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Cell Phone Service Degenerates Further
An anonymous reader writes "Almost everyone I know has been complaining about their cell phone service lately. These companies continue to add more subscribers, overloading their networks to the breaking point. They hold you hostage by not allowing you to switch providers and won't invest in new infrastructure. Customer service ratings are dismal for all the major providers. Doesn't look like it's going to improve any time soon."
Well mine is fine. Never had a problem except in the metro /subway
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
Damn Leonids.
This space for rent.
The only thing that will give the providers incentive is if they start to lose subscribers. As long people limit themselves to grumbling and complaining, nothing will happen to make the situation better.
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
Cell phones are but one service that is starved in spectrum allocation. If the government was to let the free market allocate the spectrum, an entire new universe of wireless network services could become available.
I get a signal about 50% of the time...and it has this nasty habit of going from full signal to zero (dropped connection) and immediately back up to full signal....what happened in the middle?
Sons of bitches...do NOT get Sprint...they seem to have a "random service droppage" policy...or a major bug in the system.
And on top of it, they have no procedure to submit a dead spot at, say, YOUR HOUSE and have it corrected, or even listened to. Once you've hit that 14 days, you are stuck my friends.
Maybe Microsoft or the Gov't will get involved than we will not have to waste time making a decision.
The non stop aggressive advertising for cell services and the general status of a cell phone in daily life no doubt caused an explosion they weren't ready for. The constant rate wars make it harder and harder for them to invest heavily in infrastructure. A rates increase (timed charges? yay!) is probably the only thing that will pull the industry up again.
Would you pay a bit more for a better service, or will you always go for the most minutes?
---
When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
I live in a pretty packed section of LA (Hollywood Hills) and I have noticed over the two years I have been here that my cell phone has always been between 1 and 2 bars in my apt. out of 4 (signal strength) yet I used to be able to make phone calls and now I spend half the time not even on the network. The cell towers have gotten so crowded that when you call AT&T they tell you that only about 68% of all calls made from that area are able to get through due to overcrowding. Yet they have no plans to expand in our area for the next year.
It kinda sucks. And I'm locked in by a contract.
Honesty may be the best policy, but apparently by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
Haven't had any real issues w/ my Verizon service while at school in Milwaukee, WI. or anywhere else in the state, can't complain at all...maybe cuz back in my hometown nobody has a cell phone, hell, we're all hicks anyways...
Does anyone else find it slightly odd that cell phone companies are allowed to make cell phones that only work with their network? For instance, I can't ditch Sprint and use my Sprint PCS Samsung phone with Verizon service. Why is this allowed? I mean, what if Verizon required you to have a special type of phone for your local (land line) service. If you wanted to switch to a different provider, would you have to buy a new home phone? Most people would freak about that.
Thoughts?
Mike
-- bearclaw
"Can you hear me?" "No" "Good!"
Don't sign any contracts that extended beyond that period.
At least here in the states, cell phone carriers will be required to institute true number portability on cellphones. They've been pushing it back for about 4 years now but the FCC told them it was do or die time.
This is from: clarkhoward.com:
"Cell phone portability stays alive - July 18, 2002
If you are one of our listeners who took the time to write to the FCC about the cell phone industry, Clark wants to congratulate you. A law passed in 1996 allowed you to take your cell phone number from company to company if you changed providers. It was called "true number portability" and the cell phone industry was terrified of it. So, they have tried everything they could to postpone the law going into effect. The FCC asked for you comments in this matter and your voice was heard. The FCC has issued a decision, saying the rule will stay in effect and you'll be able to keep your number. But reinstatement will not go into effect until Thanksgiving 2003. So, we will be able to take our number with us, but not for a while. And, when this goes into effect, many cell phone companies will go away because of mergers. As long as we have four major players, we will have a decent amount of competition."
Here's the original link.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Capitalism = who rips off best wins
This may be modded as a troll, but in modern economics, it is a truth.
Uh, yeah they do. As soon as your contract runs out you can change to whatever you want. No one forced you to sign that contract. You probably thought the contract was a good deal when you didn't have to pay full price for your cell phone.
Someone correct me if I am wrong (And i think i am), but was not the justice department investigating the major cell providers for illigaly forcing customers to only use certain cell phones? For example, that nice new shiny Nokia I want will only work with AT&T wireless, not Sprint or Verizon. That, and some back door deals with the cell phone makers to restrict options raised some eyebrows, if i remember right.
Yeah, something is up with them. When I got my latest cell phone, I had a somewhat in depth discussion with the sales rep about the various carriers. He said that although Sprint has some excellent protocols and ideas for new network services, they are relatively new to cell phone service. As a result, they don't have as much experience with networks as Verizon or VoiceStream do. So that could be the source of your problems.
The sales rep also said that Sprint has problems with reception inside buildings (more so than other providers). I ended up going with Verizon as a result.
neurostarI have Sprint PCS and use it all over the country (it's 85% for when I travel). I've been pretty happy with the service I have gotten.
Sure its not your phone?
I gets lots of service drop-offs in the Akron/Cleveland, OH, region, including one big one that's 2 miles away from the Cingular store ( Fairlawn, OH ) I bought the phone from.
*comes home and tears open the packaging on a brand new cellphone that came with a 8 year service contract, then reads /.*
damn...
XML causes global warming.
Sprint's service Sucks. I only get service near hiways. (Its not a car-phone, it's a cell-phone)
And don't let all of their comercial "Can you hear me now?" crap fool you, when you dont have good service, which is pretty often, the sound cuts out for seconds at a time.
Move to europe. My phone works fine, is cheap & lets me move from network to network easily.
I don't know about everyone else, but here's my experience:
I had a SprintSpectrum GSM phone when they first came out, loved it, then Sprint dumped it and went to CDMA SprintPCS. And I've had one of those since. Ever since it's deployment, service has gotten steadily worse in the Washington, DC area, and there are parts of major roads where you are guaranteed to drop a call.
Then I moved, and my phone got even more odd. I've been through several, and each has this behavior. If I stand up in my apartment, I have tolerable reception, if I sit down, zero. Seriously. I called Sprint, they said "well, we don't guarantee it will work in home or office, only outside". Wow, isn't that helpful.
So, since most of my friends travel a lot, they have GSM phones from Voicestream (now T-Mobile), and I decided to get one of those spiffy new SonyEriccson T68i phones for $50 from Amazon. When I finally got it from back-order, it was ready to go, and weighed nothing, and had excellent coverage at home, office, car, and has only dropped one call, when I was driving by the CIA.
Now, I didn't want one of the overlay numbers for Northern VA (571 area code), so I called them, and they thoughtfully changed my number to a 202 on the phone. Effective immediately. No cost, thank you for being a customer.
I have had only one problem with coverage, and that's my new office, in the middle of nowhere. But Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile work only sporadically in the building, so I don't take it personally. It's just annoying.
I do think what they do in Europe is more normal... you can get a cheap phone that's locked, or you can pay a bit more for an unlocked phone (T-Mobile gave me the unlock codes for my phone). Then, since *everyone* uses the same system, you can change carriers as you see fit.
Of course! this explains why the USA's cellphone infrastructure is so much better than Europe's - the EU is just over-regulated!!
NB: That, like US cellphone systems, was a joke.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
poor service is nothing gnu.
in a urlrelated topic, you can only imagine our surprise, at being listed as one of the "Top 10 Companies of 2002"(tm) , on fuddle's search thingy.
almost everything's gnu now.
beat DOWn from trying to be a billyunheir/keeping your job? you may want to try some nice ktea. it's not snake oil, but it's still good for you.
That said everyone I know complains about Sprint's coverage and has sworn them off, something I couldn't figure out. Then this summer a bunch of use started to do a phone comparison. And you know what, almost everywhere I had a few bars while they were dropping to roaming.
Then we realize that my older (and slightly larger) Samsung must have a more powerful antenna. All my friends super cool $300 migit phones made a signal strength vs. size tradoff.
So don't complain if you cant get signal in doors. You should have bought a larger phone....
Some people can stand voting with their wallet because they do not absolutely require the cell phone service. However, many others do. So, just change your service often - forcing the sales representatives to give you good introductory rates but without a long term service contract. If you can get one of them to give you cheap rates for half a year and then standard rates for another half a year on a one year contract, then take it and cancel the service afterwards. Repeat. Not only does this get you repeating good rates, but it contributes to the service cancelation numbers for the companies to possibly motivate them to provide better service.
Funny thing to note that most of these bastage companies are just ripping you off even more: Where I live, we need to make a lot of cell phone calls from a certain area just South of town, but we can never seem to get good service there. So after switching providers a couple times and figuring out that none of them will give us good reception down there, we start looking at coverage maps for the cell phone companies in our area. Guess what, they all look exactly the freaking same. Not only do they all use the same towers, but a lot of them even use the same equipment, they just portion their usage off with each other. So, the only thing you are usually paying for is how much less of an a$$ one company will be to you over another company.
... Add to that the fact that anyone calling me on my cell wanted a "favor"; together those two things gave me all the excuse I need to get rid of it. After 7 years or being tied to the world, freedom couldn't feel any better! Snip from my past life ....
RING... ... ah, hey, my computer stopped working, do you think you ...
RING... ... hey, this is the BossMan, the Database seems real slow, can you take a look at it...
RING... ... hey, I'm putting in this new mother board and I can't get any video. Can you...
********
P.S. AT&T - I'm still waiting for you to credit my account (and no, I don't want 30 days free call-forwarding to make it all better).
I live in southeastern New Mexico...we (my family) have Sprint as our cell phone carrier, and have had next to no problems. A few days ago however, we traveled to Lubbock...and pieces of Sprint's network in Texas crash...it was not fun.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
If I could mod you up to +10, I would do it in a split second.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Harumph!
I really do... need... it.
Umm... so I can find out where to go drinking!
Yeah, that's it!
Part of the problem is that there are several different standards for digital cellphones here in the states. Some networks use CDMA technology, some use TDMA technology, and some use GSM technology. If you are switching between carriers that use the same technology then you can probalby keep your phone. This is also how out of area roaming works. I have Dobson/Cellular One phone. AT&T Wireless uses the same technology as Dobson, so when I get out of my local area I start using AT&T phones. If you look at the model numbers of cellphones you'll often model numbers that only differ by one digit. A Nokia 8260 and 8290 for example. These phones are basically the same except that one can talk TDMA and the other talks CDMA.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
I work for a wireless reseller, and I've seen the complaints flood in. We are often flooded with callers who cannot connect their calls, or once every 10 calls they might actually get through. This is more seen in big cities such as New York, Miami, etc. The systems are overloaded, and from my experiences, the wireless carriers don't really care. They need to take a step back, and look at the current infrastructure they have in place, and realize that this is not going to last much longer. The systems weren't designed to handel the amount of traffic they are currently holding, and it's only a matter of time before it all comes crashing down around them.
I know that they currently do not have the money to pump into upgrading the entire system, but right now, the cellular phone industry is at a place where a lot of people are relying on the technology, so it may be a time to have a small markup in the rates. I know where I live, it is cheaper to own and use a cellular phone then a landline phone these days. There's only so much that the consumer will be able to handel before they go back to their old ways of communicating.
tourettes
In 56 percent of the nation's households, someone now subscribes to wireless phone service, more than double the percentage in 1995.
The average per-minute cost has dropped to 11 cents this year from 56 cents in 1995. For the phone companies that has meant a decline in average revenue per customer to $61 a month, from $74 in 1995.
I wonder if the same would happen if cd's dropped to a fifth the price? You've got double the customers, so you're still making more money just not as much per customer.
A lot of people wouldn't have a cell phone if it still cost 56 cents a minute.
The PUC is your best friend. I have a friend that had a subscription with T-Mobile. Their service was horrible and customer service was always jerking him around and billing was charging him for hundreds of text messages he never used. I kept telling him to threaten them with calling the PUC. One day he did it. They immediate dropped all the false charges and kissed his ass.
Each state has it's own PUC, for instance, this is Minnesota's. As you can see, they control telecom, electric, and gas. PUC really is your friend. For instance, PUC is responsible for penalizing Qwest for anti-competitive business practices.
In a way and after a fashion who can blame them? The MCI statistics that the net was doubling growth every 110 days (I think this is correct) led to a gut of telecom infrastructure growth (in certain areas). The bottom fell out, regulation on what they could charge consumers increased, etc, etc. The aforementioned items primarly impacted large telecoms, but many wireless providers are in part owned or dependent on these large telecoms for service or funding at some point. With the technology fads that we have fitnessed in the last 5+ years who can blame provider networks if they decide to wait for a while while a strong set of standards evolves for just what consumers want in their handheld/wireless devices. Then again they just might all be broke as hell.
My service is actually quite good and I'm in the mountains.
I have AT&T, live in the Northeast Megalopolis, and have great connections, and never drop a call. Perhaps you live in a bad area, or have a bad provider. And why does "an anonymous reader" get posted to the front page, with such an obviously crap story? Is this "Whinedot" ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Much as I dislike the local cell service and its "dead areas", it's not like ther's a flip-of-the-switch solution to fix it. Dead spots seem to come in for a variety of reasons. Locally, we have some that seem to have their signals blocked by large obstructions of nature (trees, hills, etc), or degraded by local interference.
It's not like the cell company can just go out and say, blow up a large hill (or business complex) to clear the way for your reception, and putting up repeaters to boost signal for 1 or even a few people is just not worth it.
Another thing is that some businesses/locations actively block signals. In one area of town, cellular reception often dies when you drive past the local call-center. This never happened before the call-center went in (it was a Kmart before), so I would assume that they are doing something that interferes with the standard cellular signal.
I do sympathise, I used to live in a house where my cell didn't work either, but in that case can you get one-touch-call-forwarding to your home phone?
I'm stuck in the midwest, with only cingular with a tower close enough to get a signal. Its so bad we have 4 cingular dealers in a town with 5500 people. Unfortunately we can't even get a signal in half the town. I'd be happy to just get a good signal, let alone a different company, but nobody else wants this area.
On the upside, my Verizon service in SE Michigan (Metro Detroit and Ann Arbor) has been good though relatively expensive, but you get what you pay for. Customer service has been excellent, but maybe that's because I pay them $350/month (it's my business phone).
