This is interesting: “Disclosure: Bright House is owned by the Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which is part of Advance Publications. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica. Advance/Newhouse would own 13 percent of Charter after the proposed transactions.” Consolidation is going on in every industry. For news/media, very few voices as 6 companies control 90% of it.

CenturyLink plans to reach 14M households with 100 Mbps over copper via vectoring. So those copper lines annoy VZ but Frontier, C-Link, Fairpoint, and 700 RLECs are still make money off them. “By using vectoring, Post said that CenturyLink will be able to reach most of the addressable homes passed with higher speed services than what it can deliver today over its existing ADSL2+ and VDSL2 networks. This can be done at a relatively low cost of under $200 per home passed.”

What is VDSL2 vectoring? Alcatel-Lucent explains.

G.fast is almost here. See this video from Sckipio, a vendor partner of Calix.

The MVNO market in the US is still going. A new UK entrant called Tello joined using the Sprint network. Everyone is fighting for low ARPU customers, but the advertising indicates that customer acquisition is over $650 per user.

Analysts Craig Moffett Worries ISPs Aren’t Capping Users…Enough. He must pal around with FCC Commish Ajit Pai, who dissented in two deals (ATT/DTV and Charter/TWC/BH) over the review process being about regulation and adding conditions. (In this case, Charter suggested the No data caps for 7 years condition themselves.

BTW, while Charter and Frontier made promises about no job cuts… well, they lied.

Apple missed Wall Street analysts’ estimates and its stock gets hammered. It lost $45B in market cap yesterday. As Tom Peters said, “So Apple sucks. Mere $11B profit on $50B quarterly sales. Meanwhile unicorn models don’t even bother to talk about profits. Funny old world.” I wonder how the VoIP darlings fare.

Meanwhile all this consolidation is due to:  (a) money is cheap and easy to get; and (b) organic growth to keep Wall Street happy is just not possible. Look at some of these deals:

• Charter buys TWC and Bright House, an $88.4 Bn deal now.
• Comcast is buying Dreamworks for $3.8B
• Gannett Offers $815 Million for Tribune Publishing

In Healthcare, it is constant M and A:

Abbott to Acquire St. Jude Medical for $25 Billion. This after Abbott is in process of acquiring another company for $6B. Sanofi Offers to Buy Drug Maker Medivation for $9.3 Billion. AbbVie to Buy Cancer Treatment Start-Up for $5.8 Billion.

I was in this industry for a few short years (10). Healthcare gave up on R&D. Less risky to buy a company than to do research. Most Big Pharma pipelines for new drugs do not contain any blockbusters. It costs from $500M to $1B to bring a drug to market. Big risk. Better to buy. Better to invest in startups, and buy them if it works out.

What a crazy world we live in.

AFTER-THOUGHT
BY Simon Rothman

“Both founders and investors value traction. Everyone wants to see strong customer acquisition, transaction volume, and geographic expansion. Growth can be a positive signal of a business’ long term potential, which is why growth is a priority for every startup. Unfortunately, growth has become a proxy for success — even if it’s “bad” growth. And yes, there is “bad” growth. If the cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is greater than the lifetime value (LTV), a startup can grow itself to death.”

Sometimes Wall Street uses the wrong metrics.

The State of UC&C from the perspective of UC Expo in Europe.

“Perhaps unified communications has been a victim of ‘overbranding’ in this sense. Even Wikipedia described it as a ‘marketing buzzword’ as of April 2016.” AT&T is just using AT&T Collaboration for its Broadsoft UC&C service.

“Meanwhile, 40 percent of businesses are already using the technology.” BY tech, we mean components of the platform that has been labeled UC&C – VoIP, conferencing, IM/Presence, video, et al.

“Gartner’s 2015 Hype Cycle for UC, which tracks excitement and interest in technology against adoption, anticipates that mainstream adoption of technologies such as enterprise file synchronisation and sharing, external peer-to-peer communications and SIP communications is less than two years away.”

“To Vishy Gopalakrishnan, AVP of Product Marketing Management, Voice and Collaboration at AT&T, it is a mixture of supply and demand.” Yeah, there is a lot of supply but the demand is waning so far. I wrote about this earlier this week. Few new tech companies focus on demand & brand which is why their success is limited.

BTW, VoIP services market is up 5% to $73 Bn in 2015, says IHS. ResidentialVoIP is 62% of that. UCaaS grew just 6%.

“It’s not because people didn’t try the first time. It’s because being surrounded by people on the same journey as you causes you to level up.” When you are surrounded by people who support you and are trying to raise the ocean together, it all brightens.

“Your path forward is pretty simple: Decide on your journey and find some people who will cause you to level up.” Seth Godin.

That is one reason the Master Mind Group works so well. A group of executives that can bounce ideas, support each, hold each accountable has proven to be effective. Ask Thomas Edison and Henry Ford as Napoleon Hill wrote about in Think and Grow Rich*.

A few years ago I ran a CEO master mind group for 5 people. It lasted one year and seemed to work out fine. There was pre-work for each session that involved wins and losses and hurdles.

I have moderated or participated in mastermind groups since 2004. If you are interested in joining one, please give me a shout.

* Jeffrey Gitomer has a blab on Sunday mornings at 11 am to go through this book, Think and Grow Rich, one chapter per week on the platform Blab.

* The comments on this blog post consist of advice for a new CEO. Coaching is the top piece of advice.

Google designed a new wireless router that it is selling – and is hoping that ISPs will offer it too. The OnHub wireless router has 2 versions – one by Asus and one by TP-Link. (I have a router from TP-Link; it was DOA and the tech support line is always busy.)  The designs for both are really nice. Non-boxy. Looks like Amazon Echo.

The Verge has a nice review. “With the OnHub, Google is trying to solve the three biggest pain points of routers — setup, coverage, and troubleshooting — and build a wireless portal for the future.”

Wi-fi is how most people connect to the Internet. Google wants that experience to be better. So should ISPs. A bad wi-fi experience is blamed on who?