Class Action Filed Against Verizon Wireless

Nuclear Elephant writes "Kirtland & Packard has filed a California-based class action suit against Verizon Wireless alleging some of their handsets have been advertised to have certain features, only come to find later that they were crippled for profit. With the Motorola Bluetooth Hacker's Contest ending unsuccessfully, many have taken this opportunity as a last-ditch effort to change things at Verizon." We mentioned the Verizon/Bluetooth episode earlier.

Comments

Re:I fully support this lawsuit

[jc42]

Discuss, discuss, I'd love to hear your inights on this, /.

Well, there is one major problem with an open/free "smartphone": How do you go about getting your packets through the cell-phone system? The frequencies are owned by corporations like Verizon, and you can only communicate if you use their approved equipment.

It's true that a PDA can contain a wifi card, but at least in North America, that only works in much less than 1% of the landscape, and in most places, you first have to negotiate access through an access point, and if you move 100 meters, you have to do it again, paying in full each time. If wifi access were universal, you could use VoIP on top of it and be done with the phone system. But not this year.

You can do IP across most cell-phone channels now, too, but you can only do it with equipment approved by whatever carrier owns that channel at the spot you're standing, and there's no way you'll get approval for your own toy.

A couple of decades ago, the US government ended the "no foreign attachments" rule of the phone companies. There was a huge explosion of new telephone gadgetry, to everyone's profit (including the phone companies who fought the change). We currently have a "no foreign attachments" rule in effect for cell phones, which means that we can't develop anything on our own. We have to wait breathlessly for the phone companies to tell us what we're allowed to use.

Maybe some day this will change, too, and we'll suddenly find the cell-phone system as useful as it should be. Or maybe the wifi system will expand to full coverage.

But it probably won't happen this year.