Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Capitalism = who rips off best wins
This may be modded as a troll, but in modern economics, it is a truth.
> If the government was to let the free market allocate the spectrum,
Yeah. Free market will solve everything. Bandwidth ? Free market. Energy ? Free market. IP laws ? Free market. Pollution ? Free market. World hunger ? Free market. Greed ? Free market.
How lucky you are about having a religion that gives you an answer to everything.
> If the government was to let the free market allocate the spectrum,
one company would have ended with a de-facto monopoly on the spectrum.
They don't need more spectrum, they need more transmitters and more regulation of mobile phone companies. The UK is much more densely populated than the US, has much higher mobile phone usage per head and no more spectrum available for mobile phone use, but has generally excellent mobile phone service.
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
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.
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.
What does that have to do with companies giving us poor service? They promise us a product, and whether we need it or not they should deliver it.
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
"If the government was to let the free market allocate the spectrum, an entire new universe of wireless network services could become available"
And they'd all conflict with one another. Company A would blame it on company B's product interferring and vice versa. One thing companies are not very good at is agreeing with one another. Therefore, a free market with a small, but necessary regulation is what we have. As for the UHF stations, you simply blink them out of existence? Far be it from them to broadcast their signals (read: be in business) if it causes static in your call to Aunt Martha, so you'd basically have to wipe them out to bring on your new 'universe'.
Does the Federal government do a lot of messed up stuff? Absolutely. Is dividing up the spectrum in such a way as to ensure the quality of each signal one of those messed up things? Well, I don't think it is, but why don't you ask whales what happens when you let just anyone start tossing around any signal they like.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Spectrum scarcity is not the problem I'd say. Cells can be placed quite densely to support many concurrent users, or they can be placed at large intervals to provide good coverage over a large, sparsely populated area. You'd need a lot of phone users to overload a network that uses the most densely possible cell placement.
This is more a case of the phone companies "overselling" their networks, by taking in more and more customers but not upgrading their network and placing additional cells to accommodate the increased load. ISPs are also notorious for this.
Of course many telco's find themselves strapped for the necessary cash to place additional cells in overloaded areas. One of the reasons is the enormous amounts of money they paid at the spectrum auctions... which is interesting: the telcos over here own rights to spectrum bands which go largely unused for lack of money to place transmitters to use that spectrum.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The UK is much more densely populated than the US,
Parts of the US being sparsly populated might be part of the problem, but no real excuse for poor coverage in urban areas.
has much higher mobile phone usage per head and no more spectrum available for mobile phone use, but has generally excellent mobile phone service.
The whole point about a cellphone system is that you don't need huge amounts of spectrum. In an area of dense usage you simply have smaller cells with lower powered transcievers.
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
That's what you ALREADY HAVE. The feds have monpolized this space and auction it off to special interests. Broadcast spectrum for educational channels alone take up an absurd amount of UNUSED spectrum.
At least the free market would allocate space to services that people want! Right now the services people want occupy a few slivers of the spectrum. Take a look at how the spectrum is divided up before you make any more uninformed comments.
GSM in Europe I think has more free marketability than the mish-mash of conflicting standards and provider lock-in in the States. I can switch providers merely by changing the SIM card in my phone. No need to buy a new handset. Most customers coulnd't care less if the phone uses CDMA, TDMA, GSM etc. so long as it works.
TCP/IP may not be the best protocol in the world, but imagine if there were three or four incompatible standards used by the major ISPs, and you had to buy an operating system locked into that ISP's infrastructure to use the net...that's what the cellphone situation is like in the US. Everyone singing GSM is like everyone talking TCP/IP. You know your handset will work regardless of the provider you choose.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I think you're missing the real reason, even though you have all of the facts right there.
Of course a cell phone company is going to be putting up better equipment in higher-income neighborhoods. More people in those areas are going to use the service. Why does everyone alsways try to make things like this racist?
If they can put up one more tower in the higher-income neighborhood, maybe they'll gain 50 new customers, and make 1000 more happy with the coverage. If they put one up in the lower-income neighborhood, maybe they'll gain 1 customer and make 50 happy. Which is a better investment of the money?
Same reason why you don't see AT&T Broadband trying to extend their cable internet services into low-income neighborhoods. It just doesn't make economic sense.
I am not aware of things being mandated. The "rest of the world (tm)" use GSM because of the free market, because consumers want to be able to use their phone anywhere without worrying about whether it will work. Which it will. Anywhere. Except the US. Doh.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
It's a relatively well known fact that Sprint PCS seems to work great in the major metro areas on the East Coast (I have a couple of friends with it, so this isn't personal experience...but I can hear them when they call...) As long as you're within 15 miles of a city, PCS is great. Don't even think about going out of that range, though.
That's why I *didn't* get Sprint PCS. While it works well in Boston, it doesn't work so well out where I work. It works well at my parent's house outside NYC, but my sister is too far out.
It's the all important research-before-you-buy. Verizon's the *only* carrier that can make it through 5 stories of brick into my apartment...and knowing they work where I need them to is why I picked 'em.
It's just really too bad you can't take a phone for a test drive...I would really like to take a phone into my apartment, on the drive to work, and on the drive to my parents before purchasing it. I hate locking myself into a contract that can't provide what I need.
The original post is extremely valuable in this thread, and very true: wireless carriers have cut back on network quality in the interest of their bottom line. When people want to buy a cel phone they don't want to know which network is going to work the best overall, they just want the smallest handset with the most bells and whistles.
Actually, I think your statistics are off a little -- the highest rates of cell phone usage are often found in the poorest (and, coincidently or not, most minority) areas. More importantly, the growth rate of cell phone ownership among minorities tends to exceed that of white or middle/upper class people. To the extent you talk about broadband usage, I completely agree, but cell usage has a very different demographic. And when you factor in the greater concentration of people usually found in lower income areas, the reduced land costs, the reduced permitting hassles, there is simply no justification for the discriminatory cell phone coverage.
:)
On the other hand, a past GF attended a small women's college in the heart of one of DC's most affluent areas, and the coverage there sucked too -- so maybe they are just incompetent -- never rule that out
I thought this was NEWS for nerds? Since when has cell phone service in the USA not sucked?
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? ]=-
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.
I think the original poster was trying to distinguish a NEED from a WANT. The college kids/soccer moms/etc. don't NEED a cell phone. They WANT a cell phone. But marketing and peer pressure have convinced them that the NEED a call phone which is what marketing is supposed to do. Does marketing change "reality"? No. However it changes the perception of reality that in turn drives sales.
I am so glad that I finished college way before the cell phone craze started. The meetings where the cellphones continuously ring drive me crazy enough, I can't imagine lectures would be like with half the students carrying cell phones.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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...