Wireless Industry Cozying Up To the Disruptors 32
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.'"
No one wants to be last (Score:4, Interesting)
The mesh-network internet is coming, sooner or later (my money being on later, especially in this country, but my point still stands) and any wireless provider who doesn't have a piece of it will be irrelevant. When WiFi connectivity is as ubiquitous as the cellular network, or frankly even before that, people will go to WiFi+VoIP in droves because it won't require that you, like, spend any money. What could be better than that?
This is of course why providers are willing to sell cellphones with WiFi. At least that way they get some money out of the hardware.
Critical mass (Score:3, Insightful)
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 c
Mesh shouldn't require WiFi? (Score:2)
I thought the whole idea with Mesh phones was that they connect directly to each other or route via intermediary Mesh phones. The WiFi thing was only supposed to be a stop-gap for calls between cities or until enough people had mesh phones and we reached a critical density where the cellular carriers became unnecessary. I have no idea how the routing would work, but that's what I thought the idea was.
If this is, indeed, the way that it is supposed to work, then I doubt Mesh pho
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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 bes
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Now, whether or not that pipe dream will ever come about? Your guess is as good as mine. The concep
Communication (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Eh? back in 99, I had my whole CD collection ripped at at least 24x, taking no more than 10-20 minutes each...
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Sorry to be annoying, but you hit on one of my pet peeves. "A couple" means two. No more, no less.
MP3 encoding hasn't been a multi-hour excursion since the early days of the Pentium-I.
Don't cozy, just die (Score:3, Insightful)
Disrupters? K'pla! (Score:5, Funny)
The grass is not all green, of course ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not if the Baby Bells and the likes of SBC/AT&T have anything to say about it.
Not quite true re wireless industry (Score:1, Interesting)
I hope this is good news (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
as it should be (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
Communication vs. telephones (Score:2)
The first is basic functionality and reliability. Right now people put up with disconnects all the time on data connections. What? That page didn't load? Click it again! To some extent, the software could make up for some failures simply with more and better error handling rather than just dumping it out on the user. But that doesn't solve the problem 100%.
The second is an economic one. Most of the telecommunications that the Inte
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I could not agree more.
"Most of the telecommunications that the Internet relies on was bought and paid for because of telephone services."
I somewhat disagree. Much of today's telephone infrastructure was put in with TAXPAYER money. Telephone, cable, and other utilities are MONOPOLIES that effectively charge whatever they think they can g
Re:Communication vs. telephones (Score:4, Informative)
Misleading Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Isn't it already starting? (Score:4, Interesting)
I use it several days a week. It still has downsides - like all cheap service it suffers from "Gravity Well" syndrome. Inbound data is free, fast, and cheap. Output data is difficult, slow, and expensive.
My point is, I'm already using the cell networks for more data than voice. A lot more. I could (if I wanted) make voip calls over the cell networks but why? It's just as cheap to do it by cell phone "out of band".
What I really really wish for -- what would be WAY better -- is if telcos and wireless telcos would make use of DUNDi lookups. That would allow those of us with VOIP phones to receive calls which never transit the public networks. The cell carrier would check the DUNDi service and see that when dialing my number they could bypass the public network and just connect with a voip call directly.
Most don't do this now. Even though it would save them money on cross-connection (after all, they have to connect to the PSTN as well) they're more afraid of being bypassed themselves then of spending the extra money.
As a result, I have to pay a monthly fee essentially for the address routing which is my PSTN telephone number.
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Breakaway Carriers (Score:1)
They will do that only when they see that their subscriber base diminishing. And the data services will not entice users to these one's: the voice services will. The phone is still primarily used for talking, not surfing the web or vie
Bits are bits (Score:3, Informative)
One can only hope. This is my major beef with the US mobile carriers. Voice and data have been equal in the rest of the world since the 90's.