Rochester Writers

My two-year indenture with Verizon expired this week, so my cellular overlords graciously provided 100 "dollars" of scrip for a new phone, as long as I signed up for 104 more weeks behind the plow.  The prospect of renewing my contract and buying a new phone filled me with a mixture of anticipation and dread. 

Anticipation, because Verizon is the most popular cell carrier in Rochester for good reason.  Their 1xEVDO network can provide Internet bandwidth almost as fast as a home DSL or Cable connection in 180 cities around the country.  This means, in theory, that searching for a Wi-Fi hotspot is a thing of the past: I could connect wirelessly anywhere in Monroe County, and in virtually every airport and urban area in the US.  This is the stuff of geek dreams.

The dread comes because I knew that there was no way that Verizon would let me use their net at a reasonable price with a cool phone.  Unlike the wired Internet, or Wi-Fi, or even the regular telephone network, which allows me to using any device that follows a basic set of protocols, the cellular Internet is completely controlled by the carrier*.  I must buy my phone from the carrier, at their price, and I must accept whatever feature limitations they impose on that phone. 

This is like only being able to buy your computer or telephone from Frontier, since you want to use their network.  If the Internet were run this way, we'd all just be upgrading to the new blazingly-fast Pentium II technology running Windows 98, for a mere $2,500, with a three-year service commitment.

But I digress.  As I was heading to the store, I imagined that I'd be bombarded with pictures of happy smiling people connecting to the Internet in the middle of a garden of flowers on a sunny day.  That seemed like the logical thing to shill when you have the coolest network on earth.

However, when I got to the store,  everywhere I looked I saw V-Cast, Verizon's service for downloading music and video over their shiny new network.  For those of you who haven't heard about V-Cast, imagine iTunes in a straitjacket, or, better yet, imagine your digital media cuffed, chained to the floor, in a jail cell, with 10 mg of Haldol on board. In other words, there are a few restrictions involved.

The selling point of V-Cast is the ability to download and experience video and music in your phone.  Well, sort of.  When you download the music through your phone, the copy you get isn't as good as the one you could download with your PC.  Yet it costs twice as much ($1.99) to download music to your phone rather than your PC.  If you want a high-quality copy, you must go back to your PC and download the song again.  And the copy you download on the PC only works with Windows Media Player, i.e, not on your iPod.  Plus, the V-Cast PC software doesn't support some features, like creating a playlist of music and syncing that playlist with your phone.  Because who needs those frills?

If you tire of just listening to music, you can also watch a selection of videos on the gigantic screen of your phone ("Twice the size of a postage stamp"  "Bigger than the average preemie's fist").   Music videos cost a mere $4 each.  I didn't bother to check the restrictions are on those videos -- I imagine they involve a lien on all of your earthly goods, or a few ounces of fresh human flesh.

If all of this sounds too good to be true, remember that there's a $15 monthly fee for V-Cast.  In other words, you pay a fee for the privilege of paying more fees.  And did I mention that that V-Cast music store has a small fraction of the music available from iTunes or eMusic?  I'd have to work hard to create a "service" that costs more and delivers less than V-Cast.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not a hippy or a commie.  I have no problem with businesses making money in a competitive market.  But  V-Cast is isn't the the product of healthy competition:  it is a product nobody wants, deployed on equipment nobody likes, at a price that no one wants to pay.  Only an dysfunctional oligopoly can begin with the best wireless network on the planet and end up trying to jam a festering turd like V-Cast down their customers' throats. 

If products like V-Cast are the result of cell carriers "freedom to innovate", then they're just begging for more regulation.  Eliot Spitzer, Verizon is calling.

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* Mostly.  GSM phones, which are used by Cingular, T-Mobile and in Europe, can be unlocked and used on any GSM network, but that's not true in CDMA (Verizon and Sprint) land. The GSM carriers in the US are only beginning to build out their "3G" high-speed networks, by the way.