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Cell Phone Industry's Six Biggest Failed Schemes
adeelarshad82 writes "The tech world is for dreamers, schemers, and sometimes, scammers. Which is why it's no surprise that the cell phone industry isn't any different. In wake of the recent news about the Israeli mobile-phone firm Modu shutting its doors, mobile analyst Sascha Segan revisits six major failures in the cell phone industry, from using phones to create a peer-to-peer that would eliminate the need for wireless carriers to a company with a $225,000 phone."
Is it really too much to ask the /. editors to quickly look around the page for the crud-free one-page "print" version link and post that for us all instead...
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=259387,00.asp?hidPrint=true
For one thing, the outrageous charges for text messages. Or making sure that every aspect of you using your phone gets the last little second out of you so that it takes away from your total minutes. Or not having phones that function as answering machines simultaneously as voice mail....the list goes on. They are really taking consumers for a ride.
What it really comes down to is that most of the good ideas in cell phones (a) have been done already or (b) are waiting for technologies in other areas to advance first. All those other not-so-good ideas have extremely limited appeal to the masses. Yet people and smaller companies continue their attempts to "innovate" in this marketplace, primarily because there appears at first glance to be such a huge amount of cash sloshing around in the cell phone arena. As it turns out, though, that money is pretty much locked up by the major players, so your Popeil-esque Great Idea But On A Cell Phone This Time is going nowhere.
P2P would(barring some very clever design or a focus more or less exclusively on walkie-talkie use cases) likely be a poor candidate for cell phone use(lousy latency, uncertain availability, battery life of nodes...) P2P works pretty well for cheap transfers of big files; but somewhat less well for low-bandwidth, but latency sensitive, stuff.
The system that I would like to see would be a radically free market(and thus, likely never to be seen in the cellular arena) system of phones that electronically bid for resources in real time, from carriers within range who dynamically compete for customers in real time.
Consider a basic example: I have a cellphone with a GSM module that can see two or three carriers' towers, and a wifi module that can detect a number of access points. I open my address book, or start typing in a number. Detecting that I am going to be making a call, my phone checks the rate information being broadcast from the wireless links visible to it: it then silently routes the call out through whichever offers the lowest rate. In order to prevent surprises, the user could, of course, set "absolute ceiling", "manual verify", and "warn but continue" price thresholds within their phone's bidding engine. Towers, for their part, could dynamically adjust prices, down to the operator's set floor, in order to keep themselves busy but not over-saturated.
Data would be handled in a similar manner: cell towers and wifi access points could broadcast their willingness to provide, and rate(at home, of course, your router would treat you as a special case of free access, to ensure that you always used the bandwidth you had already paid for, and applications requiring data could choose based on price.
Since most people would not want to trouble themselves with the details, phones would, ideally, ship with some sensible defaults and a few heuristic rules(ie. if I almost always make long calls to contact X, and very short ones to contact Y, select a carrier for contact X based on lowest expected price for a long call, and select a carrier for contact Y based on lowest expected price for a short call). For those who did wish to dig deep and twiddle all the knobs, the tools for expressing and solving optimization problems in multiple constraints to computer systems are not exactly terra incognita. The real propellerheads could have their handsets algorithmically trading off between lower and higher power-requirement connections based on batterly life and location/time based estimates of next charge, and whatever other variables they felt like including...
Text messages aren't sent over the data channel.
Oversimplified version: Text messages are embedded in normal GSM packets. Most of these packets are essentially "are you there" messages and are sent frequently between the device and the tower. "Are you there" doesn't fill an entire packet. So cell phone companies came up with SMS to fill the rest of the packet. SMS is essentially free for the cellular providers to handle because it's using part of the timeslice that would otherwise go to waste.
So you won't need to worry about wireless bandwidth costs. If the device can attach to a cell tower, it's got all the bandwidth it needs for SMS.