Taiwan market: Vendors cutting netbook prices to clear inventory

Taiwan market: Vendors cutting netbook prices to clear inventory

Monica Chen, Taipei; Joseph Tsai, DIGITIMES

Asustek Computer is planning to drop prices of some Eee PC models in order to meet its annual shipments goal of five million units and to clear inventory of some older models. HP and Acer have also dropped their netbook prices.

Asustek's 7-inch Eee PC has maintained its price at NT$7,990 (US$243.63) in the channel, however the model is still mainly shipped to telecom service providers and the company expects to ship another 200,000 units before the end of this year.

The Eee PC 901 has seen its price adjusted from NT$16,900 to NT$12,900 while the Intel Celeron M processor-based Eee PC 900 has already been phased out of the market. The Celeron M-based Eee PC 1000HD has seen its price drop to NT$13,980. and prices for both the Eee PC 904 and 1000H have fallen around NT$1,000.

HP has cut the price of its 2133 Mini-note by around NT$2,000, while Acer's Aspire one has gone down around NT$1,000.

Dell Sees Future in Services

from GigaOM by Brigid Gaffikin

Despite the pressures of the economic downturn and caution among most of its customers, Dell continues to see opportunity in its enterprise infrastructure and service business, Senior VP 

Paul Bell said at the Dreamforce conference today. He noted that Web 2.0, social-networking companies and other firms that are adding users need to scale up and are continuing to spend on infrastructure services, while financial services companies are trying to find ways to tighten analytics while paring down extraneous costs.

Bell said reports the company would shrink its manufacturing operations were speculation. But he said Dell’s ongoing move into providing infrastructure as a service is part of a business direction that will cut back on the more labor-intensive service model of the past, in favor of, for example, the remote support services the company now offers.

While the consumer market still accounts for just 15 percent of the company’s revenue, Bell said its existing laptop personalization features are going to expand to allow “true individualization” of the outside of laptops, but he wouldn’t give specifics. He hinted at other areas the company was looking at in PC personalization but didn’t give details, and he also declined to comment on the likelihood of a Dell phone.

But Bell did say the company doesn’t buy into the idea that consumers want complete convergence of Internet devices. Handheld and laptop devices won’t end up as one device everyone uses, he said, and the company is testing out whether netbooks in developed markets will end up complementing rather than replacing fullsize PCs. For now, that means the company is focused on larger screens and keybords rather than smaller devices.

Verizon Cuts Pricing on DSL Packages - Expands 7.1-Mbps Servic

Verizon expands 7Mbps DSL to compete with cable

By Justin Mann, TechSpot.com
Published: November 3, 2008, 6:28 PM EST

Shortly after Comcast announced plans to incorporate DOCSIS 3.0 with speeds approaching 50Mbps and higher, Verizon is seeking to retain their DSL customers with faster speeds as well. Verizon will be expanding their fastest-tier DSL service, making it available to around 6.6 million people, significantly more than the less than 1 million it was available to prior.

The increased DSL speeds will go as high as 7mbps, and apparently is only being targeted in areas where FIOS isn't available. Those speeds still fall short of most cable offerings.

From a global perspective, even these speeds are rather unimpressive. The U.S. is still ranked fairly low for average broadband speeds worldwide along with Internet propagation. The size and layout of the U.S. makes broadband for everyone hard to accomplish however, so the stats looked at as absolute numbers only paint one side of the picture.

Verizon Cuts Pricing on DSL Packages

Telco Drops Pricing on Bundles With DirecTV; Expands Availability of 7.1-Mbps Download Service

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 11/3/2008 8:49:00 AM

Verizon Communications, after suffering net losses in its digital subscriber line business for two straight quarters, is renewing its focus on the segment by cutting pricing on its DSL, phone and DirecTV service bundles as well as expanding the availability of its fastest DSL tier.

The moves are designed to slow the defection of DSL users to cable. Despite Verizon’s aggressive push behind FiOS Internet and TV services, DSL remains its most widely deployed broadband service, available to about 25 million households nationwide compared with 9.1 million for FiOS Internet.

Verizon is introducing an entry-level triple play with 1-Mbps DSL, phone and DirecTV service with 150 channels for $79.99 per month and dropping prices of its other DSL-based bundles by up to $18 per month.

In addition, Verizon said its top-speed DSL tier -- with downloads up to 7.1 Mbps -- is now available to 6.6 million households nationwide compared with 3.4 million in mid-June.

Verizon positioned the promotional pricing and renewed focus on DSL as catering to value-conscious consumers facing economic uncertainty.

"In strained economic times, maintaining a high-speed Internet connection remains at the top of consumers' discretionary spending lists," Verizon vice president of consumer product management Susan Retta said, in a prepared statement.

The telco boosted the speeds of its entry-level DSL Internet service to 1 Mbps downstream and 384 Kbps upstream, up from 768 Kbps/128 Kbps, and is offering the service for $9.99 per month for the first six months with a one-year contract. After the six-month promotional period monthly pricing for the remainder of the annual plan will range between $19.99 and $25.99 depending on the market.

While Verizon has delivered solid growth in its FiOS service -- after investing billions building out and marketing the high-capacity fiber-to-the-premises network -- its DSL and traditional landline businesses have deteriorated. In the second and third quarters of 2008, the company reported a net decrease of 133,000 and 96,000 DSL subscribers respectively.

