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Wireless Phone Carriers Held To (Texas) State Law
profet writes "The Dallas Court of Appeals found that wireless carriers must abide by state consumer protection and contract laws or face liability in state courts. A story on PR Newswire talks about AT&T's practice of 'misrepresenting' (read lying), and overbooking its network."
"You know, we're already providing a useful service to the citizens of Texas - it's not like we should have to obey the laws too!'
Seriously, though - weren't there some estimates that by 2010 major corporations would be in a position to blackmail the government to the point of having martial rights and extratorritarial soverignty?
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
I could understand the problem with 'misrepresenting', but all mobile carriers, as well as ISP, always overbooking user subscriptions to maximize the usage. How could they draw a line there?
How on earth would anyone decide if a telco was "over-booking" or not? If a telco had to provide everyone the ability to make a call when they chose, it would be the equivalent of providing every subscriber a leased line.
How carriers generally plan networks is that they take a Grade of Service of 2% or so. This means that 2% of the times someone attempts a call, the call won't be completed. Unless AT&T has drastically reduced the grade of service, there shouldn't be a perceptible difference between them and any other carrier.
Dimensioning a network is fairly complex. Carriers first assume an average Call Holding Time (90 seconds or thereabouts) and the average number of calls per day per subscriber (say 3). From this, they derive the total Erlang (one erlang is one channel used for one hour) required over an average 10 hour day, and dimension that as the peak loading on the network.
Of course, the actual dimensioning is considerably more complex. However, I doubt very much if any carrier would commit to a grade of service that they cannot meet.