Many in rural Vermont are still in the connectivity stone age with dial up up satellite as their only internet access options. That’s about to change thanks to WiMax. Expected down speeds are a paltry 1 to 5 MBPS, but if the best you could get before was 56KBPS, it will be like riding a rocket. Do you remember your shift to broadband an how long ago it was?

..FairPoint Communications has announced it will install fixed WiMax technology over wide areas of the state to bring broadband to residents in some of the state’s most remote areas. FairPoint has been taking over most telephone service in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire fromVerizon Communications (NYSE: VZ). (Information Week)

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a piece over at ComputerWorld. His shot? That in 2009 there will be more Linux based computers deployed than a Windows based device. Personally I won’t take bets, but best guess is it would be a 50/50 shot of it happening. –

Of course, while most of the vendors would like to give their customers Windows, they can’t. Windows is no more capable than booting fast than John McCain is of winning the Olympic gold in the 100-meter dash. That’s where Linux comes in.

You see you can boot Linux up in a hurry if you do it from the hardware and thanks to a company called deviceVM and its fast-booting Linux, SplashTop. PC OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo, are all including SplashTop on their lines.

That’s his take. Well I have another one. I have been noting that ‘thin is in’ on device sizes and have a couple of posts discussing it. My contention is one wants compute on the go which is why the NetTops have been wildly successful this year. So my observation is go the other direction, literally.

If you the consumer is going to tote around the NetTop, all 2lbs of it. Why not use THAT as the comm device. It already fits the bill as your compute device on the go, into and out of the cloud as you please. So if the device had bluetooth enabled to interface with a bluetooth earpiece and SplashTop could support a always on VoIP connection in a low wattage standby mode. Combine that with 3G or Wimax for the data transport. Then you have essentially arrived at the combined portable system I have alluded to. All this with some near term technologies. No leap of faith on some future development; just need to add a little always on VoIP to the NetTop.

I don’t know if it will happen, but as far as I am concerned the hardware for the Apple Dynabook concept is here.

At least that’s how i’m reading between the lines. Moto anmnouced they would delay the spin of of their devices unit while at the same time dumping the Sybian OS and developing Andriod handsets. We may very well see $99 smart phones with the big M on them very soon.

The world’s third largest phone vendor has been expected to introduce an Android phone in 2009 for a while. (See Motorola Preps Android Phone.) On the company’s third-quarter earnings call this morning, Motorola’s new co-CEO and handset unit head, Sanjay Jha, clarified that the firm intends to focus on just two platforms in the higher-tier market next year in a bid to further reduce costs and simplify its labyrinthine cellphone offerings. (See Motorola Delays Devices Unit Spinoff and Moto Reports Q3.)(Unstrung)

“Business is soft and we have too many people”. It’s a standard announcement made in the fourth quarter of every year by the telcos who still have an unbelievably bloated payrolls.  I’m actually surprised that the number is only 1200. The media is (hopefully inaccurately) predicting a radically anti-growth, anti-business group will be running the Federal government come January, and many busineses are radically downsizing in anticipation of this.

Qwest may have been the first this year,  but they will not be the last telco to announce layoffs. While it’s bad news for those affected, if Qwest is an indicator, there will be more staying at work than I would have expected.

“We had a good revenue performance, but profitability was soft,” new chief operating officer Thomas Richards said during this morning’s call. (See Qwest Appoints COO.)

Qwest shares trade at around $2.40 these days, having lost 70 percent of their value in the past 12 months.

The carrier saw business revenues grow 7 percent versus the same quarter a year ago, contributing to a 4 percent increase in data, Internet, and video revenues.

But landline disconnections continued to pile up — 320,000 of them in the third quarter, leaving Qwest with 11.8 million phone customers left. Revenues from voice services were down 9 percent from the previous year and down 2 percent from the second quarter.

About 5 percent of Qwest’s wireless customers have been moved to Verizon Wireless under the carriers’ new partnership. (See Qwest, Verizon Partner.) Qwest also noted that it added 40,000 new fiber-to-the-node subscribers during the quarter. (Light Reading)

AT&T steps into another one. When you are big, stuff happens. This time is underhand payola. AT&T may be innocent of course, but law of agency puts them squarely in the cross hairs. Target with deep pockets doesn’t help either. –

The lawsuit, filed by 44 wireless subscribers in Oklahoma federal court, alleges that between 2001 and 2005 a private investigative agency obtained phone records without subscribers’ consent by paying a management-level employee of AT&T Mobility for them.

