Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs Wanted an iPhone-Only Wireless Network
jfruhlinger writes "One of the more profound ways that the iPhone changed the mobile industry was the fact that it upended the relationship between the handset maker and the wireless carrier: Apple sells many of its phones directly to customers, and in general has much more of an upper hand with carriers than most phone manufacturers. But venture capitalist John Stanton, who was friends with Steve Jobs in the years when the iPhone was in development, said the Apple CEO's initial vision was even more radical: he wanted Apple to build its own wireless network using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum, thus bypassing the carriers altogether."
iCanthearyounow
That would've freed up a lot of the load on AT&T. However, it would've made the iPhone a lot more expensive per unit... hmm. Where's the downside?
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Apple to build its own wireless network using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum, thus bypassing the carriers altogether."
Which would have worked, if you were only willing to go about with something like the iTouch. While popular, the evolution to hand-held computer, camera, game-device and phone became a bit mostly on the latter.
I visualised such a network years before the iPhone and realise how much it wouldn't have happened. There was some network in the SF Bay Area meant to do something similar, but you had to be paying to be on it and these sorts of things didn't come cheap. Even taking advantage of economies of scale, you'd be running up against those who own the cell towers. My cousin is in that racket and don't underestimate the costs and other problems inherent there. Going with cellular was the only way it was going to work.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Clearly a wise idea, but I wonder how he would have run a cell company different. How would rates be structured? Would the incumbents let iPhones roam on their networks or would they try to freeze-out the interloper? The mind boggles...
One of the more profound ways that the iPhone changed the mobile industry was the fact that it upended the relationship between the handset maker and the wireless carrier
It really only upended the relationship between Apple and its wireless carriers. Most phones are still marketed and sold the old-fashioned way, and Google doesn't have magic open-source-fairy dust that prevents carriers from selling crappy phones on very carrier-friendly terms.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
This would not have been feasible, which is why it didn't work. the idea of a carrier pushing through a wifi network with enough coverage space is laughable. The 3g/4g wireless spectrum operates entirely different than wifi because wifi is limited in many ways..
The point is, we can all sit around and throw ideas and himhaw back and forth, but if things don't pass engineering/financial spec the don't get done. Applauding Jobs as a visionary for an idea that failed on technical and financial merit is kinda stupid.
On a good day, Wifi (802.11a/b/g/n) can travel about 900 feet between devices. Even with a directional antenna and some good hardware, you're looking at a maximum of about one mile transmitting distance between devices... Not sure how you could have any kind of sustainable network within these limited parameters.
I hate to speak ill of the man so soon after death but I always felt Apple was always too restrained by him. Every thing they do is so closed and exclusive. They never extended a hand to the open source community. Yes, the same could have been said of Microsoft but Apple seemed off the deep end. This did offer some of the benefits of Job's vision but I think Apple may be poised in a better position now. Time will tell.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
...this would eventually make the entire Mobile Network privately own by Apple, and you'd all pay a traffic fee, even if you where the carrier of other peoples traffic. That's Apple.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I wrote an article (for a now-defunct tech news startup) predicting almost exactly this model, being built on top of the existing iChat voice / video architecture so you'd get free calls to Mac users and other iPhone users and only pay when calling a POTS number. I wondered in the article if it there was enough WiFi coverage for it to be able to compete with real mobile phones, even including some kind of mesh networking (which would impact the battery life). Then the iPhone came out and was a conventional phone. Good to know in hindsight that I was able to predict was Steve Jobs was thinking, even if I failed to predict what he did.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The article doesn't mention anything regarding how this would actually work. There's no infrastructure and just because you don't need a license to operate in the 2.4 GHz ISM band doesn't mean you can just do whatever the hell you want, there are still rules.
Apple could've bought a wireless company easy.
Breaking news: industry mogul wants to own the whole stack, outlaw competition. Details at 11.
Steve wasn't the greatest engineer, designer, or technologist but what he did do was think of what he saw as perfection and not waiver from it. This is the one thing I think all of us in tech really lost with his passing. Not even that what he came up with was always the best but the fact that he did dare to dream and then force it to fruition. So much of what we use and do came from his efforts even if they were taken or altered/improved upon.
That is a very impossible thing to pass on or keep going by someone else and I really hope we don't begin a period of stagnation and minor iterative changes or updates because we seriously all lose. Linux, MS, or Mac user.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
More proof that Apple doesn't believe in interoperable standards.
Now who is surprised?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Given Apple's love of the monopoly, you can bet it wouldn't be long before you could only call other iPhones. Cuz, you know, it improves the user experience. :)
Agile Artisans
this isn't even slightly surprising. the carrier is the #1 obstacle between Apple and their iPhone. It's the one aspect they have very little control over, (or that even has a bit of control over them) and I'm sure anyone at Apple would love to see an independent network to run their iPhones on.
