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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."
The walled garden would have replaced the internet.
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.
The walled garden would have replaced the internet.
Not his walled garden, he'd have left the door for Microsoft to walk in and do it. As inept as Redmond has been with wireless and smart phones, this would have made them. And in turn they would have dominated the market because Apple didn't learn anything from past failures.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's basically building another wireless network from scratch, regardless of the spectrum space. Apple has the warchest, it could certainly do that today, but in 2005 or 2006 to get 20 or 30 billion dollars would have A: given up the plan and B: been completely unthinkable for Apple. On top of all that you have enormous chicken and egg problems while the whole thing is getting built.
On one hand, who wouldn't want their own wireless network to stick to the big carriers (I'm in canada, our carriers are equally bad, if not worse than the US ones), but it's a very risky game to play.
I dont see how the fact that they sold millions to negate the fact that the price was absurd. Maybe there are a million of absurd people.
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."
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.
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.
apple's webkit is just a fork of KDE's KHTML
Seems to me like you're the one trying to rewrite history.
http://opensource.apple.com/
The depth of delusion on Slashdot surprises me to this day.
Anybody who's used Chrome or the web browser on Android has benefited from Apple's work on WebKit. But the zealots will try to rewrite history on that too.
The more I learn about Steve Jobs, the better Bill Gates looks.
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
Well, it is your carrier that is overselling their bandwidth. It is really not Apple's fault.
It would be Apple's fault if your phone couldn't use a signal that was there, or if ou had to hold it in a funny way to not touch the antena. That problem you describe, it's really an AT&T problem.
Rethinking email
The article is not that clear on which portion of networks services Jobs planned to put on his un-licensed wifi.
Clearly Calls would have to bridge the gap between his network and the POTS system somewhere.
Perhaps he was only planning for the data portion on his network. Even then, its clear he had no idea of the enormous size of the
task at hand. Even using mesh network topology the cost of APs would have been enormous.
Still you can't fault him for trying to end-run the bastards. We will eventually end up with a "dumb pipe" network from the carriers,
where they stop selling us minutes or data, and just sell bandwidth.
I suspect Google is much closer to being able to allow you to forego minutes altogether, by handling calls over data on their Google Voice service via what ever data connection you might have. I suspect the only thing holding them back is not wanting to piss off the carriers.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
Note to /. : Never say that to a girlfriend, no matter how true.
I don't think that's going to be too big a problem around here
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
Erm, I had cable modem service with MediaOne in 1998 at 3 Mbps. By 2000 they upgraded it to 5 Mbps though I was actually getting 6 Mbps. There was a minor scandal as some hackers figured out how to unlock them to get the full 30 Mbps speeds the modems were capable of (crowding out their neighbors' bandwidth). My cell phone at the time could do a 150 kbps data connection.
.com.
The dotcom bubble burst because most of the ideas were stupid. Venture capitalists were so caught up in the hype over the "Information Superhighway" that they were willing to throw money at anything that ended in
It was the first to be that aggressive about it. That, coupled with the texting craze sweeping North America and the control channel fills up quickly.
And technically, the iPhone was the first to show the behaviour because the iPhone used the Infineon chipset - something most North American phones avoided because the chipset is more tuned to Asian and European networks, because of its aggressiveness and control channel utilization. For North American phones, it was generally required to use a Qualcomm chipset which wasn't so aggressive, but also meant it consumed more power. Remember, the iPhone was purely designed by Apple - AT&T/Cingular had zero input in the matter (they would've protested the use of the Infineon chipset).
For a comparison, note how the European networks and Asian networks fared. Heck, even the Antennagate iPhone 4 problem was virtually non-existent.
Irrelevant, actually. In a cellphone, data channels (and voice) are allocated dynamically and last as long as you want. You basically "open" a data channel (which tells the carrier you intend to send data and set up all the billing and handling information). Then you can send and receive data at will. If you have no data to send, you give your timeslot to someone else.
For EDGE and GPRS, the system used unused voice channels, which is why these systems disallow simultaneous voice and data (because to support it requires supporting two upstream channels and two downstream channels - i.e., two receivers and transmitters plus control transceiver).
For 3G, the system is far more complex, but from the baseband side, you open up data channels (PDP contexts), the more you open, the faster the transfer (basically channel bonding like behaviour).
But each time you do this, you create control channel traffic as you open and tear down these data connections. And whilst having the data channel open, the baseband consumes more power because it's in active communications with the tower, ready to send and receive data.
If you want to compare it with WiFi, think of the "no data channel established" state as WiFi disabled - it's powered off. Then you want to transfer data, so you create the data channel, which is basically turning it on and associating it with the access point. It's not transferring data, but it's taking more power now as the module is consuming standby power, ready to respond to packets for it. The highest power mode happens when data is transferred, because the Rx and Tx are actively engaged.
A "normal" device associates with the AP, and leaves the connection idle. It takes power, but it also means it's ready to go in an instant.
If you had a battery-challenged device, you might try to do an iPhone and leave the WiFi off as much as possible to save power, then turn it on and associate it with an AP when you need to transfer data, then turn it off again. You'll find the AP load is increased and if enough devices do it, the AP can be so busy handling association/deassociation requests that it can't actually transfer useful data. (The analogy fails because WiFi uses one channel for both management and data transfer, while cellular uses multiple).