Columbia Professor: Cell Phone Carriers Limiting Innovation

Information Week pointed to a Columbia professor, Timothy Wu, who has published an opinon paper on the business policies of cell phone companies and how they inherently limit innovation.

“[Cell phone carriers have a] practice of only enabling handsets they have approved and locked to their networks.” Wu’s argues, “[they] are using the practice to block or control the roll out of handset features including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, advanced SMS, browsers, legal photo and sound file transfer capabilities and call timers.”

These gripes are no surprise to anyone who has used Verizon and been disappointed that features have been disabled or handicapped on their phones in order to push more business to Verizon’s Get It Now and VCast options. Typically these services are much less advanced and functional but are billed by the month, or worse, by the minute! I’m so sick of being nickled and dimed by Verizon but here in Vermont we don’t have much of a choice. AT&T/Cingular and T-Mobile don’t operate here, not that they’re much better. Only other option is Unicell or Sprint and in my experience in the past, and according to friends and business associates that currently use them, both remain very unreliable outside the few population centers in the State.

[tags]cell phones, cellular plans, cellular companies, verizon, at&t, cingular, t-mobile, unicell, sprint, gps, wifi, sms, iphone, cellular phone[/tags]

usrbingeek is a Commercial, Wedding, and Portrait Photographer in Vermont and is also a Global Admin on the WyldRyde IRC Network. WyldRyde offers a free chatroom that can be added to any web site or blog and is home to the Lockergnome Chat.