Making Sense of the Cellphone Landscape

Charlie Stross has a blog post up that tries to make sense of the mobile phone market and where it's going: where Apple, Google, and the cellcos fit in, and what the point of Google's Nexus One may be. "Becoming a pure bandwidth provider is every cellco's nightmare: it levels the playing field and puts them in direct competition with their peers, a competition that can only be won by throwing huge amounts of capital infrastructure at their backbone network. So for the past five years or more, they've been doing their best not to get dragged into a game of beggar-my-neighbor, by expedients such as exclusive handset deals... [Google intends] to turn 3G data service (and subsequently, LTE) into a commodity, like Wi-Fi hotspot service only more widespread and cheaper to get at. They want to get consumers to buy unlocked SIM-free handsets and pick cheap data SIMs. They'd love to move everyone to cheap data SIMs rather than the hideously convoluted legacy voice stacks maintained by the telcos; then they could piggyback Google Voice on it, and ultimately do the Google thing to all your voice messages as well as your email and web access. (This is, needless to say, going to bring them into conflict with Apple. ... Apple are an implicit threat to Google because Google can't slap their ads all over [the App and iTunes stores]. So it's going to end in handbags at dawn... eventually.)"

Comments

What's the value of an unlocked US cellphone?

[jerryasher]

Is there something I don't understand? I don't think unlocking a US cellphone has any additional value than an unlocked US cellphone. The phone's most value is on its original network and it's almost worthless on any other network.

All GSM is not equal. Unlock a T-Mobile cellphone and move it to AT&T and you get a degraded EDGE speed. And I assume that's true in reverse. An unlocked AT&T cellphone presumably has poor speed on T-Mobiles network.

All CDMA is not equal. A Verizon phone cannot necessarily be switched to Sprint -- my experience is that Sprint has to support that phone explicitly in its own network, including a possible new firmware load. And presumably vice versa.

And of course a GSM phone cannot be activated on a CDMA network or vice-versa.

So even if you can unlock your phone, there doesn't seem to be ANY interoperability with respect to carriers. Your unlocked phone has the most value on the network it came from, and almost no value on any other network.

So what's the point of unlocking it?

Please feel free to correct me and point out all the things I don't understand about cellphones. Cause I don't get it, and I assume it's due to my ignorance.

Re:What's the value of an unlocked US cellphone?

[JWSmythe]

    Unlocking works if your phone is capable of working on other networks. That's why the manufacturers advertise how many networks they work on.

    I had Nextel back in the day, before Sprint bought them and started raping their customers with extra fees. (I was getting $300 for various things, even though there was no service at my house, and the phone sat on my desk with a dead battery). A friend of mine bought two unlocked Boost Mobile phones, because she thought they looked nicer. She gave me one, and I used it on the Nextel network without problems (like, since they were the same network anyways).

    Even a nice world wide "standard" like GSM, has 14 different frequency bands, so your phone may or may not work in a particular location.

    A long time ago, I bought a GSM phone in Europe. It only worked on that provider, in that country. After I got back to the states, I gave it to a friend who was traveling to another country in Europe. Even though that provider had service in that country, it wouldn't work. It was the cheapest prepaid phone I could get my hands on that day, so I didn't really expect much of it. It suited it's purpose (having a cell for the week I was there).

    Some phones are more cooperative, because they work with multiple frequencies, or they happen to use the same frequency. I knew someone who lived in Europe, who would come to the states, and his phone became a US phone as soon as he got off the plane. :) They were completely unrelated providers, but it worked, so he was happy.

Re:What's the value of an unlocked US cellphone?

[Guy Harris]

Why would you think that? How is a phone worthless on another network? Do you even understand what unlocking is?

Do you understand what the tower of Babel of different mobile phone protocols the North American market is? If not, please reread the posting to which you replied, as he mentioned those issues (e.g., "And of course a GSM phone cannot be activated on a CDMA network or vice-versa.")

Here in the UK, lots of little shops offer to unlock your phone. And people pay for it, because its worth moneys to have an unlocked phone.

Here in the US, you can unlock a phone you got for, for example, the AT&T mobile phone network, and you will not be able to use it on, for example, the Verizon Wireless mobile phone network, for purely technical reasons - AT&T uses GSM and UMTS, Verizon use cdmaOne and CDMA2000. There in the UK, all providers, as far as I know, use GSM and UMTS.

That's why he said "unlocked US cellphone", not "unlocked cellphone". He wasn't saying "unlocked cellphones aren't useful anywhere", he was saying "unlocked cell phones aren't useful in the US market".

Re:"Apple are..."?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, "Apple are ..." is correct in British English. Not everyone lives in the US or speaks American English.

Re:I Just Did...

