More and more, the world around us reflects the growing assumption of the law of mobility. Each week we will track indicators of Mobility’s growing importance in our businesses, our lives, and our society:
- Google spending hundreds of millions on mobile
- London Olympics to encourage citizen journalism?
- Microsoft: “in the mobile business in a big way”
- ABI says: Nationwide WiMax plans good for consumer electronics
- A billion mobile ads
Full list here.
The Google bid for spectrum is really interesting. In many ways, what they are suggesting is similar to Sprint’s MVNO strategy, except that Sprint was more selective than Google claims it will be. I’m not sure about this but I suspect that Google, if they win the license, will be forced to create some sort of restrictions to prevent major bandwidth hogging.
I used to have a Verizon EVDO card; my company recently switched us over to Sprint Rev A cards. With the Verizon card, I found that I was frequently being kicked off the Internet; they could not provide an explanation. I ended up finding out that they limit their unlimited data by kicking you off, except for e-mail, once you’ve exceeded a certain amount. Sprint doesn’t appear to be doing the same.
The analogy, I feel, is that if Verizon felt that they had to prevent true all you can eat data usage, wouldn’t that be moreso the case for an “open access” provider?