Blog: Mobile Phones

Maybe it's the criticism Verizon has been getting on blogs, in the press, from academics, and in Congress for its anticompetitive behavior. Maybe it's pressure from activist groups like Save the Internet. Maybe it's the upcoming spectrum auction, where the FCC implemented some (but not enough) rules to encourage mobile competition, and Verizon sees the writing on the wall. Maybe it's because they refused to launch the iPhone on their network, and instead Apple ended up with an exclusive with AT&T. Maybe it's Google's recent announcement of their open Android platform.

Whatever the reason, yesterday Verizon—the most control-freak-ish of mobile carriers, the one that cripples phones to disable WiFi or Bluetooth or anything that might compete with their high-priced service add-ons, the one that refused to give NARAL SMS access, whose BREW system locks out all but the deepest-pocketed developers—that same Verizon Wireless yesterday announced that it will open up its network to any phone, the "cellular Carterfone" Tim Wu has been advocating.

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Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal calls out the telephone companies for stifling innovation and limiting consumer choice. The telcos claim that their market is competitive, that they are empowering rather than restricting their customers, but unlike Congress, Mossberg isn't fooled. (Mossberg doesn't receive tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the telcos.)

A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that ... severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world.

That's why I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the "Soviet ministries." Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them.

Great framing by Mossberg, and great that someone of his stature is laying out the facts.

We've all sat in a hot, stuffy room, uncomfortable, and know the amazing feeling of a brief gust of wind blowing fresh air into the room, cutting through the muggy feel just briefly before subsiding, leaving us craving more. Last night's Democratic debate felt that way. CNN opened a window - brief, limited, controlled - but they opened it, and the refreshing feel of the outside air tasted so delicious.

I had the opportunity to attend last night's South Carolina Democratic debate in person. The room looked and felt like any other produced, managed television event. The candidates started out rehearsed, giving their prepared sound bites in response to each question. But the questions were real, as were the questioners, and as the debate went on, the candidates changed. Not radically, but they began to respond more directly to the questions. They started talking to the questioners. They resisted when Anderson Cooper tried to force them to discuss trivialities like whether they have chartered campaign planes instead of the real issues of global warming. While of the campaign videos followed tired old campaign commercial patterns, a few were funny and felt genuine.

Television still dominates politics and candidates still speak in a way that will play on TV. Last night was one debate, but cable news continues to fill tens of thousands of hours with content controlled by a small group of journalists. Still, last night, we could see a glimmer of a better way where candidates speak to citizens. Briefly, a gust of fresh air was swirling through that large auditorium. The Internet is blowing this fresh air through the rooms of our politics, our economy, and our culture. Anyone can blog, or sell their own t-shirts, or release their own music.

To some, however, this open economy is scary and dangerous. How can we know which books are good without Barnes and Noble to select them? How can we avoid buying shoddy jewelry or fake silver without the controls retailers have in place? And what will happen to a civilized centrist political consensus when just anyone gets to speak their opinions? To some, the gust of air is chilly and brings in the salty smell of the sea and a whiff of garbage. Maybe conditioned air is best. Maybe we should leave it to the professional HVAC technicians to manage our air.

In the early days of the Internet, you could sign up for access through a service like AOL, Prodigy, or CompuServe, which resembled shopping malls. Each piece of content was carefully selected by editors. Or, you could get direct Internet access, which had enormously more content to read, communities to join, and products to buy, but it also carried spam and other dangers, fooling people into buying worthless penny stocks or giving their bank account numbers to Nigerian scammers. More content and community, because nobody had to ask AOL for permission to be on the Internet. Spam, because even the spammers didn't have to ask permission.

Most of our communications networks work more like AOL than the Internet. Television and cable professionals decide what you see on TV. The cable companies decide what channels to offer. Radio managers choose shows for their stations. And Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile determine which phones to offer and in many cases what applications you are allowed to install on those phones. They want to keep the air clean (according to their standards). You can choose between AT&T and Sprint, between NBC and CBS, and they do compete vigorously, but within a professionally selected range of offerings. Nothing unpredictable, but little participation from citizens and limited innovation from entrepreneurs.

