We may not be in a recession but we are facing tough times, primarily at the gas pump. Families are having to cut back on nonessentials, like entertainment. AT&T, Verizon and now Sony have indications that the consumer has tightened the belt. –

TOKYO: Sony posted a bigger-than-expected 47 percent drop in quarterly profit Tuesday, hurt by losses at its mobile phone joint venture with Ericsson, while Matsushita Electric Industrial reported 86 percent profit growth as a result of rising sales of flat-screen televisions.

Sony raised its forecast for full-year operating profit to reflect a change in its accounting method; Matsushita, which owns the Panasonic brand, reaffirmed its annual outlook, which surpasses market expectations.

By the way Toshiba has been hit as well.

All you broadband providers better listen up, even you wireless guys. If you want to survive this downturn you HAVE to provide a no frills, transport only tier. If you continue to lump yourselves as a ‘entertainment medium’ you are going to lose customers by the fistful. The consumer sits here and looks at all that is before them — cable/FIOS, 500 channel wasteland, pay-per-view, digital phone, cellular phone. Bills running probably up into the $300 a month range. For what?

Many Americans, being forced out of homes by foreclosure are cutting the land line phone for good. Those that are on a solid footing for the housing still have to make choices. So if its a choice between the cell and landline or VoIP they are choosing cellular. They sit there and ask why am I paying $25/mo for premium channels when I don’t have the time to watch them? I am wasting money so out it goes. Besides they could do better with NetFlix or Amazon IPTV. Pay per View the same thing.

So what’s left? Transport, maybe digital phone if one of the breadwinners works out of the house and basic cellular service. That is Basic Fat Pipe. One last angle to consider AT&T, Comcast, Verizon. It is better to assist the consumer with that BFP now. That way you retain a relationship with the customer. When the economy comes back, and it will, that customer will be amenable to adding additional services. If they just cut you off, then you have to compete all over again for their dollars when they get the itch to buy. They just may decide to NOT pick you.

Linky

Consumerist, a website I thoroughly enjoy and occasionally highlight, is having their annual ‘Golden Poo’ award nominations. The only reason I mention it here is that the semifinalists are CountryWide Mortgage and Comcast. Yes, that broadband carrier we love to rib. I believe that the voting starts Monday. You might want to go over and laydown your vote.

What would be interesting is that any company that receives the Poo award ought to have their CEO and board discharged. I think the stockholders would support that idea.

Consumerist.

We have of course covered the whole BitTorrent - Comcast war. Well it is an interesting thing to watch. But if you are a Linux user you can map your data flows in and out of your system and avoid the whole thing, while at the same time improving your traffic and seeding patterns.

The how to do it is here. One minor observation. You will need root access to accomplish this with all its attendant ills if you get something wrong. But if you are comfortable with the commandline you should be able to do this in about half a hour.

I do have a caution. This is not a panacea. If enough traffic gets generated using alternate port numbers it will be nothing for Comcast add that port to the bit filter. But enjoy the freedom while it lasts!

I’ve long  had the suspicion that the heartburn AT&T and the cable guys get from P2P is more about getting paid more for content delivery and avoiding the necessary investment in infrastructure to accommodate users demands. The fact is ISP revenue is up and the cost of capacity is in free fall. This makes providing more capacity at current prices levels very profitable, just not as profitable as raising prices without making new investments.

In the connected world, bandwidth capacity must continuously increase. At the same time we must find ways to do more with less. Anyone within minimal understanding of technology can look at P2P vs server to client content delivery will discover that P2P is an exponentially more efficient way of delivering a large file or stream. That takes us back to the debate about getting paid more to deliver content and avoiding new investment, which seems to be what the cable guys and the death star are really interested in.

Mark Wegleitner, Verizon’s senior vice president of technology agrees with me on the efficiency of P2P:

Peer-to-peer is a distribution enabler. But often when people talk about P2P, it gets lumped into a category with things that are bad, mainly because it takes up so much capacity on the network. But whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, there is underlying technology for P2P that can be used to everyone’s advantage to get content like video, which everyone is asking for, distributed in the most efficient way.

We conducted some tests with the P4P group and Yale University, and showed that customers have a better experience, and we use fewer resources, when we used the P2P technology. It’s really a win-win situation for us and the customer.(Cnet)

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with coax. It’s a great way to deliver huge amounts of data unless you want world class broadband over a shared cable that has the vast majority of it’s available bandwidth consumed by legacy RF signals.

A new development in optical may finally end the reign of coax. RFoG or radio frequency over glass promises tons of dedicated RF bandwidth combined with virtually unlimited digital bandwidth capability.

On Monday, Hitachi introduced two “Node+Zero” modules that are compatible with RFoG, a new cable industry initiative that enables cable operators to install FTTP systems that are capable of communicating with the MSO’s existing headend and traditional cable modems and digital set-tops. The SCTE kicked off an RFoG standards-setting project earlier this year. (See Fog Lifting on RFOG.) Several cable operators, including Cox Communications Inc. and WideOpenWest Holdings LLC (WOW) , are taking a more formal look at FTTP technologies, including RFoG, for residential greenfields and in support of business service deployments, (See Cox Flirts With Fiber and WOW! Does GPON.)

The product from Hitachi most closely associated with RFoG is the Node+Zero H-112, a standalone device that handles the optical-to-electrical conversion at the customer premises and passes through traditional RF-based cable services, including Docsis. The vendor’s Node+Zero H-103 model also passes through RF services but works in conjunction with a GPON optical network terminal (ONT) should operators decide to “future-proof” the system with an extra PON wavelength. (See Hitachi Rolls RFOG Gear .)  (Cable Digital News)

Initially, expect to see the ever reluctant to invest infrastructure cable guys deploying FTTH peace meal and sparsely. However, since RFoG enables them to intermix FTTH with their tired old head ends, it’s likely to become mainstream.