Mobility

According to the latest NPD Group Connected Intelligence Smartphone and Tablet Usage report, cellular data usage among consumers with unlimited plans is 67 percent higher than those with limited plans. Limited plan users instead rely more on Wi-Fi access. Over the last three months, limited plan users consumed eight percent more than their unlimited plan counterparts, with a spike of 18 percent more Wi-Fi usage in October.

It’s that time of year - presents are being wrapped, the weather is getting a lot colder, and we huddle up somewhere warm to start writing down our predictions for the New Year. And while we’ll get to more predictions in future blog posts, there’s a very large possibility for 2018 that deserves a blog unto itself. We expect that in 2018 Dish will make its move in wireless, finally mapping out what it intends to do with the large quantities of spectrum it has picked up over the past few years.

“I talk to other CEOs around the world in this space, and we’ve all been struggling a little bit making the business case work,” said Gavin Patterson, CEO of the UK’s BT Group, when discussing the need for 5G at a recent conference. And he’s right to be concerned.

In England, all beached whales must be offered to the Reigning Monarch. This law came into force in 1322, is still in effect today and is, of course, a rather silly law in today’s world. No policy maker would consider building a proposal based on the precedent set out in the 1322 law. And yet, I feel that the FCC’s Net Neutrality argument is just as ludicrous.

An old colleague of mine, let’s call him “Tom,” had a theory regarding productivity and the car. He often drove from New York to Washington, D.C., following the New Jersey Turnpike and i95, at strange hours in the early morning; and his theory was that he could multitask.

You’ve likely heard of cord cutting, the trend toward cancelling cable TV in lieu of streaming video or no paid TV service at all. This trend, which is becoming more mainstream, is no longer just a behavior of innovators who test the waters of new technology. In fact, it’s so pervasive that media companies such as Disney, CBS, and HBO, have or are in the process of decoupling their programming from the traditional pay-TV distribution machine, now offering streaming services that don’t require you to buy a large bundle of channels, but rather subscribe to the core content they offer.

The initial fanfare of last week’s Apple announcements has subsided and the debate has moved from what will be announced to which device consumers will purchase. What we have seen so far from data collected by market intelligence company, CivicScience1, is that consumers are fairly divided.

This year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) Americas is, in many ways, a story of edges. Smartphone manufacturers are clearly demonstrating that phones should have less edge, while the networks that enable these devices will require a far greater edge presence to succeed in the future.

Tomorrow, Apple is expected to launch its next generation iPhone. Assuming the anticipated announcement becomes a reality, this will mark 10 years since Apple entered the smartphone market and fundamentally changed not only what we expect from a phone, but also the competitive landscape for mobile phones – and smartphones in particular. Theoretically, this next iPhone should be an incremental enhancement, following Apple’s pattern of launching the “S” version every other year; but, Apple cannot (and will not) simply launch a minor hardware update for the 10th anniversary. Apple is working to stay at the leading edge of the market as competition looks to build faster and more aesthetically pleasing alternatives to the iPhone behemoth.

The lady sitting in front of me on the tram was clearly into her music. She was using headphones, but it didn’t really make much of a difference. The tram driver came back with the request for her to turn her iPhone volume down, which she did. In the relative quiet that followed, I realized that there were two tech issues addressed by that single moment. Firstly, in a future (or in some places, current) world where there is no tram driver anymore, we would have continued to listen to the tinny echoes of Eric passing through the headphones; and secondly, tech smarts can (at least for now) be ignored at will by the consumer.