Recently in Cellular Category
One of the joys of being a grandparent is that you get to watch the 1939 film version of the Wizard of Oz all over again. And again. And again.
Still, for those of us who tromp the halls of tech public policy in Washington, there is a potent lesson in the Wizard's booming refrain of "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain..." when the great Oz turns out to be a fraud. A lession that played out this week at the US Department of Justice.
For those who have been on vacation, this is the week in which we hit a new all-time high for unemployment in the US, and the stock market again began to tank with no end in sight. The FBI announced that mortgage fraud is so rampant (and growing) that they simply can't keep up. Someone (possibly North Korea) launched a cyber attack against the computers of the US Treasury, the Secret Service, the Federal Trade Commission and the US Department of Transportation. Spam is out of control, as is identity theft.
Oh, and the US Department of Justice announce that it would launch a new anti-trust investigation into cell phone companies seeking to determine...ummm, something. Or maybe nothing. They aren't sure, and probably won't be until they have spent untold millions of our dollars. They think, just maybe, they may decide that cell phone companies have too much power, and want to investigate that.
Understand, no crime has been committed. In fact, when Sen. Herb ("I spent eight trillion dollars of your tax dollars and all I got for it was this crummy tee shirt") Kohl launched a similar investigation of the cellular companies, he could not find anything wrong. He did, however, ask the the Department of Justice to launch an investigation of these non-crimes.
The reality is that the US cellular industry, for all of its faults, remains one of the best things about this country. It is highly competitive. It offers an incredible array of services. It has continued to innovate, to improve services, to improve coverage, and to lower prices over the past two decades.
If you've read my columns in print publications (including my Bleeding Edge tech columns), you'll know that I am no particular fan of the cellular companies. For the past 15 years, I have devoted two to three columns per year to berating those companies for their junk phones, goofy policies and bizarre advertising claims. But I do so out of love, not hate. Like a wayward child, I chastise them when they are wrong but otherwise love them for who they are:
The very best cellular services in the world. Innovators. Successful private companies that bring value to the nation and to their shareholders. And companies that just might, if we don't let their competitors use cheap political games to bring them down, solve the problem of ubiquitous broadband in rural America.
In today's challenging environment, the DOJ intention to investigate these companies based merely on speculation and gossip is an outrage. An outrage that the White House should put an immediate end to, but probably will not.
As for me, I'm saddened to think that the Justice department I once thought was the great and powerful OZ -- an agency I believed was committed to justice and the law -- looks more and more like a political hack in a cheesy suit pulling levers behind a curtain.
Time to go back to Kansas.
Over on GigaOm, Worldwide Lexicon founder Brian McConnell has blogged about the reasons why municipal Wi-Fi has been an astounding disaster, and what can be done to fix it.
He's half right.
McConnell correctly notes that one of the biggest problems was that Wi-Fi advocates completely misunderstood who used public Wi-Fi. He notes that "muni W-Fi proponents have misunderstood how the Internet is used in public spaces, primarily by assuming that people who can afford laptops are somehow unable to afford Internet access."
That's one of the reasons. You can also add lack of planning, poor reception, technical obstacals, abysmal security and the "somebody else will pay for all this" mentality that seems to follow these projects, but I won't quibble.
McConnel then goes on, however, to state that the problem of serving the poor and minority could be handled by giving anyone who can't afford broadband a cell phone data plan and a data-enabled cell phone. McConnel elegantly puts it this way:
"It seems reasonable to me to require mobile operators -- as a condition for siting cell towers throughout a community -- to provide basic service to users who can't afford it."
Pardon me for saying this, but I think most municipal governments would chew off their arms rather than give up a sheckel of the loot they extort from the cell phone companies for the right to build towers. They are unlikely to give up the loot in particular to help poor people get cell phones. Still and all...
McConnell should get high marks for a good idea. He begins with the premise that public-private partnerships could be a good idea in the cell phone market, and that expanded use of data on cell phones would be helpful to some poor people. He even takes the tech community to task -- rightly, IMHO -- for its arrogance:
"Most of us who read this site take communication for granted, and frankly, have a warped view of what people outside the tech industry need. Talk to a tradesperson or someone who falls under the category of the "working poor" and you'll get a much different view of what's important (things like an affordable place to live, basic services, the means to find work and get things done)."
But McConnell's idea suffers from the same major flaw as arguments for municipal Wi-Fi. It's based on wishful thinking, not on data. McConnell must know that even poor families already have cell phones, and that plans exist to help them with "lifeline" services. Likewise, I don't think that the problem is that people can't get reasonably-priced plans for mobile communication, even if they involve pre-paid phones.
