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Verizon's Wireless Road Warriors
Joey Patterson writes "CNN has an article about how Verizon Wireless uses technicians who drive around the country in station wagons filled with wireless gear to look for holes in the company's cell phone network and analyze the service of its competitors. This program isn't cheap (the cars cost $270,000 and $15/mile to operate), but it definitely helps Verizon find out where they stand relative to their competitors."
While I do find that ad campaign highly annoying, it's
pretty cool to know that those guys are out there.
Pretty much everywhere I've been in the US (and parts
of Canada, I've rarely lost signal. (Paid a lot of
roaming fees, but that's my fault for not having a
national plan, I guess)
then again, they need to get a few of them off the
road and into my office building, reception's awful
in there.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
Hm... since I suppose this thread will be filled with a ton of "verizon rules/verizon sucks" posts, I might as well chip in my 2 cents.
Basically, the coverage is excellent -- I've been covered from San Francisco to Rocky Point (Sonora) to Toronto to Boston. Basically the only time I lose coverage altogether is underground. I used to have analog-only in southwest Michigan, but a quick roaming-software upgrade fixed that; I think now they're piggybacking on sprint's network here, whereas they weren't before.
That said, Verizon leaves a TON to be desired in the customer service department. The reason I bought my phone is because I've truly been traveling across the country for the last year. Trying to change billing addresses is a HUGE hassle; Verizon was cobbled together from 3-4 disparate wireless companies across the country, and it still shows. You have to get a totally new account number when you move, and sometimes you get double-billed for up to a month.
That, and you're basically not allowed to move out of their "preferred market" areas. My new address was about 20 miles south of the Verizon market limits in SW Michigan, same area code and everything, and they were adamant about not allowing me to change my address to that "uncovered" location (note: digital service works just fine here). Long story short, I ended up using a friend's address and paying all my bills online; it's not perfect, but I'm getting along.
So, yeah. it doesn't surprise me that verizon has all these techs in trucks all over the country; their coverage shows it. Now if only they'd hire that clever IBM basketball team to integrate their billing across the nation.
You'd think they would be able to do this from their home office - except for the part about testing each of their competitors signal at the same point. Do they really need to do that though? What they should be doing is comparing signal strengh to usage, and concentrate on making the high usage areas have a good signal, regardless of their competitors.
When I commuted across the Bay Bridge, there was a gap in the Sprint services on the bridge that lasted no more than 50 yards, but it would always drop your call. I'm sure that's one of the heaviest populated gaps in service in the country, yet it went uncovered for years.
300 minutes in 1 day? You must still be in that phase where it takes 60 minutes to hang up the phone.
"Love you, bye bye"
"I love you too, c'ya later"
"You're still there. I love you"
"You hangup first, I love you more"
In that commercial where he is walking around saying "Can you hear me now?" he would stop in that forest and say "Hmm... can't hear me? OK we need a cell tower right over here." and then cut to an aerial shot of the forest with a big cell phone tower coming out of the tree line finally cut to families sitting around the clearing under the cell tower enjoying their newfound reception.
adam
AT&T does the same thing, I've known a guy that does that for about 2 years now.
These same vans will be equipped with ECM gear to actively jam other services cell transmissions... Sort of the minivan equivolent of the EA-6B Prowler ^__^
"Enemy cell tower, 9 o'clock! He's transmitting!"
"Goose switch to active jamming!"
"But what about that other tower!?"
"Don't worry about the tower, you just keep those fighter off..." Um, Nevermind.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
3 things:
1. Every wireless company does this.
2. In britain, wireless companies have been sued by employees when the employee contracted a tumour, which doctors believed was caused by the large amounts of electromagnetic radiation that he was exposed to day in day out by useing a cell phone almost constantly to check signal.
3. This whole article is fairly redundant, and seems more like some kind of "yay for verizon, they do something everyone else does, but look, theres an article on slashdot about them, they must be something special. yay"
thankyou.
you mean the anoying can you hear me now? guy really exists? maybee if were luckey, he will have an unfortunate run in with steve "dud your getting a dell" guy.
or perhaps the maytag repairman can fix them, he has nothing to do anyway...
True enough.
Another reason why GSM phones work. Go to europe. Check it out.
You buy an open GSM phone.
You want a phone number, you go buy a new sim card.
You want more time? Easy.. buy a card, recharge the phone. reasonable rates.
Full services included. voicemail. data. etc. It's not crippled.
It's anonymous.
You want a new phone? Get a new phone, put your sim card in, away you go. All your stored numbers, your phone number, etcetera.
Wow! They bought SIXTY vans? At TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THOU each? Why, that's 16.2 MILLION dollars! Big bucks for sure!
They're spending a whopping 0.025% of their revenue (67.2 billion) or $0.52 per customer (31 million wireless customers) to see whether their customers are actually getting what are paying for.
Be still my heart!
(Say, I wonder how much they spent on the television advertising showing those technicians?)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Verizon dude: "We get signal!"
Customer: "What you say!!!"
Customer: "Main screen turn on!"
Sprint PCS guy "How are you gentlemen??"
eh, you know the story...
PCS uses 1900MHz. Traditional cellular uses 800MHz, which penetrates buildings slightly better.