[Trepidity]

Replying to myself, here's a thread buried in the Amazon reviews for the N900 that seems to have mixed experiences of people getting various tricks to work. It sounds, based on that, like T-Mobile is just being somewhat lax about checking what phones are allowed to connect to the $10 plan, so I'm not sure I'd count on it as a long-term or generally available solution for cheap-data smartphones.

Re:We need a Debian Atp-Get model for phones

[Eunuchswear]

Google really needs to rip off Apt and Synaptics and make a version for their phones.

What, you mean like Nokia already does?

Illogical? Ungrammatical?

[jjo]

Two points:

1. The British usage in this case is reaching through the corporation (Apple, singular) to the ultimate meaning of the corporation (Apple's management and employees, plural). To insist on the exclusive correctness of the singular would be to insist on the exclusive validity of the legal fiction that is a corporation. That would be absurd.
2. It's an idiom! Idioms are, by definition, grammatical.

Re:I Just Did...

[sznupi]

It's not a case of usual "differs from market to market". US is practically the only of major ones where Nokia doesn't dominate the landscape (I don't know the numbers but I guess you could also include Japan and S. Korea, they are quite isolated from the world at large when it comes to cellphone trends)

Ignoring Nokia when talking about "future of mobile phones" isn't some small regional peculiarity, it's talking solely about your local market (while not giving that impression, perhaps even not realizing)

Re:We need a Debian Atp-Get model for phones

[jilles]

Well, Maemo is essentially a Debian derivative with the fully functional debian package management tools installed and configured to be used with Nokia software repositories for over the air apt-get updates & upgrades (i.e. no need to flash the device with new firmware, you'll get updates as they are made available). You can install a package from the officially supported (i.e. no need for hacks to accomplish this) list of packages to get a root shell after which you can modify sources.list to e.g. add one of the several repositories for free (OSS) goodies or even your own repository (which is really nice if you are developing for the device).

http://repository.maemo.org/

This is right now the only device that is truly open to modification and usable as an actual phone at the same time. There are many linux phones on the market but most are either intended for developers and barely functional or intended for end users and completely locked down (e.g. pretty much any Android phone). The N900 is not locked down, comes with official support to get root access, excellent linux based SDK, an excellent mozilla based browser, excellent multimedia and multitasking support, and it is a pretty good phone too.

disclaimer: I work for Nokia but just check the many independent reviewers for some more or less unanimously shared enthusiasm about what this phone can do.

Re:What Makes Sense

[Dravik]

It's an expression used to express options that give short term relative boot to an individual by causing damage to his neighbors. You'll hear to expression a lot if you look into the great depression economic and trade policies. Most beggar-thy-neighbor actions can be taken by all individuals and thus come back on those who implement them. As it applies to the cell companies: The first one to embrace the data pipe only model would gain significant market-share and revenue initially, but when the other companies responded with the same cheap data only plans every cell company would end up higher capital costs and lower revenue. The first mover company would see a short term spike in revenue and then it would collapse to lower than before they made the change.

Wal-mart is in Europe, just by a different name

[mdwh2]

But with supermarkets, you'd expect it to be more focused on the country. E.g., a UK programme talking about supermarkets would only mention Tesco, Sainsbury etc, and you wouldn't expect to hear a mention of Wal-mart.

But imagine a UK programme talking about the latest in computer technology, and then focusing solely on Acorn Archimedes and RISCOS as if that's all that existed? Wouldn't you think that a bit bizarre? Now imagine those stories getting pasted all around the Internet. That's how it looks to us with all these nothing-but-Iphone stories.

And your example is flawed anyway, because Wal-mart does operate in Europe, just under a different brandname (Asda in the UK). So they would get a mention in my hypothetical UK programme.

Re:Awesome....

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you can't just compare the countries as a whole. The US has areas of incredible densities, and areas that are so sparsely populated you can drive for hours and not see another person.

For example, the population density of Finland is 16/sq km. The US has 12 states that are less than that. There are 7 states that are less than half of that. Even ignoring Alaska, they have 4 states in the contiguous 48 states that are less than 1/4 of that.

For reference, those 4 states have an approximate area of 380k + 253k + 200k + 183k = 1.02 million sq km. (Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota.) This is compared to 338,000 sq km for Finland.

So, don't just grab some population statistics, and higher prices and claim the US is incompetent. From your short post I can tell you have no idea what problems the US has compared to Europe when it comes to creating nationwide infrastructure. Now, if you want to talk about corporate greed, that's an entirely different conversation.

Re:I Just Did...

[Nursie]

I was going to comment on that too. Android is a linux kernel with a custom userspace and display layer, AFAIK (and I've poked around the internals a bit).