Are Microsoft, Apple and Google quietly preparing for war with mobile carriers? I think so. With all the advancements in mobile phones in the past 10 years, the part that’s been woefully slow to advance is the phone part. Making calls, placing calls, searching for signal and scrimping minutes hasn’t changed much since the phone came out, because carriers have little motivation for innovation.
I sure as hell hope so. I remember years ago thinking we were on the verge of ubiquitous wireless internet access at reasonable prices. Instead we have ridiculous prices, crummy availability and bandwidth caps on the only network that even comes close to the speeds of a home broadband connection. It’s infuriating to see how little we’ve moved in the last 5 years. I wish good luck (not in a sarcastic way) to anybody trying to change that.
Me too. I just dropped my landline phone last year, and I am amazed that I can stream videos and music on my cell phone, but the actual voice quality of calls sounds worse than on landline. Shouldn’t the quality of voice calls be better, especially on high end smartphones?
Why should it ? For a very long time, wireless networks had a far worse bandwidth than wired ones, and phones need to keep compatible with the old networks around us.
Let’s just hope that next time we design digital communication protocols, we make sure that they can benefit from future, faster networks, by offering better call quality…
Edited 2011-05-19 12:42 UTC
“you’d be able to get caller ID data for incoming cellphone calls”
WTH! You guys in the US don’t have caller id for cellphones? How primitive! In Pakistan we’ve enjoyed caller id for years. Its free as well.
No, US cell phones have caller ID; they are not quite that primitive. I was confused by that.
Perhaps he meant that the caller ID shows a phone number (or name from your own address book) instead of a name chosen by the caller like you would get on Skype.
Bringing down the industries one at a time, music, movies and telco. I am sure others are on the “hit list” too.
I guess what it means is, if you are a service company, then don’t be evil 🙂 Give great service at competitive rates and Apple, Google, MS and others might leave you alone.
I think for years these organisations have gotten away with murder.
Having said that, I am sure we will replace one crime with another 🙂
People do need fast access to HD quality porn on mobile phones, so that’s why we have 4g now. Phones are using 4g solely for data transfer now.
First, GSM is a standardized norm.
This norm has been adopted almost World Wide by carriers.
2G, 3G, 3GP, 4G, etc cannot move as fast as IT. retro-compatibility is very important.
You don’t want go to Safari in Kenya with your brand new smartphone and don’t be able to place a single call. You will be angry if your phone works perfectly in London but not in Manchester, etc.
Second, investments are very huge in term of facilities. Plus, carriers pay very high price to get a radio license in some countries.
Third, to bring high-speed IP, the carriers must now invest in WAN networks (placing WAN Fibers, High-end routers, redundancy, etc, etc). In bancking/stock markets crisis time, it is not as easy as a snap.
So, my point of view is that take over the job’s carriers will not be as easy as you thing.
I think the author’s point is that companies like Microsoft & Google will have the capacity to completely avoid all those problems you mention because they’ll use technology like Wifi/Wimax that gets things done without worrying about 4G licenses etc.