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Mobile Q1: All Eyes on Tablets, T-Mobile and AT&T

• Colin Gibbs
• Tuesday, April 19, 2011
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Summary:

The first quarter of 2011 saw the continuation of some important trends, but it also some unexpected developments. The biggest story saw AT&T agree to acquire T-Mobile USA in a deal that — if approved by federal regulators — would drastically consolidate the market of tier-one operators. Apple’s hold on the tablet industry, meanwhile, loosened slightly emergence of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and a few other devices. Competitors of the iPad 2 nonetheless face a daunting challenge. And Verizon Wireless continued to ramp up its LTE deployments. The mobile carrier is potentially poised to capture a base of lucrative postpaid subscribers with this — and perhaps close the gap with the combined AT&T/T-Mobile, should that deal go through. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Research in Motion, Nokia, Google, HTC and Motorola. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

We have affirmed our ‘AAA/A-1+’ sovereign credit ratings on the United
States of America.

The economy of the U.S. is flexible and highly diversified, the country’s
effective monetary policies have supported output growth while containing
inflationary pressures, and a consistent global preference for the U.S.
dollar over all other currencies gives the country unique external
liquidity.

Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be
very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the
path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook
on the long-term rating to negative from stable.

We believe there is a material risk that U.S. policymakers might not
reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary
challenges by 2013; if an agreement is not reached and meaningful
implementation is not begun by then, this would in our view render the
U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’
sovereigns.

The Open Data Foundation (ODaF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the adoption of global metadata standards and the development of open-source solutions promoting the use of statistical data. We focus on improving data and metadata accessibility and overall quality in support of research, policy making, and transparency, in the fields of economics, finance, healthcare, education, labor, social science, technology, agriculture, development, and the environment. While we see this information as being primarily statistical in nature, it is understood that it can be drawn from a wide variety of sources and therefore may include information not traditionally seen as such.

Data has many sources, the administration of surveys and the monitoring of transactional flows and registers being some of the most common. In order to become useful for the end-user communities, raw data commonly go through various editing, aggregation and analytical stages. While researchers and academics may find the micro-data useful, policy and decision makers and the and the general public are more commonly interested in the easier to manage high-level aggregates. Despite the existence of tools and the emergence of open metadata specifications, it is often not possible to connect the different parts of this information chain together. Such connection, however, is critical in fully understanding the data.

Ideally, it should be possible for a user to easily perform tasks such as:

• Discover the existence of data
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The Open Data Foundation exists to help realize this vision, working in cooperation with standards initiatives and other interested parties.

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