On the downside:
- Sound quality is bare minimum: Just good enough that if both parties are on cell phones, I can barely have a conversation. Critical details need to be repeated. (If anyone knows how to fix it on a Kyocera 6035 smartphone -- increase the Vocoder rate? -- feel free to post it.)
- Call drops, uneven coverage -- it's all much worse than landline. Perhaps I'm merely the victim of diminished expectations.
The ability to leave a customer-unfriendly provider for a better performing competitor should be a customer right. I can leave my cable or wired phone company at any time. So why can't I do the same with a wireless phone company.
It's not like there are any startup costs associated with setting up a new customer. Cell phone activation is totally computerized. Especially if you bought your phone (not a free phone), there's no loss to a wireless company when you leave. And therefore no reason to be held hostage.
While many GSM phones are locked to a provider, some times they will unlock them after a certain time (likely after your contract period expires). And if you buy your own phone of course it won't we locked at all. Then you can choose between Cingular, ATT and T-Mobile.
This will be great for competition once people realize they can do this... Right now many are probably unaware of this.
And in Europe... and in India. But when I get to the US there is a marked drop off. To the stage where I have often used two phones, one tri-band and one CDMA/analogue.
I can "roam" onto competitors networks outside of my home country, but not at home. Hence my tri-band phone often gets a signal as it has 3 or so networks to chose from, while the Sprint phone gets nothing because I'm in a Sprint zone.
Basic solutions would be for better roaming agreements between providers and one standard for phones.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Okay, well the title doesn't really have anything to do with what I'm about to say, but bear with me for a moment here. The reason that Cell Phone company's don't care about customer service is that they've got their customers "by the balls" (metaphorically speaking, don't want to be un-pc :P). Off the top of my head I can think of three major providers (Verizon, Sprint, Cingular), I know there's many more but as far as I can tell they're all as bad as the next guy when it comes to this.
The problem? So many people have cell phones that if you market enough people are going to sign ridiculous contracts for a service they don't really need.
As long as everyone keeps viewing cell phones as an essential tool, nothing is going to change (barring goverment intervention).
(Note: Yes, in case you can't tell, I don't have a cell phone, and sometimes I think I'm the only one.)
Ok, so I'm no mobile expert, but I thought that you'd still see signal even if all call timeslots were being used ...
I know that when you go to a soccer game or some other large event, the cell phone nodes can't handle it due to the huge numbers trying to call their friends with the latest score etc, most nodes support surprisingly few simultaneous calls.
Presumably a similar thing is happening - small hotspots of overusage in certain city areas, I wonder what the difference in terms of node density between a perceived good service and a bad one.
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
Kind of gives the advertising campaign a whole new meaning!
Sleep is for the Weak
When my contract was up, I simply got rid of mine. Alltel was absolutely horrible, but Cellular One was no better, nor was Suncom. I now just use one pager, supplied by my employer. And you know what? The world didn't end when I got rid of it, surprise surprise. You find out that you DON'T have to be connected 24 hours a day. And the people constantly calling you discover this as well. I got my life back when I dumped that damned phone. I've now set rules on how I can be contacted. In an emergency, page me, but it damn well better be a real emergency. Other than that, send email, and I'll get back to you when I can. It feels so much better that way. When I had the phone, it seemed that I was on call to everone I knew constantly. Now it seems more like I'm in charge of my own time again. Dump your cell phones. You'll be surprised how much better you feel.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You know the one -- the "Can you hear me now?" guy -- he's set for life! Talk about full employment! Do you think, that maybe, he's not being entirely truthful? He always seems to have coverage no matter what god forsaken place he travels to...
But to me, the most interesting thing about cell phone coverage is how it seems to vary by economic class and race. Take my area in Washington, DC. There are five or so close in suburbs (the Maryland and Virginia sides) that are all connected by a six lane death strip -- known as the Beltway, or 495 (so coined by G. Gordon Liddy). Cell phone coverage in the affluent white suburbs (Montgomery, Fairfax, Alexandria) on the beltway is just about 100% perfect -- heaven forbid anyone driving their Mercedes E class on their way to their McMansion should be out of touch with the illegal immigrant nanny for even a second! But once you cross over into the predominantly African American and less wealthy (it's still the richest majority-minority county in the country based on per capita income, but still "poor" compared to the other surrounding counties) the cell phone coverage on the beltway drops to almost nothing in wide stretches. And this is not some backwater! We're talking Interstate 95!
All humor aside, I hate suggesting that the cell companies are purposefully racist, but the fact remains that the more politically connected counties would never stand for a major national thoroughfair being without coverage. Perhaps there's a lack of infrastructure in the minority areas, perhaps there just aren't any AT&T executives who live in that area -- whatever the reason, it stinks from an ethical and moral standpoint and is indicative of the need for economic development in that part of town.
My cable TV has sucked lately
Our Internet connection at work stinks
My home DSL sucks this week
My dial-up won't stay connected
Back in February of this year I purchased my first cell phone and service contract from ALLTEL. The plan I have is 500 anytime minutes Mon - Fri, 5000 minutes nights and weekends, nation wide long distance service, caller ID, call waiting, and voice mail. My local calling area is the entire state of Ohio. The monthly service fee costs $39.95/month + state and federal taxes on the calls I make. The FREE CDMA cell phone ALLTEL shipped to me was a Motorola TalkAbout T2260. During the time of owning this phone and using their service, mostly for free long distance service, only two calls were dropped while I was talking to people. I think this service is excellent compared to other services and I whole heartedly recommend this service. Man, I couldn't be a happier camper with this company.
My parents have had dismal results when they switched to Sprint. For two weeks they were getting calls from people all over the country they didn't know, apparently from Sprint network problems.
Because of this, I end up not using all the minutes I buy every month on my phone. Which means two things, I am not getting what I am paying for and T-Mobile is losing out on raping me on overage charges. So its a two way loss.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I've managed to go through the first 22 years of my life without a cellphone. Yes, there would be a few times where it would be handy to have a phone, but I've never needed a phone for personal use.
For my job, my employer provides me with a phone, which largely stays unused. In fact, it's used primarily as a two-way pager, for text, and infrequently for calls. I think that I've reported car accidents more often than I've called for any other purpose, in fact.
Wanna learn to chill out? Ditch the phone, ditch the laptop, palm pilot, GPS, etc, and go just do something. Do something that doesn't require to make a big deal about doing it. Stuff like sitting in a park under a tree with a novel. You'll find your stress level and blood pressure will drop dramatically.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I'm sure everyone will attempt to account their various grips about the vagaries of cell-phone customer service. But is this problem really just in the NE or is it elsewhere. I'm thinking along the lines of lot's of buildings, terrain, lack of relay stations. In Texas, we are flat as a fritter, so a 40 foot tower covers a major city. Our cities are very spreadout, so traffic is spread out over the infrastructure.
---- This is off-topic ----
I still crack up everytime I see that commerical, "I thought she said 'Get a Monkey with a cold.". The little monkey has his pajamas on, and a thermometer in his mouth, and then he takes a kleenex when offered. Oh, that cracks me up.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
I read the article at nytimes.com, and then closed the window. What popped up in front of me? A Sprint popup ad for 3 months of service for only $30. Hmmm, ummmmm....maybe....no. Nice try sprint, but I'm already an unhappy customer, no need to tempt me with another year's worth of a contract.
I have personally worked in GSM network deployment for quite some years and here in Spain we've been having similar problems for some time now. The blame however is in my view not just the operator's overloading of BTS's, but the fact that right now it's impossible to place new ones anyware.
You see the (voting) general public has been seriously misinformed about the way in which these things work, especially their health effects. Local councils will not give licences to build new towers or rooftops, and are even ordering the removel of stations in certain areas. This means it has become virtually impossible to install base stations in time, not just to cover new areas but to increase capacity in a certain area, when the existing stations simply can't handle anymore.
I personally think that even without the economic crisis the creation of UMTS networks would have been completely impossible in the current situation.... at least in this country.
I think that articles linking to the New York Times should have a category to themselves. That way I could just filter them out. I have registered a thousand times but it never fails that as soon as I sit down to browse at work or from a friend's machine there is another NYT link on Slashdot.
n ow is an excellent example. I worked in a department store selling their stuff back in '96 when they first hit the market. I'll never forget the coverage maps that they gave us. At first glance it appeared that their coverage area was huge but after reading the fine print you saw that the giant swath marked on the map was in fact their "planned coverage area". The actual coverage was a thin line following the path of interstates. Aside from swelling ever-so-slightly around cities, the coverage is pretty much identical today in spite of the fact that they have a much larger subscriber base.
Oh, and as for on-topic content, I think Powertel/Voicestream/T-Mobile/whatevertheirnameis
Depends on if you buy your cellphone or get it "free" with your plan. With local providers, they make the phone out to be a bonus you get with a term contract. Of course, the phone is completely useless on anyone else's network anyways, but the way they advertise you are only paying for the contract service, and the phone is a bonus.
Of course you can buy phones too, and the last phone I bought had the parent company absorbed by a larger one. It ceased to function at all when they ripped the high-range transmitter towers down and moved them to the east (I heard they had a swap deal when one company - Clearnet - traded western to Telus in exchange for eastern customers?). Not only is the phone useless on other networks, but it's useless on the network it was bought for, though it still exists just under different ownership. They were supposed to have a "buy-back" for the old phones and I had my name on a list, but it never happened.
The phone does work on analog but what seems to be piggybacking various networks, does the "our-network-only" restriction only apply to digital?
*Special note: Keep old phones for emergency. Even a disconnected one can still dial 9-1-1
So you can keep your number... big deal.
Or as Phoney McRingRing said: "Well, scientists have discovered that even monkeys can memorize ten numbers. Are you stupider than a monkey?".
Having 4 crappy choices isn't competition.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
The cell phone companies in the US are very greedy and only focused on short-term profitability for shareholders rather than going for long-term customer satisfaction and profits. That's why they are hesitant to invest in infrastructure, force customers into contracts, and have not switched to flat-rate plans yet. This is the major reason Instant Messaging via cell-phones and even the wireless voice services themselves have not caught on here as well as they have in other countries in Europe and Asia - because the pricing structure (and even their business model) is not consumer-friendly here in the U.S. - Government regulation will most likely be needed to force them to behave similarly to traditional telephone companies, refrain from ripping customers off, and allow customers some freedom of handset choice.
If you want to know the history of Sprints problems you need to go back a few years. Its not the phones, its not the technology (CDMA), and its not anything technical. CDMA base stations (antenna + RF parts) used to be much more expensive then TDMA or GSM base stations. Sprint ended up doing a bare minimum network coverage when they build out their network, but advertising good "coverage areas" so while the network coverage area appears to be good, its like having a lake of 100 square miles that is 2 mm think. I beleive that they spend more money on marketing and advertisements then any other carrier.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Slightly off topic, but anyone else notice that according to the article the average person is starting to say "Hey, make it better before you make it fancier," for cell phones, but on the other hand probably has no idea what "fix security and stability before adding in new features" means when it comes to software?
Just a thought.
I have Cingular in Milwaukee, WI and I have no complaints. I don't have signal problems, no billing horrors and a feature package that is just what I want. Naturally, everyone always wants it cheaper, no matter what it is, but I do not feel that I am being gouged.
I really think it depends where you are. I'm not seeing the problems that are discussed here.
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
While there is much vapor-ware talk of it someday, I don't know of phones that do more than one of the above. Your Sprint phone CAN'T talk GSM and allow you to be on Cingular.
Now there are issues regarding systems on the same standard. Particularly, the various GSM systems. In principle, you can pop out your SIM card for one network, pop in another, and go. But the providers put lock on the phones to prevent this. This is a better example of what you are complaining about. In Europe, once you've spent enough money (maybe USD 150), you can usually get the provider to unlock it -- kinda like having to fulfill a contract.
Anyone know if you can get the unlock codes for your GSM phones here if you've spent enough money with one provider?
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
Seriously.
Look at Japan. Look at Europe. The United States may be larger, but our corporations also have a lot more money to throw around.
There is *no* reason that our cell phone carriers need to oversubscribe and underinvest - aside from the fact that executives need $100 pens, $1000 chairs, and lobster with filet mignon at every dinner.
It's not just the cellular industry. Look at the dot bombs. Some whine about 'lack of a business plan', but the fault again is overspending on shit unnecessary to the business - $1000 chairs not for executives, but everday employees that time.
I don't deny that higher ups in business should have it better - they're risking the sanity of their families, and their own personal lives if they're any good, to try and make a business work. They deserve something.
But common sense says that if you're having business woes, you don't walk into your local Staples and pick up a slew of overpriced pens for your desk because they look nice.
Our business is located in Moses Lake, Washington... about 150 miles east of Seattle and 1/2 way between the Puget Sound area and Spokane, the largest city around. I commonly get the quick-beep indication of busy circuite and often have to redial 5 or 6 times to get out. This is on the AT&T network in a town of about 15,000 in an extended area of no more than 40,000. We don't expect much infrastructure living here but it's nice to know we're no worse off than the big population centers on the east and west coasts.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
...for signing up people and not having enough capacity, then it seems the cell phone providers are ripe for a class action lawsuit. At least with AOL you could quit at any time.
About 2 years ago, I had service with Airtouch (now Verizon?) and the service had gone to hell in the Phoenix area. I got so fed up that I switched to Sprint and called Airtouch and told them to cancel my service. They, of course, said that I had a contract. I spoke with a supervisor, who reminded me of the contract. I reminded him that the contract also required that they provide cellular phone service, and that they were not holding up their end of the bargain. He agreed (I think alot of people were dropping them at the time), and I terminated the contract with no penalty.
Moral of the story: Talk to your provider, you might get satisfaction.
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
This is usually the breaking point, it is seen all over the planet. We should soon see a revolution in Cell Tech and Providers. Just like everything else, it comes out and is barely used, and slowly grows to beyond its capacity. After staying in a condition that is about to rip apart at the seams, a revolution occurs that either makes us all go to a different service, or the exisiting service will evolve once again,,, ---just give it time
Funny Ha Ha:
:-). The phone doesn't work. It presents a very beautiful display of all the services available (O2, T-Mobile, etc) but of course I can't use these services.