Without the openness of the Internet, we wouldn't be experiencing the tremendous growth of citizen involvement in politics. Without it, we couldn't learn about nearly any subject instantly from Wikipedia – even if the information hasn’t been vetted by gatekeeping Britannica editors. Without it, we couldn't buy all the many hard-to-find products on eBay from around the world – even if they don’t come with corporate guarantees of quality. Without it, millions of people wouldn't be finding love on dating sites – though they occasionally meet sketchy people as well. The market chose the freewheeling Internet model over AOL's controlled "walled garden". Internet access boomed while the managed online services went out of business. Clearly, citizens are willing to be unpredictable and take advantage of open systems. And I believe citizens are able and willing to be their own gatekeepers, which has worked on sites like Craigslist and Digg.

Many of the former gatekeepers are opening up to the idea of opening up, even if begrudgingly. Newspapers are blogging to remain relevant as subscriptions decline. Candidates are competing for supporters on Facebook and MySpace. And CNN is letting citizens write the debate questions. Meanwhile, others are fighting the trend. Many pundits and commentators attack bloggers. Books about the Internet "killing our culture" get widespread attention and praising reviews in the New York Times. The RIAA, according to Rolling Stone, is facing obsolescence because it refused to try to work with the Internet constructively.

So far, the telephone and cable companies are choosing to hold on to old, closed business models. An upcoming auction of new wireless spectrum could follow "open access" principles to create a new wireless network more like the Internet, but Verizon and AT&T so far oppose this. We should give consumers this choice between the current networks and an open one. Net Neutrality is about preserving the ability to choose an open network as new fiber-optic networks replace today's DSL and dial-up modems.

The fresh air of creative citizen participation is starting to blow into Presidential politics through the window CNN opened. And this week, we have an opportunity to open the window in telecommunications as well. Senator Dick Durbin is conducting a series of discussions on OpenLeft.com to make policy by talking to citizens.

The question we ask ourselves when choosing a President is what kind of America we want. The question we must ask ourselves and Senator Durbin is the same - what kind of network do we want? Should we leave it to the professionals to decide what applications we use and what content we see? Or do we want the Internet to keep being open, so anyone can blog or sell products or create the next Amazon or Facebook without permission? Do we want to expand that openness to mobile technology? Or do we want to return to the tight control of the AOL era, or Presidential questions being written by a small panel of Washington elites? I hope Senator Durbin will open the windows. It's awfully stuffy in here.

Apple's iPhone is being released today amid tremendous anticipation and publicity. Several people have asked me if I'm going to buy one. But despite the great innovation it represents in mobile technology, the iPhone is also a step backward for some of the worst practices of the mobile industry, and I'm not planning to get one.

The phone will only work on AT&T's network, unlike other GSM phones, making it impossible for a customer to lawfully purchase it and then connect it to another GSM network in the U.S. (T-Mobile) or any GSM system overseas. This is the same AT&T that recently announced its intention to built technology to spy on its customers on behalf of the RIAA and MPAA.

AT&T will charge an early termination fee if you cancel service, even though they don't subsidize the phone at all, despite the widespread claim in the mobile industry that the purpose of the ETFs is to recoup their cost of providing a free or discounted phone with activation.

And worst of all, the iPhone doesn't allow third party applications at all - even worse than Verizon's practice, the previous worst, of requiring all application writers to go through an arduous approval process and pay high costs to Verizon. The iPhone does allow AJAX Web apps to run on the phone's Safari browser, which ameliorates much of the problem, but that has many limits, most of which aren't yet known. Will the apps be able to access the camera or microphone? (Porbably not.) Will they be able to take advantage of the innovative input gestures like zooming by moving fingers closer or farther? Access the address book? Save files locally? Apple could have built an API for developers, but they've never been particularly interested in fostering a development community around their technology.

Many defenders of wireless industry practices like early termination fees and locking argue that if consumers really cared about these things, they wouldn't purchase phones and plans with them. Well, I'm not purchasing an iPhone. And I hope you won't either.

