On Net Neutrality: To End the Debate, Innovate
In recent weeks the long rumored, but nonetheless shocking partnership announcement from Verizon and Google—shocking because Google has long championed openness— is poised to pit consumers against carriers, with the FCC as referee. While it is generally considered poor business strategy to alienate your customer base—or developer base for that matter— AT&T has also come out in support of the deal, claiming that wireless is different because there are very real limits that “technology and physics impose on wireless network” versus wireline.
While this is may be true, network providers are in a sticky position. On one hand, you can’t in one breath tout your superior performance over rivals and publicize new investments in 4G, and in the next breadth and complain about the limitations of your infrastructure. As Jim Patterson astutely noted in a recent RCR article “ If the bandwidth is as copious as predicted, many consumers and small businesses will see [LTE] services as a wireline replacement, not a complement. This is precisely the wrong time to begin to delineate wireless from wireline services.” Recently published data cap pricing plans are just another example of this mixed messaging.
On the other hand, simple economics tells us that high demand met with an insufficient supply (in spectrum) equals a business opportunity to carriers and potentially higher prices to customers who are very willing to pay a premium for the always-connected lifestyle.
It is precisely this type of quandary where innovation is often born. Innovators take problems labeled under “can’t be done” and “we have no other choice” turn them into blue-water products that solve real market needs.
At Recursion, we’ve taken the pending scalability problem to task in our development roadmap for pervasive platform Voyager. We do not claim to solve the still sticky issue of net neutrality, but we offer a way around the real underlying issue of spectrum scarcity and scalability. We’ve chosen to do this by presenting a new, more efficient architecture for wireless apps, a hybrid solution that uses a smart-client-as-a-server and peer-to-peer connectivity both to keep data distribution at the edge, closer to the point of origin and destination as possible. This means excluding application servers and the mobile web from the mix, and allowing the device itself to carry more of the burden. GigaOM (Pro) describes our approach as vital to the future of connected devices in their coverage Cool, Calm and Connected: 3 Design Principles for Connected Objects.
Those familiar with Voyager know we’ve been in the forefront of mobile innovation in this area for over a decade. Those just getting to know us should read more about how Voyager helps developers solve both bandwidth and fragmentation issues. Whether it is our approach or a policy-driven solution, carriers should strive to incentivize developers to build efficient apps, preferably native implementations vs. the mobile web, while also incentivizing consumers to consume just enough data to appreciate the value of their connected service, while seeing bandwidth as a resource worth conserving. Recent data cap plans are a very poor solution to the resource issue.
Innovation is what fueled the birth of the internet. It is only fitting that innovation solves the inevitable growing pains as the internet transforms into Internet of Things. We welcome your thoughts and comments on our vision for this exciting future that is upon us. And we want to know: what are you doing to innovate in the area of bandwidth?
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