Send to Kindle
We live in a world dominated by carriers. While technology in general has been innovating at a fairly rapid pace since the 70s, the consumer technology of tomorrow is reliant on the Carriers’ willingness to play ball. Guess what? They won’t.
The future of computing resides in two areas, touch-oriented operating systems, and the cloud. The carriers have already strangled, customized, and restricted almost every smartphone on the market, even the Google’s own Galaxy Nexus. This atrocity has not been unusual lately with tablets as well, as carriers start to slap data plans onto tablets like the 2012 iPad, but limit what you are able to do with them (i.e. AT&T’s arbitrary tethering restriction). Obviously Apple has some control over carriers, but not as much as you would expect. iOS had included Carrier IQ (as its name suggests, this tool was primarily made for carriers) up until iOS 5, and the tethering feature Apple launched in iOS 4, took one whole year for AT&T to add to the iPhone.
So then what’s the problem? Sure, carriers might be restricting our mobile devices, but the features they’re limiting such as Google Wallet or tethering are mediocre useful at best. None of these features affect the core functionality of the devices, and as long as that isn’t tampered with, we can just use third party options to alleviate our options, right? In a semi-ideal world, that would be the case, but unfortunately, carriers have been slowly planning to absolutely own and profit off of the core functionality of technology as we know it. The issue is data plans. Gone are the days of unlimited data (Sprint is gonna let go any day now) and with that, we lose a major component of future computing: the cloud.
Without mobile, unrestricted access to the cloud, it becomes meaningless. Offering access to files part of the time, will never overtake an option of being able to access your files all of the time. The continuation of carriers restricting data plans needs to end now. Once carriers start charging us to access our files, they own our files, and that’s where we lose control. The way data plans currently work is that once you go over your limit, you get charged a ridiculous overage fee, that can be as expensive as 10 dollars for a measly 200 mb. You wouldn’t be able to stream that movie you have stored in Dropbox for 200mb. Effectively, this is carriers charging you for files you already own, but instead of charging you just once, they charge you each time you access those files.
This isn’t to say that carriers are completely corrupt. Spectrum costs money, and it’s perfectly reasonable for carriers (as companies) to want to make a profit off of their services. What’s corrupt is the way the government is handling the purchasing of spectrum. The DOJ blocking a merger with AT&T and T-Mobile is one thing, but restricting what spectrum Verizon can buy to improve its network is simply infuriating. It’s clear that the government simply does not understand that limiting the growth of of carriers is limiting how quickly mobile computing can innovate. In other words, we’re screwed until we can work out a new system to pay for mobile data, that benefits both the consumers and the carriers.