Working Assets Wireless has launched a campaign to pressure Steve Jobs to unlock the iPhone for any network and has done a terrific job of building awareness of Apple's and AT&T's anti-innovation, anti-consumer practices. I encourage you to sign their petition, and most of all, don't buy an iPhone.

Voicemails are very annoying. I love hearing from the people leaving them, but it takes a lot of time to listen to them compared to reading email. Worse, if I can't respond right away or deal with whatever question is raised, they're difficult to save and then manage. If I have saved voicemails, my phone gives no reminder of this, and I often forget about them until the next time I receive a new voicemail, which is usually not a time when I can deal with the old ones.

It's cumbersome to navigate among voicemails (and every carrier's system is different, meaning in the months since my switch to T-Mobile I still haven't learned how to easily jump around in them). Saving a phone number from a voicemail usually requires me to scramble to find some paper or memorize it for a minute until I can switch phone applications to write it down. They're not searchable and not saved long term.

Email, on the other hand, lends itself well to having a few messages in the inbox which need to be dealt with and whose presence is a regular reminder; makes random access to messages easy; and saves old messages in a searchable way (at least with a good service like Gmail) indefinitely. Today's New York Times examines two services, SimulScribe and SpinVox, that aim to fix these problems with voicemail. They let a customer forward voicemails to their system, which transcribes them and sends them as an email or SMS, as well as still allowing access to the original audio recordings. I just signed up with SimulScribe, which the reporter found to be better and which is the only one to attach the voicemails as audio attachments to emails. I'll report on how well this works.

Good thing I'm not on Sprint anymore - they charge a usurious 20 cents per minute to have calls or voicemails forwarded to another number.

Recently, much of the debate in telecom policy has revolved around network neutrality on broadband networks. But Tim Wu has a great new paper about how the wireless companies are far worse. Not only do they practice traffic discrimination in violation of net neutrality principles, but they go to great additional lengths to deprive consumers of useful features and innovative products.

None of these are new, but Wu assembles them into a convenient, detailed list, including:

• Preventing consumers from using phones other than those approved by the carriers
  
• Crippling phone features such as photo sharing, WiFi, Internet browsers, and even simple call timers so consumers can see how much time they are spending on the phone
  
• In the case of Verizon's BREW system, forcing application developers to go through an extensive screening process to even begin writing applications, and then another complex approval process to get the application launched
  
• Making it nearly impossible for applications to use the features the phone already possesses, especially GPS location information

Simple policy solutions could open up the wireless market to innovation without needlessly regulating the industry. Wu lists a set of good ideas. Even just the first one - ending the stranglehold carriers have to restrict which phones they allow on their networks - would go a long way. Without the ability to keep phones out of the U.S. market carriers would lose the ability to mandate that the manufacturers cripple phone features, or to impose burdensome approvals on the applications.

The FCC recently required a similar opening up of cable networks with its CableCard standard, which allowed electronics makers to build new cable set-top boxes with new features and required cable companies to let consumers connect these devices to the cable network without approval from the cable company. I'm actually somewhat surprised that the FCC, so often in thrall to the companies that made big campaign contributions to the Republicans, would

The openness created by CableCard (if it works - the cable companies are fighting it) is a perfect example of fostering competition and making markets work. There's no reason liberals and conservatives alike shouldn't embrace this kind of policy - it's only telecom industry money standing in the way.

I wouldn't call myself an early adopter of technology. I generally am not the guy who can't stop talking about his new tech gadget. But over the last week, with a break for electioneering, I spent a large chunk of my time purchasing a variety of digital technologies:

Internet: I signed up for cable modem access from Earthlink (via Time Warner's cable infrastructure). Previously, my only Internet connection at home was BroadbandAccess (EVDO) service from Verizon ($80/mo for unlimited). It's fast enough for email, not quite fast enough for video (when viewing YouTube videos I usually have to pause and wait for it to load, then come back in a few minutes). I got by with that for the first six months of living here, but my consumption of video is increasing, so it was time to upgrade. Plus, I disapprove of Verizon's tactics in trying turn the Internet into a walled garden, like it has with its wireless service.

