The US Telecom has a blog titled, “Consumers Continue Shift Away From Landline – Regulations Are Behind“. Using FCC and state data, it makes a case that landlines shouldn’t be regulated. (It also starts to make the case that the ILECs are not incumbents any longer.) In this case, it includes business and residential lines, which is funny to me, since most of the regulations have to do with residential. The FCC’s duty is to the consumer. (Stop laughing.)

1. “USTelecom asks the FCC to forbear from applying archaic regulations that divert spending to narrowband networks and perpetuate inefficient legacy network architectures.”
2. “Clearly the data show that with the growth of mobile voice and broadband-enabled Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) alternatives, it no longer makes sense to classify traditional landline providers as dominant in voice service.”
3. “There was not a single state in which landline telephone service from a traditional voice provider was used by more than half the households — the range was 22 percent to 45 percent with a median of 32 percent.”

USTA wants deregulation for LECs. I get that. They want to be deregulated, but still receive favorable status, USF funds, CAF money, government contracts, yet no responsibility as the monopoly and carrier of last resort. Many of the USTA members – like Frontier and Fairpoint – have a large rural base, where they ARE the only choice. As you examine the rest of the USTA board, they are larger RLECs as well – Pockets of monopoly and fiefdom. Yeah, deregulate the monopoly of the communications network that is vital to residents and small businesses. That makes sense.

Kathleen Q. Abernathy is an EVP (of External Affairs & Chief Legal Officer) at Frontier now and on the board of directors for USTA. She used to be an FCC commissioner. You have to love the revolving door of industry and government.

ASIDE:

Free Press Disagrees With Findings of USTelecom Study on Title II Regulation (from NECA)

“Free Press filed a letter on November 21, 2014, asserting the study USTelecom filed, which Free Press said purports to say a return to Congress’s Title II legal structure for broadband telecommunications services would cause a near one-third drop in capital investment, is flawed. Free Press argued the study: does not accurately separate out investments under Title II regulation from those that are not; fails to account for investments already made; the basic premise is essentially that investment in the PSTN declined since 2009 and broadband investment increased under Title I; ignores the current massive investments LECs (and MSOs) are making in Title II enterprise broadband services; and reaches a wildly inaccurate conclusion, while ignoring the realities of forbearance.”

This is a snapshot of just one day at the FCC and just one docket – Open Internet.

• FCC Seeks Fiber Deployment Information from AT&T
• Cox Discusses AT&T and DirecTV Merger, Open Internet
• NCTA, ITTA, USTelecom, et al. Discuss Proposals for Open Internet Regulation
• NCTA, et al. Discuss Open Internet Issues
• CCA Asks FCC to Provide Flexibility to Wireless Carriers
• Open Technology Institute Discusses Study on Wireless Broadband Providers
• CTIA, et al. Discuss Mobile Broadband Issues
• Rural Wireless Association Discusses Open Internet Issues 
• U.S. Cellular Discusses Open Internet Issues  
• T-Mobile Discusses Data Roaming, Open Internet Issues 
• WISPA Asks FCC to Consider Interests of Small Providers  
• GSMA Expresses Concern With Title II Classification of Broadband Services

That is a lot of groups and companies weighing in on how they will be affected by Open Internet. From the looks of it over the past week, cellular companies are experiencing a sphincter tightening over Open Internet rules being applied to them too.

This twitter transcript about building and spreading culture was curated from a chat session. Some good points, but as always with a twitter transcript it is a little disjointed.

A bad example of culture might be Uber right now. Seth Godin has a short take on storms that brew. “Action or inaction are both forms of leadership and standard setting.” Employees see all the actions you do take – and all the ones you do not take. Both.

17 Gapingvoid Cartoons That Will Change Your Business

Interesting panel at Broadsoft Connections about how SP’s around the world are selling UC.

Goal Setting & Sales Planning for 2015 webinar is on Dec. 10. Register here.

Good article about science fiction and predictions: here.

Good read from Seth about Apple as a luxury brand. Luxury, Tribes, Placebo effect, Brand, Function – all reasons people buy from you.

Patagonia is still a luxury tools company. The coats they sell cost more, but some professionals choose them regardless of brand, because in addition to tribal affiliation and the placebo that comes from buying a luxury good, they’re still extraordinarily functional.

And Advice from a shark: @ CP.

Some stats on VoIP from ANPI.

By the end of 2015, “60% of all North American enterprises will move at least 30% of their voice communication to the cloud” — Gartner.

The IP Voice services market is currently growing at a 28.8% compound annual growth rate — Gartner

The current communications market for businesses with less than 100 lines is $15 BILLION

$377 BILLION will be spent on VoIP, Unified Communications, and other hosted services over the next 5 years.

$30 Billion US Telecommunications Private Line Services Market Starts To Decline, says Insight Research Corp.

Some numbers on Comcast Business and quarterly revenue numbers here.

MORE

Global UCaaS Market Revenue Is Expected To Grow To $75.81 Billion In 2020: New Report By Grand View Research [Or some big number that no one will hold us to.] “On premise unified communication accounted for over 60% of the market in 2013.

Global (UC) Unified Communication Market 2015-2019 report says one of the key trends in this industry is the increasing adoption of hosted UC. Mobility helps enterprises establish connections with businesses, workplace, and customers without time and location constraints. Analysts forecast the Global Unified Communication (UC) market to grow at a CAGR of 14.08% over the period 2014-2019.

New Wainhouse Research Study Forecasts Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) Market to Grow to $5.3B by 2018. In fact, the worldwide UCaaS market is forecast to be approximately $5.3B by 2018 with a 5-year compound annual growth rate of 24%, with considerable growth coming from the mid-to-large enterprise segment.” [source]

I am sitting on Edgewater Networks webinar. Security is the top opportunity out there for service providers.

Video conferencing and video calls is what many vendors wish was on the horizon. I think it is further down the runway, except for telemedicine, where it is huge. the nice thing about video: there’s some hardware, install, MRC and bigger bandwidth pipe.

Under security, mobile sits right in that puddle. Besides BYOD (bring your own device) problems, there are also mobile device management (MDM) issues for even the company owned devices (phones, tablets). It is predicted to be a big market.

Managed WLAN or wi-fi is on the E-Rate radar. It is also on the radar of municipalities for parks; mall owners; and business owners to segment visitor traffic from employee traffic (think lobbies, meeting rooms). ADTRAN and Cisco are big in the Managed Wi-Fi game with an as-a-service, but Brocade just partnered with Aruba to get in the game too. (See here).

There are some changes in E-Rate, so check those out. This NoJitter article explains the possible opportunities now in E-Rate.