Category Archives: Mobile Industry General

Was the FCC Lied to? What the FCC was told on SMS spam.

I was reviewing the replies to FCC’s Targeting and Eliminating Unlawful Text Messages, CG Docket No. 21-402 published in 2022. You can see all of the replies here. Some that drew my attention are listed below. The Campaign Registry (TCR) Reply.  Before we begin: The FCC document is about “Targeting and Eliminating Unlawful Text Messages.” […]

When Power goes Unchecked: The Telecom Triopoly

Background The next chapter of our messaging monopolies series is about as typical as any story of unchecked greed and power can be. Unlike the tragedy of the small business victim in the Messaging Monopolies post, Jenny’s Construction & Design Services (Jenny’s), who’d successfully led a business category for one decade. But couldn’t compete with […]

Commio Industry Briefing. Top 10 Predictions for Cloud Communications in 2024

I don’t normally do predictions as they’re: generally statements of the obvious, or woefully optimistic predictions, or framed with weasel-words so no matter what happens it can be claimed to be at least partially correct. However, Tim from Commio is a nice guy, he asked if I would put some predictions together, so I had […]

Messaging Monopolies Simplified

Responding to several reader requests, this post is a simplified version of the original Messaging Monopolies, with more background explanations, a few analogies, and less assumptions made on the readers’ detailed knowledge of the US SMS industry. It is longer, but I hope makes things a little clearer. In the Appendix we walk through a […]

Messaging Monopolies

Subtitle: US #SMSspam club’s EBITDA is $2.4B The motivation to create this post came in part from a post by James Crawshaw of Omdia on the movie, “The Network”. James referred to the monopolies in America, and how AT&T was broken up and then put together again by bankers with the exception of Verizon (Bell […]

Simple Programmable Communications Model

The purpose of this article is to explain a simple model to understand the programmable communications market. I divide the market into 3 domains: Aggregation, Technology, and Applications. I’ve shown a number of similar frameworks in the past, see this one from TADSummit 2018 given during the State of the Union presentation. The reason I […]

My View on the “Accelerating Innovation in the Telecommunications Arena” Paper

Introductory Comments Overall, it’s a rather telco-centric view in the Telecommunications Arena paper, which today is far broader than telcos. It’s the internet. Most communications today are over the internet, not the PSTN. Telcos provide access to the internet, i.e. to peering points, they are not the exclusive transport / network within the internet / […]

Understanding the Shift in Telecoms, Acceptance and Recognition

I’ve been repeating the ideas presented in this weblog quite often of late on the shift in telecoms, ever since TADSummit / TADHack Global in 2018. None of this is new, it’s simply packaging old ideas into an easy to digest form to better understand the shift in telecoms thanks to programmable telecoms, why digital transformation […]

From IM to the First Point of Contact with the Internet (FPOCI)

IM (Instant Messaging) / chat has been around for a long time. Before AIM (AOL Instant Messenger, 1997) and ICQ (Internet Chat Query, 1996), there was the command line function ‘chat’ on unix (early 1980s) which evolved into IRC (Internet Relay Chat,1988); and for the VMS (Virtual Memory System) crowd there was phone (sometime in […]