Details on Visual Voicemail and Wireless Carterfone

by on July 10, 2007 · 22 comments

Over at Ars, Ken, Jacqui, and Clint have written their magnum opus on the iPhone. On page 9 (yes, the review is more than 10 pages long), we get an interesting tidbit about the visual voicemail feature:

Visual voicemail is a new feature introduced by AT&T and Apple with the iPhone that currently only “works” over AT&T’s network. Instead of requiring the user to dial up the carrier’s voicemail number and listen to his or her voicemails in the order that they were received, visual voicemail lists each message out in visual format on the iPhone, almost like e-mail. It displays who the voicemail is from (and if it doesn’t recognize the number, it will analyze the area code and tell you what geographical area it’s from, which is helpful), and the user can tap whichever one in the list that he or she wants, no matter its position in the list. When the voicemail is playing, the user can pause it, scrub back and forth in the message, or skip.

The way it works is actually not as magical as AT&T might like you to believe, although the technology is still AT&T-specific. The iPhone actually downloads sound clips of the voicemail messages off of AT&T’s server, presumably over EDGE, and stores them in temporary files on the iPhone’s flash storage. This allows the iPhone user to select messages to listen to out of order, because all he or she is doing is listening to an audio file. This is also what enables the user to scrub with the touchscreen and listen to different parts of the message. It’s a nifty bit of technology, but really only required AT&T’s voicemail servers to tell the iPhone when to download a new message, and then the iPhone takes care of the rest. In our tests, visual voicemail worked as advertised, and we had no trouble with it. It is, however, a feature that we would be more than willing to sacrifice if we had the opportunity to use an unlocked iPhone on another network. That said, Ken believes that this is a very significant development in the world of voicemail, and he hopes and prays that this becomes standard everywhere.

This is a question we’ve discussed several times here: how much special support is required on the network side to make visual voicemail work? The answer seems to be “some, but not as much as you might think.” That is, the network does have to notify the phone of when new messages are available, provide them for download to the phone, and accept status change notifications from the phone when the user has listened to or deleted them. But there doesn’t need to be tight integration between the phone and the network when the user is actually listening to the messages.

Come to think of it, another advantage this approach presumably has is that you shouldn’t have to be connected to the network to listen to your voicemail messages. Once they’re downloaded to your phone, you should be able to listen to them anywhere, even if you’re in a location that doesn’t get good reception.

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Curtis on Visual Voicemail and Wireless Carterfone

by on June 13, 2007 · 8 comments

Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge sent me the following, which I’m re-posting with his permission:

I was listening to the conversation you were having with Tim Wu on the Tech Policy Weekly podcast. The visual voicemail feature of the iPhone actually doesn’t require anything special on the provider side of things. It’s essentially a VOIP voicemail service, which you can find on their own all over the Internet (Callwave is a good example), formatted with a GUI on a mobile phone.

To me, it speaks to the innovation that can come about when services are built to open standards.

I asked whether this means that messages on the iPhone are stored on Apple’s servers, rather than Verizon’s. He replied:

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TPW 16: Wireless Carterfone, Korean Copyright Deal, and Broadcast Decency

by on June 8, 2007 · 2 comments


Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, Tim Lee of the Cato Institute, Prof. Tim Wu of the Columbia University Law School, and Gwen Hinze of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Topics include,

  • Tim Wu explains his wireless Carterfone proposal,
  • The United States signs a trade agreement with South Korea that includes some controversial copyright provisions, and
  • The FCC loses on appeal in an important broadcast decency case.

There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!

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Wu Responds on Wireless Carterfone

by on June 4, 2007 · 0 comments

You should be sure to check out Tim Wu’s smart comments on my Wireless Carterfone article.

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Critiquing Wireless Carterfone

by on June 1, 2007 · 4 comments

In the latest installment of TechKnowledge, I critique Tim Wu’s recent article on “wireless Carterfone”:

True, a government-designed standard is not impossible, but “not impossible” is a long way from a good idea. Indeed, Wu seems to be implicitly conceding that it is far from the “simple requirement” he touts in his Forbes article. He seems to be proposing that the FCC dictate to wireless carriers what network services they must offer, who may access them, on what terms, and at what price.

