Tag Archives: wireless networks

Data caps can we get rid of them?

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Changes are afoot in the mobile industry. We’ve been seeing a sea change with how T-mobile looks at their customers. They’ve been changing the contracts and potentially even eliminating them. They’ve separated the phone payment plan from the monthly access fees which is an imortant first step in completely separating the purchase of a phone from the carrier that provides the services. This will eventually reduce the amount of junk files installed because  the carriers can’t force the providers to install them. I think that the reason why the Nexus 7 isn’t on Verizon Wireless is that they are refusing to install the bloatware that the Verizon is trying to force upon Google. I think this is a good thing. Google has also filed a suit against VZW to force them to allow the Nexus 7 on their network. This is going to break the carriers power over the user. Carriers don’t want to be dump pipes for the internet. The wired and cable companies are actively fighting against this by puttng data caps on downloading content. At the same time they’ve experimented with this, the wireless providers have been much harsher. However, these caps weren’t a problem in the past. According to BGR a website that focuses on mobile issues has noted that the amount of data that wireless users has begun to regularly break the data caps. T-mobile has also offered all of their plans without datacaps. This will likely push many data users on verizon and AT&T to switch over to these networks. This will likely put more pressure on the carriers than they have experienced in over a decade. I look forward to this increase in competition especially since I refuse to go over my data caps and greatly limit the amount of data that I use over the wireless networks. I believe we’ll see some interesting changes in the future.

I think that these changes will also preclude the merger of T-mobile and sprint as the US market needs additional competition not less. I think that there will be changes in all of the companies marketing and product offerings, but likely T-mobile will be the largest winner with Sprint in second.

Ubiquitous free high speed wireless: Business

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In my previous blog I discussed some governmental issues with ubiquitous free high speed wireless internet. In this piece I’m going to discuss the impact on businesses. I’ll start with some really obvious impacts and then move into some that may be more interesting.

First, this would effectively kill the current business model for telecoms. Not just internet providers but it would also have a massive impact on telephony and television providers. Internet providers would basically go out of business unless the governments that implemented the network hired them to manage the networks and perform the upgrades required to ensure expected performance. It should also be expected that net neutrality should be the norm as the internet is free as in free beer and as in free speech in a situation like this. This would impact telephony in a similar manner. With free internet phones could be designed to work on wifi (or whatever the network type is) and use services like Google Voice (which is popular in the US and free). These services provide a telephone number as well. Further more skype communication or similar type programs could become the norm as they are free and easy to use. The impact on television would be a continuation of the current system. With Netflix and Hulu driving usage to the web. Without easy access pirating will be the norm and extremely easy.

In the US Starbucks is extremely popular for two reasons, gigantic flavored coffees and free wireless internet. I think in the Dutch context free wireless internet would spur an increase in the amount of business meetings that happen at cafes. With the slow service which is designed to encourage conversation and being social, it would be a great way to work remotely from outside of home. As it stands there aren’t that many places, at least in Eindhoven, that have wireless internet like that. I think it will spur sales at restaurants.

The broadband movement is already increasing the number of people that can work from home and be educated at home. I think there will be some differences though. Mostly because of the freedom that is allowed with the wireless connections. You are able to connect everywhere and anywhere. I think this will create more flexible schedules. I’d be able to work nearly as easily on a train as I would be able to in the office. I would be able to get on a train at the time I’m supposed to be at work get there for some meetings and finish up around the same time just on the train.

I think that there will be more business models based on highly interactive advertisements and user driven actions out in the “wild.” I’ve seen a lot of the QR codes outside of buildings as it is, but I think there will be an increase in the number of these. Users will be more willing to activate them because they are going to get the data from them significantly faster than previously. This will drive traffic to these sites and potentially new jobs from the different types of videos/ads that could be created with them.

I think this will also be something of a technological discontinuity. Broadband at home encourages one type of behavior, but I think there will be very different interactions with broadband everywhere. In the long term there could be a slew of different devices that will take advantage of the continual connections. Clothing could be that could measure the current weather conditions real time which could be uploaded to get real time weather information. We could collect data at levels we’ve never seen it before. This is just one usage of the informational sphere we’ll be living in. There will be a huge number of new applications that will radically shift the way people think about knowledge, information and computing products. Predicting the next wave of technologies based on the wireless web is difficult. It’s likely to be impossible.

However, I think that in my next blog on Computing, we’ll see the largest changes.

Ubiquitous free high speed wireless

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One of the people I follow on twitter posed an interesting question. What would happen if there was free broadband wireless all over Europe. I sent them my 140 character answer but felt really unsatisfied by that. I’m going to devote some blog space to it over the next few days because I think that there would be a lot of changes. I’m going to break this into a few section. I haven’t worked out all of them but there will be government, business, computing and social changes. This structure loosely follows some of the structure within Lawrence Lessig’s Code 2.0. He also argued there were four structures that impact community building on the internet. It is written in the US context, but can be applied in other countries.

I’m going to start with Governmental changes.

One of the first things that will happen will be further encroachments on the ability for users to be anonymous and use pseudonyms online. Initially the requirement to login will be used to track which areas have the highest user rates and things like that, but this could be an incredibly powerful tool to prevent copyright abuse from users of the network. IP addresses would go out the window as an enforcement tool of nearly any online abuses. For instance, the safest place to download a movie from the internet would be on the train. You’d be changing IP addresses frequently and it would be very difficult to track a single user from one IP address to the next.

To deal with these problems there would have to be strict oversight to protect users of the network from invasions of privacy from the government and third party users of the network. Currently, the US government has a significantly heavy hand in collecting data from ISPs, Cloud data and social networking data. This includes both European and US data. This would need to be prevented.

Paying for and managing this network would need to be determined as well. One route could be to put a tax on advertisements that are displayed in a IP address range. Since IPs are distributed through regions this would be technically possible. Google just announced they made $9.7 Billion and nearly all of that is from ads (99% was from ad revenue in 2008). Putting a modest tax on this revenue will help pay for this network. Assuming that this infrastructure would need to be rolled out and continually upgraded I would expect at least $2-3 billion annual investment is required. I’m basing this on how much Verizon Wireless and AT&T invest in their network annually. This of course would change based on the amount of capacity required (a lot) and what technology used (WIFI, Wi-Max, LTE) for the network.

Since, this will effectively kill the business model of the telecoms, like T-mobile and KPN, they could be used to help manage the network. Governments and the like aren’t the best at managing these networks these old companies would be the best suited to manage it. That or create an organization that is based on former employees.

Finally, the network would have to be net neutral. Otherwise, it would effectively be government censorship if there was a reduction in access to any portion of the web. This means that the internet would be free as in free beer and free as in free speech. This would ensure the most positive results from the free internet on the business side and improve ability of users to participate in democracy.

Biggest changes? Management of the network, increased privacy concerns, paying for the network and copyright owners influence on data controls.

In my next blog I’ll discuss how this would change the business environment.