How Many Cellphones Do You Have In Your Closet?

I have a number. I know right where they are, with their chargers and owner manuals. Once I signed up for another year or two and got the shining new phone, I didn’t think about them again.

I know they were free, or quite cheap, given the service commitment and the monthly price. Throw-a-ways, like a malfunctioning VCR, DVD player or TV.

But the wireless world, boys and girls, is a changin’. Two things are helping or hurting the current model, depending on your viewpoint. The Government which owns our air is going to auction TV “spectrum” that is now reserved for broadcast UHF. For those of you that are young, Google the term. You’ll be amazed to know that TV’s used to have two knobs that clicked as you turned them. I know, I know, don’t believe me, go, find out from the company that does no evil. Soon there will be no analog TV. The spectrum needed for digital broadcast TV will be much less than is now reserved for it. The Feds are going to sell it to the wireless companies.

Said non-evil company is lobbying to set the rules for the auction so that bidders for the spectrum have to agree to not tie equipment to access to service. Kind of like open source software, but not quite.

And now, Verizon has announced that it will voluntarily offer two ways for customers to use its air. What we have now and the new Verizon “BYOC” model (C standing for cellular device). I think, Verizon doesn’t want to be mandated to open its air and it is getting ahead of the curve, I think also, a good thing.

As an example of the difference this makes, think of the world today if Microsoft had been able not to just steal its operating system and make it the dominant system in the world, but if a law said that if you want to operate a computer or access the Internet you have to use Windows. Though not as dominant as the Evil Empire, wireless transmission today is dominated in the U.S. by AT&T, Verizon, Sprint/Nextel and T-Mobile (?), the first two by far the dominant players. If you want access to their systems, you buy their devices. Period. End of discussion.

This has led to the pipeline providers dictating what the device providers offer. Think of all the ads that the wireless companies run telling you that you can get a Razr, now an I-Phone, etc. but only if you sign a two year contract with them and only them.

Actually I just thought of another major event in this shift, the I-Phone. Apple, the device provider had the upper hand in its relationship with AT&T, the pipeline provider. Think of Apple, Nokia, Samsung and Motorola competing with each other for all of the market, unfiltered by the deals they now have to make with the wireless companies. If a device maker like Apple was faced with a market of other makers that used 3G transmission for a similar product, do you think I-Phones would be limited to Edge? I don’t. (All of AT&T’s other wireless products have 3G, why limit the I-Phone to the slower Edge? I don’t know but it wouldn’t happen if there were real competition for the best device over the entire wireless market.)

No big finish here, I just think there will be some interesting changes coming as I type this post on my Dell laptop, about to send it to Blogger over my AT&T wireless broadband connection that costs too much – maybe soon I can threaten to move to Verizon, something I can’t do now without buying a different card that works on Verizon’s network and then sign up for a couple of years of servitude. There’s the word to wrap this up, servitude. Thank God Almighty, we may be free at last.