History suggests that such efforts often end badly. Even when a government-created monopoly situation makes public utility regulation unavoidable, as in the Carterfone case, it can take a decade or longer for the dust to settle. The Clinton-era FCC attempted to create competition in the telephone and DSL markets by requiring Baby Bells to “unbundled” their local phone lines and lease them at FCC-determined prices to competitors. The Bells ultimately killed the plan using a combination of lobbying, litigation, and foot-dragging. But for the nine years between the passage of the Telecom Act in 1996 and the Supreme Court’s Brand X decision in 2005, telecommunications firms spent tens of millions of dollars on lawyers and lobbyists to seek advantage in the regulatory arena.

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More on Wireless Carterfone

by on May 29, 2007 · 2 comments

Tom Coseven left a comment making some good points about last week’s podcast and wireless Carterfone. I also got an email raising some of the same objections, so let me see if I can address them.

First, in response to Tom’s first point, I didn’t mean to give the impression that Carterfone was an antitrust decision. My point was simply that the policy rationale for regulatory intervention is much stronger when you have a single, government-protected monopoly than it is when there are four (relatively) lightly regulated incumbents. Whether or not you want to call them an “oligopoly,” it’s clearly more likely that market competition will discipline network operators in a 4-firm industry than in a 1=firm industry. And on the margin, that makes the case for regulatory intervention weaker.

Here’s Tom again:

On the subject of implementation of an open access requirement, it could be done quite easily. The GSM and CDMA standards allow for very transparent connectivity at the device level with no affect on your visual voice feature you use as an example. Those kind of widgets sit at a higher layer on the phone. Either the phone has the software or it doesn’t (sort of like a downloaded game).

Part of the problem here is that I have yet to see a specific explanation of what a “Wireless Carterfone” rule would actually say. If we’re just talking about a rule that says “network operators must allow any GSM or CDMA (as the case may be) phone to connect to their network,” that’s certainly a pretty clear rule, and it may not lead to any problems. However, I have the impression that two of the four carriers (the GSM ones) already respect this rule. So if that’s all we’re talking about, the rule seems kind of superfluous. Anyone who wants the freedom to attach the phone of their choice can sign up with T-Mobile or AT&T.

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TPW 14: Fairness Doctrine, Wireless Carterfone, and Competition for OLPC

by on May 25, 2007 · 2 comments


Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Tim Lee of the Cato Institute, James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation, and Joe Weisenthal of Techdirt. Topics include,

  • Dennis Kucinich wants to bring back the fairness doctrine,
  • Tim Wu wants to attach Carterphone-style regulations to the winners next year’s spectrum auction, and
  • Nicholas Negroponte, head of the One Laptop Per Child program, wants to be the only one distributing cheap laptops to third-world children.

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Skype Gripes: Cellphones, Carterfones, and 1968

by on February 21, 2007

Don’t look now, but it may be time to dig out those old bell bottoms and love beads from your closet. The calendar may say its 2007, but in Washington regulatory circles it may soon be 1968 all over again. You may remember 1968 as a year of turmoil–with anti-war protests, assassinations, and the election of Richard Nixon. Forget all that. At the FCC, it was the year of the Carterfone decision, in which the Bell System was banned from restricting equipment consumers could put on their phone lines. The same year, the Commission allocated the first frequencies for cell phone service.

Both decisions revolutioned the communications world: Carterphone opened the first crack in the previously iron-clad, legally-protected Bell System monopoly to competition, and the cell phone allocation planting the seed for today’s wireless services, which shattered the idea of telephone monopolies at its root.

These two regulatory threads of 1968 are now on a collision course. Yesterday,
Skype –the Internet phone company now owned by eBay– petitioned the FCC to apply the Carterfone decision to wireless carriers (see Adam’s excellent post on this.) The filing follows by less than a week a paper by Tim Wu, father of the term “net neutrality”, endorsing the same idea (discussed here, here, here, here and here.)

Skype–whose founders weren’t even born in 1968–see Carterfone in grand Jeffersonian terms, using the word “right” some 35 times. One practically expects to read of the right to life, liberty, and the right to use non-harmful devices and software on telecommunications networks. Carterfone, however, did not create a right. It created a regulation. A regulation that was justifed in the face of a legally-protected, comprehensive, vertically-integrated old-fashioned monopoly, but a regulation nonetheless. It makes no sense to saddle today’s competitive, innovative and growing cell phone market with the same regulation.

