A Tale of Three (FCC) Decisions

As the FCC enabled whitespaces for the computing industry the wireless world continued to be advanced with the merger of Sprint WiMAX into Clearwire and the approval of the Alltel acquistion by Verizon.  While I will miss the wizard commercials, I think the more important observation is the question of how wireless evolves.

The Verizon story will be mostly around LTE, Clearwire around WiMAX. But who owns White Space?  Who do you associate with this alternative?  Google and Microsoft have been big advocates, but I am not sure they intend to be a service provider for this space. On the other hand, Cloud Computing is probably going to benefit tremendously from the access the White Space provides.  Should I insert Ebay/Skype and Amazon into this discussion?  Motorola and Phillips for their devices?

Imho the future of wireless is going to be very dynamic.  And as we have seen from the iPhone’s success its going to be more about what you can do than what technology is used.

Tom Evslin about the future of Wireless

Tom joined me for a podcast about the wireless Internet.

In other conversations this week, I got on to the subject of devices. I have some friends who love the iPhone, others that want an open system.

In talking with various friends the Kindle has been talked about alot and I thought it made sense to talk about the possibilities of the wireless Internet from the perspective of what the Kindle represents.

I asked Tom to think about the lessons of his Kindle and where he expects the opportunities to develop.

I think he is probably right, and would love to have a conversation with a GPS company next.

Most importantly the discussion about White Spaces is becoming very interesting.

Please listen to description of WIFI and BlueTooth.

Let me know what you think.