I get a T68i from T-Mobile (owned by Deutsche Telekom!). This is a tri-band GSM phone.
I go to Germany (my understanding is that this is where Deutsche Telekom is based
I go to the t-mobile web site, and it tells me I need to dial a 1-800 number to activate international roaming! ARRRGGHH! Can't... dial... 1-800... overseas... The website gives me a pretty JSP error when I try to do it online.
So I rented a phone and swapped the SIM card. Heh.
Laugh at my Lisp and I keeell you.
As always, YMMV. Do at your own risk.
I'm not an expert, but as far as I know, the problem is mostly with CDMA technology. With CDMA it is always possible to add one more call in a particular spectrum. However, the more calls, the more dificult it is to pick up a clean signal, and the more often you get dropped calls. With TDMA (and GSM which is based on TDMA) it is not possible to go over a fixed amount of calls on a particular section of the spectrum.
I live in Costa Rica, Central America and our phone company (govt) sucks on everything but cell phone coverage. I think this is because they use TDMA and can't abuse their network like they could with CDMA.
please excuse my apathy
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1) Create a "service" - NEVER sell, ONLY rent
2) Suck in early adopters and charge them lots for pleasure of helping debug new service
3) As business starts to gather momentum, set MBA's loose
4) Create complicated "plans" that ensure that no one can ever get what they want without paying through the nose
5) Market hell out of service - lie if you must
6) Keep new money - make no investment in improvements to infrastructure or quality
7) Lay off employees to increase margins and satisfy shareholders
8) PROFIT!
Sorry to hear about decaying coverage for those who are hooked. Reconfirms my theory that, indeed, a lot of people are held hostages to this "convenient" device (I don't have/use a cell). Have you tried to leave your cell at home one day? It's amusing to see my friends panic when they've left their parked car on a Sunday outing, realizing that their phone is back in the car: why do they bother? Why do they need to contact/be contacted when they're already with their friends, on a day off?
A little more then a month ago in the middle of a conversation, my Samsung SGH-Q105 went into emergency service only mode. Aparently AT&T had switched over to GSM in my area and all hell started to break loose. I was CONSTANTLY in Emergency Service ONLY mode with my phone and the phone for my second line (Samsung SGH-N105). Customer service from T-Mobile was crap. First they told me it was just maintence and would be done in a day or two. Then they told me it was a well known problem with those two samsung phones and it would be fixed in a day or two. Then it was a well known problem with no ETA on fixing. Through this whole time the people on the Customer Care line kept saying "We do not make gaurantees of service." Finally I couldnt wait for their bullshit so I took my phone into bestbuy where I have a 3 year service plan. I could not go back to the Q105s due to the problems on the network. So, I wanted to switch phones. This was a fucking headache too since T-Mobile refuses to formally admit that there is such a problem. Finally I went into a best buy at a different hour and just said that the phone drops calls and T-Mobile said get a new phone. So, I received the Samsung SGH-S105, the flagship of Tmobile phones currently. Guess fucking what. Even though I got the phone that the retail sales manager told me shouldnt be affected by this non documented problem, Emergency Service Only. On top of that, the box for the damn phone advertises that I can hook the phone to my PDA or Laptop and use it as a modem ... such a data cable has not been made by Samsung yet.
... although Sprint's new unlimited plan is much cooler. Also the fact that my phone will work in damn near every country (tri mode GSM) is very cool.
Then, I go to Denver for the weekend. The whole time I am in the Denver area my second line (also in Denver with me with my Girlfriend) could not dial me.
There is also the constant billing problems I have. Every month I have to take $2-$3 off my bill for text messages they charge me for. I have 350 and I use say 100 and they charge me for half of them! Then there is a problem where I call in and pay, and I never get charged yet they tell me I am late to pay!
Also, 9 times out of 10, the Wireless Internet, or T-Zones they call it now, does not work. Bad gateway response, server unresponsive, etc. Im glad I do not use that for anything important.
Voicestream and now T-Mobile are notorious for having phone manufactures issue special cippled firmware here in the USA. My Nokia was crippled and so is my S105.
I will say this. I do have a great plan when it does work. Unlimited between my two lines. Unlimited weekends. 800 shared whenever minutes. No long distnace, no roaming, detailed billing. Also, for the internet stuff -- when it does work its by MB not by minute
I realize that no matter who I go to, I am going to have issues. I had a friend with Sprint that would over bill him. His statement said X minutes and they billed him for Y and pointed to a clause that said the statement may not be accurate minute counts. Another friend was getting eronous charges with Cingular aka SwBell aka SBC who then turned off his phone line and internet for not paying a $2000 cellphone bill. My aunt has AT&T and she says half the times when she is in Wichita she can not get a signal. Another friend is on Verizon and said other then the shitty plan, he likes it.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I have two phones with two different providers. No problems. I don't think the author knows very much about the cell phone business. Can't switch providers? Won't invest in new infrastructure? Overloading their networks? Whatever. A few weeks ago my little city just approved the lease of a cell tower from one provider to another. We got to see a little of how they are handling the spectrum. They are doing a pretty good job here. I doubt the author's area is much different. Probably he and a couple of his friends have a lot of dropped calls and they dreamed up all the "supposed" problems with cell phone providers.
Only on Slashdot, is every topic somehow related to the RIAA, the MPAA, or the DMCA.
"There might be a tenth planet? The RIAA needs to pay attention to it!"
"Futurama got cancelled? Repeal the DMCA at once!"
"RMS posted a rant? If only the MPAA learned its lesson from this!"
Just cancel. If it's important you can always be left a messagew through other means.
Within the last 2 years, I have owed or heavily used all of the major Cellphone providers. Below is my thoughts on each. All companies SUCK if you go over your minutes! Oh and I travel about 40% of the time so I am basing it on Nationwide coverage.
Sprint PCS: This is my current provider and I plan to keep it that way. Yes there are occasional places where the service skips, but a quick call using their VOICE COMMAND customer service gives me a credit minute, and away I go. Not to mention most of those places get fixed if you report the location to a SPRINT STORE. Not the phone customer service, but the actual SPRINT PCS store. Overall coverage is good in major metro areas. Have some of the BEST PHONES, and I have found often times the PHONE is the problem over the coverage area. However the new network they have does get hit heavily in rush hour.
Cingular: Overall a decent company. I like the no extra charge for analog roam. I dislike their customer service. THeir Digital Network is a bit weak in the coverage area though based on how much I travel and see. Literally cross a street in Manhatten and lose coverage.
Verizon: I would never use them now because of the "Can you hear me now" commercials. However when I used them, I found some cities had EXCEPTIONAL COVERAGE, yet others had HORRIBLE. Atlanta for one was HORRIBLE coverage for them. Their Customer service is an absolute JOKE IMHO. All in all would be near the bottom of my list of preferred companies.
T Mobile: If you job requires connectivity, DO NOT USE THIS. Its great for some of the trinkits and features, however if you are traveling its a PAIN! When you lose a call its INSTA DROP, not the usual "you are breaking up" if you would hear static on another phone with TMOBILE you LOSE THE CALL. The customer is ALWAYS WRONG with them too.
Nextel: Hard one to comment on. If you are in a city and use alot of intra company minutes this is the way to go. However if you are traveling about, their ROAM network can KILL YOU, and you need a credit card with you to use it.
Bottom line is NONE of them are perfect. I think overall SPRINT is the best. However time will tell if that will remain. I personally take my phone in every 2 months for a software and network update. That has made alot of difference to my service and coverage area over the past year. Its a hassle but I DEPEND on my phone.
Razzious Domini
I could be a GREAT KARMA WHORE if I could just shed the few morals I have left.
Also, there are NO dropouts with the GSM service as I had with Sprint PCS.
About five years ago, I signed on with a progressive wireless PCS carrier named Powertel. They were the antithesis of closed-minded carriers at the time, and saw that wireless telephone customers wanted high-quality service at affordable, predicatble prices. Powertel did not force customers into annual contracts -- which signalled to many that they were confident enough not to lock you into a poor service -- and ten-cents-per-minute pricing was in line with the rest of the industry. They offered fabulous features for a 1996-vintage carrier, like store-and-forward fax, and "Appear Local," which let me buy a local number in neighboring states in their service area so my clients would need to dial long-distance.
Deutsche Telekom made a bid for VoiceStream, with contingencies on VoiceStream's purchase of Powertel. They all became one big conglomerate on or about February, 2001. And service went down the tubes.
VoiceStream immediately ditched "Appear Local" because of a policy decision. They brought mandatory contracts upon Powertel customers, forcing long-term agreements if a customer wanted to modify their service plan.
When the change to T-Mobile officially took place, customer service seemed to slump. Billing errors became commonplace again (reminiscent of Powertel's earliest days), and credits to remedy the billing errors were somehow "unapproved" after the Representative ended the call. Their pricing plans became nearly identical to every other carrier, eschewing strightforward pricing for the free phone, high-priced service, long-term commitment style that so many other carriers have practiced for years.
Finally fed up, I called last month to cancel my T-Mobile service after nearly five years. The "Customer Rentention Specialist" threw all sorts of offers, pricing plans, and FUD at me, even suggesting that my new carrier of choice, Verizon, has "radiation problems" with their phones!
Now that I've received my second Verizon bill, I've already been erroneously overbilled $120+ by my new carrier.
True number portability would allow us customers to remind carriers that we can walk -- and take our phone number -- without the hassle of reprinting business cards, notifying dozens of friends and family, and updating PIMs and electronic directories.
Or better yet, let's organize a slashdot buyers' group and tell them what our pricing plan will be... =]
From the ad I got with the article, seems like cell phone providers are not the only ones suffering from degradations of services.
Thanks intel HT compiler, but I don't thing this is a loop
:
I've had Nextel for about a year and a half, before that sprint (horrible), before that cingulair (also horrible). I've never had a problem at all with my nextel (other than the fact that I'm hard on phones, which they replaced no questions asked). I can always get through, their customer service is GREAT, and their cellular phone service (not to mention the direct connect) sounds better than any others that I've used. Only 1 downside, you can't roam off their network, but unless you live in a podunk town nowhere near an interstate you're probably fine. Yeah, they may cost a bit more, and they may not have all the wacky little phones, but they own their own towers (not like ANY other provider) which allows for greater scaleability, and their service seems to work well.
nb
There are a whole host of issues affecting network quality right now. I'll start with some history. Back in the late 90's wireless was hot. RF engineers were in incredible demand. Those that were good (and plenty who were not) became consultants making lots of money. Wireless carrier s couldn't get enough consultants to handle all the design and optimization work, and they still needed to hire their own in-house engineers. Obviously the relatively low salary positions with carriers didn't attract the best engineers who were making very handsome six figure salarys, but they did attract a lot of less qualified individuals.
Enter the recent downturn. Wireless carriers (many of whom have never turned a profit due to the massive costs of the ongoing expansion of their networks, Verizon, Cingular and other cellular providers excepted) suddenly became unpopular. In an effort to become profitable / look good to Wall Street, they suddenly slammed on the brakes and stopped or dramatically slowed their builds. They also got rid of all the high-priced, very talented consultants, leaving only their staff engineers to handle the optimization and new design.
In addition to getting rid of consultants, a lot of staff engineers have been cut as well. Those that are left don't have time to track down the obscure problems that arise in the complicated interactions between cell sites and phones that cause dropped calls (some are due to lack of coverage, but the vast majority of drops are due to the internal parameters that govern the behavior of the cells and phone not being tuned to provide the best service in a specific area. The phone needs to be told when to hand off, what to hand off too, and so on. Often the particular combination that will work for a user traveling on a certain road is unique to that road, and even the direction of travel. Each combination needs to be figured out, and then manually entered by an engineer.) Even when a problem is tracked down, money to fix problems is non-existant. The budgets reflect very specific priorities, and quality isn't nessesarily high up on the list (since it takes a long time for consumers to react negatively to poor network performance. They can't go anywhere else for years sometimes).
Oh, one poster mentioned that his phone seems to have several 'bars' of coverage and then suddenly drops to none. There are a few reasons for this. The first, and most common is what is known as Rayleigh fading. Wireless connections experience very rapid, highly localized signal fades. You may have experienced this phenomena when listening to a radio station at a stoplight. It may be almost unlistenable until you creep forward a few feet, at which point it returns. Mobile phones are afflicted by the same problem. Providers use multiple antennas per sector on each cell site (known as diversity), to reduce this effect, but tough zoning laws often force us to use only one antenna per sector , which increases the freqency of this effect. (cross-slant polarization antennas can help in some situations, but not all, and certainly don't perform as well as dual antenna configurations)
The rapid fading can also be a product of the way the phone displays the signal strenght. Some phones on CDMA networks (Samsungs in particular) do not display signal strength with their 'bars'. Instead, they show the signal to noise ratio. In a weak signal area with low interference, the phone will show a great signal to noise ratio when the signal is just above the receiver sensitivity threshold, but just a small change in signal strength can drop the signal below the threshold, at which point the signal becomes unusable.
Sarcasm mode ON...
Oh sure, EVENTUALLY. And in the mean time, you're just going to wait and feel slightly silly. But at least you are in a free market (or should i spell it with capitals as well?).
Sarcasm mode OFF...
Aaah, love it
Or we're you sarcastic youself? It's difficult to tell nowadays.
Here (I'm in Canada) people pay monthly plans that allow them, say, 200 minutes and free weekends or some such.
Now, which system entices the cell phone companies to enhance the service and the coverage? The one system that helps them make more money if people use the phone more - or the other system in which every "free" minute used by a customer actually costs the cell phone provider money?
chm.
There was some report I read recently that basically said "be glad that mobile phones do not work on the subway". I think it was a Japanese report.
It pointed out that since your inside the tube in close confines and with lots of other folk you would, due to reflections and such, get about 200 X the usual field strength than if you were outside.
Every conversation I have with my girlfriend (Cingular cell-to-cell) goes like this:
"Hello ? Sweetie are you there ? Hello ?"
".... (stttt) Call M--"
"Hello ? Hello ?"
(Disconnect)
I alternate between posting +5 and -1 Comments. Karma: +53 -47 = 6
It will improve soon. We had a similar situation a few years ago in Europe.. you usually subscribe for a year and after that, you can cancel at any moment. And since you usually get a new phone with a new subscription, a lot of people switch after their subscription expires. Well, the tech savvy ones do anyway.
