Signal to Noise

From Jeff Pulver’s blog:

Skype has asked the FCC to 1) enforce its “Carterfone” rules in the wireless market, 2) to start a rulemaking proceeding to determine the legality of the carriers’ restrictions on subscribers’ full access to Internet-based applications and 3) to oversee a private sector group that would work to set open standards and transparency in wireless networks.

Now then, remember last week when I wrote of T-Mobile CEO Hamid Akhavan:

Truth is, Skype is frustrated that your network sucks, Mr. Akhavan. There’s not enough IP on your network (or any cell player’s network) to support applications that exist in the IP domain, like Skype. So when Niklas complains, he’s really complaining about YOU.

Take a look at Zennstrom’s second point above, from Jeff’s post.  This reinforces my point that the power players in the VoIP software business are frustrated with the wireless carriers, as they are with all the major telcos. Skype has taken this dissatisfaction to the next level by going to the FCC to lobby for institutional change in the regulation of wireless carriers. Right now, these carriers maintain enough power to keep Skype and its contemporaries (Gizmo, etc.) essentially on the sidelines of our national wireless infrastructure. Naturally, Zennstrom wants this barrier removed, and he’s willing to appeal to the FCC to make it happen. Problem is, appeals to the FCC are rarely understood by the bureaucracy, and even more rarely acted upon in a manner that has a lasting beneficial effect for comms consumers.
Continued, increased sophistication of the regulations about what access providers can and cannot do with their networks is only going to make things more difficult, make it harder for those providers to earn a profit, and quell what little innovation is presently occurring at the network and transport layers.

The real solution to the problem of open access–is for one of these big wireless players to establish themselves as a true access network and develop a business plan that’s not pegged to billing for minutes, but rather for providing open access to Internet-based services, including third-party voice products such as Skype. Enforce a little QoS along the way, and you have a golden goose. Consumers will flock to you because of the application choices you guarantee for them by maintaining an open, neutral access network, and third-parties will bend over backwards to promote your access network without any thought of remuneration, because it helps them sell more solutions. Everybody wins. The only thing stopping this is fear: the white-hairs that run these big carriers aren’t sure it can work and unwilling to take such a huge risk. They’d rather collect minutely fees and bang you for overages while thinking you actually care about gimmicks like “free nights and weekends” and “my circles”.
And the end result?  Because of the lack of balls on the part of American wireless carriers, non-Americans like Zennstrom are forced into groveling to American regulatory agencies like the FCC, to the detriment of American consumers. Not a pretty picture, is it?

And here we may come to see that Skype is lacking in the testicular region as well. Then again, who am I to know if they’ve already approached a major wireless carrier with the idea of an open network?

Perusing my Google Analytics, I noticed a 1333% increase in the term ‘myspace sucks‘ over the last week. What’s going on over at MySpace? It’s true that MySpace is often slow as molasses, and I’ve only just started with MySpace Music (which, so far, seems like everything iTunes needs to become, save for MySpace’s hum-drum look and feel). What makes MySpace suck? Is it the ‘unknown errors’ that pop up when you’re trying to reply to a board post, or is it the slow load times, or is it the inexplicably random broken image links that seem to creep into every fifth or sixth page load? Or is it the laughable tech support people? Why does MySpace suck?