Not only is the expected data rate (2-5 up and 5-12 down) comparable to landline speeds, I expect the range of services and devices offered will gradually expand the application areas beyond now-traditional 3G application areas, and begin blurring the distinction between wireless and wireline provinces of the Verizon empire. Note that the “Rule the Air” marketing campaign and rebranding that took place earlier this year erased the “Wireless” from Verizon.

The importance of very low latency is diminishing as real-time voice becomes a smaller and smaller component of demand — at least within certain contexts. 500 milliseconds to get my 30 Rock streaming download to begin is perfectly acceptable, but it makes human conversation virtually impossible (which some see as an advantage). My youngest daughter exchanges something like 2000 text messages a month, but uses only a couple hundred voice minutes in the same period. That works out to a ratio of about ten texts for every telephone minute. Voice, in this context, is becoming a ’special purpose’ application. I’m not saying you don’t need low latency, just that the range of applications for which it is necessary is shrinking to an ever smaller portion of the value pie.

What’s clear is that the emerging environment is depending ever more on near-instantaneous (by which I mean a few hundred milliseconds) availability of an incredible variety of services with incredibly different bandwidth and service performance requirements. If I want to watch Cliff Lee’s pitching duel against Tim Lincecum in Game One of the World Series, I want to watch it now, and there will be hell to pay with my service provider if there is any interruption or degradation of service. If my daughter wants to blurt out a three word text to her best friend to get her to come into Javapalooza for coffee, she wants the SMS delivered now, not a minute from now when her friend has already passed by the coffee shop (when I was her age we used to actually walk to the door and shout ‘hey, c’mere.’) If it doesn’t get delivered in time, the phone is broken, the network is stupid, and she wants to switch services.

The emergence of LTE is going to complicate the support requirements for this even more as it further erases the distinction between wired and wireless services. No one is going to care (or often even know) what the final delivery method is (wifi hotspot? 4G over the air? 3G picocell? 4G mifi?). They’re just going to want it. Now.

And if it doesn’t work? Louis C.K. has that figured out.

Some of the more interesting tidbits:

• In North America, Netflix streaming video accounts for 20% of primetime download traffic;
• Real-time entertainment is unquestionably the largest component of demand growth for internet bandwidth, whether mobile or fixed. Entertain me. Now.
• In Asia, household bandwidth consumption is running at 12 gigabytes, versus only 4 in North America.

Worth a few minutes to peruse, and downloadable here.

• 23% of Americans now live in a household that has a cell phone and no landline (that goes for 100% of my own daughters);
• 35% of Americans have cellphones with apps (although only two thirds of those use the apps);
• One in ten Americans has downloaded an app in the last week, and one in five Americans under 30 download an app every week.

It’s not that it really comes as a surprise — the long-term decline of subscriber access line counts in the wireline business, the unloading by Verizon of their sparser market territories to Frontier and Fairpoint, the insane valuations that get applied to mobile social media startups all are indicators of the shifting center of gravity.

The implications that are interesting to me are, of course, how this transformation — which is still in its early stages — impacts the way networks are operated, and the software infrastructure needed to support that. Two things come to mind:

• backhaul capacity, driven both by the overall volume of downloads and by the certain emergence of very bursty, event-driven download storms, is going to continue to grow at extraordinary rates, and the tools for commissioning, upgrading, and measuring results will need to get much better, much faster.
• if the richest mine of emerging value is in the app, and if app population in end devices (both traditional cellphones and new target devices) is growing exponentially, then tools for managing apps (in all the ways they must be managed) need to be invented, improved and scaled. Your smartphone has apps. It’s going to have hundreds more. But so is your car. Your thermostat. Your blender. Can someone help me keep track of all of that? Upgrade it all? Know when it’s broken or compromised or dead-ended?

NSN’s contract is worth a potential $7 Billion, and it covers the purchase, design, build, install, and operate phases of a hybrid 4G satellite network that is the brainchild of New York hedge fund Harbinger Capital.

I love competition, and I love to see new entrants in markets that are lacking in competitive dynamics, so I’d love to see Lightsquared make it. That said, I’m old enough to remember Iridium’s startup dog & pony show. It took a lot more years and a lot more billions to make that business plan fly than anyone expected back then, and it makes me wary. There couldn’t be a better time to launch a new supplier for radically mobile high speed data, though — just look at AT&T’s Q2 results posted earlier today, with a 27.2% jump in wireless data revenues, up nearly a billion dollars over last year’s quarter. That’s a lot of bits in the air.

