For those of you not keeping track of telecommunications news, the FCC just auctioned off the 700Mhz band of the wireless spectrum. It was a silent auction, rather than the enjoyble, from a people watching perspective, variety. Also, it was anonymous, and therefore significantly more mysterious. And mystery is awesome, right? Well, there probably isnt a whole lot of awesomeness in a room full of telecom lawyers doing math and wagering billions of dollars on the rights to a particular frequency of EM radiation.
Oh, yes, BILLIONS of dollars. Verizon managed to win the much-talked about C-Block for $9.4 Billion. The C-Block is apparently the block of spectrum most easily used by current wireless tech and therefore was sought after much in the same way a room full of drunks will scramble for the last beer. A really delicious beer, that brought in over half of the $16 billion the auction posted overall.
At some point after announcing their competitor to Apple's iPhone, albeit more of a competitor to the OS, as they seem to eschew the hardware world, Google announced their interest in the C-Block and then followed up with scraping some loose change together to back it up. Needless to say, I think a GooglePhone Network would be pretty awesome and I would drop my current carrier in a heartbeat should such a thing have come to pass. Alas, it did not and Verizon has walked away with that delicious last beer.
But there is a small victory for Google in all of this, and that is the open access requirement of the C-Block. Essentially this means that Verizon will be required to permit 3rd-party hard and software open access to its network, will be prohibited from engaging in any vendor lock-in with the hard and software it sells, and will be further prohibited from using any kind of network administration shenanigans to make unlocked and other 3rd party devices and software less desirable. Or, in other words, a significant portion of the typical telco sales arsenal is utterly banned within the C-Block.
Now, I've been a loyal Sprint customer for the past 8 years. They don't fuck me over too hard, and in return I don't shop around. But my current phone has T9 that won't learn new words and the media functions have been locked off so as to prevent me making my own ringtones. Granted I hardly ever have my phone on anything but vibrate, but if I could import some awesome video game themes or the Hawaii 5-0 song, or something equally awesome for free, I fucking would. But I can't. And that makes me SadBeard.
So my plan, and I encourage everyone to join me, is to compile a list of complaints, wait for Verizon to get off its ass and market this shiny new toy of theirs, and for Google's Android to become an actual product, find a sweet phone onto which Android might be installed, then go to your provider with an ultimatum: fix my complaints, totally and without charging me a penny more, or I'm ditching and going to this new network where Verizon is prevented from fucking me over too hard and where I'll have this sweet gPhone.
Granted, there remains some confusion about how the open access rules would be implemented. It all depends on how Verizon decides to use the spectrum. Should the C-Block be used by devices that also access Verizon's existing networks, which set of rules will they abide by? I think we can safely assume that Verizon will opt for trying to force the existing lack of open access rules to spill over as much as possible. The issue will likely be tied up in litigation for years and blah, blah, blah. I, however, will continue fantasizing about that wonderful call to Sprint Customer Service.
Granted, there remains some confusion about how the open access rules would be implemented. It all depends on how Verizon decides to use the spectrum. Should the C-Block be used by devices that also access Verizon's existing networks, which set of rules will they abide by? I think we can safely assume that Verizon will opt for trying to force the existing lack of open access rules to spill over as much as possible. The issue will likely be tied up in litigation for years and blah, blah, blah. I, however, will continue fantasizing about that wonderful call to Sprint Customer Service.
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