Of course here in the Netherlands (a little larger than Delaware, 16 million people) you can choose between 5 providers and there's a regulation where they must provide you with the option of keeping the same cell number. If there's less competition where you live, you might be screwed.
Cell companies built like mad during the 90s. It wasn't about profits or revenue, it was all about capital expenditures and building out infrastructure (sound familiar ?). Now that it's time to pay investors back, cell companies are having to layoff engineering personnel left and right and have had to stop building capacity sites. It's not about quality and performance engineering anymore, it's about quantity.
It also doesn't help that most cell companies have reached customer saturation in every market. Every last business person, drug dealer, soccer mom, and teenager has a phone. There's no more revenue out there in new sales, it's all goofy new services like being able to download pictures on your phone and other technocrap that no one really needs. And with the cutthroat pricing and marketing tactics going on it's going to get much worse before it gets better.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
and, believe me, it isn't his phone.
Sprint is, by far, without exception, the most disparaged cell phone network going. All phones, all places, all the time.
EVERY sales person has tried Sprint, because their "deals" seem pretty good and we are smack in the middle of their biggest coverage area.
EVERY sales person ends up SCREAMING how badly they suck, within a week. Many end up stuck with the contract, all end up moving to another service.
I went to a community meeting last summer about how to keep a 60-foot cellphone tower out of our little "historic neighborhood" and noticed I was the only person sitting around the conference table who wasn't packing a cellphone. Everyone wants to complain about their cellphone service, but no one wants a tower in their line of vision. Actually, we tried to steer them to a couple of churches who could have used help with their crumbling steeples. A lot of people were surprised to learn that the tower would benefit only those who were using Cricket phones, not wireless communication in general, and that there is no limit to how many companies can build towers within the same area. There was also some grumbling about Cricket, with its short range, being the choice of "hookers and drug dealers." As it turned out, Leap Wireless, hardly has enough money to keep their NASDAQ listing, much less fight a bunch of pitchfork-wielding homeowners, so they never built the tower.
I just love those commercials about how the new digital service doesn't have static. Well sure it doesn't because if the signal isn't there you get no sound at all. Personally I'd rather have static than nothing at all!
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
I work for an agent of Cingular in the Metro-Detroit area. Things are going very well right now. We are in the process of going to GSM, which is capable of handling three times the amount of traffic that the old TDMA system can, not to mention the increase in data speeds from 9.6 kbps to almost 56 kbps!! I've had my service (TDMA) for over two years and have NEVER gotten a network busy or overloaded message and I use over 1400 minutes a month! On a side note, with GSM Cingular will have phones that work with GSM 850/1900, TDMA 800/1900, and AMPS (analog). (Yes I said GSM 850Mhz). I've used a couple of the GSM phones and they sound much better than the TDMA do.
if you don't need it, cancel your service.
I'm sick of seeing all these college kids/soccer moms/etc complaining how they need their cell phones...
YOU DON'T NEED IT!
you didn't need it 5 years ago, you don't need it now.
I've only met a handful of people who would "qualify" as needing it. one runs his own business, the other only has that phone, and no land line.
your NOT that important.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
I ended up dropping my cell service (sprint pcs) after I was unable to place a 911 call at an accident. All circuits busy or some such error.
As a direct result, it took an extra 18 minutes to reach emergency services. As a result, a mother of 2 died.
Sprint still socked me with a $150 cancellation fee.
Thought the headline read:
..and I was thinking "What in the name of Godwin does this mean??"
Cell Phone Service Denegrates Fuerher
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Mine is good too (AT&T Wireless). However doesn't anyone else see a problem with these two statements:
These companies continue to add more subscribers, overloading their networks to the breaking point.
They hold you hostage by not allowing you to switch providers
Uhhh... maybe the problem is that one provider has good service, people move to it, service declines, the other (bad) provider miraculously gets better when the load lightens and the cycle starts again.
And, oh, by the way, give me a zillion free minutes, and only charge me $1 a year for service.
It's interesting to note that Cingular (nee Cellular One) and AT&T are converting their services to GSM. T-Mobile and Nextel are already GSM. The voice quality is higher, but it is still the older TDMA-derived system. People who use the CDMA services (Sprint, Verizon) seem to be the worst off, as the voice quality gets worse and worse in congested cells where in TDMA the quality stays the same but the ability to make and receive calls is limitted.
I think it's very telling that the two largest providers are converting their networks to GSM/TDMA and are totally eschewing CDMA.
Kris
Kriston
People who invested their money in the Clinto Airwave Auction Scam took a big risk and should reap the consequences. Yeah, it sucks to lose but it happens all day long. Make a promise, keep a promise. Those big fat companies do not deserve a rescue as they stomped on others to get what they have.
Further regulation to protect these ineffient opperators will only preserve the problem. They did not build when the money was good. Now their technology is obsolete, paid for or not, it should be trashed to alow new entrants who will serve us better. That is how a free market works.
The New York Times Article is a troll on it's own, and has to be some kind of AP trash. "Oh the poor little telcos," they cry, "their problem is so hard and they are working so hard to fix it." The quotes about "robust competition" is a particularly bad joke. Clueless BS, all of it. There is no further technical reason to restrict radio transmisions.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My phone's been useless for over a week now, and their website has been down for just as long. I've contacted customer support (after emailing someone about the fact that the website was broken, and I can't get customer service information - they replied with a direct callback number for a customer service rep!), they've walked me through the "fix your phone" scripts, and when that didn't work, they asked me to call back tomorrow after they do more checking. This was on Wednesday.
I haven't been able to call them back yet during working hours (I blame RedHat(heresy!)), but I'm going to call today during lunch to see if they can fix the problem. You'd think that they'd make an effort to contact a customer if they had a solution for the problem, though...
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
This is a fucking tech site. What the hell do you expect?
Jeez - better not talk about new technology or the whining poverty-stricken anonymous cowards might start crying again, fer feck's sake.
T-Mobile (nee Voicestream) allows you to move your SIM card among as many telephones as you like. If you have the fancy internet phone and want to use your simple tiny handset for travelling you need only eject the SIM card from the internet phone and plug it into your handset and turn it on. No fuss, no muss.
Kris
Kriston
Does the telecom part of the PUC cover broadband. I have a bone to pick with ATT Broadband over some unreasonably slow rates (120 up, 136kbit down: advertised as 1500kbit down, 384 up) and was looking for some leverage in my dealings with them. Or can they rate limit me down to below 56k and say that our service only promises up to 1500kbit down...grr.
Posting anon from a school cpu.
I've had SprintPCS for the last 2.5 years with no problems. The one time my service started to drop off I went to their service center and they gave me a firmware update. They said this was to update the codes in my phone to let it talk to their newest towers. Sure enough, I've had great service since.
I have a wireless phone instead of a land line and I will never go back. I like having all the features and long distance included in the single monthly fee. My local telco monopoly (Ameritech) tacks on a dozen extra "service fees" and has shitty customer service to boot.
Oh, and here's the best part: No telemarketers. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 bans calls to cellphones if they are made by automatic dialers or use recorded messages.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
I spent two months in Germany this summer and my phone never had less than a full-strength signal.
Ever.
Train tunnels, boonies - made no difference. Every call worked perfectly, everytime.
I don't know anything about cel phone tech, but if US providers want to get it right, they simply need to do what they're doing in Europe. Because it just works. Period.
So don't complain if you cant get signal in doors. You should have bought a larger phone....
Ah hah! And to think my friends laughed at me when I bought my new cell phone!
"And like that
Rubbish.
instead, work towards making such thing illeagal. you don't get cars for free by signing a contract to only use special gas x and buy it from gas station y.
more expensive phones you say? that's the price you gotta pay for not being tied up in a crappy provider.
works here ok(finland).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I signed up with the Cingular Rollover plan myself. I have yet to have any phone service issues (internet is a different matter) with my phone, coverage or connection. Between work and home (30 mile drive) I am out in the country most of it and I am getting 4 to 5 bars of signal strength. Really, to start losing coverage I have to keep driving north away from any major populated areas. I have yet to have any calls drop or any calls so weak I can't be heard or I can't hear. I am also in the basement of the building I work in and I still have really strong signal strength. Of all the carriers I checked into, Cingular has the best to offer, and service wise .. has been much better than verizon, AT&T and sprint. (if coworkers can be trusted;))
If put to the free market, UHF stations would sell their spectrum in a minute.
Funny, you read here about how overloaded the networks are, but try watching 15 minutes of tv sometime (at least here in the US) and count the number of cell phone ads you see.
Maybe if they spent more money upgrading their networks instead of advertising they could handle the customers they already have. You'd think having an abundance of customers would mean having enough money to keep up with the upgrade costs (unless they have bad ecomomies of scale when they get this big...).
The only reason I have a cell phone is for emergencies; which is exactly what I use it for. Is there REALLY a good reason why people find it necessary to talk in a restaurant, in a movie theatre or in their car? Jeez....what DID people DO before cell phones? Do they REALLY NEED to talk to someone else on the planet THAT badly? If so, can't they get out of their car to do it? Maybe we, as a civilization, should reevaluate our meaningless lives so that we don't concentrate on the trivial issues like 'Am I being charged for roaming rates?' Not only do we want fast, cheap service but we want it at the expense of the people around us. Get a grip people; it's just a PHONE SERVICE for Christ's sake!
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
Have you ever tried complaining to the cell phone company about their crummy service? I complained, and the representative disputed that I had a problem. I have had all of the following problems: dropped calls, unavailable service, poor reception and garbled transmission. Then there are the problems calling my phone such as fast-busy, bounce into voice mail automatically, recorded message and unavailability every Friday and Saturday night. The representative told me this is "normal". Normal! I told him that I thought their system was overbooked, overloaded and not maintained reliably. "Well," the representative said, "this is regulated by the FCC. ... It's impossible for us to overload our system because we are simply complying with the numbers they set for our system." So complain to the FCC because they set tower-to-subscriber ratios too high.
If there is an area of leading edge technology where the US trails Europe big time, this is it. The cell phone service in the US is so crappy that, from the point of view of European standards, is almost unusable.
I am not all that fond of cell phones anyway (and I hate those morons who drive around with the stupid phone atuck to their ears,) and getting a subscription here in the US is at the very bottom of my to-do list. I.e. I am not likely to do so before hell freezes over.
there are neighborhoods that get nothing and others that are great. Welcome to mountain area's weeeeee, Denver CO AT&T wireless
I like things that are sweet and not things that are lame. --
The fact that there is huge tracts of underutilized spectrum is why the government needs to get out of the auction buziness.
This is a shame. Our cell phone services could be so much better if the providers weren't solely motivated by maximum profit. What good is a product if no one wants to buy it because it sucks? The problem is that people ARE buying them, even if the service sucks because they don't know any better. Then they get trapped in these long-term contracts with crappy service. By the time they figure it out, it's too late and the companies already have their money. it's a damn shame... just a damn shame.
Un-news
This is odd, since they only seem to have gotten to the US West Coast a few months ago. I don't remember seeing VoiceStream; T-Mobile booths started popping up in the malls and that was the first I'd heard of the company. I think they replaced some multi-carrier companies in the mall, so I assumed they were a fairly new company going through a huge expansion.
I bought the T-Mobile SideKick about a month ago. Kudos to Danger; they really did get it right. I would like a colour screen, of course, and I'd like the option to use a larger font, but other than that, the device is darn near perfect for its intended use.
No, the problem is T-Mobile.
Voice service here in LA seems very similar to other cellular providers - not very good, but it works most of the time. I can't say I think it's good, but I don't think it's any worse than the bad cellular service provided by other companies.
My real problem is with availability of the data service. When it works, it's really cool to have lunch while exploring the Internet using the cellphone. When I first got the device, it was a real gas surfing the web in California Pizza Kitchen, the only restaurant in which it would reliably work. So I wound up spending $21 for my lunches instead of $8-11. Oops. But then my illusions were shattered when it stopped working even there!
So now I'm not sure what to do. I sold the service to myself by saying "Well, I won't have to buy books to read during lunch, so I will actually save money with the wireless Internet!" Now, I'm not so sure about that.
The problem is that I really like the device - a lot - especially when it works. So I'll keep it, and hope things get better over the next few months.
At present, though, the data service is so spotty that I'd claim T-Mobile is in breach of contract because I can't get the service I've been promised. Perhaps someone should start a class-action suit to get people out of unfair cellphone contracts when they are unable to get the service to work consistently. That might be the one time I'd be on the side of the lawyers; they would earn their (huge) fees fair and square by getting the little guy out of these contracts with the unfair termination clauses.
D
Hello, can you hear me now?
Didn't think so.
Is this really news to anyone? We all have cell phones, service sucks. We all know this. Is there anything we can do without breaking out contracts? I don't think so, but I would like to hear some constructive ideas.... I looked at my contract, I can not even sue Verizon. Does anybody have any CONSTRUCTIVE ideas on how to force change?
That's why companies like closed standards - once they get a customer, the customer is locked in, and has to spend a lot of money replacing equipment to switch to a different provider. Think back to the old 800MHz SMR days, there were 3 (4 briefly) manufacturers who all had different formats. If your customer got pissed and wanted to switch, they had to buy a whole new fleet of radios at $800 each. Same deal with cell phones, and computers. Pissed at Apple? Too bad, you're stuck with your Mac. Mad at MS? Migrate all that proprietary data to some other format. The service of a proprietary system has to be good enough to make switching uneconomical, and no better.
Well maybe if cell phones weren't sold for way under cost this wouldn't be a problem. With so much price dumping it has to be illegal..
oh wait, microsoft isn't involved so its a government conspiracy now.
geezus this crowd makes me sick these days. Intellectuals my ass. Find some news for nerds rather then this FUD/CRAP/GARBAGE.
I had a cell phone for the past 7 years, most recently it was Sprint PCS and dropped all my service last July. I noticed that eventhough my usage was very low, the monthly fees were getting nuts. The customer service I had been getting was shotty at best (they double charged my credit card 3 times in a row), the quality of the connection was getting worse every month and the phones break all the time. I was much happier with cell service before all this digital service and fancy gizmos came out. I mean come on, who the hell needs to have call-waiting, voice mail and friggin games on their damned phone!? Aren't these things supposed to be an extension of your house / work phone? I picked up a pre-paid phone for emergencies and have had no problems with it at all. No extra bill, no extra fees and the quality of the connection isn't any worse than I'm used to. Hell, most of the time I'll just make a call from a pay-phone. Much easier and the signal doesn't drop out.
