Steve Jobs’s legacy on the mobile industry is uncontested, but instead of just changing the balance of power between handset makers and the carriers, Jobs’s original vision was even more revolutionary: he wanted Apple to become a carrier using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum.
According to venture capitalist and wireless industry legend John Stanton, “[Steve Jobs] wanted to replace carriers” from 2005 to around 2007.
“He and I spent a lot of time talking about whether synthetically you could create a carrier using Wi-Fi spectrum. That was part of his vision.”
This obsession with replacing carriers lasted until 2007, when he abandoned the idea of Apple figuring out a way to harness unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum into a carrier of its own. But imagine what a different world we all could have been living in if Jobs had succeeded.
[via MacWorld]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
