Corned Beef Renegade
Banned
What if cell phones in 2014 were still a luxury item for the rich and people in certain jobs with the majority of people still using pay phones?
Cell Phones remain a luxury item
- Thread starter Corned Beef Renegade
- Start date
Somewhat difficult, you would need a POD that butterflies affordable electronics and microprocessors, but yet still keeps them extant enough that it is deemed economical to make portable telecommunications devices with them. Even if those devices are very pricey.
Perhaps some even that stagnates technological progress at an early to mid 1980s level.
I'm not sure exactly where the best place to start for this is.
Outside of public terminals tied to mainframe systems? likely yes.
Not for sure.
Some screw up regulation for cellphone caries would do too.
Just Imagine if FCC had same attitude as it had in 1930s.
For example currently you auction off broadcast spectrum and then operators use as they see fit.
But instead you get one monopoly provider (as to make it better state one) and high prices are their for sure. If this happens in USA countries follow on.
Even if some countries have different policy market is not big enough to support cheap phones..
Damm I remember those days -1984. Sending text messages on a green or red screen from Okinawa to the US on a computer at the battalion adjutants office. & a friend bragging about riding somewhere in Chicago in a Limo. with a car phone. I think it was owned by a stockbroker.
Four years later in 1988 I was discussing the pros and cons of getting a 'modem card' for my Apple IIe to send messages on the "internet". Decided to forgo that and upgrade to a Mac+. That could support a affordable drafting program. Meanwhile we started seeing folks carrying big brick cellular phones around the big city. Four years later we were being told anyone not able to communicate electronically with email had better think about their contribution to the organization. Meanwhile my peers on the construction sites were unable to escape the phone on their belt of briefcase & anoyed the rest of us with their constant interruption to answer their phone.
Four years later in 1988 I was discussing the pros and cons of getting a 'modem card' for my Apple IIe to send messages on the "internet". Decided to forgo that and upgrade to a Mac+. That could support a affordable drafting program. Meanwhile we started seeing folks carrying big brick cellular phones around the big city. Four years later we were being told anyone not able to communicate electronically with email had better think about their contribution to the organization. Meanwhile my peers on the construction sites were unable to escape the phone on their belt of briefcase & anoyed the rest of us with their constant interruption to answer their phone.
Easiest way to do it would seem to be to have the US, Europe (maybe by way of the EU) and China (not particularly difficult given the Chinese inclination towards censorship) have very uncompetitive telecommunications regulation, though I doubt that even that will delay it indefinitely, so long as technology still progresses, ugly legislative and legal battles in the major markets could certainly delay progress on cell phone development and availability by 20-30 years compared to OTL.
Bones points if a more deregulated cable market becomes the primary driver of the early consumer internet, instead of the phone lines as OTL. (presumably followed by purpose built fiber-optic networks when the internet really begins to take off).
Bones points if a more deregulated cable market becomes the primary driver of the early consumer internet, instead of the phone lines as OTL. (presumably followed by purpose built fiber-optic networks when the internet really begins to take off).
Hard to do - infrastructure-type things (like cell phones) get significantly less expensive as more people use them.
How on earth do you do that?
Cell phones use the same chip technology that computers do - smart phones ARE computers - and to freeze cell phone tech would be to freeze computer tech.
Good luck with THAT!
Carl, you were on Okinawa in 1984? I was there too - 81-85 - at student at Kadena High School.
Your post has me thinking how much computer-related change there was between 1984 and the early 1990s.
In 1984 (I think that was the year), we had a competition at Kadena High between Kadena students with calculators and local Okinawan students with abacuses. I sort of remember the abacuses beating out the calculators.
not really, no. NiCads already existed, and they would suffice. Oh, sure your cell phone would be twice the size, and smartphones would be harder, larger and more expensive. But staying with NiCads (or better NiMH, which was likely in the wings already, even if not on the market) is NOT going to do anything like what the OP asks for.
not really , i suspect that what would happen is that while the market may be smaller anyone who travels significant distances will have a car phone - the only reason more cars didn;t have standard built in phones was the fiddly nature of swapping sim cards between GSM phones and the lack of effective work arounds by the networks to support multi sim on one subscriber number or you'd see the 'handbag' phones remain a common form factor where a car phone handset was the 'handle' to a rigid or semi rigid 'hand bag' containing a Lead acid or NiCad battery pack and 12v and mains chargers...
What you may also see is continued widespread use of conventional pagers, probably tied to your 'car phone' account so rather than going to voice mail if you don;t answer the phoneis switched off it goes to the pager and then you either return to the car or pick up a landline. the 1990s saw 'calling party pays' pager systems for domestic use rather than the leased from the tel co pager systems used by businesses with large 'fleets' of pagers ( this was also thecase with most of the pagers in use in the UK emergency services, itwas only retained duty Firefighters who had local area pagers using the PMR frequencies allocated for the vehicle radios)
by the time cellular telephone technology came about the USK had allready begun to de regualte relecoms , BT was a traded PLC not a goverment dept , there was competition in business telephony and the cellular netowrks allowed competition in without the sagas of LLU ( as pre LLU the only alternative to BT for line provision in domestic and small businesses was if you were in a cable TV area.
Larger, more expensive and shorter battery life would put people off I'm sure, which I'd call much more likely to succeed than any attempt to slow down digital development.
Slow down? certainly. But that's NOT what the OP asked for. The phrasing was "luxury item for rich people", a very much more restrictive challenge.
Yes, but at no point in time can we be sure what the next five years will bring. The computers of any given day are always better than those of just a few years in the past. From 1989 to 2003, you had a literal Moore's Law doubling of capacities and processor speeds every two years. During that time, cell phones became universal. Since then, the progress has not been as rapid. Computers reached the 1.4 GHz processing speed around 2003. Since then, they have doubled but not quadrupled, the criteria to make old units obsolete. Now, suppose at some time in the early nineties, processor technology hits a limit. The first Pentium chips, the first PowerPC chips were impressive in their day. There was no assurance at any given time that processor speeds would continue to double every two years for as long as they did. A freeze at 1994 would still allow a slow World Wide Web, but cell phones might not compete with land lines.
Then make the initial charges for data/texts/minutes so prohibitive that mass usage of the early devices just does not take off. The marketers think its for rich yuppies - so why not extract a premium price?. Or the regulators keep the frequencies etc. for the police/military or whatever reason so there is more of a price squeeze on the limited channels.
With no mass usage, prices for the hardware and for data don't fall to affordable levels and so the snowball effect does not happen - no mass consumer take-up of mobile devices.
Either the same happens for landline data (thus putting the brakes on the internet as we know it) - or it is relatively cheap compared to mobile data rates so the PC with a modem is still a useful device. But you will still probably be in the 90s mode - connecting to Costu$erve for a few expensive dial-up minutes to download your messages to read and compose replies offline, not the 'always on' browsing that took off later on since you'll get charged per minute as well as per kilobyte of data.
Mobile therefore remains a niche product for stockbrokers and similar, or police and emergency forces and military because the data charges stayed pegged at the initial extortionate levels that only yuppies would fork out for.