The problem remains literacy, and computer literacy. All the infrastructure in the world won't help if Johnny can't read. And that's the crushing problem that is holding back the national adoption of broadband, more than any other single factor. Not deployment. Not cost. Not competition.
Literacy.
McConnell is on the right track -- public private partnerships, helping poor people become economically independent, and helping them to upgrade to better plans as they can afford them. He should be encouraged to take the next steps to flesh out his ideas with more and better data.
And if they are thinking clearly, the mobile communication companies will help fund that effort.
For more than a decade, "untethering" was the core mantra of technology geeks.
We cut the landlines for telephone service, opting instead for the better features and lower costs of mobile phones.
We made Wi-Fi a national obsession, left behind the limitations of Ethernet cables and power cords for laptops that could be used in places as obscure as airplanes and city parks, and replaced wires with Bluetooth for personal headsets and microphones.
All of which makes it curious that I, like millions of other geeks worldwide, are busy getting tethered again.
Not in the old sense of tying oneself down to a stationary cable. But by replacing Wi-Fi connections with a high-speed data connection through a cell phone or card. All of the major cell phone providers are now offering an option to "tether" your data-enabled phone to your computer as a means of getting broadband service. Using a USB cable, the data-enabled cell phone becomes a "modem" through which a PC or laptop can access the Internet.
This "tethering" arrangement isn't yet all that it could be. After all, EVDO version A - the dominant form of data transmission for CDMA cell phones - transfers data at a relatively anemic rate of less than 500 Kbps.
That's about one-third of the standard DSL or cable transmission rate. HSDPA, the data transmission favored by GSM providers in the US, isn't appreciably better.
And the cost is higher than simply using Wi-Fi, since you must pay for an unlimited data service plus a monthly tethering fee of about $15.
Still, there are some excellent reasons why broadband users may want to take a second look at this "Cell-Fi" service over Wi-Fi or the someday-may-actually-arrive WiMAX for their wireless Internet service:
It's more secure. Wi-Fi, as you will note from my many scathing references to it, is somewhat less safe than playing with scorpions. Any time you make a Wi-Fi connection, you place yourself, your company and your friends at serious risk. Cell-Fi, by contrast, has built-in security capabilities that are far superior. In fact, for the average hacker a cellular data transmission is virtually impossible to hack.
It's more available. Let's face it, Wi-Fi's limitations are extreme. It won't penetrate buildings. Or trees. Or much of anything else. Even without obstacles, the signal doesn't penetrate very far. And trying to find a signal and connection even in "hot spots" can be daunting unless you are prepared to pay handsomely.
It's more reliable than satellite. Living in the country, I use a satellite as my primary Internet connection. It's an acceptable broadband service, unless the weather is very bad or some jerk is tying up the uplink trying to swap video files on a peer-to-peer network. Then the service can range from very slow to non-existent. On the other hand, I can tether at speeds only slightly lower than satellite and with substantially less lag time.<
I'm not the only broadband geek getting into tethering. A report from Infonetics Research predicts the mobile data market will quadruple in size over the next three years, with more than 144 million subscribers by 2011.
That growth will be driven by upgrades to HSDPA and EVDO to deliver download speeds of 1.5 Mbps or better over the next two years. And further reductions in pricing that will make the use of either a tethered cell phone or an "air card" more attractive to mainstream consumers
Broadband via cell phone is still a work in progress, and it will be a few years before there is enough movement in both price and performance to make it feasible for the masses. But for selected applications and locations, getting tethered may be a welcome trend in broadband access.
Are open networks and unlocked phones the Valhalla of cellular technology? Perhaps, but I have a strong hunch I don't want to pay for it.
Right now, I can get a phone that works right out of the box at a reasonable cost and with a choice of service plans. If it doesn't work right out of the box, I can swap it at a local store. If it breaks, I can get it fixed or get a replacement. If I don't understand it, I can call free tech support and resolve the issue.
It is the ultimate in reliability, but comes at a cost. I can't use just any old phone. I can't just have any old service plan. And I generally have to contract for an amount of time to use the service, so that the cellular company can plan its future cash flows and ensure that they have the operating capital they need to continue to innovate, deploy and serve.
It isn't the ultimate in freedom for me, but it isn't unreasonable, either.
Sure, I hate my cell phone. And I'm not happy about dropped calls, areas without service or the lack of data networks in rural areas. But that doesn't mean I think we should break a system that works in order to implement one that we're not sure about.
Consider this: if we open the cellular networks, who will be responsible for giving tech support on the flood of cell phones from all over the world. The cellular phone company? Not likely, or not at any cost I can afford. The manufacturer? Good luck getting that. The reality is that if we open the networks we will have to pay the price of that openness. And accept that this openness will be harmful to the vast majority of American consumers who need reliability as much as they need choice.
