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:
The wireless industry used to be fairly straightforward: You had a network, some software, a device or two (one being the Motorola Razr) and two technologies. The Federal Communications Commission regulated it all and every once in awhile, someone in Congress or a president stepped in on some issue of great importance. You had one judge, Judge Greene, who broke up Ma Bell. And every time something changed, journalists would get to write: “Judge Greene must be turning over in his grave.”
Ah, the predictability of the good old days. Now, it’s just change, change, change. Crazy-headed institutions like the U.S. Library of Congress are doing things that impact the wireless industry. When did that happen? The chief librarian—shouldn’t he only be sshsshing us and ruling on Kindle Nooks – said it’s OK to “jailbreak” the iPhone. First off, should the chief librarian be using a word like “jailbreak” since it means an escape from prison, not an escape from the App Store? Well, actually, being a librarian, which we all know are strict rule enforcers, he is saying that technically, it is not a violation of copyright law to jailbreak a handset.
But if that’s not weird enough, wireless is going into everything. I now have to pay attention to e-mails from Ford Motor Co., because wireless is getting installed in some cars. Ford uses words like “infotronics,” which makes jailbreak look like a normal word. I spent significant time this morning to try to put two words that don’t make sense together to see if I could be clever too – only to conclude that I am not clever (which is why I rarely write Worst of the Week and vow to never have Dan go on vacation on a week Apple is not introducing something.) Where’s this week’s antennagate?
Descriptions don’t make sense any more either. Take Qualcomm, for instance. We used to write “CDMA innovator” Qualcomm. While that’s still true, we can now say: “Indian wireless operator Qualcomm, which is now partnering with enterprise operator Tulip Telecom.” If I wrote that a few years ago, people would think it was a joke. I still had to check the date of the press release to make sure it wasn’t April 1. (Tulip?)
Worlds are colliding, I tell you, and the end result will not be pretty. It’s like when Independent George explained that Relationship George would kill independent George. Nokia Siemens Networks claims to be the world’s second largest wireless operator, Alcatel-Lucent exhibiting at South by Southwest. It’s crazy.
Actually, it’s just because wireless technology is so awesomely popular. There was actually a column in the Denver Post earlier this week lamenting that the “culture has been focused on new phone and pad technology; now, as summer winds down, good old television has its moment in the spotlight.”
This brings me to government, of course. Everyone wants a hand in wireless because it’s all that. Right now at the federal level efforts are under way to implement the National Broadband Plan, find a third way to regulate the wired and wireless Internet, steer development of wireless medical devices through a joint effort between the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, pass a Senate bill that would speed spectrum reallocation efforts, find a way to speed up microwave backhaul deployments and pass a House bill that would enable voluntary incentive auctions. With that many people trying to help wireless broadband, what could go wrong?
Seems like we can all sit back and read about the fall TV lineup.