Right now what does someone do if they get a lot of dropped calls? blame Apple. Sometimes it's Apple's fault like with the antennas, but Apple fixed that, because they could. What now? still getting dropped calls? AT&T sucks? There's really nothing Apple can do about that. Apple is completely dependent on the carriers to make their product work well, or work at all for that matter. Any business that has one of their flagship products held by the balls by a company they have little to no control over is naturally going to be looking for alternatives. It's not good when your company is at another company's mercy.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Well, the Steve Jobs that executed that plan never made it to the top, so that's why Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs.
Perhaps the former had more luck in some other universe.
Or perhaps I just need to go to sleep.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
With enough devices on the market, altogether with advances in Ad-hoc networks, this may be possible (I think there are still tweaks to the routing protocols, which I think are pure madness).
However, I see two main groups against such thing:
1. The carriers, that may lose a big chunk of customers that don't mind no having complete availability.
2. But most importantly, the government, which, besides of opposing to this, may also be worried about not being able to track users so easily and tap on conversations, as they do now.
So more than "technically", I think is politically unfeasible.
One of the more profound ways that the iPhone changed the mobile industry was the fact that it upended the relationship between the handset maker and the wireless carrier: Apple sells many of its phones directly to customers, and in general has much more of an upper hand with carriers than most phone manufacturers.
Maybe in the United States, but in the rest of the world it's always been like this.
You're getting caught up in the technical details. What he was thinking about was more high level ie how to build a phone carrier that was unencumbered by the high capital costs of building out infrastructure.
I suppose an MVNO wasn't in the cards, although there were rumors about that too.
With LTE, it'd be possible to do exactly what he wanted - have a global MVNO that Just Works. You'd sell your phone and it would be able to hop onto any LTE network, no contract required. At that point the carrier would be split into tower/backhaul and billing/marketing divisions. I mean really, the consumer side of the business is totally separate conceptually from the back-end. Backhaul is backhaul.
that whole article was basically summarized with the statement "venture capitalist John Stanton, who was friends with Steve Jobs in the years when the iPhone was in development, said the Apple CEO's initial vision was even more radical: he wanted Apple to build its own wireless network using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum, thus bypassing the carriers altogether"
I find it fascinating. I wonder if he used this as a threat when negotiating with ATT and the other carriers in the beginning. I'm surprised apple hasn't bought a wireless carrier yet. Maybe that is what their rainy day fun is about. I guess they're going to take as much money as they can from all the carriers, then build their own network and drive them out of business while selling them their hottest phone as they go under. If that's not the answer and I was a shareholder I would be demanding investment of their cash reserves as they don't seem to be doing much with their many billions. In terms of a vertical monopoly the carrier is one element apple is likely going to want as it is a key piece in the whole delivering content to a user thing they make money off of.
That would be down-right fantastically, orgasmically, innovatingly cool IF not for the fact that Apple would go just whore it out everywhere.
Mod me down, bitches.
The more I learn about Steve Jobs, the better Bill Gates looks.
Steve Jobs is one of the few people that could have pulled it off, I think this would have provided actually competition to occur and upset the current price fixing going on.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I had this idea once upon a time, still haven't gotten around to blogging it. The gist of it is that there's a whole bunch of newly (and pending) publicly available radio white space (up to a 50 mile radius at full power!), which could be used for wireless mesh networking. Consider a few high-power fixed antennae blanketing an area as a pseudo-backbone, then delivered to people's home routers (which could use this and traditional (shorter-range) 802.11a/b/g/n wifi) which extend range, provide redundancy and alternate paths, etc, then go to the phones and other wireless devices.
Dead spots get cleaned up by adding new home routers, which extend the range of the blanketing backbones, and even phones and laptops can extend range in limited circumstances (limited to conserve battery life, maybe something like limiting data transfers to super-low bandwidth like SMS) .
Plop VoIP and IP TV atop this network layer and you've got a telco killer. Terminate VoIP and IP TV inside the mesh WLAN (e.g. via a few PBXs and some PVRs), add a caching web proxy, and you'll limit the external network traffic pretty significantly.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Steve got railed by the PC segment back in the day and may have wanted to say efu and do an Apple only phone network too. But, the telco's are not known for fairness or general customer service and control the device makers by how they tie the phone to contracts. So Steve could have been trying to say screw that also. I know Google tried to break that telco-device tie in the US but it failed.
I'm going to figure that because it was early on in the iPhone development, it was Steve being Steve and wanting to move his monoculture into the phone segment.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
With enough devices on the market, altogether with advances in Ad-hoc networks, this may be possible (I think there are still tweaks to the routing protocols, which I think are pure madness).