My good sig is in the laundry
but even though they swore I was in a fully covered area I could not EVER get or make a call from my house in the middle of the so-called coverage area. 4 phones later they refunded my years bill and I moved to nextel without a problem. The phones still suck, but the radio coverage works at my house at least, which is the minimum so work can reach me.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Get a HAIRCUT, take a SHOWER and get a JOB, you SMELLY HIPPY!
I live and work in the "crotch" of i95, just south of Boston... cell works everywhere, rarely a dropped call, never not been able to make a call (except during a freak snow squall 2 years ago)...
I commute into boston two nights per week, never have an issue using the phone in town or on the way in...
I have Verizon service...
lets clear a few myths on cell phones so everyone has a basic understanding of what we're talking about here. First of all i wanna point out the the US is not trailing europe in cell phone technology. Next i'd like to point out that sprint sucks, because it has the very bad coverage compared to other providers. Let compare providers first, these are genralization depending on where u live they may vary. The market is currently dominated by Verizon at 24% of the share, then comes Cingualr, Sprint, ATT, Nextel, Voicestream, in that order. Verizon had the largest network and can cover just about all of the us if u have a tri-band phone. Verizon and sprint both us cdma technology, this is in contrast to Att, voicestream and cingualr who are using tdma or gsm. GSM SUCKS...i'll tell u why...CDMA is far superior...DONOT GET ANY GSM ENABLED PLAN...LOOK AT THE COVERAGE!!! CDMA will evolve into cdma 2000 which is currently holding the market share in 3g technologies. CDMA 2000 competes with WCDMA which currently is the upgrade from gsm networks...as u can see to use 3g(get pictures and stream video on ur phone) u have to switch to cdma sooner or later. The upgrade cost for cdma operators such as verizon and sprint will be far less just have to change a network card and software upgrade...for gsm networks like att and cingular the upgrade cost is tremendous because u have to set up a whole new cell phone tower. Verizon and sprint will switch to 3G next year and they will have the push to talk feature currently in nextel phones. There by crippiling nextel who already has 14 billion dollar debt. A good move would be to switch to verizon and sprint and wait for the 3g technology to come out..something att cingular or voicestream won't have for another 3 years. whats bettter about cdma 3g compared to gsm evolved 3g(w-cdma)...number one thing Data transfer...2 mb/s on gsm eveolved service(w-cdma)...5 mb/s on cdma evolved service(cdma 2000)...in fact beacuse of such advanteages...Europe might actually because of lower cost to upgrde to a CDMA 2000 network compare to a W-CDMA network go with CDMA 2000. Not only lower upgrade costs but also the data transfer and performance is much better. This is not open to debate most of what i have sazid is fact. But do you own research and find out...REPLY TO THIS IF U THINK IT HLPED YOU OR IF U HAVE QUESTIONS.
(no really, fuck off. now. hurry up. fuck off and die.)
Glad to hear that you're happy, but if you want to talk about coverage, use a coverage map, not some anecdote about how your phone worked in the bar, and your buddy's didn't.
Why is "NEED" a requirement for obtaining something? Also who are you to define how important everyone else is? Are you some appointed Importance Authority? College kids and soccer moms have just as much need for a cellphone as anyone else. It makes them happy. Provides them with comfort. I'm sure you don't begrudge those same people for having computers, TV's , radios, MP3 Players, cordless phones, answering machines, alarm clocks...etc that they don't NEED. So why pick on cell phones? Whats the reason for the hate?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
... it is hands-down, the WORST company I have ever dealt with.
Their service is spotty and weak (here in San Diego, anyway). In the two places I spend the most time (home and work) the signal is marginal if I get it at all. Others have posted that their phone goes from four bars to zero frequently. It's not your phone -- mine does it too.
The majority of the CS reps are the most ignorant, lame losers I have ever had the misfortune of spending an hour on hold to speak with. I swear, half the time they either lie or make stuff up. I have called them about problems that are clearly due to their network software, and they try to blame it on my phone. Some of their favorite blow-offs are: "go and get your phone checked"; "let's upgrade your PRL and see if that helps"; "we're doing a software upgrade, call back in X days"; etc.
Once, my personal bookmarks completely disappeared from my wireless web service, no doubt due to some "upgrade" [shudder]. Even though they're stored (and can be managed) on the Sprint website, the CS rep insisted that they're stored on my phone! No amount of logical reasoning could convince him otherwise.
And don't get me started about roaming. Oh boy...
I am waiting not-so-patiently for the day we can change companies and keep our phone numbers. When that day comes, I'm gone to Verizon.
if that wasn't enough for you..=]...which i'm guessing is not the case...if u really want to have a phone that will in europe...goto ebay buy ur self a cheap UNLOCKED nokia gsm phone and u can buy prepaid cards in europe which will be much better than the coverage or the PRICE you will get from the gsm enabled networks jsut ash att,cingular or voicestream. Another bit about these networks is that att and cingular wre originally and TDMA network and later had to setup completely new GSM towers because TDMA(what ur most probably using right now is NOT backward compatible so u have get a dual mode phone to get around this little trick. THINK TWICE BEFORE U GET M-LIFE OR CINGUALR GSM...
You Yanks are just catching up with us Brits. The next thing that will happen is that the high density areas will need more coverage, and the areas with no reception at all will need to be addressed.
In short, more masts.
Then you'll get your local news coverage plastered with NIMBYs, (normally affluent middle class soccer moms with kids in tow) saying they don't want a mast near them. But they do want cellphone coverage.
Hypocrites.
The same people who are currently complaining that they get crappy service and cut off in the middle of calls are the same people who in a years time will be whinging that the new mast at the end of the road is giving them cancer.
Unless you suck it up, you'll never be happy with cellphone companies. You got 'em coming, you got 'em going. They can do only wrong... except that without a cell, your life would almost certainly be different.
-- The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
"Can you hear me?" "No"
That was me in the metro Boston region.
I found that with Verizon I had crappy quality of service. I don't live in the boondocks - I live about 3 miles from the city limits.
For those who don't know, Boston is one of the top 10 metro areas (in population) in the US. And Verizon is the largest cell phone carrier in the USA.
So due to my quality-of-service issues, I switched from Verizon.
I was going to go for Sprint, but their service was pretty much the same - my girlfriend had lousy service while in my neighborhood.
And so I switched to AT&T Wireless, and now I get good signal (except for a few days this summer, when things were just odd... maybe they had a local infrastructure problem?)
I'm not saying that Sprint or AT&T or Verizon is better or worse in terms of overall quality of service. What I am saying is that at least for me, quality of service is strongly dependent on where you live and the carrier you choose.
Does this suck? Yes. It sucks because instead of having the choice between AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, I only have one real choice. AT&T. They have a monopoly in my neighborhood. Maybe when my contract is up I'll look into T-Mobile or Nextel.
---
As for changing phone numbers - who cares! Tell your friends that you have a new number, and leave all the telemarketeers in the dust!
Again, the NYTimes only really cares about NYC. Since when did NYC reflect the United States?
Manhattan having some part of their infrastructure overloaded? Why should that be a surprise?
As for the rest of the country (except other major cities), we're doing just fine.
Living in the Northeast in a mountainous area I find having a text pager is more than suits my needs. Not to metion the cell service is horrible. If someone needs to get a hold of me they can text page me or send a voicemail. It allows me to be in control of when I get back to them, plus it allows me time to think about there problem or question before I talk to them.
I am senior in Electrical Engineering at Purdue, (focus in communications design) and I am also the recent purchaser of a GSM cell phone from AT&T Wireless (they cover Indy, Lafayette, and
Miami).
I got the new Ericsson T68, which is a great phone if you want bluetooth and lots of features in a small package. It is a very poor phone if you want to be able to pull in a distant cell site or if you are being overloaded with intermod.
I am disappointed with the coverage provided by AT&T here in general, but I am also happy about one thing: once my contract is up, I can keep the phone and move to a different provider. That is the key to getting the cell phone providers to truly compete on the quality factor.
Right now the Europeans who manufacture the GSM phones are providing the 1900 Mhz band as an afterthought in terms of RF design quality, but I see that as slowly changing. I think that the number of GSM providers is growing to begin to reach a critical mass, and when that happens, I think you will see the European style of pay-as-you go type service packages with increasing coverage.
American GSM is at a disadvantage being at 1900 Mhz compared to European GSM when you talk about attenuation through buildings and such. However, I think that if enough providers get into the American GSM market, they are going to end up competing over subscribers who have enough portability to choose a service provider based on their quality of service, rather than how many minutes they are offering for their 5 year contract. Heck, maybe one day a provider will offer incoming calls for free (woah, what a concept)
Of course, maybe this just means that American GSM will die an ugly death because no company will be willing to spend down the infrastructure costs to produce a truly good network. That does not seem to be the case right now though.
I thought this was NEWS for nerds? Since when has cell phone service in the USA not sucked?
I used Sprint PCS for a year 4 years ago. It was horrible. I got voice messages days after they were left, and calls were often dropped. I ended up ditching the phone, as it was nothing more than an expensive piece of crap that causes brain cancer (yeah don't forget that little doozy).
Then last Christmas, my parents got me a new phone... one that was already setup to use Cingular's service. Cingular's horrid service made me dream for the crappy Sprint PCS service. Both are rip offs, but Cingular's service doesn't work 90% of the time. I call a number, and it fails. Someone tries to call me, and it fails. I get voice messages days after someone left them.
Btw, I live in a major city. So its not like I am living in the boonies here.
If you want to talk about bad service though, I have something that is even worse than my cell phone: AT&T Broadband Internet Cable Modem. Can you say 75% packet loss and 300ms latency.... to servers in the same city as me?!?!?!?! And I pay $50 a month for this shite! The problem is, broadband ISPs are basically monopolies. I can't get DSL, so I am stuck with crappy cable.
I tell you, once all of the corrupt CEOs are out of the picture and the bad investments are gone... the thing that will hold back the internet is the last mile. People should be able to get cheap broadband to their homes, otherwise new internet services such as video on demand, voice over ip, etc... will never take off.
The thing is, large fat telecom monopolies don't want such services to take off. They like things the way they have always been: under their control.
It works very well. I have had no problems. The fact that I don't use phone too much and the fact that I live in the middle of nowhere would certainly contribute to the no problems, though...
TMobile is a bunch of crooks. I can deal with crappy service, that's their right and I can always leave. The problem with TMobile is a that they are basically a band of thieves.
I called to complain about the fact that they kept billing me after I canceled my account but they dont' take complaints except by fax. So I fax them. They respond by sending me to collections without ever responding to my fax. BTW, this is actually illegal since I provided my dispute in writing. To make things better their collections agency doesn't answer the phone so I can't dispute it there or pay it off.
Fortunately their sevice is shit even compared to Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T so hopefully the robber barons will go out of business before too long.
They are thugs avoid them at all costs.
Hehe... :-)
There was an article about this, but regarding the situation in Stockholm in Computer Sweden today.
Strange coincident...
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
One good thing is that the forebearance for wireless number portability ends next November. It could have been up this year, but the feds decided to give the companies even more time. It's a software problem, I worked for a company that wrote a product for this market, unfortunately the company is gone, probably in part because of this forebearance.
Next November though, it should be all over, take your phone number with you when you leave.
asshole.
Telemarketers calling you anywhere, anytime...pphphpttt!!!!
Actually the number of calls in one cell is limitited to the availability of slots in the time-division of one frequency and the number of available frequencies near your location (not necessaririly your cell). And for other types of communication than voice, like SMS (runs over the signalling channel via the MAP protocol), is limited to the bandwidth of the signalling channel (C7, or A7 in the US).
;-) (Don't do this at home, kids, GSM only)
:-)
And regarding emergencies: In GSM-networks it is allways possible to put the network into emergency-mode. In emrgency mode only subscriber with a special flag in their subscriber entry in the database (Home Location Register) are allowed to place phonecalls. And 911 or other emergency calls allways kick one call out of the line when there isn't no more bandwidth. Fun for new years eve. Tell your friends to call 911 and hang up immediately. 30 friends bring 30 free lines for 30 friendly phonecalls
The point that the basestations and "towers" aren't powerful enough is just... Well, NYT
Ahh, how common is GSM in the US anyway? Is it as common than in the rest of the world or is it still just available in major cities and sourrounding areas? Just for comparison: GSM coverage in Germany is ~97% for all providers in the mean. What is it in the US or Canada? (Except deserts, mountains and other very remote areas)
Alex.
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
Technology X has shitty service, both customer service and signal/bandwidth/etc. Providers refuse to invest in new facilities, claim they can't afford it.
Are we finding out that the technology house of cards we built we really can't afford? Is it possible that it's really not economically viable to have cell phones, high speed internet, etc?
It's not a matter of technological feasability, but economic viability -- you can't have it because it's too expensive. Like The Concord -- too expensive for everyone, but just barely affordable enough for the very wealthy.
Like the old radio phones you see in movies -- and you only saw them in limousines...
Size is one thing, but 1/2 inch won't make a difference. It is the power that is being transmitted that matters. And the small phones have small batteries, so they have to cut back on the anntena power.
Plus there was that whole brain cancer thing that made them look into reducing the power transmitted I think.
I'm not usually one to advocate litigation, but in this case it might be a viable option. Everyone is talking about how they are locked in to a 2 year contract, and the service is awfull, but you have to remember contracts are a two way street.
When you agreed to pay for 2 years of service, there is also a stated or implied commitment on the part of the carrier, to provide service for those 2 years as long as you pay your bill etc.
When they oversell their networks, and dont live up to their end of the bargain, it should be trivial to bring about a breach of contract suit, and either be released from your obligations under the contract, or have an injunction placed on the carrier to get their acts cleaned up.
Of course IANAL, and you should talk to one if my ideas make sense, but I have heard of people using similar logic to be released from a lease.
