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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."
Damn Leonids.
This space for rent.
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.
That's part of the problem. You get your free phone and tie yourself into a 2 year contract with a provider. If you want to break that contract you're charged a fee that's high enough to pay for several months of service. Either way, they're getting money without providing service. They'll never turn away anyone. They couldn't expand fast enough if they wanted to, and they have no motivation to do so anyway.
*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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
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
Uh... yeah, a large portion is still dedicated to UHF television because it's in use.
Until HD takes off, that spectrum will continue to be in use. Once 80% of US households are capable of receiving HD then the old UHF (as well as VHF) analog frequencies will be reclaimed and reallocated.
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.
Yes. And we'd have no conflicts at all from different companies rampaging across the "free market allocated" spectrum, right? Because that never happens. Nope. No interference between wireless networks and wireless phones. No interference from jacked up CB transmitters either. And we know that unallocated spectrum won't ever have two wildly conflicting technologies utilizing it, right?
Not to mention that the free market does tend to ignore certain costs and needs. Part of the VHF/UHF reallocation will be used to greatly expand the number of emergency channels for police, fire, ambulance, and other services. Think the free market will care about that? Doubt it.
It's funny, because generally I'm against government interference in things, but I think the kinds of interference that would occur otherwise are far worse.
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...
I would avoid any PCS service. The high frequencies of PCS (1900MHz) don't penetrate walls as well as cellular (800MHz). Verizon is mostly cellular except for a few states.
Also, I've heard from some network engineers who claim that the cellular carriers have better tower placement, in bigger cities, because they came well before PCS.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Austin Powers: Well! Finally those capitalistic pigs will pay for their crimes, eh? Eh comrades? Eh?
Basil Exposition: Austin... we won.
Austin Powers: Oh, groovy, smashing! Yea capitalism!
Carthago delenda est!
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/ .
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.
All of your assumptions are valid... except that price elasticity is different for different products. If this wasn't the case, then *everything* would sell for $0.11 per minute (assuming that to be the optimal cost), and there would be no such thing as an excise tax (or all purchases would be excise taxed equally).
Read up on your microeconomics before you post. Microeconomics is a cool geeky subject with lots of math and theories that rival physical theories.
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 fact that there is huge tracts of underutilized spectrum is why the government needs to get out of the auction buziness.
Grumble all you want, but most companies (in the US at least) either force you or "highly encourage" (read: force) you to sign a 1 or 2-year contract.
Yep, and in all those "socialist" countries the cell networks are in pristine working condition. The next time you want to vote to privitize electricity(california?), or gas...think of the cell phone industry. The cell phone industry is a clear example of private enterprise and competetion failing to improve service. We're seeing the same thing in broadband services as well.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
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.
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.
Do you really believe that the free market would have done better than the FCC has? If there were no FCC, there would be no radio astronomy. Your TV signal would get interference from the cell-phone bearing people walking down the sidewalk.
The Iridium satellites' frequency band was closely examined and approved by the FCC. When they launched however, it was found that they were broadcasting in a sideband well outside of that permitted band, rendering radio telescopes useless (like shining a flashlight down an optical telescope) so the FCC decreed that the Iridium transmitters had to be turned off as they passed over certain geographical regions.
Tell me how the free market would have solved that one. Ruled in favor of science or dollars? Free market favors the majority when a conflict arises. The government also keeps the needs of the minority in mind.
Further reading: Wired article