The cell phone industry has done an artful job of using its quasi-monopoly status to screw its customers into paying as much, or more, than their cable bill for services that can only be described as pitiful. Worse yet, in their efforts to make sure that we pay dearly for every iota of bandwidth and every minor convenience that they dole out, the carriers are screwing themselves and strangling any real innovation that could keep the wireless industry afloat in the long term.
If you know anything about electronics it's apparent that the cell phones bouncing around in our pockets are not living up to their potential. While they can take pictures, play music, or run a contact database, it's difficult, and sometimes impossible, to make these neat features work in concert with the stuff you already have on your computer. Impossible, at least, until you pay another $10 - $30/month for something that would be free on your laptop. A couple of years ago, I would have chalked up a phone's inability to move music and pictures to my laptop across its Bluetooth link as the early growing pains of a new technology, but recently it's become apparent that the real problems with our phones are not technical.
It turns out that North American cellular carriers are deliberately crippling their phones to keep their customers paying $2 - $3 for songs or ring tones, and 3x - 4x what you'd pay at home for any meaningful data capabilities. A recent study by Columbia law professor Tim Wu provides some very compelling evidence that the cellular carriers themselves are forcing phone manufacturers to deliberately cripple their products so they cannot take advantage of basic functionality available on any laptop or PDA. According to Wu, this "feature crippling" includes simple things like not providing a call time counter to see how many minutes you've used, but has quickly expanded to deliberate disabling of basic Bluetooth modes to keep you from moving your own music onto your phone.
Although feature crippling does a nice job of fattening the pockets of the cellular carriers, it also makes it difficult to move your photos on and off your phone without paying the carrier for the privilege, and often impossible to do simple things like backing up your phone's address book. And while many early smart phones featured Wi-Fi capability, it's nearly vanished as carriers seek to force subscribers to pay another $40 - $100/month if they want even basic Internet access. To get a better sense of just how badly you're getting shafted, you can check out the transcript of a recent radio interview which Dr Wu held. If you want to see why he thinks these practices are not only monopolistic, but also illegal, you can read his excellent paper Wireless Net Neutrality: Cellular Carterfone on Mobile Networks available for download at the Social Science Research Network.
Perhaps, even worse than the immediate inconvenience and cost to consumers is the roadblock to future innovations that feature crippling creates. The painful problems this practice causes can be seen in how they affect Agere's recently-announced BluOnyx, a pocket-sized wireless server. When I reviewed it last December (2006), I was thrilled at how easily it could use a simple Bluetooth (or Wi-Fi) link to allow any Java-enabled cell phone to serve as a control panel to let you store, or stream, data or multimedia to any other handheld device it is linked to. A BluOnyx in your pocket could stream movies or music to your phone or PDA, collect photos off your camera, or serve as a back up for critical data from any handheld device. Unfortunately for Agere, and for the rest of us, the crippled Bluetooth capabilities dictated by the carriers will severely limit what BluOnyx or similar products can do, or even make them impossible to use.
Unless phone makers and semiconductor manufacturers are free to develop products that give users the full benefits of standards-based connectivity and network-neutral Internet access, the mobile phone industry has doomed itself to obsolescence and our nation to a second-rate wireless infrastructure. One can only hope that some recently-initiated legal actions will begin to undo the technologic log jam created by carrier's attempts at monopolizing both the networks they run and the content that flows over them.
In the short term, I'll have to keep giving my cellular carrier the $80+/month I pay for two phones and a modest amount of talk time. But if Cingular, Sprint, Verizon, and the rest of the wireless pirates don't change their ways, I think I'll be cutting back to a bare-bones service plan and looking into alternatives like Wi-Fi phones and VoIP carriers like Skype to handle the bulk of my wireless needs. I'm also eagerly looking forward to the introduction of some of the so-called open-source cell phones that are currently in development. I'd gladly pay $250 - $400 for the OpenMoko or similar device that allowed me to add features and functionality at will and interoperate properly with the rest of my electronic life. Once these devices hit the market it will be interesting to see whether the carriers are successful in keeping them off their networks, or if sanity prevails and the road to wireless innovation is re-opened.
Questions? Comments? Got a Wi-Fi phone or open-source handset you want me to review? Write me at: lhg at en-genius.net.
