Wireless Industry Cozying Up To the Disruptors

PreacherTom writes, "As recently as a few months ago, the wireless industry showed little apparent interest in partnering with companies like Sling, Skype, and ISkoot. After all, they make products that threaten to compete with services that mobile-phone companies are eager to sell. Times are changing, at first in Europe and perhaps soon in the U.S. A few days ago, Sling Media's CEO sat down with execs from Hutchison Whampoa, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson for discussions. Skype isn't far behind, while ISkoot is in 'advanced discussions.' According to analyst Krishna Kanagarayer, 'This could turn the U.S. wireless industry on its head. The advent of mobile access to full-blown home PC and TV applications could lead to a revamp in pricing of wireless service providers' data plans, possibly to tiered pricing. And as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable.'"

Communication

[Archangel Michael]

Most people don't really understand what the whole internet idea is, in its most basic form. They only realize what it can do for them by the services it offers (web, email, bitorrent etc). When one realizes what the Internet truly offers, communication, then it becomes clear what what the possibilities truly are.

Anything that can be imagined as getting two things talking to each other is the basics of the Internet, everything else is specifics. Wireless, Optical, copper are all mediums for that communication, nothing more, nothing less.

As mediums become more ubiquitous, and as they start to overlap, it just provides greater continuity of the communication which enables forms of communication that were previously impossible without the overlap and continuity.

Something I once discovered for my self (though in a completely unrelated sector), is that if it takes too long to do something, you just don't do it. If it takes 7 days to download a movie (dialup) while it is possible to do it, most people didn't. Now that it takes a couple of hours or less, people are starting to consider it. A couple of years ago, it took 6 hours to encode a CD to MP3, now it takes just a few minutes.

Because of the increase in bandwith, the ubiquitous connection, we are starting to see new means of communication which were impossible only a few years ago. It is inevitable. And things that take days or long hours today, will shortly be available for the average person. Those are the things we should be looking at.

Don't cozy, just die

[duranaki]

I don't want them to cozy up.. I want them to fight tooth and nail to keep their over-priced our-services-or-no-services mentality until they are driven out of business.

I hope this is good news

[troll -1]

The industry needs to get out of the old 20th century phone system mentality and become part of the Internet. I bought a Treo 650 from Sprint a while back. Recently I switched to Cingular but had to buy another phone because the one from Sprint doesn't work on Cingular's network.

Could you imagine if the Internet had been designed and implemented by private industry? It would be a whole bunch of separate networks and you'd be nickel and dimed for every service.

Phone systems are just plain dumb.

Critical mass

[EmbeddedJanitor]

First off, the apparent lack of interest thus far is only that, an **apparent** lack of interest. They've probably being cuddling in private for many years, just waiting for the right moment.

There is also a good reason to hold hack a bit. Nobody wants to flood the world with gear that goes obsolete very quickly. If they'd been trying to roll these plans out even two years back, the whole scheme would have flopped. It is better to hold back a bit until the critical mass/killer app point is reached. Also, a couple of years back, things were still blurry enough that people would have not understood Wifi vs cell phone (like some dumbfucks still don't understand Wifi vs Bluetooth). People (consumer level) are now getting sufficiently sophisticated to understand what Wifi is.

Now is the time to scramble in this space.

as it should be

[User 956]

And as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable.

As it should be. I think most of us here have only been waiting for this to happen for about 10 years. The fact that it's gone on for so long like it has is actually kind of surprising. (or not, depending on how cynical you are about corprate profiteering)

Misleading Summary

[mpapet]

Wireless providers like cingular may add those features, but will do so at extremely high rent to end-users.

Look at music download service provided by the wireless vendors. Bandwidth is very expensive for those mobile phones, so I expect slightly higher prices than Apple but not the ridiculous prices they have now.

Mobile phones and the SIM chips in them have fantastic capabilities that can't be touched by entrepreneurs. Interoperability and outside innovaters are to be discouraged at all costs. The wireless providers like it that way. Java/j2me certainly didn't solve the problem.

Re:Mesh shouldn't require WiFi?

[Anonymous Coward]

While all too fascinating of a science project, mesh networks (or at least exclusively mesh networks) are NOT designed to (despite claims of the vendors) and will never become any sort of carrier class service.

From the random rules of behavior, you are going to leave someone without service when enough of the mesh migrates from one side of their map to another. You can not sell services which you might or might not have depending on what your neighbors are doing. That's a theoretical communal network at best (and therefore logically "free" because everyone shares in the facilitation of the service), but that does not make it saleable "commercial grade" or worth its weight in salt.

Yes, "labratory tests" will prove otherwise, but I fear that in the very near future, a lot of people will have learned this very expensive lesson through "real world" results, rather than what the too-excited manufacturers paid to be the result of the "exhaustive testing".