Walt Mossberg wants the US Government to sort out mobile industry
Mike Masnick over at Techdirt posted this yesterday. He’s commenting on Walt Mossberg, the noted Wall Street Journal tech columnist, who’s pushing for US Government intervention in the mobile phone marketplace.
It’s an interesting — and rather contentious perspective:
Link: Techdirt: Walt Mossberg Pushing For Gov’t Intervention In The Mobile Phone Market
Walt Mossberg has been talking about this for a while, but his latest column follows a few other recent calls for the government to step in and mandate more open wireless networks. The idea is that mobile networks should be more like the wider internet. That is, when you buy a computer, you don’t buy one locked to a particular ISP, or with only what that ISP wants you to access included. That openness has resulted in tremendous innovation in the PC, internet and software worlds — and it’s quite likely that a similar openness would lead to much more innovation in the mobile space as well.
Walt’s right — the interoperabilty, the compatibility, the openness is definitely what heavily contributed to the success of computer industry. (Apart from Apple….. or… well, even Apple standardised on the likes of USB, Firewire and so on).
Mike adds:
The problem, though, is that it’s really not that simple.
And he’s right. It’s not as simple as calling for openness. There’s so much going on across the marketplace and the dynamics are, at best, difficult to pinpoint exactly.
Do you subsidise every handset? Yes or no. Do you lock the handset to the network? How do you handle the mobile phone look-up if you’re using T-Mobile one day and chatting away on Vodafone the next?
What’s more is that we have both CDMA and GSM networks here in America, and they’re both just as big in terms of coverage. Thus, you’d really need a CDMA/GSM handset. However, the CDMA operators in the States both opted to not use R-UIMs (SIM cards to those on GSM) so each handset is still activated by the ESN, similar to how it was with TDMA. This only adds to consumer confusion, “So these phones will work with T-mobile or AT&T, but these will only work with Verizon and Sprint?”
Also as you mentioned there’s so much else going on in the marketplace. Since our operators give us all kinds of free minutes (free nights and weekends, free Mobile-to-mobile, nights starting as early as 6pm!, etc) they only subsidize the handsets by ~$150 for a 2-year contract.
Personally, I’ve suggested in several different forums that at least ONE carrier begin to offer a monthly discount rather than a subsidized handset. Thus, when you pick your phone, you have 2 options:
1. Pay $150 for the phone, 2 year contract, $40/month
2. Pay $250 (or full retail) for the phone, 2 year contract, $40/month with a 10% discount for the length of the contract. When your contract expires, so does your discount. To get another discount, sign another contract.
That way, people get accustomed to buying handsets at full price and the manufacturers have more reason to innovate, consumers are more likely to renew their contract to get a discount as opposed to a new phone, and the carrier is basically getting the same overall income from the consumer.
Posted by Ricky on October 23rd, 2007 at 7:52 pm.