Last weekend a friend of mine visited Seattle for the Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX. He’s an avid gamer but not much of a “tech guy” and I noticed he was in need of a new phone; his Palm Pre had a cracked screen, was held together with tape, and, well, it was a Palm Pre and this is 2013. So I dug through a drawer and retrieved an iPhone 3Gs I had used for hacking purposes. The 3Gs is older, but platform-wise the phone is still supported by most apps so it was an obvious upgrade.
The first thing he did after we set it up and popped in his SIM was to disable the 3G and cellular data options. “What are you doing?” I asked in disbelief.
“Oh, I don’t have a data plan, and I don’t want one. I’d still be using a flip phone if you guys would let me.” He is right; the Pre was a gift forced upon him from another friend whose wife worked at Palm. But what about playing games?
That prevalence of Wi-Fi may be something Amazon is counting on for the “Kindle phone” that we’ve been hearing about this week. The latest buzz is that Amazon may be offering a phone device for free, or at least for Prime customers, as a loss leader to help entice more people to use its digital services.
The basic components of smartphones – the screens, the wireless radios, and batteries – are becoming more commoditized and thus cheaper. It’s not hard to imagine Amazon putting together a phone made of not-quite-cutting-edge parts that would cost it next-to-nothing per unit to produce that would most of the features that America’s one-to-two year-old smartphones have, making it an enticing thing to switch to.
In addition, most of the US carriers’ new-every-two-year upgrade plans would suddenly look downright stingy in comparison. Sure, there are always those of us who will pay a premium for faster, slicker, more well built devices, but for most people, free is a great price for a “good enough” phone. But due to some implied partnerships and new technology licenses, the carriers might not be involved at all.
Globalstar, a company known for its satellite phone systems, has applied to and received a license from the FCC to begin testing a technology known as TLPS, or Terrestrial Low Power Service. TLPS is a wireless communications system that works as a sort of private channel for Wi-Fi. TLPS can piggy back on existing hardware but uses a privately licensed frequency band, meaning devices that use TLPS won’t be subject to the interference and range problems of standard Wi-Fi communications. Indeed, being on a privately licensed spectrum, TLPS can work at cellular-like ranges on cheap and often existing Wi-Fi hardware. In other words, TLPS could give Globalstar (and its partners) a nationwide wireless data network with speeds comparable to modern 4G carriers for a fraction of the cost, and it could even carry digital voice.
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So not only do we have rumors of a potential phone for Amazon to give its members – or at least its Prime subscribers – for free, but there’s also solid evidence that it’s testing a new type of wireless networking that would be the perfect match for just such a device. Amazon’s TLPS could be ad-supported or content-supported, and thus free.
And, as a little icing on the proverbial cake, the Jarvinian FCC filing states that it's testing at Amazon’s labs are “to help a major technology company assess the significant performance benefits of TLPS for a transformative consumer broadband application”. That certainly sounds like it could be a wireless phone network to me, and it, coupled with free “Kindle phones”, I believe could finally talk my friend into subscribing to a data plan. Or, at least, maybe.
