A Couple of Things

While at the ITEXPO in Anaheim, I wanted to share a few things that happened.

Birch bought some of Sage Telecom’s customers. From the Sage page, it looks like Residential base but there are probably some small business too. More inorganic growth.

Competition can keep broadband prices from rising. Except AT&T and Verizon have chosen not to compete head to head against cable. (VZ co-markets cable since the SpectrumCo deal). And cable companies do NOT compete against each other — except the two over-builders, RCN and WOW!. Maybe Altice will change that now that it bought Suddenlink and Cablevision.

Competition is up to the independent service provider. In this story in ARS, once Sonic entered the area, Comcast reduced rates. Nice to see! Congress and the FCC are intertwined with the Duopoly. There isn’t any money in helping the indie to drive competition. That just takes money out of a politician’s pocket.

Someone pointed out to me that Accel Networks, the 4G/3G data MVNO, was acquired by Sierra Wireless in May for $9M. No idea how I missed that. Accel Networks was headquartered in Tampa Bay, my home town. It gives Sierra’s hardware a network provider. And they get the antenna that Accel was pitching.

Wi-fi provider, Boingo, launched an OTT (over-the-top) TV offering that includes some sports. The OTT TV market is getting better, while it destroys the regular TV distribution system. The cablecos have money invested in TV distribution, but most of that CAPEX has been ROI-ed. The Telco TV CAPEX that VZ (FiOS), C-Link (PRISM), AT&T (U-Verse) have spent billions on has not been returned – and likely never will.

Jabra released a speakerphone- the Jabra Speak 810. Finally, another speakerphone hits the market.

Off to give a Noon session on open source.

Tags: comcast, isp, mergers, ott, TV
Related tags: accel networks, provider, cable, money, accel, competition