I posted something about this just this morning, linking to an older article I wrote. In a nutshell, between advances in wireless networking protocols and approaches, improvements in mesh networking and new developments in end-to-end voice and data encryption, we can reasonably begin thinking about creating telco-less networks.
However, I see two main groups against such thing:
1. The carriers, that may lose a big chunk of customers that don't mind no having complete availability.
2. But most importantly, the government, which, besides of opposing to this, may also be worried about not being able to track users so easily and tap on conversations, as they do now.
So more than "technically", I think is politically unfeasible.
I reposted the article because of the SOPA fiasco currently playing itself out in the US Congress. Network ownership (or, more precisely, the affiliation between network owners and so-called content owners) is one of the main obstacles to the continued development of the Internet as we know it. The only way around the draconian content restrictions being proposed by media and tech companies is to operate a network that doesn't rely on their good graces.
I don't have any illusions whatsoever that a Jobs-inspired Apple network would have been a Free Information playground. Quite the contrary. It would most likely have resembled a digital Disneyland, with cutesy characters allowing you to do anything you like, as long as it's what they intended you to do in the first place.
Nonetheless, the idea of a Network Of Devices is sound. I just wish someone with both the necessary resources and a sane understanding of freedom were in a position to begin creating it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure such a creature exists....
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Google wanted to spend billions on spectrum. Google CEO was on Apple's board for a while.
His original iDea was to create an iNternet that would work only with iDevices. But he was thwarted.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
WOW........ Way to go Steve Jobs! I say "Lets do it!!!!!"
Geek Code GS/M/CS d- s+:->: a--- C++(-) U++ P+ L E W++ N o+ K? w O- M- V- PS PE Y PGP- t++ 5? X+ R+(++) tv+ b++(+++
How is it sound, exactly? If I need to make a call, I need to make sure someone else is in the area with their cell phone turned on and willing to let me drain their battery? How do you do long distance?
Apple used to have their own data network for their devices, about 17 years ago.
I remember using Apple devices on airplanes back then.
I thought it was the 80s, but I guess it was the 90s based on this press release I Googled:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/PAGENET+TO+PROVIDE+WIRELESS+NETWORK+SERVICES+FOR+APPLE+PRODUCT-a015985515
It's almost like Steve Jobs wanted some kind of walled garden or something where he can control all aspects of his products.
... visionary magician ...
Republic Wireless is an new carrier (Virtual Network actually) that relies on its customers using Wifi for calls, texts, and other services http://republicwireless.com
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
How is it sound, exactly?
'Sound' in the sense that we've solved some of the key problems that kept this idea in the realm of the impossible. Now, it's merely improbably difficult. 8^)
If I need to make a call, I need to make sure someone else is in the area with their cell phone turned on and willing to let me drain their battery?
Agreed. Which makes it problematical for a lot of the continental US. But it's not so impractical in Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Egypt - countless other locales. Which, not coincidentally, represent the largest area of growth in wireless networks right now.
The battery issue is another kettle of fish. I can only hand-wave at the moment and assume that improvements in power storage and efficiency will continue for at least a decade, which would render this issue manageable, even if it doesn't solve it entirely.
How do you do long distance?
Assuming a data-only network (i.e. VOIP as the sole means of voice communication), you don't even think about it.
But I think what you're really asking is: How do I communicate with people on other networks; and how do I handle billing for inter-carrier calls (which is an astoundingly ugly and byzantine process)?
The short answer is: You don't.
The slightly longer answer becomes clear when you phrase the question thusly: How do I send email to someone who's on another Internet? Back in the days of AOL, Compuserve, Delphi and co. this used to be a real issue. Once the Internet asserted itself, however, the whole thing just sorted itself out.
To sum up, operating a carrier-less network allows you to dispose of a lot of the structures that the carriers have built into their data networks.
But notwithstanding what I've just writting, your point still holds that there are significant -show-stopping- issues that still need to be addressed. I don't deny that. I do, however, feel that these are finite technical problems, difficult but not insurmountable.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Steve Jobs Wanted an iPhone-Only Wireless Network
And sharks with friggin' laser beams.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If Linux ever unified to the point where they were able to create other things, this would be right up there.
All they would need to do is allow anybody to connect as a guest to a Wi-Fi network. Add in being not-anonymous, semi-anonymous, or fully anonymous in the data transfer (get different bits from different servers).
It would have to start off small, but I think that it could be done. I mean, there is hardly anywhere that you go that doesn't have a secure access point. Imagine if you could use any of those...
Thanks to the way phones are sold, people have unrealistic expectations about the price of cellphones. Of course, $600 is right in line with what a smartphone actually costs. It is basically a full fledged computer with a built in cellphone after all. But people lose sight of that when you sell them for $100 and then subsidize it by raising wireless subscription rates. The same computing hardware is in an iPhone 4S and an iPad 2, the only difference is the screen and the battery. Yet for some reason people pay $630 for the cellular enabled iPad 2 but only $200 for the 4S.
