Comments on: We need to open wireless

By: NGS

NGS — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:28:26 +0000

a) Carterfone and wireless devices are not alike. Analog phones of their time, and still today, have one function: to generate pulses or tones comprising a dial sequence and to have a mic and a speaker that translate analog voltages to sound. Pretty simple. Now take a current 3G or 4G (don’ even exist) device and what do you have. Airlink protocols, access probes, authentication protocols, rx power level, tx power level, interference, out of band interference. Not so simple anymore. WIth spectrum being a shared resource (unlike the pair of wires that terminated ones landline back in the day) what one person’s device does to the network affects all others, or at teh very least, can make troubleshooting much more difficult. So Carterfone, while seeming to be a good analogy at the political level, is really not a good analogy technically.

b) No one in the wireless industry opposed open access per se. What they oppose is the requirement to use such a model in a given piece of spectrum. Frontline, and hence your suggestion is to limit the attractiveness of a piece of spectrum to only open access, and I find this suspect and incongruent with FCC policy for the last decade. If the “open access” model is the foundation of a successful business model, why do you not gain the spectrum at auction, competing fully with the other carriers, and then compete in the marketplace with an open access model, serving all those left behind by the large wireless carriers? This is the criticism levvied by the big players. If you are convinced of the success of open access, offer it without asking the FCC to endorse it. Otherwise, you are conceding that at “market” prices of spectrum, the open access model does not fly and that you hence have to lower the price of the spectrum artificially (by excluding bidders) to make it affordable enough to execute your business model.

I love the Frontline plan overall, but the exclusivity around open access and the E block is just not very well thought out politically.

By: DSS

DSS — Tue, 01 May 2007 05:52:26 +0000

Much as I admire Ram’s awesome track record, I must say he is a bit off here in positioning it as an open standards network argument. I would argue that most of the public wireless networks except CDMA based are open. GSM/3G, WiFi, WiMAX are as open standards as one could hope to find. The reason behind the “walled garden” is simply maximizing corporate profit, not dissimilar to what the folks owning the local loops did not too long ago (and are trying to do again with the net neutrality debate).
It might be a safe bet right now to assume that most large providers lacking significant wireless reach would be eyeing this spectrum with lust, and will probably would not mind competing with all those conditions laid out by Ram above.

By: Hamish MacEwan

Hamish MacEwan — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:21:12 +0000

I agree with most of this, but the closed proprietary version of of wireless is cellular. Wi-Fi and WiMAX are existing wireless protocols and services that to the degree local regulators allow are open and global.

There could be better solutions with agile and cognitive radio, but they do exist.

By: Blake Senftner

Blake Senftner — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:10:14 +0000

I wholly agree. With the wireless service providers requiring a minimum of 50% of any revenue, negotiated down from an initial request of 70%, it is no wonder anyone does business with them. This keeps the cost of doing business so high that, as you say, many entrepreneurs simply give up and direct their efforts in other industries. This is one of the key technology drivers everywhere in the world, except the US. I feel as if it is time for the politicians to step in – clearly the cellular industry is not going to open up on their own.