Mobile Breakfast Series is
a quarterly event that brings together thought leaders and
visionaries from the global mobile industry to interact and share
ideas, insights, and best practices with the entrepreneurs,
enthusiasts, and others who are passionate about mobile. The next
event is on March 10th, 2010 with keynote from
Rob Glaser,
CEO and Chairman, RealNetworks
Registration.
Notes from the
2nd event -
GigaOM,
Moconews,
AORTA
Sponsors: Motricity, Openwave, and Clearwire
http://www.chetansharma.com/stateofthebroadbandnation09.htm
State of the
(Mobile) Broadband Nation - a benchmarking study
We live in an
information society that is driven by a knowledge economy. A
nation’s competitiveness is directly dependent on its information
infrastructure, which includes access to and availability of
broadband at a low price. Availability of broadband decreases the
digital divide and allows consumers access at a much faster rate,
changes user behavior, and has a positive impact on the local,
regional, and national economies.
Broadband networks reduce the disadvantages of low
population densities in rural areas. New applications such as
telemedicine, e-government, public safety, e-commerce, small
business assistance, and entertainment can be launched and adopted.
As a result, new jobs are created and often new or offshoot
industries are created as well. The economic benefits of broadband
can also be attributed to indirect factors, including increased
commerce, reduction in commute times, increased consumption of
entertainment, and savings in health care as a result of
sophisticated telemedicine. In the United States, several studies
have been released that detail the prevailing economic benefits of
broadband deployment.,
Broadband
availability becomes ever more important in the global society in
which the end-points of any solution can be anywhere.
In an interconnected world, for example, healthcare delivery will be
much more decentralized and distributed. The local clinic might be
responsible for monitoring a patient's vital signs but the analysis
and prognosis might come from a physician thousands of miles away.
One might be lying down on a bed in Kuala Lumpur but the surgeon
doing the surgery might be in Stockholm on video conference with
experts from Cambridge and Chennai.
Given the
importance of broadband in fostering the US competitiveness and the
economic well-being, the FCC is required by the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to submit a National Broadband Plan to
Congress that looks at the broadband policy by Feb 2010. The key
initiatives and principles adopted by the FCC will not only impact
the US market but will also have wider ecosystem repercussions. In
its interim findings, one of the seven gaps that FCC identified is
Consumer Information
Gap.
To understand
the state of the US mobile broadband market, we undertook a
benchmarking study with the help of our colleagues at
Root Wireless
who have developed an innovative approach to collect mobile
performance data. Root provided us with copious amounts of data from
the urban routes in seven big markets for all four major US
carriers. Other benchmarking studies have typically focused only on
the data cards
and have used limited data samples (though some have covered more
cities). This study used over 4.7 million data points for
analyzing the mobile broadband performance in the US. Since
smartphones are the most important and the fastest growing segment
of the US mobile industry, for our analysis, we primarily
focused on the smartphones as very little analysis has been
done and scant performance metrics have been reported on such
devices.
Our goal was
to benchmark the state of the US mobile broadband market with
respect to the signal quality, realistic mobile broadband speeds,
and 3G availability. This paper presents the findings from the
study.
Download Paper (1MB)
Examples of such studies: Robert Crandall and Charles
Jackson, ‘‘The $500 Billion Opportunity: The Potential
Economic Benefit of Widespread Diffusion of Broadband
Internet Access 2001,’’ ‘‘Broadband Bringing Home the
Bits,’’ National Academy Press, 2002. In addition, there
have been several local and regional studies looking at the
impact of broadband to their economies such as ‘‘George Ford
and Thomas Koutsky, Broadband and Economic Development: A
Municipal Case Study from Florida,’’ 2005.
