Threat to Verizon’s reliability mantle

Rating: Shot itself in foot with Openness thingey

by Tony Dennis

No real hard news here at the E5 event hosted by Telcordia in  San Francisco. Until somebody asked guest speaker, Nicki Palmer, who is vp for network operations support with Verizon Wireless about her company freshly announced open network initiative.
She came out with the confession that - only 17 weeks into her tenure with the Wireless bit of Verizon  -  the newly  announced $20  million  testing  lab associated with the initiative  actually comes under her remit.
So as soon as she finishes in San Francisco, she intends to pay the labs a visit as she hasn’t seen it yet.

Sadly, Ms Palmer didn’t flesh out many more details of how the initiative will work save to announcing that the company should be able to issue some standards as guidance for those who want to develop devices to run on Verizon’s network.
Her hope is that by Q1 2009, it will be feasible to have any device you want fully provisioned on the network. That’s provided that it has been certified by Verizon’s new labs.
And there’s the rub. Exactly how much will it cost to gain certification. Plus how long such a process might take. Luckily there’s a precedence for all of this.
In the UK, any device attached to the fixed line network (run by BT)  have to obtain approval from  BABT -  the approvals body. Initially,  manufacturers  made noises about how long things took  and the expense.
Once the rules had been established, however, the whole approvals process soon began to run smoothly.
There’s another similarity. Actix CEO, Alex Hawker, recently told me that there a big difference between cdmaOne based handsets and GSM ones. A badly designed cdmaOne handset could bring the whole network down and this had actually happened to a certain Australian network with the introduction of a rogue handset.
So Verizon really does have to be careful what devices connect to its network. The necessity for its new labs is very real indeed. It’s all the more important given that Nicki Palmer prefixed her remarks by declaring that Verizon Wireless is the most reliable mobile network in the country.
It will certainly lose that mantle if a rough handset makes it way onto the network without proper testing. So by its sudden switch to ‘open’ networks, Verizon may have accidentally shot itself in the foot.