service’s limitations are understandable, they nonetheless make it a less than desirable solution to for users to remain connected or get some work done.  Until these deficiencies are addressed – and they will be - the target audience,  business users and won’t find find In-Flight access to be tremendously valuable, unless they find themselves on a coast-to-coast trip.  Still, there are situations in which any connection is better than none.

Lessons for Smart Meters From the Smart Phone World

Smart Meter Apps At Your Fingertips

Microwave backhaul underestimated in fiber’s shadow

“Backhaul requires a fiber fix,” this video tells us, a sentiment echoed by its subject: no less an authority on fiber than an executive from a backhaul provider with fiber in its name.

But while fiber is front and center in wireless backhaul requirements, wireless microwave technologies are also often required to reach cell sites that can’t cost-effectively be reached by fiber. You may not hear as much about it because companies that use a mix of fiber and microwave — like Allied Fiber and Intellifiber — don’t put the word “microwave” in their names and prefer to be known for their most prized product. Quietly, though, it’s a sizable chunk of the backhaul space: Southeastern backhaul provider TowerCloud, for example, serves 80% of its sites with fiber and 20% with microwave.

The AT&T – T-Mobile Merger: The More Pressing Question

Total Number of Android Apps Available (2009 – 2011)

Mobile Traffic Deluge:  Exploding Backhaul Bandwidth Requirements

Telecom M&A shifts from fiber to cloud

At the CompTel Plus show this week, I was reminded of the prediction made at last year’s show that 2010 would represent something of a volume peak for fiber-based mergers and acquisitions. That prediction appears to have been borne out, with dealmakers reporting this week that, even assuming some more transactions before the holidays, fiber M&A in 2011 will be “not even close” to the volume seen in 2010. There simply aren’t as many assets left on the market these days.

As my hastily assembled list indicates, telecom M&A in 2011 shifted more toward cloud-centric services, including hosted communications, particularly after the starting gun of Verizon’s (VZ) $1.4-billion acquisition of Terremark Worldwide in January. (Yes, I know: This list is far from exhaustive. Please feel free to harangue me about the ones I omitted in the Comments section below.) Cloud M&A will continue to hold the spotlight for some time (more on those trends here and here), but even large-scale fiber M&A hasn’t closed its curtains yet; expectations for cable MSOs to buy nationwide fiber networks continue to grow as trade associations lobby regulators for a green light to such deals.

Frontier’s next big move

Amid a wave of cloud-centric M&A from historically rural carriers large and small – CenturyLink’s (CTL) acquisition of Savvis, Windstream’s (WIN) purchase of Hosted Solutions, TDS Telecom’s (TDS) VISI deal – one carrier we haven’t seen make a cloud acquisition yet is Frontier Communications (FTR). That’s primarily for the obvious reason that Frontier currently has its hands full digesting its last acquisition — Verizon (VZ) wireline properties in 14 states – which closed at the beginning of last year’s third quarter.

As with any telecom carrier, key to Frontier’s success is its penetration of business customers, which contribute 51% of its revenue. But attacking that market – or even retaining it — while assimilating Verizon’s properties has not been easy for Frontier, and the next nine months will be a crucial period for it to make progress.

Before Frontier acquired it, Verizon’s business it was losing about 30,000 access lines per quarter on the business side alone (nearly quadruple that on the residential side). In the long months leading up to the acquisition’s close, as both companies plodded through a politicized regulatory approval process, Frontier could only stand by and watch as cable companies (Comcast [CMCSA] in particular) pilfered those Verizon customers, easily spreading fears that the transition to Frontier would create the kind of horrible service headaches that FairPoint Communications (FRP) saw when it executed a similar deal. (That’s another reason why Frontier had to make the integration of these assets its sole focus throughout this transition before tackling any other new initiatives.)

Fiber rollouts fuel rise of Ethernet backhaul

A quarterly update from Zayo Group today gives a refreshed view of technology trends in wireless backhaul. More than 60% of Zayo’s fiber-to-the-tower revenue in the June quarter came from Ethernet services, having been less than 40% in the same quarter last year.

It’s another sign of how quickly Ethernet is penetrating the backhaul market. Just three years ago, despite widespread recognition of Ethernet’s benefits in this application, there was also widespread reluctance to use it for several reasons. Today Ethernet is becoming mainstream in backhaul networks, and mobile operators are even starting to use Ethernet exchanges.

One historical obstacle to Ethernet adoption in backhaul has been the relative scarcity of fiber at cell sites, a condition that is rapidly being reversed as 4G deployments fuel wireless bandwidth demand.  As Zayo’s Ethernet mix grew from roughly 40% to 60% of backhaul revenue over the course of a year, the number of towers it serves with fiber jumped nearly 90% — to 1,978 in the June quarter, with another 500 under construction. As fiber continues to proliferate, so will Ethernet. What will the charts look like a year from now?

When call analytics become more valuable than calls

When will we reach the point at which the value of a voice call is eclipsed by the value of the data surrounding the call?

Businesses are rapidly learning how valuable call metrics are to their operations in multiple ways: Knowing how the length and volume of customer service calls can be affected by the particular customer service rep, the particular customer, the particular topic or circumstances, time of day, etc. – all of these things can help businesses optimize their processes and keep customers happier.

The more call data is unleashed, the more businesses and service providers will learn about how best to harness it. And more data is being unleashed all the time. This week Google added its Voice service to those included in its Takeout offering, which allows users to download data associated with services like Gmail and Google+’s social app, Circles. So now Google Voice users will be able to download their call history, voicemail (both audio and transcripts), greetings, recordings and so on.

Google has long offered APIs for its services that allow others to cultivate and process data surrounding their use. Various developers have created mashup apps for tracking call data through Google Analytics. And Google also offers call metrics with its AdWords advertising service, so that users can measure the effectiveness of ads by looking at the number of people who place calls through the ads. But that application serves Google’s ad sales (as a sort of ad-spend-ROI calculator) more than it serves users’ own direct needs.

What may turn out to be especially valuable about Takeout for Google Voice is its

Inside the Vocalocity Aptela merger

If you’re like me, when you saw today’s announcement that Aptela was merging with Vocalocity, your first thought was how convenient it is that Aptela and Alteva, two companies in the same space whose names you were sure to keep confusing, were both taken out of the game in the same summer.

Believe it or not, today’s deal has significance even beyond that.

As I’ve documented, M&A has been accelerating in the hosted business VoIP space for a while now — there was another deal just last month — and today’s merger (which technically closed yesterday) adds mass and momentum to that fast-growing snowball. Increasingly, we’re seeing carriers acquiring hosted VoIP providers,
such as TelePacific buying Telekenex, Earthlink (ELNK) buying STS Telecom and CBeyond (CBEY) buying Aretta Communications. But we’re also seeing pure-play hosted VoIP players combine with one another, as we did today.

Because there isn’t a great deal of product differentiation in the hosted business VoIP space right now, M&A among in this sector is typically about acquiring customer bases to build scale and, secondarily, acquiring talent to more effectively compete.

Eight-year-old Vocalocity, which had roughly 11,000 customers and 150 employees, grew by about a third with the addition of Aptela’s roughly 4000 customers and 40 employees (including one important gain in particular: Aptela’s CTO and founder, Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya, who is now CTO of Vocalocity).

The new improved Vocalocity, with nearly 15,000 customers, should have annual revenue