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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."
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"
> 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.
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....
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.
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
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.
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/ .
So if that explains everything, why is cellphone coverage in New York terrible?
Each GSM cell has a maximum diameter of about 30Km, so it's understandable that very lightly populated areas will have signal issues. You're not going to be able to call your friend from an uninhabited island off the coast of Alaska, but that should not affect your calls from any of the big metropolitan areas on the East or West coasts.
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.
I'm sorry, but population density is not the reason why cell service in the US sucks.
New York has the highest population density in the US, comparable to the density of Paris and London. New York's cell service sucks, especially if you're on Sprint or Verizon which uses (surprise) Code Division Multiple Access instead of GSM (used in Europe).
You can try to deny it, but regulation matters in questions of standard service. If it's a network, standardization can be facilitated by regulation. Far from hindering the growth of a network, regulation can help. In the case of the US cellular network, a "free" market means a fragmented market which in turn means broken cellular network.
blog
This is not necessarily true. 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 dispersion. 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)
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