New Wireless Service Offers Could be Real Head-Turners

Posted on January 27, 2015

The Wall Street Journal published a story this week promising that the wireless industry business model is about to be turned on its head. The story built on the WSJ’s breaking coverage of an anticipated US MVNO launch by Google, which is expected to incorporate Wi-Fi into the connectivity mix, with the news that US cable TV and broadband provider Cablevision will shortly debut a Wi-Fi only smartphone service, Freewheel, priced at $9.95/month. Exciting, disruptive stuff. To date much of the disruption in the provision of wireless access has been driven by small companies; which is what you’d expect. And, again unsurprisingly, it’s easy enough for the big boys to dismiss these companies as trivial at worst, and plucky (if misguided) upstarts at best. You can’t say the same for the likes of Google and Cablevision. These are organizations with the kind of clout that can be neither dismissed nor ignored. Their brands, their customer relationships, their reach, their complementary service suites… Traditional operators should be worried. But, hang on a minute: What do these guys know about providing wireless service? Google and Cablevision haven’t spent years building expertise in wireless service provision, investing in spectrum, deploying, operating and optimizing complex…

Location, Location, Location

Posted on January 8, 2015

Talk to any estate agent or realtor (depending where you live) and they’ll tell you that location is the most important thing when it comes to selling property. Is it a nice area? Is it easy to get to? Does it have good access? Decent restaurants nearby? If you’ve got the right location, you’ll have eager buyers queuing up, quite literally, at your door. What the agent won’t talk to you about is security. They won’t ask you about your window locks, how long you think it might take to kick that nice shiny front door off its hinges, or (unless you’re in Hollywood) whether you’ve got a panic room with a ten-inch steel casing in your basement. That doesn’t mean security’s unimportant. Far from it; some people might hark back to the days when you could leave your door unlocked without concern, but nobody really wants to test human nature like that today. Security is very important to home buyers but it’s just one element of an entire package that gets weighed as people contemplate tying themselves down to a 30-year mortgage. But it’s always location that comes out on top. When you’ve moved in, and you do start…