I buy the notion that the mobile internet is the fulcrum of innovation, and that service providers are on the verge of massive transformation. It’s not just LTE and 4G, there are new approaches to fixed wireless access needed to accommodate smart grid, healthcare, consumer electronics, and as yet un-invented applications. The pace of capacity addition to backhaul networks will have to accelerate yet further, and the potential for disruptive innovation among content, device, and network providers is high.

What baffles me, however, is the continuing primitive state of the operations technology that is supposed to sit behind all of this and make it work: to ensure that the connectivity stays up, that new networks roll out as quickly as the content and devices are demanded, and that the whole intricate mesh remains reasonably secure from intentional or inadvertent harm. The pace of innovation in operations technology has been glacial, and this is not a sustainable practice. For every cool new location-based advertising service or must-have device, there is a consequence in the complexity, scale, and criticality of operations support.

Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM wrote a good piece advancing the “enemy of my enemy” theory, which is a compelling start. It goes like this (extended to fit my interpretation): Google is the Apple antithesis: open garden vs. closed, hardware agnostic vs. vertical hard/soft integration, sponsor-paid vs. subscriber-paid. Verizon is the ATT antithesis: CDMA vs. GSM, FiOS vs. UVerse, Atlantic bellheads vs. Southwestern cowboys. Google and Verizon can agree on what’s good for America, because they both know that what’s not good for America is iPhones on an AT&T network.

Of course none of this newfound friendship may matter in a few months when Verizon is selling CDMA iPhones and Google is using its experimental network to make FiOS look like 56KB dial-up, but it’s heartwarming for the moment.

What particular chord got struck here? Why does everyone want in on Google’s tea party?

Much may be blamed on the continuing dismal state of the US economy. Topeka’s major industrial employers include the Burlington Northern railroad, Frito-Lay, Goodyear, and Hill’s Pet Nutrition. The biggest employer is the State of Kansas. Someone could be hoping that a little bit of Silicon Valley sunshine might flow through the G fibers (although that someone probably hasn’t seen the number of empty parking lots in Fremont lately — Kansas unemployment was 6.8% in February; California came in at nearly double, 12.5%).

I’d rather think that this is less about desperation and more about an optimistic embrace of the salutary powers of a network-based economy. To judge from the response, there is a broadly held conviction that high speed access networks have a transformative economical and social potency that borders on the magical. They’re fast. They’re green. They breed jobs like rabbits. Jobs you can do in your pyjamas on eBay. The flip side of the dream is that there seems to be just as broadly held a conviction that the current pace of deployment by incumbent carriers is cheating a huge swath of the country from a nirvana that is both possible and tantalizingly close.

Put it together and it looks like a classic case of frustrated demand. It bodes well for alternative providers of high speed access solutions. Given Google’s stated aim of reaching a population of no more than 500,000 with its Gnetwork, it’s unlikely to spell a major reordering of the telecom marketplace led from Mountain View.

The US FCC’s recently released Broadband Plan provides an interesting contrast. Goal #1 is for at least 100 million U.S. homes to have ‘affordable access’ to high speed data (100 Mb down/50 Mb up). That represents about 90% of all US households. There’s no specified technology associated with that goal, although goal #2 is to “lead the world in mobile innovation,” and LTE is capable at least in theory of providing rates on this order of magnitude (so long as we’re talking peak, not user average). As far as putting its money where its mouth is, the FCC proposes an evolution of the Universal Service Fund (which subsidizes telephony only) to a new “Connect America Fund” and “Mobility Fund” amounting to about $15 billion over the next ten years.

I doubt the ensuing debate in the U.S. will generate video footage as entertaining as Vector’s, however.

The WSJ listing uses a methodology that puts a premium on serial entrepreneurship among the management team, and heavy capital raising from among the investors. Neither Apple, Google, nor Facebook would have fared well as early stage candidates under those metrics, but I suppose they’re predictive of at least one kind of success.

A couple of observations stand out from the overall pattern.

First, a quarter of the list is made up of consumer companies, nearly all of them web-based businesses with a social networking bent. These are going to be very tough to bring over the finish line, and they’re going to need massive capital to get there.

Second, of the roughly one-third of the list that is in IT, there’s a theme developing in management and test of ‘new infrastructure,’ by which I mean cloud computing, smart grid, and broadband networking gear. Five of the eighteen listed information technology companies are in this space, and another five are directly in the business of providing networking or cloud products or services.

My takeaway: new services are driving a new generation of infrastructure, both classically identified as “network” and traveling under the guise of “cloud,” “smart grid,” or “virtual” monikers; the new infrastructure calls out for a new paradigm for operations: new tools, new processes, new business models, all of which spell new opportunity.