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Cell Phone Company Cronyism

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By Fred Weinberg

GM of China executive Bob Socia at 2013 Shanghai Motor Show

When my late father (a card carrying member of America’s greatest generation) came home from World War II, there was a new industry being born.

Television was just waiting for the resources that were being taken up by the war effort to spread its wings.

Imagine, radio with pictures!  It must have really been amazing at the time.

I was born about four months before the end of the Korean war, and I have no memory of living in a house without a television (although I do remember that the first television I watched was a Magnavox console model with a radio and a phonograph built in.  Black and white, of course.)

Today, I carry not one but two little television sets in my pocket, almost at all times.

Oh, I’m sure that most people don’t think of their iPhones or their Android smartphones as TV sets, but they are.

The other night, Louisville won the NCAA tournament in a great game over Michigan.  The game was on CBS.  And also on my little pocket TV sets masquerading as iPhones.

Had I happened to be in rural Nevada, within reach of a cellular tower, I could have watched that game just as I watched it on Channel 2 on my big screen in my living room near Reno.

This sort of cross platform video brings with it two problems that need to be sorted out; and, as usual, it is competitors lobbying the government to stop progress which is standing in the way.

Let’s start with that cell tower.  And AT&T. (They’re the good guys in this story.)

Now AT&T is the company that brought you the Bell System.  And when the government decided that its network had grown too big, it ordered the company split up.

So AT&T reinvented itself as AT&T Wireless.  The same company that once built a network on which you could dial Peoria, Illinois from Brooklyn by yourself and talk to your kids like they were in the next room became the company that put that phone in your pocket allowed you make that call from almost anywhere.

But there would be more.  This thing called the internet came along, and it was only natural that one of the big players should be the company that developed the telephone network and got too big doing it.  After all, networks are networks, right?

So AT&T started combining a new network with pocket telephones; and over a long period of time, we got to where we could watch the Final Four on an iPhone from one of their cell towers in the middle of nowhere.

There are only two problems with that.

The first is that some lesser competitors want to tie AT&T’s hands in places like rural Nevada by forcing them to keep the old telephone network intact, thus stopping them from building more wireless systems until the little guys can catch up.  How stupid is that?  Stop a company that wants to invest in

From: http://www.westernjournalism.com/cell-phone-company-cronyism/

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Two Major Mobile Milestones

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By Alex Planes, The Motley Fool

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On this day in economic and business history…

Verizon began its existence — as a brand, if not a company — on April 3, 2000, when Bell Atlantic announced the name (and formalized the agreement) of its wireless partnership with Britain’s Vodafone . Simultaneously, the regional Baby Bell confirmed its adoption of the Verizon brand name for the combined company to be created from its pending merger with GTE, which at one time had been the largest independent American telecom during the Bell System era.

“Verizon” as brand was created as a portmanteau of “veritas,” Latin for truth, and “horizon,” with the new corporate identity meant to convey integrity and the possibilities of the future. Analysts weren’t quite so enamored of the morphological mash-up, though. Wireless industry analyst Tole Hart of Dataquest told CNET: “The brand name Bell Atlantic isn’t going to sell well elsewhere. But I think they could have come up with a better name.” Elliott Hamilton of Strategis Group took the long view, saying: “In the short term it might seem silly. But in the long term, ten years from now, everybody will just know Verizon. … It’s just like anything else; you have to get used to it.”

The Verizon Wireless brand was set to leapfrog all mobile-carrier competition on the market in 2000, with an estimated 23 million subscribers (following the Bell Atlantic and GTE merger), nearly double the subscribers of second-place AT&T Wireless. When Verizon itself assembled later that year, it quickly became one of the nation’s leading companies — which led, four years later, to its inclusion on the Dow Jones Industrial Average , as it replaced longtime component AT&T. The merger also gave Verizon majority control over its wireless joint venture, which initially included GTE‘s cellular operations as well.

In recent years AT&T has considerably narrowed the subscriber gap, and it boasted 99 million wireless subscribers to Verizon’s 106 million subscribers just more than decade after Verizon Wireless began operating. However, thanks to further telecom consolidation, AT&T’s revenue eventually surpassed Verizon’s by the end of the decade: The original Ma Bell reported $125 billion in revenue to Verizon’s $107 billion at the end of 2010.

The call that started it all
Verizon Wireless would never have come into existence without developments made at Motorola in the 1960s and 1970s, which culminated in the world’s first cellphone call on April 3, 1973. That day, 44 year-old Motorola executive Martin Cooper stepped out onto the streets of New York City with a bulky, brick-like cellular-phone prototype. His first call went through to AT&T’s Bell Labs, where he got in a bit of gloating to rival researcher Joel Engel for having won the mobile-phone race. After this one-upsmanship was over, Cooper decided to keep going. He recalled that morning in an interview 38 years later with London’s Daily Mail:

As I walked down …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance