Sunday, September 16, 2007

Why American Telecom companies are terrible

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6207854.html

Just to sum up as briefly as I can: When the FCC pushes all television to the digital over the air signal, it will open up a 700 mHz frequency. This frequency is very attractive to carriers because of the overall strength of the signal. It can travel very long distances and go through dense objects like concrete walls (remember, it worked on all homes for TV signal). A group of people, including Google, pushed the FCC to make this a public auction. Simply put, any company that gets acess to this signal can all of a sudden become a major provider threat. Imagine if you will, US Cellular getting a huge chunk of this new band makes them a legit 4th provider (AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint are the only ones we really have). So, in order to keep their lock of the market, Verizon (who it's worth noting is the carrier who cripples handsets the most) decides to sue the FCC's decision to allow users to connect to this network with whatever device they choose.

Yes, it's unconstitutional for American Consumers to have a choice of devices to get their cell phones. We all know that American consumers are forced to use the worst and most locked down phones in the world. It's why I have friends that leave to go overseas to pick up the phones they want that are more powerful, have more functionality, and aren't crippled by American carriers lockdowns.

At some point the US is going to have to change to a different model, much like we do with Televisions and Cable providers. Consumers buy the TV they want and put it on the cable/satellite provider that they choose. Phones should follow the same. Granted a user may pay more for a phone then, but they won't be locked into any sort of contract and would have more freedom of choice. And as a Capitalist market, shouldn't that be what we want?

2 comments:

Nelson said...

This sounds so similar to how they buried fiber optics, using litigation to tie up a service that would be beneficial to everyone. It makes me sick that companies can stop a better product from coming out, by using our laws.

So Verizon will hold this up as long as they can (for years) in court, so they won't have to compete with a better product. I wish I could sue there asses for holding back a better product for there own personal gain.

Timothy Pontious said...

Or, if the FCC had any sort of spine, they could just put the smackdown on what technologies are in, which are out, and everybody else can just go reboot their SCO servers and try again.

The FCC won't be changing though until after the next election, and by then it may be too late to undo much of this.