Telstra allows iPhone tethering

Apparently the australian Telstra has reversed their iPhone tethering policy. You can read more at ZDNET.

While some might view this to be a move towards enabling future 3G/Internet convergence that IMS is supposed to bring to the market, in my humble opinion it is more likely that it's just a response to customer requirements.

Opensource phones vs. operators

According to the PCMag, the current state of opensource platforms for mobile phones is not very promising since the wireless carriers in the US "hate the unexpected" which is argued to be one of the key attributes of open source technologies. The author basically argues that if you provide phone users too much power through an extendable OS like Linux, the networks would go "poof" as somehow a lot of "geeks" would start overusing the network.

I do agree that the author has a point in that open source tools and technologies are less likely to have a predictable development path, thus making it harder for incumbent operators to re-train and re-deploy their huge staff. Not to mention the trouble with documentation that (does not) come with opensource tools and technologies.

However, I don't think that the operators are worried about geeks "overusing" the network. The operators actually have quite solid tools for monitoring and operating the network, and they are actually very good at denying access to network hackers, barring the DDoS crowd.

Besides, in all networks the "geeks" make up a very small percentage of total user count. Network planners certainly would not make major network planning decisions based on the behaviour of this marginal group.

The author of the PC Mag article also argues that some of the incumbent operators like T-Com and Sprint were fully focused on becoming a sort of 'telecom for geeks' . I would like to point out that no large operator, could ever split even, let alone make profit if it was focusing on a very small group of users. The reason is that these already have made huge investments in software and hardware platforms and need a very stable cash flow just to cover their operating expenses.

Having discussed the importance of geek portion of market for operators, now imagine say, 50% of network, "average users" using an advanced opensource platform phone in the network.

The so-called average users are much more likely to (check all that apply) :

a) do something wrong with the advanced platform

b) not notice that they did something wrong

c) have their phone eventually malfunction as a consequence of a) and b)

d) forget what exactly they did wrong since they did not understand what they did in the first place

e) call support staff

f) call support staff again

g) decide that the operator sold them a broken phone

h) switch to a different operator

Due to their technical incompetence, the non-geek users are far likely to make trouble by using a thirdy party app they do not understand (and which could theoretically be malicious software).

Since they do not understand what they did in the first place, they are less likely to be able to self-recover from the problem, and possibly giving a lot of trouble to the operator's support staff.

As a reaction to this problem, the operator would invest more in staff, software and hardware in order to provide better "user experience". This step will not actually solve anything as each operator tries to get a larger market share so under the presumption of an ever increasing number of users additional investments to support department are required.

Eventually, the number of available 3rd party apps, and custom-made extensions makes things so complex for maintenance that operator decides to scale back. Since the staff, software and hardware investments are cut down, so is the support for the platform, and operator goes back to supporting the simple and predictable platforms.

Therefore I conclude that the core issue with the open source on mobile phones is the same as open source on desktop computers - it's simply not simple enough for the average user.