The CTIA members (including Verizon) have selective memory recall — when comparing the U.S. model to the global market leaders, they make no mention of the locked phones that can’t be switched between service providers, or the two year contracts with heavy penalties, or the ‘walled garden’ service delivery platforms that inhibit value-added service innovation from independent developers, etc.

Clearly, the U.S. market really needed a quantum leap in policy transformation to change the current restrictive status quo — full “open access” policy would have given the U.S. a fighting chance to catch up to the global market leaders. The FCC’s decision will help the cause of the shackled U.S. consumer, but it won’t turn the tide on wireless application innovation.

Well, some people think Google is bluffing, and have no intention of entering the auction. I doubt that, although to disclose how much they are willing to bid is certainly an odd move. Its most likely a bit of game theory. If I’m playing rock, paper,….

The spectrum was owned by ABC, NBC, and CBS and so on before, why would we put a middle man in the picture, worst yet, a telco??? This makes no sense! We need open open open open so that innovation rules the future. Innovation will build the pipes telco-joe! Innovation is a water cooler joke and 90 percent of the telcos, there is no value in the connection itself, but the quality of services that are delivered on it. That’s like the plumber getting a cut on my water bill.

“…True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want.”
–Larry Wall

BUT REALLY, can somebody clue me in to the difference between an application and a service?

It strikes me that EVERY thid party application on an open device is by definition an open service. VOIP, chat, location, etc.

As long as individuals pay for the bandwidth it doesn’t look like someone gets to lock down anything on either side of the transport layer. As the contrapositive, see iPhone it is locked by apple on both sides of the radio.

I think the telcos are already stunned by this Bush FCC decision – cellular just saw cost-per-minute drop to under 3 cents.

Not to pee in y’alls pool… but I thought it was disingenuous for Google to seek wholesale rates – before it would bid – huh? Like, ensure we don’t have to win and can therefore buy wholesale bandwidth, so we don’t have to bid, and for the trouble, we’ll put up a number we’re sure the other guys will outpay, so we go home happy losers – with our $4.6B in our pockets.

Mike c’mon. Logic above loyalty – even to the web.

It actually smells like a company afraid to trade half of it’s $12B in cash (easily + buildout) to buy spectrum. Maybe it ain’t that big a dog. Maybe it wa serious it shoulda asked MSFT for help.

Maybe it’s time to notice the market cap on niche advertising in the long tail, just ran dead into the 3rd quarter wall (ie the value of human attention seeking nich content). maybe adwords/sense can’t grow exponentially – cause well, not enough people use the web to find the stuff in those crazy search server logs tp justify 11 cents a search. Maybe, repeating history, Cuban just shorted Yahoo.

“it’s why SMS took off first in Europe – not because it was so cheap or advanced, but because it cost too damn much to make a call.”

that comment is absurd. SMS is far more efficient to get burst communication across. no time (read $) wasted on pointless greetings, catch-ups, etc, just state your message and youre done. replies are done in the same manner. the information flow is also done *without having to tie up both parties at the same time*. and no, voicemail is not equally convenient thanks to dialing in and menu navigation. SMS is not just financially beneficial, its time and effort efficient.

you work for a communication company and don’t realize something as basic as this?

no wonder US telcoms got their heads up their !@&$#…

Yeah, it’s an anonymous auction, but I’d suspect that some form of collusion will take place.

Republicans and Democrats might as well be the same thing when it comes to these issues. What we need is politicians who understand the power of a free market. Libertarians, or old-school liberals.

Most of you know about the FCC auction of 700 MHZ spectrum. I covered it in a previous post. Google had thrown the gauntlet in the game and asked FCC to include following conditions in the auction rules:

Open Apps
Open Devices
Open Services
Open Netw…

but it wouldn’t be too bad if you knew the rental rates before you bought the land and built the house. you’d know what to build to make money.

“In Europe, you pay an average of 22cents/minute to TALK on your mobile phone vs. 7cents in the US.”

But outside the US you don’t pay for calls you receive, so a fairer comparison would be 11c to 7c for an average minute of conversation.

If you want it done right the government should rent out the spectrum and allow anyone to use it. But companies would still have have to build their own infrastructure to do it. This would level the playing field to anyone who has the resources to build out a network… Google, Apple, MSFT, and such.

I am sure none of us would want to work hard building a house and than have someone tell you that you have to rent it at a lower price than you could get.

if america was actually a free country, and the right to use frequencies didn’t have to be purchased from the govt thered be a spread-spectrum free-for-all and we’d already be browsing at a a few mb a second from iphones by now.. sad

The public interest, who owns the spectrum in the first place. Crazy idea, I know, doing things to benefit the user. Spotty coverage might not be such an issue if the carriers were all upgrading the same network instead of each of them having a separate one. I guess those Verizon “those people? my network” commercials wouldn’t be as snappy if all providers had to share the same quality. Imagine that, separate networks provide differences that are then used by marketing to distinguish themselves from their competitors. So we have a company charging their users first to upgrade their proprietary infrastructure, and then again to advertise the differences of their networks! How ever would they maintain their current rates and employee numbers if this distinction was removed from the equation?

How much 700MHz infrastructure has been rolled out so far? Is it really billions of dollars?