That's my point, although I'm not sure my argument is illuminating much. Why do they request applause for selling what is essentially an unchanging utility? Dat

That's my point, although I'm not sure my argument is illuminating much. Why do they request applause for selling what is essentially an unchanging utility? Data goes to and from the handset. Lower latency, cheaper, wider range, higher volume, diffserved, sorted, tabulated, billed, whatever, sure: if you define implementation improvements as "innovations" then the carriers are innovating. But the thing the customer consumes is the same as the first day they lit up the first network: timely data to a computationally-capable handset.