Today’s cable chip sector is a mess. You have a collection of chip companies all competing for a sizable but otherwise relatively small market. The three main cable equipment suppliers (Cisco, Motorola, and Arris) drive a high percentage (probably something like 90%) of the cable capex spending. How this trickels down to Intel, Texas Instrument, Microtune, дивани Anadigics, Marvel, MaxLinear, and Maxim
CSGS recent announcement of it winning the remaining portion of billing services from Charter Communications (CHTR)
Currently CHTR splits its billing services for its 5.5mm subscribers 60/40 between Convergys (CVG) ICOMS (Integrated Communications Operations Management System) solution and CSGS. CHTR is consolidating solely under CSGS for all billing services starting 2010. CHTR is listed as CSGS’s 4th largest customer representing around 10% of its revenue and signing the remaining half of CHTR billing needs is believed should generate as much as a 8-10% increase in CSGS revenue in the coming year. (more…)
The flood of 2008 was a memorable event. If you pretty much follow the Cedar River down through Iowa (which starts in the central NE part of the state, down through SE part and on into the Mississippi river), you will see many cities seeing 500 year flood damage including some of the biggest cities: Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo/Cedar Falls, etc. In all, the state had somewhere around 50,000+ homes affected. (more…)
With all the pull backs in hiring, it is getting hard to find companies with any openings. So, out of curiosity, I made a list of 33 companies I’ve been asked recently about and ranked them by their perspective job openings versus their number of current employees. The chart below is the top ranked companies in my list. For those of you concerned about “American Jobs”, I added a column that describes the of job openings for this company that are on American soil as opposed to overseas. These companies look to be expanding or at least investing in new product development. (more…)
It has been said that the Internet is becoming tomorrow’s Personal Computer (PC) operating system and in so doing allow individuals to maintain a variety of different means of accessing their virtual PC. Taking a stab at a support argument for the virtual PC while posing some questions about user data which will become a thorny issue well into the future. (more…)
As building super highways into neighborhoods mutates into extending them into individual homes, fiber, namely passive optical networking (PON), is becoming the technology of choice. However, the means of terminating PON as well as its proper transformation of signals carried over PON into the various forms of telecommunications wiring found within the home (coax, twisted pair, etc.) represents an expensive and time consuming obstacle for today’s network operator installations. Especially since most home wiring creates a traffic jam for the much higher capacity fiber hanging on the side of the home. (more…)
As last mile connections to the home become 100% fiber a need exists in fiber termination (transceivers) to maintain this bottleneck free fast-lane on into the home. However, while fiber is becoming the physical medium of choice for last mile connectivity, the dominate home networking physical media is still somewhat up for grabs. Physical medium networking options to connect devices within the home include powerline (homeplug), RF or wireless (802.11g/n), twisted pair (HomePNA), and coaxial cable (MoCA, HPNA) and as one of these wins out it could finally paint the picture of which transceiver technology works best. Passive Optical Network (PON) fiber transceivers with coax termination would make good passive optical network gateways. Emphasis needs to be placed on smarter passive optical termination. (more…)
Although the price per GB of data storage is dropping, online data storage service vendors like Data Backup Solutions, eSureIT, EVault and IBackup have thus far found a way to charge a premium for their services over and above what the going rate for data storage on the Internet. This premium is based on what other online services charge for related storage of content of any type. Because of this growing differential, the online data storage service sector should experience further consolidation as other more established players in consumer online content storage sector test these markets with lower cost entry level services.
In big demand these days is software to configure mass numbers of devices on a network. Service providers are calling on their vendors to build them management systems to help them configure large numbers of devices quickly and painlessly. Only device manufacturers didn’t have “bulk configuration” in mind when they set about building advanced functionality devices or applications. Rather bulk configuration is how service providers are answering the call. How does this need for bulk configuration impact the high margin premium device and application sector? Will we see more smarter devices or a smarter network? (more…)
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