Unleveling the Playing Field - Bad News for Cellular Customers

I had a briefing with a new industry trade association on Friday that really gave me pause - and a lot of concern - about the nature of services that the carriers will offer as we transition from 3G to 4G. I don't want to overreact here, but it may be time, once again, for the policymakers and regulators to think about doing their jobs.

The trade association here is ng Connect, organized by Alcatel-Lucent, which is of course one of the major vendors of cellular infrastructure equipment. This organization was founded to bring together the key constituents in provisioning next-generation cellular services, including carriers and application and value-added services providers. ng Connect is setting up proof-of-concept labs where applications developers can try out new capabilities; that's great. Alcatel-Lucent is at present the only vendor member of this organization, as is perhaps to be expected, but they're not ruling out adding other vendors over time - in fact, I'd suggest such will be a requirement if they don't want to wind up producing proprietary products and solutions. But that might in fact be the goal here.

It is in no way unethical or otherwise illegitimate for a trade association to work toward this end, by the way. The purpose of a trade association is, after all, marketing. The real concern I have here resulted from a part of the conversation that strayed into the network neutrality debate. Should a carrier, for example, be allowed to charge a given Web site for the provisioning of a value-added service like location and tracking? Could the Wireless Web consequently end up balkanized, with carriers nickel-and-diming not just users but in addition the sites those users seek to visit? Will we end up with a very different business model than that of the wired Web, with fragmentation, a lack of interoperability, and confusion? I must reiterate my previous position on this point: carriers must carry. Wireless Web standards - real multi-vendor, cross-network standards - must be set. And the carriers should not be in charge of these decisions - we own the airwaves; they just rent them, and us users ultimately pay that rent. It's time for the regulators - in theory, anyway, our representative - to step in here.

And, again, I have no problem with tiered service, under which one can pay for more performance in the form of throughput and/or responsiveness (latency minimization). And I think the concept of a trade association that promotes an alignment of technical capabilities, carrier services, and Web services providers is terrific. But we need standards and regulations to make sure that the result won't serve to disadvantage those of us who pay the bills.

• Wireless / Mobile
• Alcatel-Lucent
• ng Connect
• telecommunications policy
• telecommunications regulation