USA Today’s Leslie Cauley has this piece today about a telecom policy debate that so far has been pretty inside-baseball: U.S. carrier control over locked and closed cell phones. The iPhone, among its many accomplishments, has provided the perfect excuse for berating the antiquated U.S. mobile phone system that allows carriers to lock down phones so that the devices work exclusively on their networks.
Public interest group Free Press has taken advantage of the fact that the iPhone, an object of much lust, is available only on AT&T’s network by launching freetheiphone.org. This offshoot group, given a lot of play in Cauley’s piece, wants the feds to open up our wireless service so that consumers can use any device and any application they want with any mobile service plan.
That’s the way they do it in Europe and Asia, where advanced services on mobile devices is a way of life. In the U.S., carriers routinely ask device makers to strip out advanced functions, such as Wi-Fi access, that compete with their costly service options.
The downside to opening up handsets and enabling application side-loading: more costly devices. In the U.S., as Cauley points out, cell phones are subsidized, even to the point of being no-cost, in exchange for the long-term, exclusive contracts carriers demand.
It sounds like FreePress and Skype and Google and others who seek to end the 20th Century practices have a friend in FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin demurs on whether more regulation is needed, but he admits to some frustrations. “Some innovative services are not becoming as available in the United States as they are abroad,” Martin says. “That is a trend I am concerned about.”
Martin did his part to move things along when he built into the 700 MHz auctions a plan for allowing at least some openness in wireless services. Google, which promised to bid $4.6 billion on the upcoming spectrum if the 700 MHz auction had been structured to deliver even more openness than the FCC delivered, could be a big proponent for change in the wireless game.
Speaking yesterday at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s big telecom policy get-together in Aspen, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that his company would “probably” move ahead with its plans anyway, even though the 700 MHz auction rules didn’t give Google everything it wanted in terms of openness. (Gigaom’s Paul Kapustka is there and has this item on Schmidt’s appearance before the policy wonks.)
With the iPhone provoking anger from high-end consumers who hate AT&T’s network but love the new device, and with Google likely to reshape the wireless business with its 21st Century ideas, how long can carriers keep the U.S. mobile phone system closed? Probably not much longer.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:57 AM|Comments(0)
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