In telecom, the carriers are barons in a monarchy.

Dr. Norman Lewis of France Telecom reveals in IT Conversations #1706 http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1706.html [How do I do format hyperlinks properly in yet another wiki?] that recovering the debt that the wireless carriers have incurred in buying spectrum and infrastructure would require every GSM subscriber, their spouses, their kids and their dogs to use GSM for six hours per day for the next thirty years.

In wireless, spectrum is the constrained resource, as arable land is an agricultural economy.

Our governments saw spectrum auctions as a means to sell their debt to the pre-bubble, cash-rich, telecom operators. In effect, they exchanged their authority over a large piece of the commons for a one-time capital infusion. Now, instead of all citizens carrying their government’s debt directly, wireless subscribers pay the that portion of the public debt through their monthly plans with their mobile barons.

Terminal manufacturers are to wireless operators as horse breeders are to barons. Yes, they play a role in the economy, but “clout” is hardly a word you could use to describe their influence. Their products are commodities.

In my view, Apple’s introduction of any kind of phone is a gross error. I presume that they are following a similar strategy as what propelled the Mac to success in face of the staid International Business Machine’s attempt at creating personal computers. However, the fundamentals are different. In the 1980’s, Moore’s Law had just put the constrained resource of computing on an exponential trajectory, upward, through the microprocessor. In Clayton Christsen’s model of innovation, computing had large populations of unserved markets yet to conquer.

Wireless telephony today is in almost exactly the opposite situation. The constrained resource, in spectrum, is scarce and getting scarcer, while the markets for mobile synchronous voice are thoroughly served by multiple competitors. The form of the mobile terminal offers only incremental opportunities for innovation, as we see in the iPhone.

The Magna Carta conceded the Crown’s divine authority. However, Britain remained a monarchy for many centuries more.

There is hope for liberation in wireless communication, but I believe that it will come about through a republic, separated from the mother land by a large body of metaphorical water. We can pick that topic up again in another conversation.