VDSL Gateway at CES

As I’m still wrapping up coverage of the products and demos from CES, here’s a quick look at Motorola’s VDSL2+ gateway. Per my earlier conversation with Alan Lefkof, it looks like this will be a big year for upgrades from ADSL to VDSL. The gateway shown here (Motorola Netopia 7000 series) can [...]

It’s a Modem? It’s a Phone? Yes, and More.

In a parade of pre-CES press releases (more info to come), Motorola announced the Surfboard SBV5422 IP phone-plus-modem today. As a veteran of earlier cordless phone endeavors (it’s a margin-eating business), I was skeptical when I first heard about this product, but it does combine a home phone with something Motorola is very good [...]

Roberts on Comcast

Stephanie Mehta at Fortune recently interviewed Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Om Malik posted a follow-up breaking the interview down into categories of questions with summaries of Roberts’ answers. Here are three items I found interesting:

Roberts called online video more of an opportunity than a threat because cable can deliver a fast connection for [...]

Cable Digital Phone - To Infinity and Beyond!

ISP Planet has a new report out showing that Time Warner Cable is about to surpass Vonage in digital phone/VoIP subscribers to become number two in the market after number-one Comcast. (Years of Vonage hype has not been enough to insulate the company against both patent woes and the might of the cable industry.) With [...]

Phone Companies Not Best for Phone Service?

New J.D. Power and Associates research puts cable companies on top among residential phone providers in a customer satisfaction survey conducted across six regions in the United States.
This blows my mind.
Not only has cable successfully entered an entirely new market in a very short period of time, but this news means that [...]

Ten Things Only Industry Insiders Believe About CableCARD

Michael Vizard over at eWeek inspired me with his “10 Things They Believe in Silicon Valley but Nowhere Else.” Please note that the list below is my attempt at humor and does not in any way indicate the real opinions of Motorola, cable companies, industry reporters, or anyone else I’ve offended.

10 Things Only Industry [...]

Why Wireless Carriers Like Convergence

After writing about Motorola’s work with Danish telco TeliaSonera, I decided I needed to do a little more research on how operators are delivering fixed-mobile convergence (FMC). For years I’ve heard people talk about IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as the basis for FMC services. Since IP voice is just made up of packets [...]

Update on Fixed-Mobile Convergence

Where other reports have shown little interest in dual-mode phones, a recent study by ABI finds that nearly a third of subscribers would adopt dual-mode phones with fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) services. Why?

Better in-home signal coverage
Cheaper calls via a Wi-Fi network at home versus a celluar network

Identity convergence [...]

Voice Convergence is Here!… um… in Denmark!

More Motorola news today, of the good kind. With Danish telco TeliaSonera, Motorola is deploying a voice gateway for fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) services. In plain-speak, here’s what the gateway does: If you’re on a dual-mode phone (cellular and Wi-Fi) outside the home and you then walk into range of your home Wi-Fi connection, [...]

Interest vs. Adoption

There is a big difference between consumer interest and consumer adoption. People expressed interest in VoIP for years, but it never reached any kind of mass adoption until operators threw it into their triple-play bundles. Same with TiVo. Lots of people talked about how great it was, but DVRs got no real [...]