Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
So Julius Genachowski is set to make my life miserable by allowing all of the craziness of open Internet to come to the wireless industry. This open Internet craziness has got to stop. I’ve been against an open Internet ever since it became OK for stupid little bloggers to steal stories from hard-working journalists and post them as their own. (See, before the Internet we called that plagiarism. You may know it by its more common term, stealing.) Stealing is bad. But if you steal on the Internet, you just have to say who you’re stealing from and it’s all good.
But I digress.
So when RCRWireless.com relaunched, I had to decide what to do about the home office’s telecom system. Cellphone only? Second cellphone just for work? Second line into the house? Cable-based voice? Well, I wasn’t going to use a landline – that’s so 2008. In the end, I chose Skype. I heart Skype. Most of my experience with Skype has been limited to international calling. I somehow ended up with a $30,000,000 cellphone bill a few years back when I attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And I’m guessing a few other CDMA subscribers also had $30,000,000 phone bills. I was lured into renting cheap in-country calling. The only problem was I wasn’t actually meeting with anyone from Spain, so I ended up paying international long-distance rates every time I connected with one of my colleagues. (Speaking of stealing… ) Anyone who has been to MWC knows that you spend most of your time calling contacts to explain why you’re running 20 minutes late to each appointment. Little did I realize that when Bill Clinton said for every 1% increase in cellphone penetration rates, a country’s GDP also increased, it was because the country held a trade show and offered rental cellphone service for cheap local calling. If California really wanted to solve its budget woes it would launch a new technology (TD-SCDMA anyone?) and then start promoting international trade shows where 50,000 people simultaneously get lost moving from building A to building B. Budget crisis solved. (Hey, maybe that’s the real reason China is launching TD-SCDMA. And here I thought that technology was stupid. Stupid genious! Watch, the next big wireless trade show will be in Beijing.)
But I digress.
A few years later, I used Skype in Barcelona. OMG you can spend $30 (notice just the one 0) to call your family back home and connect with colleagues. How does Skype stay in business? Is it out to kill the GDPs of several small countries with its pain-free voice? Is it even legal? Is it why all the commercial carriers hated Wi-Fi right up until the minute they bought all the Wi-Fi companies?
So I got Skype for the home office. Now Skype may be good to call from Spain to Colorado, but it seems to be a bit more temperamental when calling from Colorado to Colorado – or anywhere else in the continental United States. Of course, there’s no pattern to its bad behavior. It randomly skips, so people can only hear about every other word I say. Fellow RCR Wireless News Editor Dan Meyer is fine with this and would like it to actually start skipping sentences instead of mere words, but some people find it irritating. (Did you ever notice how Skype resembles the word skip? Coincidence? I think not.)
It’s starting to affect my self esteem. Do I sound OK? Can you hear me OK? Do I seem paranoid? Did I make it through that call without skipping-every-other-word syndrome? Forget asking intelligent questions during an interview, I’m exhausted by the third time I’m asked to repeat myself.
But I digress.
Now Orange Julius GenoSkypeokowski wants to let any app run on the wireless network. Skype’s already got an iPhone and BlackBerry app, but wants world dominance. So does a little company that launched another wireless VoIP app called Google. Now I’m starting to connect the dots here. We’re going to have ubiquitous wireless VoIP! Time to panic! Why, you ask? Because voice is just another application on the network and once it can be delivered wirelessly, I’ve been told you could start a conversation, get into the elevator, where of course, the call will drop, but once you get out of the elevator, the call automatically reconnects and you can continue the conversation. Whose brain works like that? You know whose? Engineers.
So there I was at PCIA in Nashville last week listening to Verizon Wireless CTO Anthony Melone talk about eventually putting VoIP on its LTE network. Oh, sure, he promised there’s a lot of life left in the works-perfectly-fine, stable CDMA network, but the problem with cellular engineers is they keep making progress. I interviewed Melone about VZW’s test VoIP calls on his LTE network and you know what he said? It worked about as well as can be expected in a trial with no one else on the network. (I was too polite to say, “That bad, huh?”)
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–Fresh off rumors that Deutsche Telekom was going to buy Sprint Nextel comes speculation this week that DT is now going to buy MetroPCS. Timing is everything, people. Do you realize we’re in the middle of the busy fall trade-show season? We don’t have time for this. Go back to your calendars and find some open time, preferably after the CTIA IT show please, to see how the financial markets respond to potential announcments.
–This has nothing to do with wireless, but I just returned from PCIA and think there should be a mandatory boycott of all hotels that don’t stock hotel rooms with coffee pots. I don’t want room-service coffee in a fancy, schmancy silver pot that takes 30 minutes to deliver. And no one wants to see me walking down a hall in a public place like a hotel before I’ve had coffee. I want to hear my coffee dripping and gurgling in a 4-cup plastic black pot that probably hasn’t been cleaned ever but it’s black so you really can’t tell.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at Tracy Ford.
