Thread: WiMax confirmed
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iball's Avatar
Posts: 729 | Thanked: 19 times | Joined on Mar 2007
#16
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
Meh, it was a broad declarative. I was rolling up the current state of affairs vis-a-vis US communications infrastructure and practices.

But basically I'm referring to the inertia of protecting an existing revenue stream at the expense of advancing your next likely source of revenue. Shortsightedly stupid, yes, but we do it-- and the FCC has been supporting that... along with allowing increasing consolidation among service and media providers. It's hard for wifi and wimax to gain a foothold in the US while we are still so beholden to "legacy" tech. However, I see radio bandwidth as an area of The Commons and think that, instead of auctioning it off and rationing it out, this is one area where the federal government should manage the communications spectrum much more than it does. That includes providing at least some of the funding and tax incentives for new infrastructure.

See, I knew breaking that down would be messy. I'm rambling...
Correct. One only needs to look at Nokia's crippling of the E61 just for the U.S. market to see that.
They removed wi-fi functionality from it and the carrier sold it pretty much for the EXACT same price as the non-crippled version.
But that CAN backfire, as evidenced in the U.K. where Vodafone had their lunch eaten by OFCOM due to their "crippling" the Nokia N95 they sold by removing VoIP functionality in the firmware.
The big problem is that Americans are just too damn lazy and won't speak up and DEMAND better from their carriers via their congressman/senator.
But in the end it doesn't matter how big of a campaign warchest you have (read: donations from carriers) no one is going to vote for you if you're NOT looking out for their best interests.