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Wireless Industry Cozying Up To the Disruptors
PreacherTom writes, "As recently as a few months ago, the wireless industry showed little apparent interest in partnering with companies like Sling, Skype, and ISkoot. After all, they make products that threaten to compete with services that mobile-phone companies are eager to sell. Times are changing, at first in Europe and perhaps soon in the U.S. A few days ago, Sling Media's CEO sat down with execs from Hutchison Whampoa, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson for discussions. Skype isn't far behind, while ISkoot is in 'advanced discussions.' According to analyst Krishna Kanagarayer, 'This could turn the U.S. wireless industry on its head. The advent of mobile access to full-blown home PC and TV applications could lead to a revamp in pricing of wireless service providers' data plans, possibly to tiered pricing. And as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable.'"
The mesh-network internet is coming, sooner or later (my money being on later, especially in this country, but my point still stands) and any wireless provider who doesn't have a piece of it will be irrelevant. When WiFi connectivity is as ubiquitous as the cellular network, or frankly even before that, people will go to WiFi+VoIP in droves because it won't require that you, like, spend any money. What could be better than that?
This is of course why providers are willing to sell cellphones with WiFi. At least that way they get some money out of the hardware.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Most people don't really understand what the whole internet idea is, in its most basic form. They only realize what it can do for them by the services it offers (web, email, bitorrent etc). When one realizes what the Internet truly offers, communication, then it becomes clear what what the possibilities truly are.
Anything that can be imagined as getting two things talking to each other is the basics of the Internet, everything else is specifics. Wireless, Optical, copper are all mediums for that communication, nothing more, nothing less.
As mediums become more ubiquitous, and as they start to overlap, it just provides greater continuity of the communication which enables forms of communication that were previously impossible without the overlap and continuity.
Something I once discovered for my self (though in a completely unrelated sector), is that if it takes too long to do something, you just don't do it. If it takes 7 days to download a movie (dialup) while it is possible to do it, most people didn't. Now that it takes a couple of hours or less, people are starting to consider it. A couple of years ago, it took 6 hours to encode a CD to MP3, now it takes just a few minutes.
Because of the increase in bandwith, the ubiquitous connection, we are starting to see new means of communication which were impossible only a few years ago. It is inevitable. And things that take days or long hours today, will shortly be available for the average person. Those are the things we should be looking at.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I don't want them to cozy up.. I want them to fight tooth and nail to keep their over-priced our-services-or-no-services mentality until they are driven out of business.
Cool cel phones, better trains... Share some train love with America, I'd really like to get to work on time :-\
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I didn't know that Skype could phone Kronos. Those Klingon disrupters shouldn't be put up to your ear though.
Oh You POS
And as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable.
Not if the Baby Bells and the likes of SBC/AT&T have anything to say about it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It's abundantly clear to many people outside a telco monopoly or cellular provider, that the future is of cellular style (long range wireless) uncapped data service (albeit probably rate limited), over which voice will be transfered with other IP traffic. One of the the few real impediments to this are the cellular providers who are afraid of change and hope to continue milking the system with per minute charges, in the same way that Compuserve and AOL used to try to get away with. For those of us living under a rock since 1987, or too young to remember, this model did not prove itself sustainable.
Fortunately for us, and in the long run for the industry, it'll take only a single cellular provider realizing that it can use its existing infrastructure to provide VOIP gateways for its customers and generalized, unmetered, data service over its networks. When that happens, the other players will have to follow along. I predict this will start happening in the next couple years, and within eight to ten years you won't be able to get anything else.
Tack on some cellular consumer protection laws from the new US Congress, and the future starts to look a little brighter.
Maybe after that handset manufacturers will figure out how to design a usable, human-friendly, interface? No, one step at a time...some things are just too hard to imagine.
I don't think the blanket statement regarding the wireless industry not being interested in alternate solutions is at all true- not as a whole industry. For the wireless carriers, it's 100% true; for handset manufacturers (who are the prisoners of the carriers, especially in NA), they'd absolutely love to make inroads on any other services. They have a tightrope to walk though; go to far (ie be to threatening) and the carriers will just refuse to buy that model, or other models, or just slow their acceptance of new models from said handset manufacturer.
The industry needs to get out of the old 20th century phone system mentality and become part of the Internet. I bought a Treo 650 from Sprint a while back. Recently I switched to Cingular but had to buy another phone because the one from Sprint doesn't work on Cingular's network.
Could you imagine if the Internet had been designed and implemented by private industry? It would be a whole bunch of separate networks and you'd be nickel and dimed for every service.
Phone systems are just plain dumb.
There is also a good reason to hold hack a bit. Nobody wants to flood the world with gear that goes obsolete very quickly. If they'd been trying to roll these plans out even two years back, the whole scheme would have flopped. It is better to hold back a bit until the critical mass/killer app point is reached. Also, a couple of years back, things were still blurry enough that people would have not understood Wifi vs cell phone (like some dumbfucks still don't understand Wifi vs Bluetooth). People (consumer level) are now getting sufficiently sophisticated to understand what Wifi is.
Now is the time to scramble in this space.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
And as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable.