I had Nextel -- they swore up and down I had free nights after 7 pm, then changed it and swore up and down they sent me a letter, so that I still owed the $300 from going over my plan. Then after changing my plan, they told me that I had automatically extended my contract for another year by changing my plan (which the rep on the phone did not tell me) -- which would cost me $200 to terminate early. I hate them. They were easy when I was on a high-payment, high-minutes plan -- buty they screwed me when I changed it.
You need to work on the quality of your posts, man! Your text not only hurts the eye, it is full of spelling mistakes and seems to consist mainly on incoherent ramblings. Yet you indicate that you think you're being particularly insightful, which is not really true. Improve readability, check spelling, check grammar, do more meaningful sentences. And also don't stick with the "don't do X, I tell you why: it sucks" pattern. And please refrain from apparently meaningless shouting (talking in capital letters) which makes your posts look like a certain kind of spam.
...that sprintPCS sponsors /.
Would it be inappropriate to disclose whenever there's a potential conflict of interest?
I agree, as I posted above, I've got a Samsung 3500 I've had for 3 years and have great service. What model are you packing?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Anyways, even if you accept as fact that the US has substantively worse coverage in true metropolitan areas than the level of service throughout western europe (an assertion that I question), you still cannot ignore the importance of the overall density in the US. For instance, a significant city like, say, Seattle, may be relatively dense within city limits, but without having a cluster of other large cities nearby certain (meta-level) infrastructure considerations may not be economically viable. Unless you are intimately familiar with cell phone technology (more than just the summaries of CDMA, GSM, or what have you) to say otherwise, I don't think you can just ignore that. Furthermore, the fact that people in the US do often venture into less dense areas, whether they be suburbs, exurbs, vacation retreats, or even commuting to another population center, means that they will take the level of service outside their nearest metro area into great account. In other words, while GSM may make sense in Europe, that same technology may not make a great deal of sense, even in cities, BECAUSE it is not economically viable in outlying areas. This may well present the telecos with the choice of either: supporting multiple standards on a single service/phone (much more expensive), losing all customers that wish to have service outside of their city, or supporting a single standard that some may regard to be technically inferior (even though it's the only economically viable solution). Furthermore, besides just the density of the population, you must take into consideration the percentage of those customers that are willing to buy service. If the US has a lower overall adoption rate, then this must factor into the economic calculus of the telecos. I do not have the statistics on hand, but I would venture a guess, from my own experience in europe and in the US, that the US has a significantly lower percentage of the population using cell phone technology than the parts of western europe that you are comparing. Now you may assert that this is a result of poor service, but it cannot be held a priori, especially considering the fact that Europe's land lines have long been less reliable and most costly than the US (thereby encouraging the adoption of such new tech).
Lastly, if you want to argue that fragmentation of standards may be the root of the problem, then I can hardly see how you can ignore fragmentation of standards as a result of fundamental population differences. For instance, GSM hardly makes sense if it's not economically viable in less dense areas.
I have a Ken P. Prediction!
In 1-2 years the cellular companies will ask for federal assistance to salvage the industry. They will receive more than 100 million dollars in assitance while the top 5 executives will pull down well over 100 million dollars collectivly in their pockets.
God Bless companies like Qwest where they lay off thousands with no severance (And no warning) but the CEO when laid off walks away with 33 million.
Head out to tsewq.com for details on that.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Here in Canada, we have only a few cell companies, and only two alternatives for DSL - Bell Hi Speed (modem) and Rogers (cable). I have had no problems with Bell Hi-Speed, or with Bell Mobility. Coverage, cost, service, and quality are all great.
But then again, winter is 6 months long. Oh well.
I live in rural Ohio.
I have sprint, Samsung 3500 multi-mode. At home, it uses cellular ("analog roam"), on the road it uses Sprint where it can, cellular otherwise.
Calls come through at nearly 100% rate. I just don't have Sprint's PCS services when in analog mode.
Compare this to my wife - she has Verizon, straight-up cellular, this is her "home" area, but calls have lots of static, and trying to call her fails 50% of the time, even if she has her phone on (one of the motorola star-tac series, little bitty flip-phone). She gets full bars - strongest signal possible - most of the time. This means nothing, of course.
The only complaints I have about PCS are a) sometimes voice mail doesn't get to me for *hours* (notification, that is!), and b) buildings (a few specific ones, mostly, that don't seem cell-phone friendly, as AT&T and Nextel service is flaky there too).
YMMV.
Redundancy is good; triple redundancy is twice as good! - Me.
Here in Boston, I've had an opposite experience with my Sidekick. T-Mobile has been a *huge* improvement over Sprint PCS everywhere I travel in the local area.
Additionally, I've had almost no problems with data reception -- I get outstanding reception in the hospitals I work in (normally a problem for pager/phone reception) and I even get good reception in elevators and many "T" stops underground (Orange line is excellent).
I couldn't be happier with both the SK and T-Mobile as my new provider.
There is no doubt that the regulation regime must change. It totally fails to take into account new technologies. I do not, however, buy the argument that the "free market" alone is the solution. As someone who has installed radio transmitters (admittedly amateur radio repeaters, but the issues are the same), there does need to be regulation and enforcement. It is too easy for transmitters to create spurious signals and interference. A regulatory system is, IMHO, infinitely preferable to the only other recourse in a "free market," namely, the courts.
So, while I do think the present reulatory system needs to be demolished, I think it does need to be replaced with a regulatory scheme that takes TDM and spread-spectrum technologies into account.
The present model is based around uni-directional broadcasting. Dedicated "channels." That needs to change.
happiness is: getting full digital coverage throughout the entirety of the desert east of los angeles through phoenix and el paso.
:'(
sadness is: getting 1 bar of cellular coverage in my house and neighborhood and 5 (max) bars of digital coverage less than 1 mile away on the main college street. (and that's it. how they made a digital coverage area about 1 sq mi completely baffles me).
cellular service in chapel hill/durham, nc SUCKS. there are lampposts here that will make my service drop. i betcha didn't know that they had that feature, didja?
being spoiled on digital-everywhere in california to move here to this "research triangle park" area and have such shitty service is pretty painful.
i miss having caller id.
i miss my phone actually RINGING when i have an incoming call.
i miss being notified that i have voicemail.
i miss not having to dial a number six times before it will actually connect.
i miss having the phone actually connect and *ring* when calling other people (instead of click.... click.... click... (5-10 seconds pass) click... You have reached the voice mailbox for...)
*sob* technology giveth and technology taketh away
When my service sounds like crap or the phone doesn't work half the time, I use my carriers insurance plan, i lost it, its stolen, i broke it, doesn't matter they give me a new phone for free. And..magically my calls all work perfectly. This won't apply to everyone, but it works for me. Although throwing my phone at the wall ALWAYS made it work. don't ask me why. they are incredibly resilient. my nokia 8260 went through the washer AND the dryer and still works. heh.
Why does Slashdot link to the nytimes.com website when it requires a user logon? I have never seen Slashdot link to any other site that requires a logon. Why is nytimes.com a special case?
Slashdot is a champion of privacy on the web, yet calls its anonymous posters cowards!
-Anonymous, but not a coward
August 2001: Signed a year contract, got a new phone, got some rebates, got lots of minutes
February 2002: Lost my phone in Ecuador (yeah, probably shouldn't have taken it... I had service, which surprised me, but didn't try it out before I lost it). Had my parents call AT&T to tell them it was missing and suspend my account.
March 2002: Got back from Ecuador, ordered a new phone from AT&T. And to get this new phone, they made me restart my year contract. And they didn't give me one freeking cent discount on the phone!
August 2002: Find out that when they restarted my contract, they didn't bother to extend the time for my promotions to next March. So my promotions are about to end, and since this is my only phone, it's a horrible deal without the free LD and boatloads of minutes. So I have to start my year contract yet again to keep getting the perks!
Now, I probably would have renewed anyway, but I was being tempted by VoiceStream's nationwide no-roaming, and I wanted to have the option to switch.
But how in tarnation can they justify reseting the contract like that to just replace a miserable lost phone???? Corporate greed I guess.
I've wanted to write and complain to AT&T but haven't gotten around to it yet. I probably will NOT renew my AT&T contract next August, unless they do something to make this up to me. That's just inexcusible, in my book.
If having your basic rights removed wasn't enough your mobile network seems to suck lots. Altouhgh it seems there is an attitude problem there though - all you septics moaning about how people dont need phones...how quaint! Seriously, that anti-phone attitude is considered pretty backward in the EU. 'Cell' phones are as good as landlines for quality, never drop a call, can always make a call and always have a signal. You can even take your phone over to another country and use it like you'd just gone to the mall with no special arrangement or payments. You just cross the border into say Germany or Italy (like us EU citizens can as and when we please) and works fine.
Come and live in the EU and escape from microsft, the Bush administration and shite infrastructure!
I have a few friends who work at customer service for a couple different cell phone providers, and one of the biggest tips they me is, don't believe the dealers. Dealers say whatever makes the sale and earns their commission. So before you believe their pitch (and sign a contract), call the customer service center and verify the facts.
United States : The free market was given reign over the fledgling digital mobile comms market. Manufacturers and Operators launched a handful of (Incompatable) systems. This had several effects:
1) Incompatable systems confused the market. Consumers did not wish to deal with CDMA V.'s TDMA V.'s GSM
2) Incompatable systems meant that Operators could not share their networks, which would have allowed Operators to spread costs and access a larger coverage area (E.g. Operator A builds to cover areas 1,2 and 4, while Operator B builds to cover areas 3, 5 and 6, giving both Operator A and B access to areas 1-6.) Operators instead spent their efforts covering the same areas which were already covered (But by a different Operators standard)
3) The above has the knock on effect that value added services such as SMS cannot and do not operate, or operate only within the subscribers network. Consumers remain uninterested in these services as they have limited application.
In theory, the free market would dictate that a single standard would have emerged, and everyone would now be using it. This has proved not to be the case. Consumer confidence is weak.
Everywhere else : The Governments of other countries auction of the radio spectrum only for use with a single standard (GSM on two frequencies). Operators begin building networks, but quickly form sharing agreements which accelerates the coverage. Consumers do not have to understand anything beyond the concept of "Buy a mobile phone. Make phone calls." Sales of mobile phones accelerates at a huge rate, and Operators rush to provide cheaper calls and value added packages in order to obtain and retain customers. Competition becomes fierce, and because coverage is not a consideration for customers, Operators are forced to compete on price and features. Operators rush to be the first to introduce new services. Mobile telephones and SMS messaging have become so ingrained into the social conciousness, television programs advertise a number viewers can send an SMS message to alongside their email address and telephone number.
Just so you know, I work in the mobile telecoms sector, dealing with 2G, 2.5G and 3G services with customers all over the world.
My big complaint is all the extra services they try to sneak onto your bill. Even if you totally opt out of all the "optional services" and want a plain vanilla account (for the price as stated in your contract) they inevitably tack on all kinds of crap and then it shows up on your bill after the "introductory period" that I never agreed to in the first place. This first happened with SNET wireless (now Cingular, I believe). They were too stupid to figure out how to get the charges off my bill, so I refused to pay. Eventually, they disabled my service and tried to bill me for the "early termination fee". This was a blessing in disguise, as they were already in violation of their own contract by billing me for services not ordered, at a rate that was not as stated in the contract. Once they disabled my phone, I notified THEM that I was TERMINATING THE CONTRACT FOR NON-PERFORMANCE.
So then I signed up with Verizon, after emphasizing over and over to the rep that no additional services were to be enabled, and that I was ordering the basic package ONLY. Sure enough, bogus charges turned up on my bill, almost from the beginning. "Per minute" charges when not all minutes were used, "Late fees" that were for payments received on-time, all kinds of crap, with the ultimate being the "services not ordered" problem after the third month. Each month I called, each month I complained. Unlike the SNET morons, these people seemed to be very much aware of what was going on, and they cheerfully credited my account each time. Month by month, the funny business diminished, until the bogus charges disappeared entirely. A cynical person might think they had some kind of system designed to detect what level of bogus charges will be tolerated, but I think that's giving them way too much credit. Although Verizon's billing was every bit as questionable as SNET, at least they knew when the customer had it figured out. SNET makes Verizon look like Amica.
Questionable billing seems to be an inherent part of the cellular industry. If more people walked away from their contracts when the carriers failed to perform, we would all get better service and less "funny business".
Sounds good. I'll be playing with my wideband spark-gap transmitter in my garage while you watch TV, O.K?
All these people complaining about bad service should maybe examine their provider...
I have Verizon service and I have NEVER had signal or capacity issues except when indoors or inside my (shielded and unusually RF-noisy) car. I can use my Verizon phone at my *aunt's house*, which happens to be in the Middle of Nowhere, NY. It even operates in digital mode. Haven't tried AT&T, but no one with a Sprint, Cingular, or T-Mobile phone can get a signal on their network at my aunt's. (Cingular and Sprint phones MIGHT be able to get an analog fallback signal.)
In short, I'm a Verizon customer and have no complaints whatsoever about service quality.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
PCS technology is no more advanced than the CDMA technology used by Verizon, Qwest, and Virgin Mobile (who is probably just reselling VZW or Sprint tower access). In fact, it's the same.
Now if you compare CDMA as used by Verizon and Sprint to GSM... That's a different story. CDMA wins hands-down, which is why 3G in Europe will be CDMA based. (Unfortunately for them, they don't have a seamless upgrade path, they have to all-out replace all phones/networks/buy new spectrum. On the other hand, cdmaOne and all of the subparts of CDMA2000 (1xRTT, 1xEV-DO, 1xEV-DV) are all backwards/forwards compatible with one another. A cdmaOne phone will work on a cdma2000 network and a cdma2000 phone will work with a cdmaOne-only site, the features offered will be the lowest common denominator.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The network providers in the U.K. had a habit of badly underestimating the number GSM phones sold as Christmas presents.
10am, Christmas Day: 5 to 10 thousand new users per cell log onto a network for the first time. *FOOM* the whole network just seizes up.
--
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
Even in the Princeton area...which is surprising since everyone here has the "NIMBY" attitude when it comes to cell towers.
I've had them all, Cellular One, Metrophone, Cingular, Omnipoint, Voice Stream, T mobile....and the only one who seems somewhat reliable in this area (and most of the north east) is Verizon.
