Surprisedly, EarthLink is offering Naked DSL. Some of it is resale but a majority will be off their own equipment (from ONE, Deltacom, New Edge). So while so many people are talking about the death knell of DSL, ELNK is saying otherwise.

DSL price hikes have not helped telco broadband. Cable now has 58% of the US market. Total broadband growth in the US last year was just 4%!

FCC Will Investigate AT&T, Verizon Price Increases – which are ridiculous. Because growth is slow, they raised rates to show revenue growth. Glad to see the FCC is on it [sarcasm]

Karl Bode at DSL Reports broke the story in March of a $5 Verizon increase on existing DSL customers.

US Broadband is slow and expensive. The Duopoly is slow and rich. The FCC is slow and useless.

Meanwhile Google fiber is actually pushing the Duopoly. ATT, TWC, C-Link are all building out Gigabit networks in areas that Google Fiber is announced. So FTTX is on the rise.

DSL Prime writes that “Vermontel charges only $35 for a true gigabit, upstream and down.” WOW! We need more of this in the US.

In a Motley Fool write up on the margins in VoIP looked at Vonage, Cbeyond, 8×8 and MagicJack.

8×8 used to have 30% year-over-year growth – now it is 17-18%.

All 4 have 64-70% gross margin.

“MagicJack is barely larger than 8×8, and has the thinnest gross margin to boot — but enjoys a fantastic 36.3% net income margin.”

TIDBITS of INFO

Buyers are confused big time! 15% think that cloud is free public wi-fi!

“More than 60% of retailers lack unified communications’ awareness.”

“Only 13.4% use unified communications within their operation.”

BTW, iTalk to Acquire 1-800-GET-VOIP Brand for Global VoIP Subscriber Service. And so consolidation continues in little pieces here and there.

In case you want to offer SAAS Office, besides Office 365 and Google Apps, there are 4 other office suites. ZOHO, OX, Think Free (java based), and Live Docs (flash based).

OX is open source and “OX offers files, email, address book, calendar, tasks, and even a social portal where you can easily keep up with your Facebook and Twitter accounts from within the OX Portal.” [blog]

A good article on Safeguarding Health Information: Building Assurance through HIPAA Security.

DISH is rolling out LTE with nTelos. “nTelos and a wholly owned subsidiary of DISH have executed a Letter of Intent to pursue a strategic relationship to co-develop a fixed-mobile broadband service within nTelos’s coverage territory serving Virginia, West Virginia and portions of Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kentucky,” per the PR.

DISH has some spectrum – 40 MHz in the AWS-4 band – that it hasn’t gotten approval to use yet from the FCC. DISH paid $3B for the spectrum, which was designated for satellite phone usage. Cell phone usage is much more lucrative.

DISH is pursuing a bid for Sprint and has lined up the $25.2 Billion financing that it will need to buy Sprint (and Clearwire) out from under Softbank. It is also chasing LightSquared’s spectrum for $2B – twice what LSQ had into it.

Where this leads, I have no idea. Where DISH is getting all this money, I have no idea.

Meanwhile, acting FCC Chair gives C-Link about $90 mill in CAF funding.