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Steve Jobs Wanted an iPhone-Only Wireless Network

Posted by samzenpus on from the welcome-to-the-iinternet dept.

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."

4 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. lack of understanding by NynexNinja · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Apple's Future by Alrescha · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Every thing they do is so closed and exclusive. They never extended a hand to the open source community."

    I'm sorry, you're terribly confused. Or a troll:

    http://www.opensource.apple.com/

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

    http://www.webkit.org/

    http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/apple-joins-openjdk-to-open-source-mac-os-x-java-technology/

    http://alac.macosforge.org/

    Etc.

    A.

    --
    ...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
  3. Re:Apple's Future by Trolan · · Score: 4, Informative

    OpenSource for other projects, but not in the development of any of their products. Not if they could help it anyway.

    Let's see...
    - Darwin Streaming Server
    - mDNSResponder
    - ALAC
    - Calendar and Contacts Server
    - libdispatch / Grand Central Dispatch
    - etc.

    http://www.macosforge.org/ is where the more generally useful items outside of OSX wind up. FreeBSD picked up the libdispatch items and ran with it.

  4. When did we start talking about Wal-Mart? by Medievalist · · Score: 4, Informative

    The extent to which Apple didn't learn from past failures is evident from the fact that they are now the largest company in the world.

    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.