Opening the Airwaves

Continued from page 1

The very first device to make it through Verizon's certification process is a simple yet practical type of sensor. Made by SupplyNet, it's a tank-monitoring device that sends alerts when the liquid in an industrial tank drops below a certain level and needs to be replaced. Bernie Crump, vice president of sales and marketing for SupplyNet, says that the company turned to Verizon because it has good coverage in the rural areas where many of SupplyNet's customers' tanks are located. Crump says that the certification process took about a week--much less than the 12 to 18 months that it normally takes to certify a wireless device. But Crump notes that wireless access is cheaper with some other networks.

Verizon Wireless isn't the only wireless company making moves to open up. Last week, T-Mobile launched the first phone built on Google's Android platform, an operating system that gives developers complete access to the underlying hardware. Earlier this year, Nokia purchased the Symbian operating system, which it will also turn into an open-source project. Bill Plummer, vice president of Go-to-Market, Nokia Americas, says that the Internet, which is open to any kind of device and software, has pushed the mobile industry to relax its control. Until recently, Plummer says, "the vision [of a comparable wireless network] was real, but we were missing the building blocks." Now, he says, widespread use of smart phones and better data capabilities have increased the need for an environment that looks more like the Internet.

But Harold Feld, senior vice president of the Media Access Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates universal and equitable access to information, cautions that Verizon's open-development initiative should still be watched closely. "The problem is that this is still very up in the air," Feld says. "Verizon as a company has been very good at reading the regulatory writing on the wall, figuring out where regulators are likely to go, and then trying to get there on their terms, rather than where they might end up if they tried to resist." He notes, for example, that once the 700-megahertz spectrum becomes available, the company may come under pressure to focus more on opening up to consumer devices (which could potentially compete with the hardware that it bundles with its cellular-network products), rather than focusing on the machine-to-machine communications that Lewis champions. Feld adds that Verizon's progress toward open development could allow the company to adjust its position carefully next year, depending on the way the new administration's FCC might interpret the idea of an open network.