In the penultimate issue of Red Herring I wrote a piece about the telecom’s survivors and how they were going to claw their way out of the current downturn. One of the companies I wrote about was OnFiber, a Texas-based metropolitan carrier, which i though had battened down the hatches and had the management depth to survive and perhaps thrive. Looks like things are slowly turning for the company. Today comes news that they bought Enron’s Portland General Broadband assets for an undisclosed amount. My guess is that it could not be more than half-a-million dollars. Last check, MCI’s Metropolitan Fiber Systems was proposing to pay a mere $300,000. (Old report from Portland Tribune) Recently they had raised $12 million in additional financing. In case you don’t remember, this is the very same network which became the center piece of Enron’s broadband nightmare which ultimately brought down the company. Enron bought Portland General Holdings in 1997 as part of its buy-out of Portland General Electric.
Archive for July, 2004
Real curse of the Beige PC
Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on “original design manufacturers” and their growing importance to the PC business. Well to me it is the reason why the PC universe is cursed by boring designs. Mass produced products that try and fit the tastes of majorities are well boring. Whether it is AOL, or Honda Civic, the tyranny of numbers is a curse on design. We are going see more of the same old same old in the electronic markets.
Job Postings
- IT Product Manager/Architect at Orange Labs SF (aka France Telecom R&D, LLC (South San Francisco, California)
- Principal IP Network Architect at Orange Labs SF (aka France Telecom R&D, LLC) (South San Francisco, California)
- Senior IP Network Architect at Orange Labs SF (aka France Telecom R&D, LLC (South San Francisco, California)
- Software Engineer - Home Group at Orange Labs SF (aka France Telecom R&D, LLC) (South San Francisco, California)
- More Jobs »
China’s Internet growth slowing?
This does not surprise me at all. Why? because folks who can afford Internet in emerging economies are finite and as a result the next big surge would come when more affordable plans are offered, and the PC penetration rises. I am not sure if these numbers include people who access the Internet on their cellphones. I think China is all about “personal communicators” like Motorola A388 and Sony Ericsson P 900.
Wall Street Journal: The China Internet Network Information Center, a semiofficial think tank, said the number of Chinese Internet users at the end of June was 87 million, up 9.4% from the end of last year, and 28% more than in June 2003. Both of those percentage increases are the smallest since collection of statistics on Chinese Internet use began in late 1997. As of the end of June, just 6.6% of Chinese regularly access the Internet, compared with more than 70% of Americans. In the year ended in June 2003, Internet use grew 48%, while in the year ended in June 2002 it expanded 72%. China, home to 20% of the world’s population, accounts for 12% of Internet users world-wide. (via Emergic.org)
McProgrammers
Business 2.0, August 2004: Rajendra Pawar created a global chain of computer schools that churns out low-cost techies for call centers and software farms. That has made him a fortune — and a folk hero. (Download file)
Let the Handset Price Wars Begin
Business 2.0: July 20, 2004: LG, Nokia, Samsung, and the rest are headed down the same path that doomed PC makers.
Continue »
3G blah blah blah!
C/Net says 3G, the term is making a comeback. Thanks to oodles of publicity over a service that at best can get you 200 kilobits per second, over two lousy and poorly designed phones, in four cities, folks are overlooking the fact that this was a contractual obligation for AT&T Wireless, since they took money from the Japanese service provider NTT DoCoMo. (When NTT makes investments like these, I wonder to myself, how the F**K did they become leaders in the wireless world? More of an accident than brilliance?)
I guess AT&T Wireless PR mavens decided not to get in touch with me, worried that I will bring up issues like hey guys what 3G this damn thing is faster than AT&T Wireless’ EDGE offering but slower than Verizon/EV-DO and supremely Nextel/Flarion. Or that the service is available in city centers/business areas for now even in the four cities the product is available. But since they didn’t give me a chance to test out the service, I am recapping the experiences of RBC Capital Markets analyst Jonathan Atkin who tested the service in San Francisco using the Motorola A845 handset.
Our tests of AT&T Wireless’ UMTS offering in San Franciso yielded as-advertised throughputs in the low 200 kbps range, i.e., faster than AT&T Wireless’ EDGE offering but slower than Verizon/EV-DO and Nextel/Flarion. Latency, however, was sluggish and similar to other 2.5/3G protocols except Nextel/Flarion. The handset-based streaming video was impressive and required minimal or no mid-stream buffering. On-line navigation seemed sluggish, akin to a dial-up Internet experience. We found coverage to be somewhat limited as we did not consistently obtain UMTS signal in many residential and business areas that provide consistent 2.5G voice and data coverage from AWE and other carriers. This is not surprising in light of the higher frequency (1900 MHz) and limited number of cell sites AWE has used for its UMTS rollout.
My conclusion, this crapola is not worth the time or the money.
More from Engadget, AT&T Unlimited data plan actually pretty limited
Sold, One Telco for $6.3 million
ICG Communications, which has the dubious distinction of being the first telecom to go bankrupt before the bandwidth bubble has been sold for $6.3 million, according to The Rocky Mountain News. Columbia Capital of Alexandria, Va., and M/C Venture Partners of Boston will purchase ICG for 75 cents a share and the assumption of nearly $100 million in debt, the daily reports. Columbia and M/C, which have a combined $2.4 billion in investments in such companies as Nextel and XM Satellite, will create a joint firm to buy ICG, The News adds.
This is the second major crisis for the company. In the first stage, high profile and free-spending Shelby Bryan, also known as Mr. Anna Wintour, (who is the frosty and imperial editor of Vogue) was to blame. After going bankrupt, the company was nursed back to health by turnaround expert Randall Curran, and emerged as an intact company nearly two years ago. But with ICG’s biggest customer Qwest in trouble itself, it was only a matter of time before ICG ran out of cash. I am not sure of this but Cisco might be taking some write-off on this one. They sold tons of equipment to ICG and used them as a poster child for their IP-Network vision.
ICG’s bankruptcy proves my theory of bankrupt-go-bankrupt which was published two years ago in the last days of disco, err, red herring! Well I guess I was a year too early on that one!
Incumbents, not dead yet
Jack Waters, chief technical officer for Level 3 Communications in Telephony:
’ÄúThe news of the incumbents’Äô death is really overstated,’Äù he said. ’ÄúThey are very good at getting before the customer and selling enhanced services.’Äù
Leaving New York
Anil left New York with this parting gift. I say, my sentiments exactly!
Tony Vs Om: AO-GO-KO?
Well despite our continuing blog-bashing, I still love TP, and he reciprocated the sentiments. Here is his latest on the whole situation. I am still going to call Powell’s column just that, not a blog post, and when he writes great stuff, I will blog to it. On the flipside, I am making headlines on Tony’s AO, so that cannot be bad, right. You can post here, or there! PS: you don’t want to see me in undies!
- Round Two: Tony, Toni, Online Column, Blog Post
- Round One: Powell’s Blog Flip Flop
Network
- OStatic: OpenID Gets Explained, Maligned, and Dropped
- TheAppleBlog: When The Cracked and The Cracker Meet: An iPhone Tale
- jkOnTheRun: Nokia’s WiMAX Internet Tablet Going Away?
- jkOnTheRun: Early CES Trend: Touch is the Air
- NewTeeVee: Coming Soon: Wireless Video Uploads from Your Camera
- jkOnTheRun: BoingBoing at CES 2009 using netbooks
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