No, I don't work for them.
-ted
First off:
I don't believe Samsung has much in the way of GSM equipment, they're primarily a CDMA company, at least cellphone-wise. So I don't think this is the reason for the phone not being tested well.
Second: It's a pretty well-known fact that one of the reasons Sprint offers a lot more phones than Verizon is because it's a lot easier to get a phone past Sprint's QA testing than Verizon's. I've heard of a number of Sprint phones being "duds" compared to Verizons, whereas I've NEVER heard of any particular VZW phone being much worse than any other in terms of call quality.
FYI, this is the reason Verizon doesn't have any more recent Nokia phones than the 5185 - Nokia hasn't been able to get any other CDMA attempts past their QA testing since then.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I'm in BC. We had a case awhile ago where a guy went over an embankment and off the road. After a day or two, he tried the cancelled phone and managed to get 9-1-1 and a rescue. Lucky for him though, half of the long highways I can't even get reception on a connected phone... not sure if it's crappy startacs or crappy Telus, perhaps both.
It was definately the latter (Revenue protection)
He was talking about taking a Sprint phone to Verizon, which uses the same technology (and has quite heavy phone overlap - The Kyocera 6035 for example).
Sprint subsidy-locks phones, Verizon does not. Why?
It has everything to do with how Sprint and Verizon sell phones. Sprint allows you to buy a phone from a large number of places (CompUSA, OfficeMax, etc.) without getting a contract. But that phone is pretty worthless without the service. Now if someone buys a Sprint phone and activates it on Verizon, Sprint is losing a lot of money.
Verizon, on the other hand, doesn't s-lock phones. That's because you can only buy a Verizon phone at a Verizon store or from Verizon's website (or by landline phone). As a result, you can ONLY get the discounted price on a new phone at contract signing. You can get a phone without a contract from Verizon, but they'll charge you a lot more. (For example, the Kyocera 6035 was $380 without a contract subsidy, $250 with subsidy.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It just proves where there is no choice consumers do indeed get raped.
Local Phone company
Local Cable company
Local broadband ISP (either your phone or cable company)
Cell Phone carrier
All of the above companies and industries which are so vital to consumers fuck with consumers the most. Between the hidden surcharges, the lack of choice and the outright hostility of customer service reps its shocking there aren't more shooting. I mean have you ever tried to get a simple thing done with either your regular phone, cell phone, cable, or boardband account? Its a freaking nightmare of long hold times and CS reps who could give a crap about you since you literally have no choice but to deal with them.
The Communications Industry is the worst period. They are in serious need of some bitch slapping to show them who pays the bills. But considering there are no alternatives, and both the FCC and Congress(Cheerleader voice:Gooooo Big business Yeaaa!) are for sale, we the consumers will continue to take where the sun don't shine.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I don't think there is a single market in which any of the major (or minor) carriers has an "overloaded network", whatever that means. In the past 5 years, capacity has vastly outgrown demand, which is the main reason why carriers are so heavily in debt-- a much bigger factor than their "3G rollout" investments. Not that lower capacity could in any way result in more dropped calls or lower service.
Probably the number one problem is cheap ass (overpriced) equipment, and a close second being that because there are more people using cell phones, that more areas of poor service are being discovered. (Think of the many eyeballs analogy.) Of course, as the article states, there are actually fewer complaints (to the FCC), despite more than double the number of users.
One area that is affected by the influx of users, is customer service, where, surprisingly, the *percentage* of complaints about billing, etc. have gone down, which is what skews the *percentage* (not the actual numbers) of service complaints.
ps. my cellular ser
Here is a snippet regarding the nationwide on network plans, im only including the top 5 in each category.
Low-end Plans
Carrier/Price/Any Min/Price Per Min
AT&T Wireless $40/1,000/4 cents
T-Mobile $40/1,000/4 cents
Cingular GSM $40/500/8 cents
Verizon $40/400/10 cents
Sprint PCS $40/400/10 cents
Mid-range Plans
Sprint PCS $85/2,000/4.3 cents
AT&T Wireless $75/1,200/6.3 cents
Verizon $80/1,200/6.7 cents
Cingular GSM $70/1,000/7 cents
T-Mobile $60/800/7.5 cents
High-end Plans
AT&T Wireless $100/Unlmtd/N/A
T-Mobile $100/5,000/2 cents
Sprint PCS $100/2,500/4 cents
Verizon $105/1,500/7 cents
Cingular GSM $100/1,350/7.4 cents
BTW this is from RCR magazine this month. And yes I work in the industry.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
AMPS - Analog mobile phone service. This still exists, but carriers are doing their damn hardest to phase it out. Every carrier in the US only provide AMPS as a fallback in areas they haven't upgraded to digital, which at this point are few and far between. (Mainly in extremely low-population-density areas)
D-AMPS - Often simply referred to as TDMA digital, although TDMA is too generic. Used by Cingular and AT&T. Most D-AMPS providers are moving to GSM. (Stupid move since that forces them into Yet Another Upgrade to UMTS since GSM is a dead-end technology with no seamless upgrade)
iDen - Only used by Nextel. Not much of a future seen for this protocol either.
GSM - Another TDMA format. T-Mobile/Voicestream was the only GSM provider in the country until recently, now AT&T and Cingular are upgrading. GPRS is the 2.5G extention to GSM.
CDMA - Split further into cdmaOne (2G) and cdma2000 (2.5G/3G). cdmaOne and cdma2000 are cross-compatible - a cdmaOne phone will work on a cdma2000 network and vice versa. Used by Verizon, Sprint, Qwest (small and being bought piece by piece by VZW).
CDMA has proven to be the winner in the USA - And its lead will continue once the GSM providers have to eat a full network replacement to provide 3G services (3G GSM is UMTS, a CDMA variant that is NOT cross-compatible in any way with GSM/GPRS, a problem that is causing financial troubles for many European carriers).
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Cingular service has been awesome here in upstate NY (Rochester). I have never lost reception, nor dropped a call. I use to be a Sprint customer but I left them because they liked to charge me roaming fees (69 cents a min.) whenever I made a call from inside a building and had to use analog instead of digital (which still sounded crappy). I'll never go back to Sprint as long as they continue to rape their customers whenever their network exhibits shortcomings in regards to its coverage area. Seriously, what's the point of having a provider that can't cover you when you're in the boonies. If my truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere, the only thing that is going to make me feel worse about it is paying 10-15 dollars in roaming charges to make a phone call to AAA to get my damn truck towed.
This is slightly OT, but I'm about to buy a Sidekick, because I need wireless internet. Does anyone have experiences with these? From reading the previous comments, T-Mobile's customer service sounds like it sucks, so I'm afraid now...
Just follow the day, and reach fo
I have a cell phone from Nextel... I really like the direct connect feature and once I switched to nextel, my phone bill dropped $100 because my girlfriend (now fiance) has a nextel phone and all the little calls (ie. want to get together for lunch?, I'm on my way home, etc...) really added up.
I understand Nextel has some problems with coverage in certain areas in the US and I'm not sure about other countries but I live in PA, USA and often travel to NJ (both northern parts and southern parts) with no problems.
My only gipe is the fact that you have to call them to get the most current, better rate plan. My experiences are that as long as you are staying with your company (in my case nextel) then you can just call them and get the better rate plan.
-Chris
I'm sure my local volunteer fire department will be able to successfully bid against Verizon for their emergency communications channels.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"Another friend is on Verizon and said other then the shitty plan, he likes it."
You get what you pay for. Yes, their plans are the most expensive there are.
Is it worth the money? Yes. My phone works where no other provider's phones do. I've had nothing but pleasant dealings with their customer service. Call quality is excellent. And the cost is still reasonable - $40/month (including taxes) for 300 minutes of peak airtime and 4000 night/weekend minutes - More than enough for me.
Most other providers provide more minutes for less money - But I've heard nothing but complaints about most of them. (Look at T-Mobile, who offers the "most anytime minutes" but hasn't had a single favorable comment in this article.) So if you want service that actually works, you're going to have to pay for the higher quality. I live in Ithaca, NY for 4 years, and had cell service for 3 of those. Verizon (and its predecessors - I started as a Frontier Cellular customer and went through two mergers/buyouts) was the only game in town if you wanted service more than 2 miles outside of town.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Nobody says you have to pick up all those calls. Put it on silent, and either ignore it altogether or only answer calls you want to via caller ID. Did you really feel like you HAD to answer EVERY call that came in to your cell? No wonder you didn't feel in charge of your time. Seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to give up your cell phone over an uncontrollable urge to answer every ring.
Your world won't end without one, to be sure-- I have lived without one myself on and off. But it's certainly convenient to have it around. I just don't have the "talk to everyone" compulsion that it seems everyone has hardwired into their brains.
This sounds awfully ranty. I don't mean this as a personal attack on you-- I'm just baffled by people who pick up every single call on their phones, but seem perfectly capable of saving email until later. And they seem to be the rule, rather than the exception. Caller ID and voicemail are fantastic. Let 'em wait until *you* have time.
You CAN be connected 24/7 without giving up control of your life.
So far I haven't seen a post that seems to truly understand the CDMA quality of service situation.
Here are some things as I understand them:
There is a huge difference between signal strength and capacity. Signal strength, measured in terms of the Pseudo-noise offset level of the spread spectrum signal is one part, and the Ec/Io (that's "Eee-See over Eye-Naught"), the difference between the signal strength and the noise floor, which is the available capacity. When your phone reports signal strength in bars, it's actually making an estimate using some kind of formula to simplify this pretty complicated technology. You can have a strong signal but not be able to make a call. You could be sitting under the tower but but there are already a few thousand other people using it.
Also, for those of you who have older phones who experience better service with "more powerful antennas," please know that it has little to do with the antenna. It has everything to do with SID vs. PRL. When cellphones really exploded here in the states (three years ago or so) they were still being built using something called SID. The definiton of the acronym escapes me, but essentially the phone would look around, pick the tower with strongest signal and the most available bandwidth and use it. So with my Startac 7760 on Verizon, if I was closer to a non-Verizon tower my phone would use it, and then Verizon would pay the other carrier a tiny fee for my use.
A couple of years ago (in Verizon's world, with the advent of the Startac 7868, I think) they got rid of SID and came up with PRL, a Preferred Roaming List. Phones were programmed with lists of preferred towers where Verizon didn't have to pay a fee. So if I was using my Verizon Startac7868W and I was sitting on top of a non-Verizon tower, but there was a tiny, weak signal from a Verizon tower 15 miles away, my phone would use the weaker signal to save Verizon a few tenths of a cent.
The corridor from Boston to Washington, via Connecticut, NYC, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, can do what Europe does, because they are densely populated. Up here in northern New England, and over most of the "red states", things are different. It may not be profitable, or as profitable, to roll out the latest wireless technology in areas where the number of customers per square mile is significantly lower. Also, and don't flame me for this because it's just a theory, people in the more rural areas may not be as inclined as those in cities to run out and buy the latest thing.
I used to live in Philadelphia, where I could choose from T-Mobile's GSM, Sprint's PCS, Verizon's CDMA, and TDMA from Cingular or AT&T. Then I moved to Lebanon, New Hampshire, where we have TDMA and.... TDMA.
FWIW, I also see this lack of population density as a major reason we can't automatically take the same approach to passenger railroad service that Europe does....
grep -ri 'should work'
Typical non-cellphone user: People in long-term care in hospital; some homeless people (they just have hotmail accounts).
Wireless base-station filters employing high-temperature-superconducting materials greatly improve cell-phone service by markedly reducing dropped calls and improving data flow. The devices are manufactured by ISCO International (located outside Chicago), Conductus (in Silicon Valley), and Superconductor Technologies (Santa Barabara). Unfortunately, wireless operators at present only employ a few thousand such filter systems. Hopefully, many more will be put in service soon.
This was a shocking report by the FCC:
2 .h tml
http://www.fcc.gov/Speeches/Powell/2002/spmkp21
Read it. No really, READ it.
They are finally getting it. I suspect we'll see some great changes by the FCC in the coming years - - They know all about spread spectrum, UltraWideBand, etc. They know how loaded the 2.4ghz part 15 space is - - and we're going to see them open up lots of new spectrum for 'real use', not just 'on the block for sale'.
-Eric Johanson
Seattlewireless.net
yeah, you get good coverage, but here in san diego, the audio compression is so insane that you can barely understand what the other person is saying. sprint pcs may have good coverage, but i require more... like clear communication.
The wireless industry paid the Gov't for the spectrum that they use. An indirect tax that is now simply being passed along to the users. They do not have the money to finish the infrastructure because they are heavily leveraged to buy the spectrum. Net result we get crappy service and higher fees and Washington can say it didn't raise taxes. Good deal -- I think not.
If you did have a ratio of Chip energy to noise, that surely is the 'signal strength' indicator. If there were many mobiles trying to use the pilot channel the base station would decrease its power, to lessen the background noise. So your 'signal strength' indicator would go down? If you had a high Ec/Io then there isn't may people trying to use the site. So 'indicator'show more bars.
ACtually, the Finns even have mobile phones for dogs. I guess a dog may have problems changing his contract though!
See my journal, I write things there
As I recall, Europe has quality of service laws that say something like "one should be able to complete a call 95% of the time", using a cell phone. This puts a lot of pressure on European wireless companies to provide good service.
The US does not have similar laws regarding wireless service. US do however have similar laws for landlines, thus giving good landline service.
Eventually US will get similar laws, but not before wireless shakeout we are going through has ended. (I bet as soon as FCC lifts the spectrum caps on cellar carriers, companies will be merging left and right, quality and capacity problems will be reduced, and high speed data will become cheaper.)
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
I echo most of what I've heard here. I held off getting a phone until last year. And I thought I was the last one in the DC area to buy one. I went with Sprint because they didn't have a contract. For the first year, as long as I didn't have to deal with customer service, I was happy. But when I did, it was hell.
Since I got the phone, it has been a great tool. It's a convenient point of contact for people to find me. If I don't want to talk to you, I don't answer the phone. Most people understand this. Those who don't... they get over it. It has also reduced my long distance phone bill to nil.
