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:
No, for AT&T’s (or any other provider’s) voicemail, messages are probably stored somewhere on their servers. My point is that voicemail is just a service (like email) that doesn’t require a phone to necessarily use the service that their provider gives/sells to them.
As a hobby, I write for a blog called the MacCast, and a while back I
wrote on a service/app from CallWave that allows via a widget/gadget
(read–web-accessible) for much of what Apple plans to provide on the iPhone. You can also easily reprogram your phone to use their voicemail as default. Again, I’d encourage you to try out CallWave, I’m going to try to contact the people there to learn more.For the iPhone, I’m guessing that after the device is notified of a new message (which can include basic information like caller id), the voicemail audio is actually downloaded to the iPhone itself, once a message has been selected. In the iPhone demos on their website, you can see the “load swirl” when the user selects the message, meaning that it may be downloading it in real-time. Sorry, I’m an Apple fanboy, so I obsess about some of this stuff.
It’s an interesting example. One of the lessons of Carterfone was that even in a network with a recalcitrant network owner, clever engineers can often find ways to squeeze out unexpected functionality. I doubt the FCC was expecting to get fax machines or modems when they decided Carterfone, but that’s what they got. I think it’s a safe bet that in the next decade, some smart hacker is going to figure out some really cool uses for the cellular networks that none of us are expecting.
The policy question is whether getting the FCC involved will make this more or less likely. It’s already possible to swap phones on the GSM carriers, and it’s conceivable that all the attention this issue is getting will convince one or more carriers to voluntarily open their networks further. It’s not obvious to me that getting telecom lawyers more involved will speed up the process any.
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