“The acts and omissions of the defendants in failing to fulfill their duty under the [Communications] Act to protect the plaintiffs’ confidential and proprietary network information were done in reckless disregard of the plaintiffs under the Act thereby entitling the plaintiffs to recover punitive damages,” the six-page complaint stated. The plaintiffs are seeking $1 million each in actual damages, $1 million each for punitive damages and legal costs.

AT&T Mobility denies any wrongdoing.

Linky.

In this world where the customer has figured out the game of ETF’s and contract invalidation due to the carrier not living up to their end of the deal. You would think that somebody upstairs would not be that surprised to lose 45000 customers in a quarter. —

Brand-switching appears to have tripped up Qwest Communications International Inc. — the carrier lost 45,000 of its 800,000 wireless customers in the third quarter and blamed the deficit on its recent migration to Verizon Wireless.

Qwest in July dropped its mobile virtual network operator relationship with Sprint Nextel Corp. in order to become an agent for Verizon Wireless. Qwest said the move — which included dropping Qwest-branded wireless service in favor of Verizon Wireless-branded offerings — would expand its service footprint and boost its finances.

Thus, the loss of customers may have come as a surprise to Qwest. Indeed, John Gonner, director of Qwest’s wireless product management, said in July that the transition “won’t be a churn situation.”

Well if losing 5.5% of your customer base in a quarter is not cause for alarm on your churn rate well hey, sail on dude. Though I have to say Mr. Gonner’s name seems apt considering the situation.

Linky.

Now this is the kind of action that should be happening in the Wireless CPE space! The chicklet keyboards for the G1 from T-Mobile aren’t even warm and WalMart is going to offer the same phone for $30 less! I love the power of FOSS in the marketplace. –

Predictably, the whining has already started. Just as when Apple reduced the price of the iPhone scant months after launch, early adopters are complaining about the price drop. Unlike Apple – which eventually caved to pressure by offering $100 in vouchers for the whinging buyers – we’d guess it’s unlikely that T-Mobile will offer any rebates — after all, thirty bucks is just thirty bucks, right? Hardly the $200 drop that the iPhone enjoyed.

Over at Channel Web, writer Andrew R Hickey is incensed. Incensed! He even offers “5 Reasons Against Wal-Mart Selling The T-Mobile G1″. The first reason? Price. Yup, the lower price is bad because of “price”. It actually gets worse, although reason number five raises a chuckle: “It’s Wal-Mart.”

Seriously, people. Prices drop, and the early adopter knows that better than anyone. What is Wal-Mart supposed to do? Stifle sales by keeping its price artificially high, just to avoid the complaints of a few nerds? And if you are really that price-sensitive, you shouldn’t be dropping money on a brand new cellphone with an untested OS anyway. Stick to the RAZR - its free.

Now you still do the 2yr contract thing with T-Mobile so all is not lost for them. Or is it? I could see WalMart teaming up with TracFone and offering its customers a G1 like phone for even less and a MTM plan to go along with it. If WalMart had just half its stores with a TracFone kiosk in it; they would become the number 3 cell provider in the nation. Scary thought for the majors. Could smiley face soon be sporting an antenna?

This is the kind of price movement we should have seen 3 years ago from ATT/VZ/TMobile/Sprint. Alas Poor Apple, FruitFone I knew it well, Dear Yorick.

Linky

[PS]: Looks like Verizon smells the discount Juggernaut and wants a piece of the action. They too will be offering the G1 in their stores. Link.

Well now, Yahoo and AOL are back to merger rumors — again. Now it is generally known that the merger of the players down field in a business segment rarely get the uplift they expected on market share post merger. –

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Time Warner Inc’s (TWX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) AOL unit are looking at each other’s books to figure out how much money they could make together and where costs can be saved, a person familiar with the talks said on Wednesday, indicating a merger may finally be on the way.

While noting a deal was not imminent, the source said the two companies have engaged in “meaningful” due diligence about a possible combination for the past couple of weeks.

Talks are focused on how to integrate AOL’s content and advertising business into Yahoo, said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly because the discussions are confidential.

