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Some tech-conscious cell
phone shoppers have a new complaint: Verizon Wireless can't hear them now, and
that's not good.
What are they trying to
say to that carrier? They'd like to use PalmOne's sleek Treo 650
"smartphone," which Sprint has been selling since December. They'd
like more phones that use Bluetooth wireless -- and they don't want Verizon
disabling parts of that feature for its own purposes. Some just want a full set
of phones that are only phones, without the digital cameras banned at
their workplaces.
Verizon isn't the only
target of these complaints -- other carriers have done the same things. But
customers who don't like the phones their carrier sells can often only switch
to another service that may have worse coverage. Despite immense advances in
technology, we face the same basic constraints that our grandparents did when
choosing what color of rotary-dial phone to get from the Bell System: You can
only buy what the phone company wants to sell.
When cell phones were
used only for talking, this might not have mattered much. Now phones are the
equivalent of handheld computers -- but unlike computers, they don't arrive in
everybody's stores at the same time and with all their promised features
intact.
There's no better
example of this than carriers' iffy support for Bluetooth wireless, a
technology that lets a cell phone quickly beam data to and from other nearby
devices -- other phones, handheld organizers, printers or computers. Eight
years after its unveiling, despite growing customer interest and increasingly widespread
Bluetooth support in computers, many carriers still give Bluetooth the back of
their hand.
At worst, they'll offer
it only on one or two token phones, and with its more useful features disabled.
Neither Sprint nor Verizon, for example support file transfer via Bluetooth. So
instead of sending your camera phone's pictures to your computer via Bluetooth,
you're expected to e-mail them to yourself, running up airtime and
picture-messaging charges along the way.
Other convenient
Bluetooth features, such as wireless address-book synchronization or the option
to use a phone as a wireless modem with a Bluetooth-enabled laptop, are also
often absent or shut off. It's as if some carriers regard this technology as
little more than a way to sell you a $50 Bluetooth headset instead of a $10
corded model.
If you could buy your
phone from a source besides your carrier -- somebody with no vested interest in
steering you to expensive data services -- this wouldn't be a problem. But
that's a difficult-to-impossible task in the U.S. market.
For one thing, carriers
sell phones at a subsidized price that they recoup over a long stream of
monthly bills. Unsubsidized models cost more, hundreds of dollars extra in some
cases. For another, about half of the market can't even pay extra to use a
phone their carrier doesn't sell.
Verizon, the
second-largest carrier in the United
States, will at least allow customers to use
makes and models of phones similar to those that it offers. Sprint, the
third-biggest, won't permit even that. Both say that they do this to maintain
the quality of their service, although any cell phone sold must already pass
testing from government and industry bodies.
These firms can exert
that level of control because they don't use a system employed by the other
nationwide carriers, Cingular, T-Mobile and Nextel. Those firms all sell phones
that store a customer's account data on a tiny subscriber identity module (SIM)
card that can be moved from one phone to another.
This SIM card is a core
feature of the technology Cingular and T-Mobile use, GSM (shorthand for global
system for mobile); Nextel, which uses a different system called iDEN, saw fit
to adopt the SIM card as well.
Customers can use this
to expand their choice in various ways. They don't have to choose one model of
phone; they can purchase a powerful but bulky phone to carry around the office,
then buy a lighter, flashier model to wear in the evening. Or they can take
their phones from one carrier to another -- once, that is, they undo the locks
that Cingular and T-Mobile place to prevent another carrier's SIM card from
functioning.
T-Mobile will unlock a
phone after the first 90 days of a contract; Cingular will do so once a
contract has ended and a customer is moving to another carrier. Customers can
unlock phones on their own, but the procedure can be tricky. (This isn't a
factor with Nextel, as no other major carrier uses iDEN.)
Sprint and Verizon
phones use a different wireless standard called CDMA, but there's no reason
their phones could not employ a similar subscriber-identity card. Industry
developers came up with that exact thing back in 2001, called the removable
user identity module (R-UIM), with the same size and shape as a SIM card.
A few carriers in Asia
now sell phones using these cards -- but in the United States, Sprint and
Verizon seem to think that R-UIM spells "ruin" for their businesses
and have declined to adopt it. So their subscribers can eat only what these
companies put on their plates.
This tension is only
going to get worse, as the price and features of such phones as the Treo 650
and comparable Windows Mobile devices increase. How long will people spending
hundreds of dollars for these gadgets consent to having their use of them
dictated by their carrier?
It might be a long time.
AT&T's lock on landline phone hardware lasted for decades, until in 1968
the Federal Communications Commission ruled that Ma Bell could not forbid the
use of other companies' hardware on its lines. Among other unanticipated
benefits, that helped open the Internet to anybody with a phone line. What
might we be passing up now?
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