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Saturday, September 27, 2008

Could Google save us from the tyranny of the SIM card?

From the department of "not likely to happen any time soon, but interesting nonetheless" comes this report of a Google patent that suggests that future phones could institute an auction amongst available wireless providers, each time a connection is needed.

If there's one thing worse than being a dumb pipe, it's being one that has to compete continually on price with an array of other dumb pipes.....

(This reminds me a bit of the original view of web services, where applications would in theory pick providers of XML components from a directory in the cloud, in real time. Although given that mobile commonly has 5-10 second call setup times, there's probably a bit more scope for this to work for phone calls, than if it was embedded in a enterprise app needing millisecond response).

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous5:38 pm

    Isn't this the same thing as what Apple patented in 2006?

    http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/04/10/filing_apple_conceptualized_smart_mvno_system_ahead_of_iphone.html

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