While there’s no contesting that Apple and Steve Jobs left a massive mark on the mobile industry, ComputerWorld reports that Steve Jobs originally had something much bigger in mind – making Apple into its own wireless carrier.
Wireless industry icon John Stanton reportedly worked with Jobs for several years over the idea of building a wireless carrier using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum. in which Jobs’
Stanton, chairman of venture capital firm Trilogy Partners, said he spent a fair amount of time with Jobs between 2005 and 2007. “He wanted to replace carriers,” Stanton said of Jobs, the Apple founder and CEO who died Oct. 5 after a battle with cancer. “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 would have been yet another industry that Jobs could have been very disruptive to. It’s unclear why Jobs eventually abandoned the idea in 2007, but it is interesting to imagine how things might have been different if he had succeeded.