As of the end of the third quarter, Verizon had approximately 6.3 million DSL subscribers, compared with 6.7 million a year prior. The company had 2.2 million FiOS Internet customers as of Sept. 30, versus 1.3 million in the same period last year. Verizon noted that a certain number of DSL-based Internet customers have adopted FiOS.

Verizon said the new DSL-based bundles mark the first time it has offered standardized packages nationwide that are priced the same regardless of state.

Moreover, the telco said it is the first time it is offering bundles with “Freedom Value” voice service, which provides only unlimited local and long-distance excluding calling features such as caller ID, call waiting and voice mail.

Verizon’s two new entry-level double plays are: 1-Mbps DSL plus Freedom Value voice service for $49.99 per month, and the 150-channel DirecTV tier with Freedom Value for $64.99 per month.

Who Killed the VoIP Revolution?

Original

“VoIP is dead,” Skype General Manager of Voice and Video Jonathan Christensen declared at an industry conference a few weeks ago. He spoke figuratively, of course, but he may well have been right. While Voice-Over-Internet Protocol proponents had long promised a decade of creative destruction, they themselves appear to have become the victims.

The full potential of a technology is not always realized once it converges with market forces. In this case, the gravitational pull of the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) has always proven difficult to resist. Most of the VoIP industry, while loudly proclaiming the SIP era as the beginning of the end for monopoly communications, secretly courted the incumbents in hopes of profiting from replacing their long-amortized investments in the fixed-line business. By tying their fortunes to the whimsy of the ILECs, many of the upstarts suffered, destroying billions of dollars in shareholder value in the process.

Recently PulverMedia, which spurred the VoIP crowd and rode its financial crest, shut its doors amid a swirl of controversy. As of this writing, Sonus Networks, once a high flier at $95 per share in 2000, trades at about $2.29. Even Cisco has thrown in the towel, discontinuing its BTS series of softswitches (which provide the routing logic for VoIP networks). These dismal stories perfectly mirror the ride of the VoIP industry in general.

The outlook was once a lot better. In 1999, with the ratification of the SIP protocol specification by the IETF, advocates who wanted to tear apart the monopolies that dominated telecom started to beat their war drums. Following conventional wisdom that the Internet democratizes and deleverages any market into which it enters, it was easy to convince investors to pour billions into VoIP products and companies. Regulators seemed to support that theory, too, sealing the deal with the FCC’s so-called “Pulver Order,” which defended the VoIP industry from over-reaching regulation and tarifing.

The anticipated period of “creative destruction” came, all right. It began in 2001 with the smiting of the competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and long-distance competitors, who had not yet even had time to embrace VoIP, by predatory pricing from the incumbents. It continued with the shift from fixed voice lines to wireless phones, as evidenced by the drop in landlines . More recently, the guns have been turned toward the VoIP equipment vendors that begat the revolution in the first place.

So what happened? What clipped the wings of so many VoIP hopefuls can be boiled down to five things:

Death by Deliberation: The incumbents and cablecos were identified as early targets for the equipment vendors, however their engineers quibbled about curbside protocols and QOS and fiddled with VoIP in the labs, delaying launches by years — far outside of the fundraising cycle of most of the VoIP startups. Competition Attrition: The implosion and autopsy of WorldCom signaled to most of the industry that being a competitor in telecom is not a healthy business. Those high prices were largely arbitrary, and as soon as the market pressured incumbents to reduce them, they did. Evolution vs. Revolution: Companies like Nortel, Siemens and Ericsson rank among the top VoIP equipment vendors today, not startups. Technologists completely underestimated the sway and leverage that the traditional vendors held over their customers. SIP in a Box: SIP might be an open protocol, but networks were built proprietarily and have not been bridged together. Most telecom services still communicate with each other via public switching, meaning that the wonderful possibilities that SIP might enable are limited by the capabilities of the plain old telephone system. Landline Decline: Even as networks were evolving, the number of landlines around the globe was shrinking. People found more convenient ways to communicate via wireless, SMS, instant messaging or pervasive email.

VoIP technology has clearly been successful in making inroads into traditional telecom networks, but in doing so, the revolution that SIP in particular, and VoIP in general, enables has been largely cast aside and the entire industry has coalesced in a race to the bottom. With this revolution went the volume of equipment and software sales that could have revitalized the supplier business and stimulated more innovation.

Of course, while the telecom industry was eating itself alive, a plucky little company from Luxembourg called Skype delivered on VoIP’s promise by almost completely ignoring the Public Switched Telephone Network, not to mention the pundits and experts that cling desperately to SIP’s potential. The point of Christensen’s superpoke at what’s left of the telecom business is that Skype has been successful because it threw away the playbook, ignoring the obsessions of so-called telecom experts and focusing instead on solving the practical needs of everyday users.

Tens of millions of people use Skype’s network today for text messaging, file-sharing, videoconferencing — and, yes, voice calling. All of these services are made decidedly more convenient because of presence — you can see who’s there before you contact them and use that information to choose what the most appropriate means of communication should be. And with less than a $40 million investment (prior to eBay’s rather more substantial buy-in), Skype’s user growth has outpaced the entire rest of the consumer VoIP business combined.

The bottleneck for innovation appears to have been Alexander Graham Bell’s (no relation) PTSN — the plain old telephone system. By going after low-hanging fruit and forcing their innovations to be defined within the walls of the PSTN, the vast majority of VoIP companies voluntarily muzzled their own revolution and ultimately cost their investors billions.