2009-12-13
post/282161595
John Gruber in a Daring Fireball piece, “Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?”
Well, in theory, it doesn’t. In practice, the fetish for devolution¹ that the United States has doomed the US mobile telephone industry from the start. This is covered as an aside in the fascinating Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford, in the chapter on John Causebrook and Vodafone (mentioned in this review).
If I’m remembering correctly, the early years of the industry (from the 1980s to mid 1990s) saw each county have its own mobile telephone company. This would be fine, except people have a nasty habit of moving around, and so you need peering arrangements. In Europe, with about 30 countries, that’s managable. If you have 1,000 municipalities instead, the number of the arrangements required kills you in paperwork.
No wonder Europeans who moved to San Francisco five or six years ago found a stunted, broken infrastructure, with recently merged operators still trying to do things that the British ones had done years before- like notice SMS as a moneyspinning killer app. Combine that with the not-invented-here rejection of GSM in favour of CDMA (which, admittedly, might have benefits in the lower-density urban sprawl that characterises much of the US) and you have a recipe for crap reception that still haunts today’s iPhone owners.
¹ This only really hit me when I realised that every county town has a DMV that can issue licence plates, which are equivalent to a UK tax disc. Here, they come from a single office in Swansea. There, you can visit someone you probably know and get your paperwork sorted. I suspect there’s still a lot about the country I don’t properly appreciate because I haven’t internalised the degree to which power is pushed as close to people as possible; while I’m sure some Americans will boggle at that statement, believe me, in the UK at least, everything is far more centralised.