The downside - Sprint's phone service is beginning to match their customer service. It sucks. Drop calls, lost signals, etc. I'm now ready to move on, but have created my own little trap of not wanting to give up my phone number. A lot of people know it. So, for one, I'm going to be happy next year when 'Big Government' forces the 'free market' to compete. Lack of portable phone numbers are a serious barrier to free competition. I, for one, have put up with a lot of sh!t from Sprint in the interest of keeping my number. Cheaper plans elsewhere, cooler looking new phones, and all the other things have been less important than keeping a stable number.
But after my encounter last week with customer service, I'm no longer willing to wait until next year. They have no concept of responsibility and no sense of why their customer's are unhappy. They rather blame their costumers than 1 hour waits. For example, one rep said they were 'too successful' and they why they were having problems. Huh???? In two years they can't hire more people? If they are so 'successful', then why are the call centers so overloaded and the reps so rude?
They don't get it. And sadly, based on other comments here, it seems to be industry wide.
My point is not that the rest of the world is wrong and we are right. My point is that you are making an apples and oranges comparison to support your conclusion that more or better regulation would solve these problems. Not only can it not be shown given my objections but it also calls into questions the conclusion itself. If GSM is not a viable technology in our many less dense areas, then you can hardly say that we should be using GSM to drive prices down. For instance: If all providers in the US were forced to adopt GSM that may well force them into fierce price wars would eliminate any profits that they make, but that does not mean that we would pay less or get better coverage than what we are receiving today, because we'd likely either sacrifice coverage outside of metro areas or have to somehow pay for its uneconomical use in the outlying areas (and no price war is going to cover that cost in the long run).
In summary, name a market that is similar enough to the US to truly demonstrate your point or prove that are truly expert on cell phone infrastructure and construct an actual plan that makes sense before you say that you can prove that this is the fault of the regulation (or lack thereof) and/or the wireless providers.
No, damn it! My Verizon cell phone works on mountain tops, in the middle of the desert, on the beach... but not in my house in the city of Pittsburgh, just a few blocks from a Verizon switching station no less.
I had the same thoughts as an earlier poster about test driving cell plans, so I contacted Verizon (local-ish decent provider around here).
Apparently, you can return the stuff within 15 days worry free. Don't know about others.
Their response:
With the Verizon Wireless Worry Free Guarantee, your satisfaction is guaranteed for 15 days on any equipment you purchase from us. You pay only for the service, airtime, toll and roaming you have used. If for any reason you are not satisfied, you may return your purchase within 15 days.
Hell, I would pay someone to MAKE the service terrible in my libraries and classrooms on campus.... its freakin ridiculous.
I use pay-as-you-go with Orange and have had very good service. No contracts, no bills - give them a go! :-)
I mean, did you buy the phone at full price, or did you buy it for really cheap or free when you signed a contract?
How can you complain that you are being "held hostage" by your provider? You are ABSOLUTELY free to buy your own phone outright and activate it where you want.
Hmm. Did I just dream trapsing around europe and buying phone cards in whatever country I wanted a phone number in? Did I just buy those cards at the corner store? Yup. I did.
Buy your phone outright,and you won't be held hostage.
Phone services don't provide you the legal arm to smack their faces...
Make written and registered complains.
After 3 unanswered complains, send them a legal letter for breaking the contract due to disrespect of the commercial and consumer laws... (exact wordings may varie from country to country)...
That will mean that they can't use the "surcharge" clausules, because the breach is because of motives in their hands, not the user hands...
Cheers...
P.S.- In Portugal that is what would happen... [you can even use a arbitrator court (you can only use an arbitrator, because if you go to court... you will get the case heard 2 or 3 years later) to handle the breach of contract, thrus avoiding legal fees and problems]
A friend of mine shared this little tip with me and said it would work, but I've never tried it myself so YMMV.
After your contract expires (and they have finished subsidizing the phone) there is really nothing to keep you from jumping ship, so they are much more open to unlocking your phone if they think it will keep you as a customer. Call them up and tell them you are planning on traveling to Europe and would like to use some of the pre-paid calling SIMs available there, but you need them to unlock your phone for it to work. If they balk, tell them how you like the service, but if they can't help you, you'll find another provider who can. Apparently, once they unlock it in this fashion, it cannot be relocked. Has anyone else tried this?
Hemos, how about checking some facts before publishing such a ridiculous post.
Verizon and Sprint are both moving their present CDMA networks to CDMA 2000 network; thereby entering the era of wireless data (not to mention further improvements in voice service/density).
Now if you are talking about the TDMA/GSM crowd
(ie, AT&T wireless, Cingular), they will have many problems with coverage and data upgrades in the VERY near future.
Well I've had a verizon cell phone for about a year now and it's the biggest piece if shit I've ever had. I have had to take it in twice now for repairs. Granted I get a new phone but it just breaks in a few months. This one I have now seems to be holding steady maybe it will survive until febuary.
I also think that while cell phones have been getting cheaper the cost for plans has remained the same or even increased slightly in the past few years. Granted costs are cheaper than 10 years ago but even the last 3 years nothing seems to have gotten any cheaper. I agree with the article that all the cell comapnies are doing is adding useless features( ie text messaging, etc ) that take a lot less investment then beefing up their reliability.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
this sounds like a major improvement as far as i'm concerned..
Ruled in favor of science or dollars? Free market favors the majority when a conflict arises.
huh??, a truly free market favors the most efficient (and lucrative) allocation of resources.. not to be confused with the collectivist model and pork barrel politics the US uses.. the term "money" was used in the post.. let that term be a research project for you and you will learn many things..otherwise you people will continue to be blundering slave idiots
man is a planner, he must plan for competition, and also those plans must comprehend true life cycle costs of his endeavor.. simple eh? not..
Your car is RF shielded?
What do you drive, a tank?!?
Most people don't care about data/video via their cellphones.
They just want their phone to work for voice calls wherever they are.
Wrong. You're still responsible for the early termination fee. It's still applicable.
I recently quit my job at AT&T Wireless (Customer Care rep) - people would try that gig *all the time*
The account will auto-terminate after it's been suspended for 30 days, and will automatically bill the ETF. Even when you suspend your service for vacation/seasonal, it doesn't remove the ETF. It simply moves your service agreement end date. This is something you agree to (and should be explained to you) when you voluntarily suspend your service.
You want to know what may very well be the only way around the ETF? Have someone else call and verify your information and claim that you have died. They'll ask if you want to do a "change of financial responsibility," of course. Simply refuse, and state that you need to cancel the service because the account holder has died. The policy is to waive the ETF in such a case.
The company does NOT like it when reps waive the ETF and usually comes down hard on them. I told management to get stuffed on more than one occasion because I waived an ETF for a customer because I agreed with them - they were misled, and were getting screwed over.
So much for being an honest employee. They'd rather have people that can "empathize" and put on a fake happy face and act like they give a shit. Too bad many call center environments are like that.
The rest of the world apart from Korea uses GSM. While many international telcos have huge debts because of the UMTS licence fiasco (the so called 3g services) there is a middle solution called GPRS which enables 48kbit/s and is now in common use in europe and MMS the multimedia equivalent of SMS, enabling people to send images, short videos and sounds to others instead of plain text is already being marketed like crazy and all new phones here in Europe now support this. SMS has been available for longer than I can remember here in Europe and MMS looks ready to improve on this with phones from Nokia and Ericsson already sporting digital cameras in them (and they are massively popular). Not only this but almost all phones in europe use the Symbian platform (apart from Orange's SPV-MS Smartphone- which looks ready to fail before it even begins). There are many providers that are already proving Java games and utilities that can be downloaded and installed on one's phone. The mobile phone has a completely different status in Europe, where there are many people such as myself who no longer (in fact for a couple of years now) have a fixed telephone because the mobile has become cheap and far more practical. You can take your phone anywhere you want in europe and it works with the same quality that you have at home, albeit paying higher rates in some cases due to roaming. Here in Switzerland, which is a very mountainous country the mobile coverage is around 95% of the country. Mobile phones, such as Nokia's communicator are doing things that PDA's were origionally sold for. The future of mobile phone technology in Europe is rosy, and the reason lies primarily behind the fact that there is ONE standard, agreed upon by all participants in Europe. The GSM/CDMA thing is becoming another PAL/NTSC thing where PAL took most of the world by storm due to it's better quality. I would go with GSM if possible in the states as that is where the the best services lie in the future.
If you're ever in Europe go into a telco or mobile shop and give the phones a spin or let a sales person demo the stuff to you. You might be pleasantly surprised. Having one standard for all participants also has the added benefit of forcing the telco's in Europe to treat their customers better because they cannot lock them in, and one can switch to another telco if one is not happy.
My poor cell phone service is due to too many users on the network?
I always thought it was the fact that there was a cell phone coverage hole located directly over where ever I happen to be at the time.
Whew! What a relief it's just poor service.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
I believe most new GSM phones support the 1900 MHz band used in the US, so there's no technical reason that people can't roam from the GSM-enabled US to the rest of the world, now.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Verizon works flawlessly for me. It's also the highest rated on many lists, sometimes beat by AT&T. The problem with both services? They are the two most expensive. You get what you pay for.
You know that one with Catherine Zeta Jones? T-mobile? They were so bad they had to change their names. They are now considered second worst. The current worst is Sprint. People joke that the guy in the raincoat must be there customer service staff, because they can't get anyone to answer the phone.
I know you'll likely not see this because I'm AC and the article is a little old, but the "NIMBY" response futher down is right on the money.
How do I know? I work for a company which does RF engineering work for cellular providers. They are *always* trying to put in cell phone towers for coverage reasons, especially in densely populated areas. Believe me, they *want* to up the number of subscribers they can handle!
In populated areas, people can get a 'signal', but not connect, because everyone is chatting on the damn cell phone. Unfortunately, it's hard to explain tech issues to local planning commissions, especially with entire neighborhoods organized to keep antennas and towers out of their part of the city. How do you convince them you *need* to build a tower if there is already 'coverage'?
The NIMBYs are as usual, stupid, especially if they're actually concerned with RF radiation, since what the companies want to do is install many low-power antennas instead of a small number of high-power antennas ( which is what they already have ).
The truly ironic part is the folks preventing more cell towers and antennas of course mostly use cell phones... they're like single-passenger SUV-driving commuters complaining about traffic, gas prices and parking.
Of course, there are rural, unpopulated areas where many less well-funded companies just don't care about coverage. What, the cows in Montana are going to use their cell phones??
Me? I never turn on my cell, only use it to call out if I'm on the road... very infrequently. I wish I could sell my extra minutes... and I'm just rural enough without being too rural so that I usually get signal and connect, though my signal isn't always great...
Same as you and I plan on keeping it for awhile. Though Samsung has discontinued this model and replaced it with a smaller one. Which sucks becuase my flip part piece is having problems and I've just given up and started to only use the hands free ear piece..... The things you have to do ;)
and I have more money than your poor forign ass
RF engineers with their theoretical models can only do so much in optimization without actually driving the field to take into account the tilting of antenna arrays, building reflections etc. Scoreboard Inc. in Herndon VA is one of the precious FEW outfits that goes about actually measuring signal strength ("Can you hear me now?") and can entirely rework a cell carrier's network for efficient channel allocation, minimize interferance and cross-talk, and balance that against "customer service" measurements.
But the carriers for the most part don't want to pay. They are fat, dumb and happy to take their modeling software costing a few 10's of thousands of dollars and their already on-the-payroll RF engineers and just try to make do. Bringing in honest-to-goodness measurements threatens the RF engineer's jobs and the software sales contracts of the incumbant supplier. Because once you've gone with automation, no human with their diddly desktop software can hope to compete.
Scoreboard has completely and utterly reworked several major areas, namely the LA basin as well as Denver/Utaw - sites of the winter olympics. If they hadn't, they don't even want to speculate as to how bad cell service would have been during that event. The glaring design mistakes they found going in were just rediculous.
But as others have mentioned, when your customers are shackled to your service and real optimization costs tens of millions of dollars and the cell companies seemingly can't keep from going bankrupt, there is no hope of any real turnaround.
Java.
Do you really know what it means for a company to invest in a java oriented platform ? It means, at least, 20 times the cost of a system running OS software.
What kind of platform do you think most cellular companies run on ? ( Java )
Where do you think most cellular companies will be in a couple of years if they don't start listening to people in jeans and not the suits ? In history books.
Enough said, i said it too many times anyways...
yes, unlocking will allow you to switch providers that use the same tech (say verizon to sprint as they both are cdma) but it won't let you switch between different techs (verizon to cingular, cdma to gsm)... that is the problem...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
For decades, long distance providers have shared resources. For instance in my small town there is only one POP, which used to be owned by ATT. The next POP over was owned by MCI. They had mutual cross-billing so whatever LD provider you used just paid the owner of the POP for the line usage.
Now, in my area, there are a dozen or so cellular providers, nearly all of which put up their own towers and transceivers. The county has recently required them to at least share towers, but not transceivers. This means a terrific redundancy, meaning higher costs, worse overall service and worse visual pollution. Why can't at least the ones that use the same technology share in rural areas? This would be a big win for suburban and exurban users, as well as any travellers.
Also, I've wondered why nobody has come up with a way to use existing power lines as low power antennas in rural areas. Many rural highways have no houses or other facilities for miles but have a power line that runs alongside. Presently when I go 'over the pass' to the big city there is a 40 mile section with no coverage at all. I know power lines can be used (carefully) as radio antennas - for example the old campus radio systems that have a filter to prevent the signal getting onto the main grid.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Sedan.
But cars are mostly sheet metal except for the windows. That blocks a lot of lines of sight from the car, and even 800 MHz signals have pretty stringent LOS requirements. Also, glass isn't fully RF-transparent, especially to 1900 MHz PCS signals. (Some types of glass are worse than others - Many have impurities added to improve their durability and/or block UV, or other things. Many such impurities reduce the material's ability to pass RF.)
It's a fact - Unless signal strength is EXTREMELY strong, you're guaranteed to lose a bar or two of signal strength indication if you go inside the metal box that is your car. This is why external antennas for cell phones and WLAN cards give so much improvement even if their gain is not much higher than the phone/WLAN card's built-in antenna and is offset by cable losses.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that
sometimes you must work under adverse conditions... like a state of sheer
terror.
-- W.K. Hartmann
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