Hiding true cost from customers is how the economy (doesn't) work these days, unfortunately. And for some reason there are a lot of people wondering why everything seems to be falling apart.
Well said. I think the mesh networks would work fine for communications in small dribs and drabs, but I just don't see how that many hops will be feasible for (acceptable) voice communications. Emergency, nextel and TXT style communication? Heck yeah.
Steve Jobs Wanted an iPhone-Only Wireless Network, but now he's dead. So who had the last laugh?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
That's funny, last year I had an "everything but iPhone/Pad/Pod" network. All you have to do is add a backtick ` and none of them can connect. The password keyboard has NO backtick on iProducts, even though every other virtual keyboard on it does. I guess you might have been able to use a bluetooth keyboard, but few people have those.
It sure did! Instead of a big, evil corporation screwing their customers, charging inflated prices, and delivering a product prone to failures... we now have another big, evil corporation screwing their customers, charging inflated prices, and delivering a product prone to failures!
Well said. I think the mesh networks would work fine for communications in small dribs and drabs, but I just don't see how that many hops will be feasible for (acceptable) voice communications. Emergency, nextel and TXT style communication? Heck yeah.
Again, I won't take issue with your argument, but I guess I just take a glass-half-full kind of approach to engineering. While you're right that latency would build up pretty quickly, I would counter with the argument that:
So yeah, I don't see this kind of approach taking off in the States; I think there's just too much invested in the status quo. But in vast areas of the rest of the world, the communications revolution is only starting. That's where I see a place for crazy ideas like this.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
...why the fuck do we need republic wireless then
...to have all those iMorons leave off into their separate net?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I have an iPlod touche Gen 4 which I use in the manner that Steve had intended. I message and make VoIP and video calls via Wi-fi connections. It is cheaper that an iPhone and no contracts! Although I would like a the GPS function.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Every time a carrier gets the iPhone they have to make big changes to their data rates and pricing just to accommodate all the extra strain on their network. Maybe if it had worked out, we all wouldn't be subsidizing iPhone users and would have cheaper phone plans and higher bandwidth caps.
His marketeers blindness to technical barriers.
"Let it be done" (with an imperious wave of the hand) is all very well, but it leads up some very strange allyways. I'm just wondering how much more SJ inspired smoke and mirror work is in the Apple pipeline. We're beginning to see that the Siri technology on the iPhone 4s is just another cloud app with latency and connection issues. Perhaps a "Good Idea", but something inflated beyond its true utility by the now headless marketing department. Lets hope it'll run out sooner or later.
"One of the more profound ways that the iPhone changed the mobile industry was the fact that it upended the relationship between the handset maker and the wireless carrier."
Most of the world already had this
This is blinging
Is it just me? Or is Steve, as time goes by, steadily turning into larger and larger jerk? Posthumously.
One more thing Steve has achieved which I -hopefully- never will. (Although this very comment won't do me any favours for that matter.)
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Ideally it'd only be a small number of hops to the nearest wifi network, which would be wired. The wired network could be community fiber. Of course, at that point it might just be easier to have community WiMax (although it's politically highly unlikely in most areas.)
This is really embarassing for the people who are using other cellphones than iphones but it looks awesome for iphone users
http://gadgeteye.blogspot.com
Sure, but that idealism is lost in most businesses and it can be positive and negative, no one is saying SJ only made great stuff and had amazing ideas. Look at the dock though and how it became disruptive and integrated into everything else, it wasn't even his idea but they did a good job of integrating it and made it what it is. Coverflow, pinch zoom, app tiles, etc. have become standards on every touch device. Or simple things like aesthetics, no one cared before but now every product that comes out at least has some basic thought or effort on design.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Neither Microsoft nor Apple are even in the top 100 largest companies in the world.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2011/
Cats seem very large to mice, I suppose, so we technical types tend to overestimate the power of tech companies.
I don't see how removing the middle man from the equation is giving more control to apple. If anything, it's just distributing it to every single person with a phone.
I think you're all getting hung up on the 'ONLY APPLE' part, and not the "you won't pay anything for service anymore, since you're 'paying' by extending the network with your own device."
...all carriers used compatible cell technologies? The lack of compatibility/portability of cell phones distorts the market.
Remember Google buyingup spectrum/wifi points and such.
Sounds similar.
Anyway, nice idea, but not sure what happens to a wifi network when 5000 people want to hit a access point. Then again, we would be at IPv8 by now.
found some cool pics of Steve check em out
http://www.ebay.com/itm/260896146187?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649#ht_483wt_1345