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Sprint announced that it will roll out its no-contract, no-credit-check, no-activation-fee mobile phone plan, Boost Mobile, in Hawaii. Pricing is lower than local operator Mobi PCS, according to this Star-Bulletin article. I discussed Mobi PCS on 21 May 2007. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have announced US$99 per month unlimited mobile plans, but these require contracts. Contracts are one way to lock-in customers, as I noted earlier today. Competition for mobile phone customers has become more intense in the last few months, as I noted on 26 January 2008.

Yesterday, Forbes reported on eBay’s continuing problems with Skype. Om Malik also discussed this development yesterday.

eBay purchased the VoIP company in 2005. eBay CEO Deb Whitman wanted eBays sellers and buyers to use Skype as a real-time communications tool during and after auctions.

eBay management is scrambling to save Skype

It hasn’t worked out well for eBay. The massive Skype outage that I discussed on 17 August gave new entrants and existing competitive rivals more opportunities to convert disgruntled Skype customers. Forbes published an article about the outage here.

… eBay’s stock barely moved on news Monday that Skype’s founder and chief Niklas Zennstrom is leaving and that eBay will take $1.4 billion in charges related to the acquisition in the third quarter. When eBay makes its quarterly report on Oct. 17, analysts won’t expect Skype to contribute more than 5% of the company’s revenues — that’s how much it coughed up in the second quarter, just $90 million…

In our local market, there are several VoIP providers who have targeted business and residential customers. Pacific LightNet, Oceanic Time Warner, and AlohaTone. Google recently purchased GrandCentral, which provides users with a single mainland phone number that redirects incoming calls to the user’s other phone numbers. The New York Times discussed GrandCentral in this 15 March article.

Even the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC), Hawaiian Telcom, offers CallWave VoIP voicemail services to cits mobile customers. See this 19 September 2005 Pacific Business News article for the initial announcement.

Meanwhile, one of the best-known national VoIP providers, Vonage, is losing patent-infringement lawsuits filed by Sprint and Verizon. Here’s Malik’s summary from 25 September. Vonage lost its CEO in April, and is struggling to keep customers.

It’s hard to compete when the key success factors in an industry are not in your favor.

In today’s Honolulu Advertiser, a story revealed Hawaiian Telcom’s plans to sell DSL accounts without a traditional voice landline. In the industry, this is called naked DSL, and it has been available from HawTel since July.

It’s another attempt to recapture former HawTel customers while the company’s upcoming IPTV service languishes in testing. Many households have switched off their HawTel landlines, eliminating them from HawTel’s current DSL service.

These residential customers rely on cell phones for their voice service. Oceanic Time Warner has captured many of the residential Internet customers statewide, while Clearwire is making some gains in Honolulu.

A baffling enrollment process

Customers who don’t have a landline will have to call Hawaiian Tel to get their naked DSL, as the current signup page asks users to enter their landline phone number. Wouldn’t HawTel want to make the signup process as easy as possible for customers who don’t have a landline, especially after HawTel’s poor performance in answering customer service calls during 2006?

Based on CEO Mike Ruley’s comments in today’s article, HawTel management wants to take advantage of recent reports that rated HawTel’s DSL at a faster speed than Oceanic Time Warner’s Road Runner service. HawTel plans to increase its download speeds to peaks of 7 t0 11 mbps next month, with upload speeds of up to 1 mbps. This is assymetric DSL, which is suitable for home service. it’s not a good choice for businesses. These are faster speeds than Oceanic Time Warner’s current residential service. However, Time Warner offers a turbo option for some mainland customers that offers comparable speeds to HawTel’s new levels.

TV through your landline

HawTel’s IPTV service will need the faster connections, especially as consumers demand more HDTV channels. HawTel could sell customers a bundle that includes DSL, TV and voice services. Oceanic Time Warner has been selling a similar bundle in Hawaii for the last 2 years. Customer lock-in is easier to achieve with bundled services.

Pacific LightNet has been testing a symmetric DSL service that offers 2 mbps speeds for uploads and downloads. At US$150 per month, PLN’s SDSL is expensive, but it can support a small or home office.

USA: John McCain has finally convinced W take legal action against the Swifties and other groups. Of course, most of the top 527s are working for Kerry and against W. The Republicans are kicking themselves because they missed an opportunity to get even more campaign money, and will now sue 527s to hurt Kerry’s chances.

Kerry is pressing his argument that the GOP is conducting a smear campaign. This could help derail W’s momentum. It could also alienate young people who don’t remember Vietnam, and undecided voters who care about real issues.

Meanwhile, the W campaign has ignored the IOC’s request to pull an ad that mentions the Olympics. The W campaign never asked the International Olympic Committee for permission to run an ad that violates US law: “An act of Congress, last revised in 1999, grants the USOC exclusive rights to such terms as “Olympic,” derivatives such as “Olympiad” and the five interlocking rings. It also specifically says the organization “shall be nonpolitical and may not promote the candidacy of an individual seeking public office.”“

Tech: E-mail is not dead yet according to the CEO of ReturnPath. His company is the official e-mail change of address contractor for the US Postal Service. They also help companies match old and new e-mail addresses. I usually get an e-mail or two every month with some marketer that wants to “reconnect” with me. And I almost always say “no”.

IMHO, e-mail is still broken, and badly so. Spam filters provide some relief, but an alarming number of zombie PCs on the consumer broadband network continue to send most of the spam. ISPs should cut off user accounts that host zombie PCs, and require the user to repair their computer before getting online.

For my part, I’ve done the following:

1. The only time I use Internet Explorer is when I do a Windows Update. Otherwise, I leave the security settings at High, so I can’t even fill out a form in IE. The cache and auto-complete options are disabled.
2. When Windows XP SP2 goes gold, I’ll install it. The beta is working well on my test box. In the meantime, I check Windows Update at least once a week on each box, and I’ve enabled automatic downloading of updates.
3. I use other web browsers like Firefox for my web browsing. Firefox is fast, free, and relatively safe. It also has some great extensions that add nice features.
4. I stopped using Outlook Express and Outlook years ago. These clients are memory pigs and security nightmares.
5. Instead, I use Thunderbird as my primary e-mail client. It’s still in beta, but it works well. I can always use webmail clients when I’m away from my machines.
6. HTML in e-mail is a bad idea, and I do my best not to send out HTML formatted e-mail. I usually use plaintext, although Thunderbird’s default settings are still a bit strange.
7. I disable HTML formatting of incoming mail in my e-mail clients. I’ll miss your pretty formatting and bouncing smilies, but I’m less likely to load the webbugs and exploits that malware and spammers insert in messages.
8. I use SpamAssassin on my e-mail servers, and have added a block list from Bill Stearns. My SpamAssassin blocklist is here. Server-side blocking takes more time and skill to configure, but it’s a much better approach if you check your e-mail from several different computers. A client-side spam filter will only work on one computer.
9. I run software and hardware firewalls on my home computers. If you have DSL or a cable modem, and you don’t have a router or NAT box, you are living dangerously.
10. I use a free anti-virus program on all my computers, and do a deep virus scan every month. My virus scanner also checks incoming e-mails and their attachments.
11. I scan my computers with programs like SpywareBlaster and Ad Aware. Both are free.

The sad truth is that I’d have an easier time with security if I ran Linux on all of my computers. There just aren’t a lot of malware and virus threats on Linux boxes yet. I rarely have to do any security-related maintenance on my Linux boxes.