if connected

The Globalisation Institute, or the self-proclaimed “Brussels’ most popular think tank website”, thinks so as they own www.globalisation.eu (interesting arguments about PCs and Windows here too, which is how I came by this site).

But, foolishly, they’ve not secured the z word for their website: www.globalization.eu. This is very insular thinking, how could anyone possibly think of globalisation without an ‘s’?

It’s even more fun at the dot com level:
www.globalisation.com is a different EU-orientated site.
www.globalization.com does not exist, so much for American global spelling.

This is going to be the first in a few entries on ISPs’ wild and confusing claims for their broadband service….
First up are the European cable companies that are jumping on the fibre bandwagon and implying that their service is similar/the same as the fibre to the home (FTTH) services launching in France and elsewhere.
Background: traditional cable networks use HFC technology which stands for hybrid fibre coax. In simple terms what this means is: Fibre runs to near the consumer’s home — like a street cabinet — and then a copper core coax cable runs down each road with branches into customer homes. The coax is shared capacity for broadband: the more capacity one house uses the less there is for neighbours.
Several European cable operators are now using the word ‘fibre’ rather too prominently in their corporate backgrounders, investors beware, and even in the case of Virgin Media in their consumer marketing. Virgin’s current poster campaign proclaims:

Truth, Lies and Broadband
Hello,
There are lots of companies out there selling ‘high speed’ broadband, claiming to be the fastest and cheapest in the land.
The truth is this… right now, in terms of broadband, there are two types of home in the UK.
Half of us can get cable broadband. This is delivered via a fibre optic cable — meaning it is officially the fastest and the best performing broadband available.

[My emphasis. It goes on in a similar vein.]
The key word in the above text is “via”.
This usage of the word ‘fibre’ is highly misleading and confusing. The service of ADSL broadband consumers will also go via fibre at some point, typically from the telephone exchange onwards, so what’s the actual difference??? Also, unlike cable’s HFC, ADSL uses uncontended (ie unshared) copper between the consumer and the telephone exchange, unlike cable’s shared coax running around the street. So, although telephone line quality and distance matter for ADSL there are some advantages for ADSL over HFC.
Bottom line: The most important bottleneck for broadband performance today, is not the technology that delivers the connection to a house, but the overall network capacity that ISPs allow throughout their network. And, as ISPs are cutting consumer broadband prices, they have less incentive to invest in such network capacity.
Going back to Virgin, briefly, their earlier radio advertising campaign was even worse:

You can now get Virgin Broadband for just £10 a month and it’s not just any old broadband. It’s unlimited super duper fast fibre-optic cable broadband or in other words broadband that doesn’t use copper wire like most providers and doesn’t slow down no matter how far you live from the telephone exchange.

Arghhh.
In my opinion, the word via is not enough to fix the message from the July radio adverts for the current print campaign and make the message clear. The word via just results in:
Truth, Lies, Ambiguities and Broadband

The current Virgin Media poster:

Carphone Warehouse UK today launched a new bundled offer, which they are marketing under the headline of Free Broadband, Forever.
The initial press coverage is reporting a “Broadband Price War” and is quite breathless. This is a major marketing success for Carphone, especially as free is not really free in this case, and the war is not starting it’s been ongoing for the last eighteen months at least. This news is, instead, a major conflict escalation which will force the other major ISPs — especially those leading with value-centric propositions — to respond.

For a monthly fee of £9.99, TalkTalk customers will receive:
- Unlimited local and national landline calls, 24 hours a day.
- Unlimited international landline calls to 28 countries, 24 hours a day.
- Up to 8 Mbps broadband access.
This offer is available from today to all customers in all 1,000 exchange areas, covering nearly 70% of the UK population. If the local exchange has not yet been unbundled, the customer will initially be connected via BT’s wholesale IP Stream service, and then migrated at a later date at no extra cost to them. The first customers will go live from the beginning of July 2006.
In addition to the monthly fee, all customers will pay the standard monthly line rental charge of £11.00.

