Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg at CTIA
“…wireless innovation has been a foundation of our country's prosperity for the last 25 years…”
Yes, let’s give innovation credit to Apple and Google and Nokia-Siemens and Ericsson and the large number of entrepreneurs who are about to help Apple reach the milestone of a billion iPhone applications downloaded.
But the carriers?
Let’s revisit this BusinessWeek article
“One way in which these companies are very different from the old phone monopoly is that while the original AT&T had a world- class research operation, its successors don't. One of the signal facts of the communications revolution is that virtually all the new technologies that made it possible were developed outside the phone world. Last year, Verizon's revenue came in at nearly $80 billion. AT&T (without BellSouth or Cingular) had revenue of $44 billion. And yet while Intel Corp. spent $5.1 billion last year on research and development, AT&T spent just $130 million. The word "research" doesn't even appear in Verizon's annual report.”
No, Ivan – we don’t expect carriers to be innovative. But please, please do your job and make the capital investments you are supposed to. After 8 years of 3G rollout we still have pretty poor coverage. That negates much of what the innovators are doing.