As it should be. I think most of us here have only been waiting for this to happen for about 10 years. The fact that it's gone on for so long like it has is actually kind of surprising. (or not, depending on how cynical you are about corprate profiteering)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
There are two basic problems to the Internet replacing the phone system.
The first is basic functionality and reliability. Right now people put up with disconnects all the time on data connections. What? That page didn't load? Click it again! To some extent, the software could make up for some failures simply with more and better error handling rather than just dumping it out on the user. But that doesn't solve the problem 100%.
The second is an economic one. Most of the telecommunications that the Internet relies on was bought and paid for because of telephone services. Much of it is still paid for because of telephone services. A lot of people here seem to think that the reason Internet connectivity is cheap is because, well, it is cheap. It isn't - most providers aren't paying for the full load of connectivity they are using and most telecommunications companies aren't charging the same for data vs. voice even over the same link.
Should voice connectivity no longer support telecommunications, we're going to be seeing more realistic costs in data connectivity, especially at the low end. When the POTS system requires copper to every house, putting DSL on that copper is trivial and cheap. When DSL service has to pay for the copper and maintenance of it, the costs are going to be a lot more realistic.
I don't believe anywhere in the world today is experiencing the real costs. This does look like it is going to be changing pretty soon. Whoever inherits the US telecommunications systems, it will be quite a shock to the customers.
The mobile phone service provider companies want to get users using as much data as possible. The problem is making sure that they get paid for it. With consolidation, new standards, new phones, and new services happening daily, it makes it hard to keep 100% up to speed with the latest on everything. as far as the services are concerned the new standard set of APIs that the mobile phone service provider companies agreed on will make it a lot easier for content service providers to get the services to the people who request it.
I think it comes down to the classic, greed, and incompetence, that has stoped services from becoming more ubiquitus. It reminds me of the local phone companies back in the early 90s. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
What's all this about WiFi?
I thought the whole idea with Mesh phones was that they connect directly to each other or route via intermediary Mesh phones. The WiFi thing was only supposed to be a stop-gap for calls between cities or until enough people had mesh phones and we reached a critical density where the cellular carriers became unnecessary. I have no idea how the routing would work, but that's what I thought the idea was.
If this is, indeed, the way that it is supposed to work, then I doubt Mesh phones ever see the light of day primarily because the carriers will kill it. Since the carriers are the major buyers of cell phones, no cell phone company would do something like create a mesh phone that could compete with their major customer's primary business... Then again, some Korean start-up without any encumbent telco customer base might try to make a run at the business, but they'd need a lot of money to saturate some market before it would be attractive to consumers - a chicken and egg problem.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Wireless providers like cingular may add those features, but will do so at extremely high rent to end-users.
Look at music download service provided by the wireless vendors. Bandwidth is very expensive for those mobile phones, so I expect slightly higher prices than Apple but not the ridiculous prices they have now.
Mobile phones and the SIM chips in them have fantastic capabilities that can't be touched by entrepreneurs. Interoperability and outside innovaters are to be discouraged at all costs. The wireless providers like it that way. Java/j2me certainly didn't solve the problem.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I have Verizon's EV-DO broadband for my laptop. For $60/mo I have 'unlimited' access that in most places is about comparable to average home DSL service. It sounds expensive, but if you consider that I travel -- take off hotel access fees, airport access fees, starbucks/borders/other hotspot fees -- or the hassle of war driving -- and it starts looking very good.
I use it several days a week. It still has downsides - like all cheap service it suffers from "Gravity Well" syndrome. Inbound data is free, fast, and cheap. Output data is difficult, slow, and expensive.
My point is, I'm already using the cell networks for more data than voice. A lot more. I could (if I wanted) make voip calls over the cell networks but why? It's just as cheap to do it by cell phone "out of band".
What I really really wish for -- what would be WAY better -- is if telcos and wireless telcos would make use of DUNDi lookups. That would allow those of us with VOIP phones to receive calls which never transit the public networks. The cell carrier would check the DUNDi service and see that when dialing my number they could bypass the public network and just connect with a voip call directly.
Most don't do this now. Even though it would save them money on cross-connection (after all, they have to connect to the PSTN as well) they're more afraid of being bypassed themselves then of spending the extra money.
As a result, I have to pay a monthly fee essentially for the address routing which is my PSTN telephone number.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Only the smaller carriers are ready to embrace the open gardens approach of the internet. The bigger ones, the Vodafone's and Verizon's of the world will still fight tooth and nail to preserve their walled garden. Its their cash cow, and nobody is taking it from them. Not yet.
They will do that only when they see that their subscriber base diminishing. And the data services will not entice users to these one's: the voice services will. The phone is still primarily used for talking, not surfing the web or viewing TV. Over an unmanaged network, VoIP will never be as good as plain old circuit switched voice calls.
The disruption will happen only when a VoIP service arrives which gives you a guarantee of quality. The telcos. know that and they will keep watching till somebody comes up with that killer service.
as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable
One can only hope. This is my major beef with the US mobile carriers. Voice and data have been equal in the rest of the world since the 90's.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.