Richard Irving, a partner at venture capital firm Pond Venture Partners, says the walls are coming down in the US to allow any device onto carrier's networks
Unlike some European wireless carriers, their US counterparts have always ensured that voice and data traffic carried on their networks came only from approved devices: the so-called walled garden. That way they control which applications and services are offered.
Always hiding behind the issue of network quality, carriers have steadfastly refused to compromise. After all, if they let any traffic on, people could start streaming whole movies to each other and crash the network. Verizon's recent promise to open their network seems to be a huge change.
Most likely prompted by Google's attempt to build a new kind of wireless phone service, Verizon claims they will publish the technical specs to allow any device to bring traffic onto their network next year.
Just how open will this new world be? Will Verizon allow VoIP over the cellular channel? Today most US calling plans charge a fixed monthly fee for phone service, including both airtime and domestic call charges. Many data plans are also flat rate. But you tend to have to pay for each if you want both. If I can just pay for data and all my calls will be VoIP, my ARPU (average revenue per user) would halve: not good news for my carrier. And the risk that an all-you-can eat data plan will encourage people to send huge files is an issue to resolve.
Speculation here in Silicon Valley is already reaching fever pitch. So here are my guesses.
There will be flat rate data plans and we will be able to use VoIP for voice. Quality will be almost as good as regular voice, but enough difference will persist so that business users may well stick to the conventional approach. Like today's flat rate plans, there are still traffic limits, and these will be set so that data hogs will pay more. And anyone trying to hog too much cell site bandwidth will be blocked. Certain traffic may be blocked entirely - this already happens, it's just not stated explicitly. That said, this really is a whole new era for wireless carriers, others will have to follow suit, and all this will lead to some interesting start-up opportunities.