In June, 2008, my colleague
Berin Szoka and I wrote a short piece urging the FCC to refrain from prohibiting
the sorts of wireless handset exclusivity deals that brought us innovative
"smart phones" like the Apple iPhone (AT&T), Samsung Ace (Sprint
Nextel) and Samsung Katalyst (T-Mobile), as well as the recently announced
Google (T-Mobile) G1. Some rural cellular companies, through
the Rural Cellular Association (RCA), have been trying to prohibit such
exclusive deals, and have not only petitioned the FCC for a rulemaking aimed at
prohibiting these contractual arrangements, but have also raised the
issue in several unrelated proceedings, including the FCC's reviews
of the proposed merger of Verizon Wireless and ALLTEL and joint venture of Sprint Nextel Corporation and Clearwire
Corporation.
The complaint of the rural
cellular companies is that the exclusives have the effect of essentially
shutting them out of the burgeoning market for advanced wireless services
and equipment, and that they need government intervention to compete.
We urged the FCC to refrain from taking action on the RCA petition,
suggesting instead that rural wireless players get together, pool their
resources, and work with handset manufacturers to develop their own
smart phones. RCR Wireless now reports that small carriers may be doing just
that by forming NextGen Mobile, LLC, a consortium of more than two dozen
existing GSM mobile operators and winners of advanced wireless services
(AWS) and 700 MHz licenses in recent FCC auctions.
According to the report, all
members of NextGen Mobile operate, or anticipate operating, networks
based on the Global System for Mobile (GSM) family of technologies,
including 3G Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) technologies
and eventually the next-generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) technologies.
In addition to achieving economies of scope and scale for its members
in terms of RF optimization, billing, customer care, roaming and network
operations, NextGen Mobile will enable the smaller operators to influence
the development of smart phones:
"A
huge obstacle for any mobile operator who is not one of the 'Big 5'
carriers is procurement of the latest, must-have handsets," said Bob
Martin, CFO and treasurer of NextGen Mobile. "By aggregating our orders,
NextGen Mobile hopes to entice device manufacturers to develop and deliver
the next 'it' handset or data card to those customers shut out in
the past."
Joint efforts aimed at innovative
product development such as NextGen Mobile are obviously the better
approach to the issue of access to advanced handsets for the smaller
and largely rural mobile carriers. Banning exclusive handsets deals,
we wrote in June, would have deleterious effects on device innovation;
is unnecessary since most exclusive deals already have limited life-spans;
and would very likely harm, rather than help, consumers. As we noted
then, and as the recent NextGen Mobile announcement demonstrates, because
rural carriers can band together and develop their own advanced handsets,
there is no reason for the FCC to prohibit exclusive deals. For
all these reasons, RCA's backward looking rulemaking petition and
its requests for conditions prohibiting exclusive handset deals in the
Verizon-Alltel and Sprint-Clearwire license transfer proceedings should
be roundly rejected.
