Wireless Carriers Increasingly Recognized as Stifiling Innovation

There are many reasons discussed for why wireless and broadband services are so far behind in the US compared to other developed countries. For example, the US is ranked 15th and dropping in broadband subscriptions, according to the Wall Street Journal. Michael Mace discusses the weakness of US wireless services compared to European wireless services. Many theories circulate why this would be so: the geographical breadth of the US, stronger competitive forces, banking laws, european life styles, and so on.

The likely explanation is far simpler than these theories: US wireless carriers are uniquely able to stifle innovation in favor of customer lock-in. Particularly with regards to wireless software, carriers throw up intentional and accidental barriers right and left. Unlike the awesome competitive and innovative stew that brewed around PC software (before Microsoft became a more-or-less monopoly) and that now brews around the internet, wireless software has struggled. Complaints are emerging not just from academics like Tim Wu, but even from staid IT publications like Information Week. This week's issue discusses what carriers do that stifle competition and innovation.

Here is a quick summary of how the lack of competition and innovation stifle wireless software:

• Wireless carriers have no idea how to sell solutions - they want to sell phones and subscriptions, but quickly loose patience when the customer wants to figure out how to best solve their business problem. If the carriers is featuring phone X, or wireless software provider Y, that is what the typical carrier sales rep will lead with, irrespective of the customer's needs.
• WIreless carriers rigidly enforce arbitrary differences between devices - why can't you buy a Java phone from Verizon Wireless? Even on devices that have Java from every other carrier, Verizon WIreless disables Java. Why? They want developer's to use Brew -- a nice enough platform for games and consumer content, but highly proprietary and mainly focused on consumers. Why not let the developers or consumers decide? Verizon WIreless is not the only carrier with such a rule, just the simplist example.
• Wireless carriers support for business customers is terrible - We have one large national customer where one of their cities got phones with bad SIM cards. The phones work for voice, but not for wireless data. They have been working for several weeks to get this resolved. My company's support team figured out it was bad SIM cards. The carrier customer support staff has refused to work with the customer's team in the city, instead wanting to work with corporate! And this is for a customer with 1000s of subscriptions. Another carrier gave up a 200 subscription opportunity rather than provide my company with an engineer that could make Java signing work on their network. These stories are common -- if anything out of the ordinary goes wrong, the carriers seem totally unable to provide support without the cleverest of politics by the account managers.
• Wireless carrier support for developers is terrible - It is beyond routine that regular software companies and software platform companies (think Microsoft Windows, SAP, Oracle, Google, QuickBooks programming extensions, eBay programming extensions) issue betas, review upcoming feature sets with partners, collect bug reports, provide workarounds to known bugs, etc. Almost none of this is done by carriers. New phones are routinely released with major bugs that are either never fixed, or fixed in unannounced upgrades that are extremely hard to find out about, acquire, or apply.
• Devices are usually designed to disadvantage non-packaged software - On many major phones, when you flip the lid closed or take a phone call, any working programs stop. There is nothing the developer can do about this. It is the developer's problem to write software to survive arbitrary shutdowns. And what about programs that need to run all the time (say, monitoring emergency alerts)? For most phones, developers need to figure out workarounds or to take the phone off the list of viable alternatives.

The point of the list is not to whine, but to illustrate the kind of egregious problems that occur when there is no effective competition. If users could EASILY take their devices, software, and network subscriptions to other carriers, these problems would quickly be addressed by the winners, and the losers would go out of business.