Death of the Cell Phone
It seems to me that the death of the regular cell phone is just around the corner. With FCC just voting to allow unregulated white space access in the TV broadcast spectrum, Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, Intel, Dell, HP, Oracle, IBM, Amazon could all blanket the country with their own so called Super Wi-Fi (as an integral part of the Cloud computing strategy) and give away a handheld device at a subsidized cost to access that Wi-Fi for a nominal monthly charge. Consumers could choose to allow targeted location based ads in exchange for a subsidized device and lower access charges. Businessses could opt for a ad free envirnonment and just pay for the device and access charges. This would be a game changer.
Google’s stake in Clearwire and the recent departure of Sprint executives from Clearwire board would seem to indicate that Google might be planning a super Wi-Fi using the clearwire network (setting it all up from scratch might take too long and be very capital intensive). Google already has the massive distributed data centers that would be an enabler for this super Wi-Fi (in addition to the white spaces in TV spectrum).
Others mentioned above and some of the existing Telcos could certainly do the same (using GSM and/or CDMA in combination with white spaces in TV spectrum). They do have the capability and more importantly, the capital.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
