Spectrum of Greed

If you are a wireless executive, this guy is VERY scary!

It is that time of year when everyone starts to think about spooky things, so who can blame Charles Golvin for making the comment that headlines this article?  Golvin is principal analyst with Forrester Research, and he made that remark regarding the reaction of wireless companies to the FCC’s current plan to extend Net Neutrality rules to include wireless providers.  The gentleman to our left here is not the star of the new “Saw” movie, or Halloween 57, or Friday the Thirteenth, part 34 - he is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.  And he is the really, really spooky dude who is causing the big bad wireless providers to seriously reconsider how safe it is to go out and loot the general public with their standard trick or treat activities.  The New York Times talked about it a month ago, and just today the FCC approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Net Neutrality.  This is to those who are advocates for Net Neutrality a day to celebrate, not a day to fear!  Check out the joyous coverage at Savetheinternet.

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Wireless Revenue Juggernaut

It is past April fools, but I couldn’t resist.  AOL isn’t really charging per IM - but cell phone providers are.  As a means to grasp what is going on in the text messaging world, downloading the song Complication by Nine Inch Nails would cost $9,512.50…if you paid current text message rates of .24 per 140 characters of text sent.  That’s right - IMing on a cell phone generates big bucks!  SMS, or text messaging, is the fastest growing part of the cell phone providers product portfolio, and the least costly to provide.  Compared to downloading music or video, the little text messages barely make a blip on the traffic monitors of internet service providers.  This means BIG margins for those that provide text messaging services.  This explains why in America’s toughest economy in more than a decade, cell phone provider profits were up substantially.  Maybe AIG isn’t the only place that a little outrage should be directed.

Gregg Christofferson, who’s 13 year old daughter Dena sent 10,000 texts to friends in the course of a month and received a similar number, received a shocking bill for $4,756.25.  The total amount of data that was moved by the wireless ISP for this charge?  2.67 Megabytes.  If Comcast or another wired ISP charged this for people using IM, the nation would be outraged.  Dad was understandably outraged, and took his frustration out on his daughters cell phone.  Great headlines for the media to play with, but shouldn’t we look a little harder at these incidents?  (continue reading…)

The American people collectively own the most valuable resource of the emerging information economy: the airwaves, also known as the radio frequency spectrum. Yet our nation’s antiquated spectrum policies create an artificial scarcity that reduces innovation and competition, inhibits the rapid deployment of universal wireless broadband services, sacrifices billions of dollars of revenue, constrains citizen access to the airwaves and erodes the public interest obligations of broadcasters and other licensees.

The words above are not mine, they are found on the front of the New America website.  I could not say it any better, so I borrowed their prose.

Until such day as the FCC recognizes this and fixes the atrocity that we currently experience for a wireless marketplace, we have to celebrate the little victories.  Like the ability to take one more step toward use of narrow slivers of bandwidth that lie fallow between broadcast TV channels that are themselves on the decline as the world moves on to alternatives like satellite, cable, DVD, Netflix & online viewing at sites like Hulu. (continue reading…)

Ask blogger Mike Elgan or his son their opinion of AT&T & Apple’s iPhone, and you get the response, “Soup Nazi!”  Tasty, desirable, and served one way no matter what your circumstances.  He also has some clever correlations to the coffee shops and other eateries in the popular comic Seinfeld’s weekly world in a recent blog post he use to blast Apple in particular,  with the cell phone network sustaining only collateral damage. (continue reading…)