TV: I don't subscribe to cable, since I don't want to watch a lot of TV. But there are a few shows I like, and I'm rarely home at the right time to watch them, so (now that I have Internet at home) I bought a TiVo. Way back when I was working for Tellme, (then) CEO Mike McCue was such an evangelist of TiVo that he bought several employees TiVos, including my roommate Mike.

Like Tellme, TiVo was a great idea that encountered some obstacles, but it's still far superior to the crappy DVRs that cable companies provide. And modern TiVos can transfer recorded shows to your computer or iPod - a great example of a feature that's terrific for consumers and scares the heck out of media companies, so much that they blocked the feature in the new HDTV-enabled TiVo Series 3.

Phone: I haven't had a landline phone since 2002; it would have been longer, but back in the foothills of Cupertino mobile phones didn't work, at least at the time. For the last two years I've had, and loved, the Treo 600, but I'm just out of contract with Sprint and so it was time to consider phone options; in addition to the many advances achieved by new phones, the Treo sound quality was deteriorating due to age. My requirements were: a phone that could be used as a modem, ideally one with EVDO, so I could dump Verizon but still get online while on the train; a phone that could use the new Gmail Mobile application, Google Maps Mobile (which did work on the Treo), and ideally the snazzy new Google Talk for BlackBerry.

I considered the Treo 700p (many reports of crashing problems, and doesn't have the Gmail app yet), BlackBerry 8703e (a little wide, some concerns about battery life), and the Sanyo SCP-8400 (maybe I don't really need a PDA phone). But I decided to stop in the T-Mobile store and loved the new BlackBerry Pearl. It has the form factor of a regular phone, but the keyboard makes text entry much easier, with a 5-key wide keyboard that has only two letters per key arranged in the same pattern as on a QWERTY keyboard (the top row is QW, ER, TY, UI, and OP, etc.) SureType technology allows you to press one key per letter, and does a remarkably good job of figuring out what word you are typing (unlike on phones with three letters per key, there are few words that are ambiguous). I was able to import my database of contacts using the sync function, getting 242 contacts into the phone in one swoop. The Gmail, Maps, and Google Talk applications work great, and I was able to set up the phone-as-modem functionality.

There are just a few downsides. Using the phone for Internet only uses the slower (2G) GPRS network instead of the 2.5G EDGE network, which is itself slower than EVDO (3G) which I could have used if I'd stayed with Sprint. (Here's a good guide to all the different G's of wireless technology.) The modem won't work over Bluetooth, at least not yet. And I can't get Google Calendar, but this is Google Calendar's fault, not the phone's, because mobile access isn't available on any phone.

Now with a fast cable Internet connection, TiVo, and a phone that can easily access email, chat, and maps as well as make quicker calls, I've got voice, text, and video zipping around everywhere!

In the early days of the Internet, there were two types of Internet access: the walled garden "online services" like Prodigy, CompuServe, and what became the most successful of them, AOL; and "raw" Internet access. The first type gave you a managed, controlled, predictable experience. In order to reach users on one of these services, the provider had to work out a special deal. That was time consuming and expensive, but ensured a certain baseline level of quality and decency.

On the other hand, the Internet itself grew to be orders of magnitude larger in the information and services available, because a site operator did not have to get permission from AOL or anyone else. With that freedom came some amount of chaos: there was no guarantee of quality, spam grew, and some even worse stuff. But ultimately, this won out. The managed online services started offering access from their services to the larger Internet, and all but AOL ultimately went out of business, unable to provide greater value than Internet itself where millions of people were creating countless Web sites and services.

Meanwhile, we have another network which is still all "walled gardens" - the cell phone network. As this anonymous entrepreneur writes, creating a service that runs over SMS on a US cell phone network requires the site offering the service to pay thousands of dollars just to have an "aggregator" negotiate with the wireless carriers on your behalf, comply with many asinine and intricate requirements, and wait months for approval. And "unmoderated chatting, flirting and/or peer-to-peer communication services" are prohibited outright by Verizon.