A combined monthly subscription price of £21 a month will be less attractive to the remaining dial-up customers than Carphone hopes: 33 percent of European dial-up users said they were unwilling to pay more to their ISP even when offered the choice of cheap bundled telephony or much faster speeds. About half of the dial-up access revenues in the UK are from unmetered dial-up users. These users must be adverse to subscription packages given their long standing rejection of both unmetered dial-up and flat rate broadband products over the last six or seven years during which they have been widely available.
It’s the marketing that makes this broadband product free, not the actual package detail. Other providers in Europe offer a no-monthly subscription broadband products that are instead pay per use. In the UK, Bulldog’s prices start at £10.50 for phone plus DSL on a pay per use basis. The cable companies, like Bulldog and Tiscali, have long offered telephony/broadband bundles in the UK. Sky subsidiary UK Online, has an entry level product priced at just £9.99, with a similar geographical limitation but without the need to switch phone package at the same time. This Carphone product is cheap, but it’s evolutionary not revolutionary.
What this package will do, is provide a natural way for Carphone to up sell their existing base of 2.6 million residential voice customers, many of whom will have an existing broadband package from another ISP. This threatens to raise churn levels in the broadband market.
Carphone’s broadband customer base of 75,000, makes it a small ISP today (and not the number three broadband ISP that the FT reports as of 1pm UK time on the 11th, until they fix it), behind Tiscali, Wanadoo, AOL, BT, ntl/Telewest, Pipex and a number of others. Those providers that have expensive or non-existent telephony packages will respond with their own product announcements over the next few weeks to counter Carphone’s successful press activity.
The devil is in the detail, and the reality is not as revolutionary as Carphone Warehouse is presenting. Customers must commit to an eighteen month contract; the trend in the UK is to shorter, often monthly, contracts although with some ISPs retaining 12 month contract lengths. Carphone’s broadband product has a usage limit of 40Gig a month. The product will not go live until July 1st, by which time Carphone’s competitors will have responded. Once customers have been migrated onto an LLU package as Carphone plans, the logistics of LLU will make it slow and painful to migrate elsewhere later, in addition to the £70 cancellation charge. Carphone have a set-up fee of £29.99 a month; many ISPs offer free installation.
Bottom line – this is more of a telephony play than it is a broadband initiative. This is not the start of a broadband or telephony price war, but an escalation of the existing war. There will be more innovative launches to come this year in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe.
Advice for clients:
- Read this: Dial-up’s Lingering Death – Will Narrowband Laggards Ever Spend More with Their ISPs? which contains the consumer survey data I quoted above, plus more on dial-up users interests, and has actionable advice for ISPs.
- Clients should also send any specific questions not addressed in our published reports, and we’ll set up conference calls or respond in writing, as appropriate.

The FT reports that Ebay sees Google, Yahoo, Amazon becoming less competitive with them :

The four dominant internet groups – Google, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon – will increasingly focus on their core activities rather than compete with each other head-on, according to Meg Whitman, eBay’s chief executive.
“I think we will end up specialising,” she told the FT in an interview on Tuesday. “We have specialised in e-commerce, payment and voice communication. Google stands for search, Yahoo largely stands for content – so I think we may on the fringe compete, but I suspect that over time the businesses will become more specialised.”

Who’s going to break the news to Google!
End up? Has the FT misunderstood? Is Meg Whitman speculating about an end game that is years into the future?
Or, is Ebay already preparing the financial community for a re-positioning of their expensive VoIP acquisition, Skype, out from the headlights of ‘the dominant Internet groups’?
Certainly for now, on VoIP, this is highly wishful thinking. All of these companies have VoIP products competitive with Ebay’s Skype. They’re all adding new features and improving their ease of use too. Plus, the article fails to mention MSN / Microsoft at all ,and so completely ignores Windows Live Messenger and its impacts.
In the wider perspective it’s even odder. These companies cover enormous ground including commerce, content, communication, advertising, search etc. with numerous Jupiter analysts researching each area. However, my understanding, to put words in everyone else’s mouth here is that there is serious competitive overlap in numerous other areas, such as Yahoo! being a major auction player in Japan; Google’s Froogle and classifieds stepping on Ebay’s toes; all of them targeting the youthful demographics that Skype’s latest avatars and ringtones appeal to.
For the next few years, Ebay will be competing with these companies whether they like it or not.
Clients – send us inquiries and we’ll set up calls with a selection of analysts to cover off whichever aspects of this are of interest. Those interested in VoIP or Skype, read this Skype case study.

