Verizon Walks the Line
Verizon Wireless has made a large footprint in the “Open” movement over the last week — first opening its network to outside devices and applications, then announcing its plan to use the LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard instead of UMB (ultramobile broadband), and Tuesday joining Google’s Open Handset Alliance. The company is positioning the OHA announcement as an important step toward having a truly open platform, a goal that has surely been set in hopes of driving subscriber growth.
It seems to me that Verizon is making a pretty big bet that its network can handle anything people can dream up and develop to run on it - especially following recent comments like those from AT&T’s CEO that the need for network upgrades “is real this time around,” and the bandwidth glut of the 90’s “is over.” Is Verizon really prepared to manage a service evolution that it has no control over? It’s one thing for a software company or OS provider to go open - more to gain than lose - but there is a fine line for carriers between growing subscribers and seeing explosive growth in new services that they may not have the bandwidth or resiliency to handle on the back-end. Verizon is walking it. Good for them.
December 6th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
How do they do that?From chinese carriers point of view,it would lead to complicated system management and higher capex.
In china,especially to fixed line carriers,growth of subscribers and benifits had slowed down.And open networks would bring troubles.
It is very interesting.