I can create a Web site by paying as little as $20 a month for hosting (free if I just host it on the same server as other sites I run), plus about $9 a year for a domain name. With services like Blogspot or Google Pages, it's free. And if my site doesn't make any money, that's okay. But if it's not profitable for the cell carriers, they won't allow it. When the overhead to create an SMS service and the bar to make it worthwhile are so high, no wonder we haven't had even a tiny fraction of the amount of innovation we have on the Internet.

Fascinatingly, some commenters on that article, who come from the wireless industry world, defend the status quo. One commenter writes that the decency requirements are necessary because of parents who complain to the carriers; another, that because the bandwidth is relatively low, the carriers need to manage the experience to keep out spam and satisfy customers.

It's surely true that for some customers, the purity and cleanliness of a walled-garden experience is desirable. After all, AOL is now building its business around making the Internet safe by blocking spam, viruses, and content unsuitable for children. But consumers have a choice. On the wireless networks, there is no choice. There is no carrier who allows unfettered SMS service creation or allows software developers to release software to install on their phones without restrictions.

Perhaps consumers would still opt for the safer, more managed networks, but I believe they wouldn't. After all, last time consumers has this choice, they chose the wilder but more innovative network. Let's give them the choice again and see what happens.

I have Verizon's "BroadbandAccess" EVDO wireless service with an unlimited plan. When I started the lease on my new place, I decided to try using the Internet through Verizon when there, rather than purchasing DSL or cable.

So far? Based on my subjective experience, it's almost as fast as cable was, and noticeable patches of slowness (unfortunately somewhat common with Optimum cable modem service) area few and far between. Yesterday I downloaded some big files with BitTorrent, and they downloaded comparably quickly to cable. Latency over SSH is a little worse, which is noticeable when I code, but not bad enough to be a real obstacle.

Unless things change, it's bye bye wire-based Internet service, and one more utility company I don't need to deal with any more.

A culture and economy of innovation, such as that which grew up in Silicon Valley and elsewhere and created so many great technological products, is widely touted as one of the greatest American assets. But I believe this is much more fragile than many people realize.

We had revolutionary innovation in personal computer software and on the Internet. But these were possible only because both supported anyone building anything to run on them - you could write any software for a computer without requiring permission from Microsoft or Apple, and could deploy any Web site without running it by anyone.

This doesn't exist on other platforms such as cell phones and cable set-top boxes. One can only run software on a cell phone that is approved by a carrier. And it's nearly impossible to write software to extend the capabilities of a cable set-top box - only the cable company can deploy features there. And not surprisingly, we have very little innovation. My cell phone can't display my voice mail messages in an on-screen UI, and I can't get software which remembers what shows I watched and lets me email them to my friends. The list of things one can't do goes on and on, whereas on the Internet, as soon as someone thinks up some new application, there it is.

Walt Mossberg calls wireless carriers "the new Soviet ministries." They are acting in their own best interest, but not the best interest of the consumer. Media companies love controlled "walled gardens," because it's orderly, with everything a consumer sees being determined by a set of business deals. If it makes enough money, it happens, and if it doesn't, then it's not worth the gatekeepers' while. But the small developer gets shut out of this process, and thousands of clever applications which wouldn't make a lot of money but would make people's lives better never get built.

This becomes an especially big problem when media companies lobby Congress for new laws, laws which further entrench monopolies and help the larger players while making life harder for the true innovators, or worse yet, imposing enormous legal risks. When the Induce Act was being debated, I spoke to a legislative staffer for a prominent Senator who said they were staying away from that bill because the media industry and electronics industry didn't agree. That was great in that case since it killed a terrible bill, but what happens when Congress considers a measure which big media companies and big electronics companies all support, but hurts innovation? Who stands up for innovation? Should venture capitalists band together to create a pro-entrepreneurship lobbby? What about the open source developers who don't raise venture capital - who will stand up for them?