Ignoring the obvious but shallow: “because they can” / it seemed a “really good idea” / to annoy Microsoft / and Larry Page aspired to command the stage at CES ’06 in the way Steve Jobs has done many times over the years at Macworld….
Potential benefits to Google of the pack approach:
1. Further expand existing search revenues.
Google could target websites that provide an index of software downloads; many of these already sell paid placement ads and sponsorships, such as cnet’s downloads.com . So, alongside ‘web’ ‘images’ ‘groups’ and ‘news’ tabs on its front page, Google could add a ‘software’ tab and sell ads alongside the results.
In other words – Google could use this to generate more searches with Google, and therefore more search-related revenue.
The key consumer benefit of the pack is ease of updates through the central Google updater software. This happens to provide Google with both a route to collect anonymous data (opt-in) and a channel to distribute software. The data adds to Google’s consumer insight engines, and so boosts the value of this software distribution channel for software publishers.
2. Pushing Google software onto consumers’ desktops strengthens consumer ties to Google, and will encourage consumers to do more searches with Google, which equals more search ad revenue.
With Google diversifying into areas that are the traditional preserve of ISPs and media companies (email, telephony/VoIP, video/TV, IM, etc.) Google may find it harder to work with those types of partners to market its products. If consumers use Google PC software — like Google desktop search — then Google has strengthened its user relationships.
Additionally, with web browser innovation still slow, despite Firefox/Mozilla (IE still has the vast majority of the online population), Google’s PC software enables Google to innovate and experiment with new products and revenue possibilities without being limited by the abilities of the prevalent web browsers in use.
3. Improving the consumer experience of the Internet improves the foundations for Google’s Internet-based business.
Google is dependent on the quality of the consumer experience of the Internet. Yet, the main tool for using the Internet, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, has barely changed in five years. By distributing Firefox as part of the bundle, Google spurs web browser innovation by encouraging Microsoft to innovate and accelerate and deepen its IE7 plans.
Norton Antivirus and Adaware also help consumers manage the daily pains of malicious software thus indirectly helping Google. If consumers become too annoyed by the dark side of the Internet, they’re likely to spend less time and money online. These products reduce those annoyances.
It’s early days, but I see some promise in Google Pack. However, please don’t ask me to say nice things about Google video whatever you do. Clients – send an inquiry if you’d like to hear a critique of Google’s video efforts.

Eric Peterson is right, advertisers should be careful about using cookie functionality in Flash adverts (to overcome cookie blocking) and of using other Flash tricks that make Flash adverts annoying to consumers.
For select groups of consumers that use Firefox, easy on/off switches for Flash already exist, see: Flashblock and Flash click to view.
Poor and annoying usage of Flash will persuade more consumers to use these kinds of blocking tools. More importantly, such usage will raise the probability that mainstream vendors — like Symantec, Mcafee, or Microsoft — incorporate similar tools into their security products which will likely impact the current installed base of Flash player software. Alternatively, as Eric mentions, Macromedia may simply remove that ability from Flash, which will guarantee that future Flash installations will be free of the problem.
I imagine there may be short term gains for advertisers in some cases of using such tricks, but the harm long term could be much greater, and what is the immediate effect for advertisers’ brands of deploying intrusive adverts?
I must ask the advertising and marketing team here (I am, after all the European Platforms & Access analyst!).

The coverage of web accessibility (BBC News / W3 WAI response) raises some interesting points. Disabled access is important, but there are other reasons to make a site accessible that have revenue impact: accessibility usually delivers a better customer experience; pages tend to load faster; they are easier for search engines to index leading to better rankings; etc. etc.
Advertising revenue will become another plus. This piece in Google’s AdSense FAQ (branded ‘AdWords’ to advertisers) caught my eye:

2. How do I optimize my site for the most relevant ads?
Our ability to target ads to your site depends on the content and structure of your site. Here are some basic guidelines for optimizing your site:
- Place ads on pages that predominately contain text — only text is used to determine a page’s context.
- If you have a robots.txt file, you’ll need to remove it or add the following two lines to your robots.txt to allow our content bot to crawl your site:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
- If your page contains frames, select the ‘Framed page’ checkbox when generating the ad layout code for that page.
- Place ads on pages that don’t require a login.
- Place ads on content pages that don’t change frequently.
By following these tips, we can better serve the most relevant AdWords ads on all of your content pages. If we are unable to crawl or understand the content on your site, we may serve public service ads or your specified Alternate Ads, for which you will not accrue any AdSense earnings.

So, the bottom line is:
Accessibility to Google’s indexing robots = Greater contextual ad revenues