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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.)"
Picked up an N900. T-Mobile unlimited for 10 bucks a month. Could probably get away without it anyway, since there's so many open hotspots around in NY. I hate AT&T. Hate Verizon. Probably hate T-Mobile in a month. :-) There's no way I want to pay 80-120 bucks a month though. Ridiculous.
Haida Manga
I want an Android's brain in an iPhone's body.
Pretty soon, we'll be buying phones with data plans and the voice plan will be optional (if needed at all).
All we need is Google to get their phones coming with a VOIP client as standard. Big unique selling point that no matter what network, or if you're not even on a network but just have wireless at home/work/in car/train/plane, you can make/receive calls.
Using phone numbers and keeping a local phonebook of addresses makes as much sense as using IP numbers in a browser to get to a website. Google providing their DNS to allow new services to be added like this was another one of the steps needed to be done. Google Voice is a stopgap, their newly acquisitioned VOIP stuff is the next step.
Shortly, it'll be standard to call someone using an email address and the data-networks will route as needed to their phone/home/business.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Here's one reason for the Nexus One that I haven't seen yet.
Google wants it's employees to use Android and test new versions and be inspired to come up with interesting applications. The best way to do this is to give all your employees phones. If you're doing that, you might as well come up with a cool phone. It's not like Google doesn't have the money to do this.
So, no, there's no ulterior motive about breaking the cellphone companies' grip on the market. There's no plan to sell it through T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, or even Mosaic telecom. All there is a phone that Google can give to their employees for testing and being creative with. That's it.
I know, I know. It's far more fun to believe that these corporations are doing all of these things as a battle that we can sit back and enjoy. But the reality is usually far more mundane.
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
Because the game of "bugger-my-customer" is so much more fun...
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
I thought of this also when I was reading TFA. The Internet tears down all garden walls, AOL is only the most obvious example.
The Internet tore down the walled garden of every BBS that ever existed, and the operators were glad of it for the most part.
It's tearing down the MAFIAA's walled garden of distribution. Movie studios dislike NetFlix and they hate Red Box. The music cartel really doesn't like iTunes, but they tolerate it because they get a cut. And they all despise The Pirate Bay, et al.
The Internet is tearing down Microsoft's walled garden of software (which is what they mean when they say "ecosystem"). Don't like Windows? Go download any of a handful of BSD's or several dozen Linux distros. And you get the opportunity to make better whichever you choose.
(Which is why I laugh every time I see a Win7 commercial... MS is actually touting the fact that Win7 wasn't their idea. Now, about that monolithic kernel...)
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.