Steve Jobs Wanted an iPhone-Only Wireless Network 263
jfruhlinger writes "One of the more profound ways that the iPhone changed the mobile industry was the fact that it upended the relationship between the handset maker and the wireless carrier: Apple sells many of its phones directly to customers, and in general has much more of an upper hand with carriers than most phone manufacturers. But venture capitalist John Stanton, who was friends with Steve Jobs in the years when the iPhone was in development, said the Apple CEO's initial vision was even more radical: he wanted Apple to build its own wireless network using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum, thus bypassing the carriers altogether."
Which would have worked... (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple to build its own wireless network using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum, thus bypassing the carriers altogether."
Which would have worked, if you were only willing to go about with something like the iTouch. While popular, the evolution to hand-held computer, camera, game-device and phone became a bit mostly on the latter.
I visualised such a network years before the iPhone and realise how much it wouldn't have happened. There was some network in the SF Bay Area meant to do something similar, but you had to be paying to be on it and these sorts of things didn't come cheap. Even taking advantage of economies of scale, you'd be running up against those who own the cell towers. My cousin is in that racket and don't underestimate the costs and other problems inherent there. Going with cellular was the only way it was going to work.
Re:Neat (Score:5, Interesting)
At the very least it would have justified the initial absurd price per phone.
Yeah, but Apple trying to be a player in a global Wi-Fi network wouldn't have happened. They succeeded because they let the phone companies bear the burden of satellites and tower contracts, fibre trunks, maintenance, etc.
Re:lack of understanding (Score:5, Interesting)
Well:
1) Charge for access to online services (Apple Store, iTunes, etc).
2) Offer free service to anyone who agrees to "share" their home wired internet connection by installing a special Apple router, which provides service to any i* devices in the area
Where I live, our biggest ISP is doing something similar: everyone who signs up gets a Fonera router (unless they opt-out) and shares their unlimited connection with other clients. Now, the ISP can advertise "Free Wifi everywhere" as a feature to attract new clients. Win-win.
Re:Apple's Future (Score:2, Interesting)
I hate to speak ill of the man so soon after death but I always felt Apple was always too restrained by him. Every thing they do is so closed and exclusive. They never extended a hand to the open source community. Yes, the same could have been said of Microsoft but Apple seemed off the deep end. This did offer some of the benefits of Job's vision but I think Apple may be poised in a better position now. Time will tell.
Jobs was entirely NON-open source. He was obsessive in needing the absolute control from beginning to end of any product, only in that way could the iPhone and iPad have become the successes they have. Apple succeeds because they product is entirely engineered by them, materials, components, software, hardware - Jobs hated the idea of having to be reliant upon a multiple of vendors who could do one thing slightly different, which would introduce changes in the software from device to device (say, a timing issue for internal storage) They wrote the specs and the vendor made it exactly the way they wanted it, period. Unlike Microsoft who let their OS run on some gargantuan possible combinations of hardware.
Jobs did understand that there was a significant market for a device people could just use, they didn't need to know where in the control panel to find ____. Had to be completely consumer oriented or nothing. I love Linux for what it allows me to do, but 99% of the people don't come close to my technical knowledge. The complete control to put everything into making a small number of models (based upon memory) allowed Jobs and Apple to focus in a way nobody else has.
Re:Neat (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Neat (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. It was genius, even if it wasn't intentional. When a phone drops calls or has data hiccups, who gets blamed? It's ALWAYS the cell carrier. Let someone else get all the blame. Funny thing though, my AT&T service was always fine until all the iPhone users appeared and clogged stuff up. Now the wireless network is getting clogged with people talking to Siri? Argh.
This is all part of the evolution of communications.
Remember why the dotcom bubble burst? Because, despite all the brilliant ideas everyone had, the infrastructure was two copper wires, all the neat tricks to get 5Mbps were still in development, and so many technologies ran into the bandwidth wall. Now we can do 6 (or more) Mbps over copper (particularly if we live close to the switch) but the flood of iPhone traffic revealed the flimsy network for cellular was never intended for high bandwidth. Well, the carriers learned (particularly AT&T after the mess in NYC) and technology has been rapidly improving (though taking more time to roll out in some areas than others.)
Voice bandwidth needs were tiny, like 3KHz on old copper. Imagine compressing that in a digital stream. With people websurfing, streaming music and video and now mucking about with the "Cloud" for documents, spreadsheets, The Bob knows what else, that bandwith must become higher or customers go to another carrier who can hack it (a good thing to have multiple carriers in any area!)
1995 paged, wants its Apple data network back. (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple used to have their own data network for their devices, about 17 years ago.
I remember using Apple devices on airplanes back then.
I thought it was the 80s, but I guess it was the 90s based on this press release I Googled:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/PAGENET+TO+PROVIDE+WIRELESS+NETWORK+SERVICES+FOR+APPLE+PRODUCT-a015985515 [thefreelibrary.com]
Non-iPhone network. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Neat (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the dropped call/AT&T sucky thing really did have the iPhone to blame partially.
You see, there's a control channel used to establish and tear down connections (voice/data), and also used for signalling and messaging (e.g., making/receiving a phone call, SMS).
The iPhone was extremely aggressive with its data connections. The instant data transfer stopped and there was no more data forthcoming, the immediately tore down the data connection. When data needed to be transferred, it established it again. If you're browsing the web, it basically meant everytime you visit a page, the page load creates a new connection, then when the page has finished, the connection is torn down.
What crippled AT&T was not running out of bandwidth for voice or data, but running out of bandwidth in the control channel. When the control channel was saturated, it means that requests get dropped. If you're being handed off to another cell, and your phone can't contact the tower in time to complete the handoff (because it can't get a word in edgewise on the control channel), boom, the call is dropped. And thus, AT&T service started degrading for everyone because basically all the iPhones overloaded the towers.
Europe and Asia didn't see this because all the texting that went on meant they saw control channel saturation happen many years ago, so they started doing dynamic bandwidth allocation - if the control channel is getting saturated, it allocates another channel to free up bandwidth.
The same thing happened to T-mobile when an IM app and Android apparently had timers that worked destructively - the IM app caused Android to release the data channel because it was idle "long enough", just after which it did a data transfer which required re-establishing the data link. So T-Mobile suffered from phones dropping and re-establishing the data connection again causing tower overload.
Incidentally, the iPhone did this to save power - holding a data connection open takes battery, so if you can drop it immediately, you can put the baseband into low power and save a significant amount of power.
AT&T was not prepared for the iPhone. Some people got bills that came in big boxes because every time the phone opened and closed the data connection, an entry was recorded and faithfully printed out, leading to phone bills that were thousands of pages long. Since it was unlimited, all it did was kill some extra trees.