4G LTE: $11 for 10 Gigabytes Across 90% of India from Ambani & Reliance
Nearly 50% price drop with new entrant into the world's most competitive market. Update 5/11 ET points to October for the full launch http://bit.ly/1Tac78M Mega-billionaire Mukesh Ambani has built a 4G network to 70% of India, with 90% expected by the official launch. Reliance Jio will bring in lower prices, $60 LTE phones and should be the most important telecom event of 2016. Reliance Jio is already running a large beta with employees and setting up dealers.
To fill that network, Ambani is offering one of the lowest prices in the world. He's already taken delivery on half a million SIM cards and requesting proposals for $50-75 mobiles in the tens of millions. The other big Indians telcos (Bharti, Vodafone and Idea) have responded by moving up their own 4G buildouts, which will soon take over the country. The increased investment is yet another confirmation that competition, not company profits, is the key determinant of investment. They will presumably reduce prices soon as well.
Ambani initially will concentrate on fixed wireless for broadband rather than mobile voice.
Added half a percent of the Internet's users each year over the past two decades." Iljitsch van Beijnum has captured the status in a great headline. There is no unifying force that implements Internet rules. Each of the network of networks takes its time. 
Market for mobile chips disappearing. When Henry Samueli shut down Broadcom's cellular baseband business, I happened to be visiting one of the founders. Many of the 3,000 engineers affected were his friends and the pain was apparent. However, I could see why the decision was necessary. Apple and Samsung dominate the mobile phone business and each made their own chips. Those two companies had growing market share and there just wasn't enough merchant business to sustain the chip vendors. Qualcomm's scale gives them a major advantage and the very efficient Mediatek has also grown.
FT/Orange Spain going to 10M & 14M. Without much publicity, Spain has pulled far ahead of other large nations in fiber homes. The U.S., Italy and France have passed fewer than 25%, Germany and England less than 10%.
The center of the Internet has moved South. Carter Horney of Forward Concepts has just published a
and Verizon could easily triple their network capacity without breaking the capital budget. The technology is obvious but the change in business models is unlikely. Sprint has remarkable holdings around 2.5GHz. Dish spectrum is totally unused.