Most users have learned the hard way that they must choose their calling plans carefully, to always be wary of exorbitant roaming and texting charges, and to generally stay on a war footing with their provider for good reason – billing crammers have made the extraction of money from customers a black art.

The FCC warns consumers that “Cramming is the practice of placing unauthorized, misleading, or deceptive charges on your telephone bill. Crammers rely on confusing telephone bills in an attempt to trick consumers into paying for services they did not authorize or receive, or that cost more than the consumer was led to believe.”

As the cell phone evolves to deliver an ever more complicated suite of services, a device such as Apple’s iPhone can become a user’s main Internet access point. The devilish opportunities for cramming are then limited only by the billers’ occult vocabulary.

The Net was Mickey-Moused

it is true that there is little that can be done beyond vigilance, for the moment. Taking away your teenager’s cell phone carries a strong risk of personal injury. Limiting your own calls to the evening hours could complicate your day job (hello?). What can you do to control corrosive phone and cable bills? A little patience may be required for a while yet – but their day of reckoning is coming soon.

It helps to first understand where these glorified billing organizations came from. The Internet’s architecture is first-generation, ad hoc, and optimized for expediency. It was cobbled together from flimsy telephone lines and haphazard cable networks, because those were in place twenty years ago; when the Web suddenly arrived into the laps of cable and TV executives like an unwanted pregnancy.

These firms had no choice but to dance with the wires that brung them, perhaps buy up small ISP’s, until wireless took command a decade ago. The cable companies had the fatter coax cables and scooped up the lion’s share of the Internet accounts, while the voice networks scrambled to morph into cell phone empires.

The Internet, however, is an 800-lb gorilla that won’t be caged in by ersatz technologies, and maturing Wi-Fi standards will force its restructuring, from the “edge” back into its delivery backbone.

Smart electrical panels will service all devices

The architecture of the Internet will eventually look like this:

• It will be delivered via fiber optics over the electric utilities’ right-of-way, which hold forth around the world. Big bandwidth will be available in every building, just as electricity is now, with today’s outmoded telephone poles retired.
• Our electrical panel will become a panel computer that manages our power usage, providing Internet access, TV, voice calls, security and Wi-Fi connectivity over a range of secure channels.

It is the FCC’s policy that power must be delivered over the planned Smart Grid, to intelligently manage energy use and possible blackouts, and allow the recharging of electric cars. There will be excess bandwidth available for communications and entertainment services.

The promise of Wi-Fi

Like FSBO to a real estate agent, Wi-Fi is the dirtiest word in the communications lexicon. It signals the eventual demise of dedicated cable and cell phone services, which the public just won’t have to pay for anymore. A Wi-Fi device that can “see” a smart building can wirelessly connect to the Internet at high speed, as is now common at cafes, airports and other hot spots. Once the public network is built out, broadband will become as commonplace as 115 volts is today.

A new protocol called Wi-Fi Direct unveiled at Las Vegas’ CES show this month allows just about any electronic device to exchange data with others, and consumers will come to expect a Wi-Fi phone to enable ordinary voice calling far below the rates endured today..

Edgar Figueroa of the Wi-Fi Alliance noted at CES that “The more you delve into the Wi-Fi protocol, the more you appreciate the 10 years of innovation that have gone behind what Wi-Fi is today.” This a technology whose time has come.

The legacy communications carriers can be expected retreat to web services that offer enhanced messaging and online content, or to reinvent themselves. Consumers will continue to pay for Internet service, of course, as a utility – but the cold hands of the billing crammers will be off their throats.

Internet content publishers and broadcast digital TV promise a rich mix of ad-driven programming, and Wi-Fi phones will retain most of the features that carry a premium price today.

With the number and variety of free services coming, communications will again be affordable, captured by the bunny ears and simpler phones of yore.

Dwight Gilbert Jones is a former Internet Service Provider and software developer.