After seeing David's post on femtocells, I thought I would add my 2 cents in. I've read about femtocells in my tech reading travels before, and to me they sound like a good idea. As long as you're internet connection is good you'll always have guaranteed cell phone coverage at home. But for wireless companies they must sound like a war drum coming from just over the hill.
Think about it, if you asked most people they probably think that cell phones signals and the internet are two separate things. But if people are using these femtocells in their homes because they don't get regular coverage from their wireless providers they might start to think, "Hey, why do I pay this company $200+ a month for a family plan when most of the time I don't even get a signal when I need it, when I could just use the internet?"
This is all fine and dandy when your at home and maybe even work, but what about when your out and your car breaks down? Now a lot of newer cars have onstar so they don't really have to worry but not everyone does. And since its rare to see a pay phone much anymore, you need a cell phone. That's the one thing that the wireless companies have going for them right now, they put all these towers up all over the place so people could carry a phone around with them and call whoever they wanted. This is also the one thing that could bring them down. New phones like the iPhone are able to use a wifi connection when its available instead of using a cell tower. I don't know how much it cost to put the towers up and connect them to networks but I would imagine it was quite a bit, and they are probably still trying to get their money back. So they charge you for things like text messaging when it doesn't cost them a thing for you to send it. Heres a link to an article over at wired about a New York Times article where they talk about how text messages are sent.
With new stuff coming out like Google Voice, I think wireless companies are going to be in for some rough times in the coming years if they don't be careful. The one thing that could almost crush the companies over night would be ubiquitously available wifi that they weren't providing. Cell phones are basically tiny screened computers so there's no reason for them to be tied to cell phone towers when there's perfectly good wifi that it can tap into. With the ability to make free calls over the internet with things like Skype where you get comparable if not better call quality for free, why would you want to keep paying companies that keep raising costs year after year as technology gets smaller and cheaper? As more and more cell phones do everything on the internet, cell phone use will transition away from connecting to towers to using city wide available wifi. And as more and more cities start offering city wide wifi, the drums that the wireless carriers hear will keep getting louder.
Edit:When I started this I didn't really mean it to be a diatribe against wireless providers or quite as long as it turned out to be.
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I'm not sure the scenario you describe above would work so well in rural areas. Wi-Fi uses a frequency that doesn't travel very far, so there would need to be even more Wi-Fi towers than cell phone towers to support a Wi-Fi network. Also who is going to pay for the installation of these Wi-Fi networks?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'm not clear on two comments you made in your post - that cell phone companies are still trying to re-coup the cost of putting up towers, but you lament that they charge for SMS. Don't they have a right/obligation to their shareholders to recover infrastructure investments?
I didn't necessarily mean that Wi-Fi would need to be used, but rural areas already tend to have problems with reception.
ReplyDeleteAs to who would pay for the installation of the networks, don't most people get a free Wi-Fi router when they sign up for internet through a company? Maybe not all companies do this but all the ones I've dealt with have. As part of the internet connection package the routers could come with a dedicated phone channel or something. You could use this as your personal phone connection and/or allow other people to use your channel to make calls. It could be like solar panels and electric companies, you could rent out your channel to people around your location to make a call and they could make a payment or something to use your channel. I don't know how the payment part would work out but someone could come up with an agreeable way I'm sure. By all means, a phone channel on your internet router might add to the cost, so instead of being free you might have to pay $50 or whatever, but you could make that up by allowing people to use your channel, or using your channel to make calls instead of paying for cell phone service.
Yes, companies have an obligation to try to recoup their infrastructure costs, but not by continually increasing the price of a service that costs them nothing to offer and providing a steadily deteriorating service quality. If quality were increasing then I could see the argument for raising prices, but people continue to complain about how badly their calls sound. My calls sound fine to me so I guess I'm in a good area but that isn't the case for everyone.