• Guys, third rule of the boardroom is if you are going to do a merger for cover you do so BEFORE the fecal matter hits the financial oscillator. Not after
• Yahoo is already in a modus survicus on their own accord. To drop merger money on top of that would be crazy. In the current environment I don’t think Time-Warner is going to push a lot of cash to Yahoo just to eliminate a weak property.
• Were this a year ago under the current situation Yahoo would be ripe for a leveraged carve up on the cheap. Their data center - content hosting and the ad revenue could be sold off. The balance trashed. The only thing holding off something like that is tight money supply at the current time.

Bottom line — perish the thought Yahoo. Time-Warner, just let AOL sink. Its business model is passe’.

Linky.

Google about 18 months ago started a service that provided excerpts of books for your viewing pleasure. Now technically they had the whole book digitized, but only permitted you to see a given number of pages. Now I assume they were invoking ‘fair use provisions’, but even I can see this steps over the line. Part of the fair use clause is that of intent. It gets very tricky for a business to utilize fair use over that say of a college professor using the same content. –

The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google have announced a settlement in a 2005 lawsuit over its book-scanning project.

Google will pay $125 million to resolve claims by authors and publishers and to pay legal fees, as well as create a Book Rights Registry where copyright holders can register works to get a cut of Internet ad revenue and online book sales.

The agreement will also make many in-copyright, out-of-print books available for readers in the U.S. to search, preview and buy online. And instead of small snippets, copyright protected books will now have 20 percent of the content available for preview.

That is a really big stab at folks like Safari Books who use the same model. Google has more presence than Safari so they win as a consequence.

The big news ” as well as create a Book Rights Registry where copyright holders can register works to get a cut of Internet ad revenue and online book sales.”, is offered almost in passing. This is huge. Under current Copyright law, I can produce a work, and I don’t have to register with the Copyright office unless I want to. Just state that the work is under Copyright in the work itself and you have standing. Well that leads to the orphan works problem that is talked about from time to time. A user of that work, gets caught in a catch-22; they can’t find the author to work a renumeration deal, they use it then get sued. Many good works go unused as a result.

With Google stepping up to the plate to provide such a registry service the orphan works problem is now limited to how stupid or lazy the author is to not register. Google’s win in this? Well hey if go to them to validate the ownership, might you also go THROUGH them to swing the deal or purchase a copy of the work? Sure you will. Even at 20% take rate that’s huge numbers folks. I don’t need to say Kaching do I?

Linky.

Well WalMart has fired one across the bow of Amazon and Apple on MP3 cost per track. A DRM free track is now 74¢ at their online store –

Walmart today made an aggressive move against Amazon and Apple by lowering the prices of its MP3 Music Downloads store. The service now offers per-track downloads as low as 74 cents versus the 89-cent minimum of Amazon MP3 and iTunes’ fixed 99-cent price. Normal tracks are 94 cents, Wal-Mart says. The retailer also plans to drive users to the store through a tie-in with CD sales: starting from mid-November, those who order physical copies of albums either online or in stores get a free MP3 song from any artist or album.

The company has also made key moves to open its previously Windows- and Internet Explorer-centric web store to more platforms. The new version works with any operating system, including Linux and Mac OS X, and supports more standardized browsers such as Firefox and Safari. It also synchronizes more directly with users’ collections and will copy both the songs and their artwork to Windows editions of iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Folks this sets some very interesting things in motion. If a price war gets fully engaged we could see 50¢ track pricing by June ‘09. As a consumer I say yea! But even at 74¢ it sets a floor of about $8 for a CD. The typical CD has anywhere from 10-15 tracks. At the current time maybe half those tracks are what I would consider filler. [Sorry Britany you have not issued an CD equivalent to the Beatles White Album in your entire career.] So $8 is probably a reasonable cost model using the individual track pricing.

It also says something of the RIAA suits going around. Some smart judge is going to look at 74¢ pricing, realize that is the floor price of the music and adjudicate accordingly, applying given restrictions in law. So one could see math like this 75¢ X 100 tracks x 10x for award = $750. At that level the RIAA lawyers can’t have drinks at Sardi’s. [We need to see an appeal to 1st appellate to set it in motion.]

It does one other thing gang. There is no excuse NOT TO PAY for your music anymore. If you budgeted $250 annually for music entertainment you have enough to buy ~350 tracks. Roughly the best of 70 albums per year. Throw in some freebies from various artists and one can collect a pretty decent music cache and not worry about the RIAA anymore. Our recommendation is to follow that lead and be smart about it. Pay for it and support the artists you like. They will make more as a consequence. A win-win.

Linky.