The battle over regulation of wireless networks promises to be a divisive one–in effect a new front in the larger war over neutrality regulation that has been raging for over a year At its heart are two vastly different visions of how best to create competition: one based on forced access and restrictions mandated by government, the other based on reducing barriers to the creation of alternative networks, with consumers–through the marketplace–deciding how they should best be run. Network managers throughout the economy–and consumers as well–should be watching this debate with interest.

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Skype Asks FCC to Impose Carterfone Regs on Wireless

by on February 20, 2007 · 4 comments

It hasn’t even been a week since Tim Wu made such a splash with his “Wireless Net Neutrality” proposal and already a major corporation has run to the FCC asking for it to be implemented into law! (Tim, my old friend and occasional nemesis, you know how to get results!)

Today, Internet phone giant Skype filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission “to confirm a consumer’s right to use Internet communications software and attach devices to wireless networks.” The 32-page filing repeats many of the arguments Tim Wu made in his paper about the supposed need for regulators to step in and impose Bell System-era device attachment rules to modern cell phone operators. Specifically, Skype wants the FCC “to create an industry-led mechanism to ensure the openness of wireless networks.” I’m not sure what that means but I am certain that entire forests will fall as the paperwork flies at the FCC in an attempt to interpret and implement these new regulations.

I disagree on so many levels with the Skype petition that I don’t know exactly where to begin, but luckily I don’t have to say much. I just need to point to the excellent critiques that my TLF colleagues and current and former PFF colleagues published last week in response to the Wu paper. Here’s a sampling:

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3 Cell Phone Unlocking Bills Introduced—What Would They Accomplish?

by on March 16, 2013 · 0 comments

In the past couple weeks, three bills addressing the legality of cell phone unlocking have been introduced in the Senate:

  • Sens. Leahy, Grassley, Franken, and Hatch’s “Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act” (S.517)
  • Sen. Ron Wyden’s “Wireless Device Independence Act” (S.467)
  • Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s “Wireless Consumer Choice Act” (S.481)

This essay will explain how these bills would affect users’ ability to lawfully unlock their cell phones.

Background

If you buy a new cell phone from a U.S. wireless carrier and sign a multi-year service contract, chances are your phone is “locked” to your carrier. This means if you want to switch carriers, you’ll first need to unlock your phone. Your original carrier may well be happy to lend you a helping hand—but, if not, unlocking your phone may violate federal law.4s-unlock

The last few months have seen an explosion of public outcry over this issue, with a recent White House “We the People” petition calling for the legalization of cell phone unlocking garnering over 114,000 signatures—and a favorable response from the Obama administration. The controversy was sparked in October 2012, when a governmental ruling (PDF) announced that unlocking cell phones purchased after January 26, 2013 would violate a 1998 federal law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the “DMCA”).

Under this law’s “anti-circumvention” provisions (17 U.S.C. §§ 1201-05), it is generally illegal to “circumvent a technological measure” that protects a copyrighted work. Violators are subject to civil penalties and, in serious cases, criminal prosecution.

However, the law includes an escape valve: it empowers the Librarian of Congress, in consultation with the Register of Copyrights, to periodically determine if any users’ “ability to make noninfringing uses . . . of a particular class of copyrighted works” is adversely affected by the DMCA’s prohibition of tools that circumvent access controls. Based on these determinations, the Librarian may promulgate rules exempting categories of circumvention tools from the DMCA’s ban.

One such exemption, originally granted in 2006 and renewed in 2010, permits users to unlock their cell phones without their carrier’s permission. (You may be wondering why phone unlocking is considered an access control circumvention—it’s because unlocking requires the circumvention of limits on user access to a mobile phone’s bootloader or operating system, both of which are usually copyrighted.)

But late last year (2012), when the phone unlocking exemption came up for its triennial review, the landscape had evolved regarding a crucial legal question: do cell phone owners own a copy of the operating system software installed on their phone, or are they merely licensees of the software?

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