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Reuters On Telephone Cultures
mamladm writes "Reuters has an interesting article about the Differences in Telephone Cultures between the US and Europe.
It describes how the different regulatory frameworks have created distinct cultures on how telephones are being used in the US versus Europe. The article mainly discusses mobile phone usage, though."
...here!. Not too hard, is it?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
... already a couple of years ago when designing mobile phones (actually, they did quite a bit of market resarch on that - I participated (as a researcher)).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Perhaps the U.S. should look at how the Europeon Union did it. All the same standard = more money.
Or perhaps it's 50% more people and a 400% higher population density.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
This does a little bit to explain why my friends in the US often say "SMS? Whats SMS?".
I just recently started seeing commercials for ringtones on American TV, while it seems like 90% of European TV commercials have been for annoying ringtones for years now! I find it funny that on the American versions of the "Jamster" (Jamba in Germany) adverts they have to have a short blurb explaining what an SMS is.
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
Old habits will die hard. I think Europeans will continue to use the phone for messages rather than as a surrogate for being there.
I know this much - I once saw a cell phone ad where the guys are at a restaurant and the one uses the pepper grinder built into his phone. Then the ad cuts in, with the narrator asking, "Want a phone with the features you need?" before breaking into a list of just utterly useless garbage. Games, ringtones, a shitty camera, etc. My only thought was that the pepper mill would have been far more useful.
Wow, more EU residents have cells than US residents do. With the differences they're citing, it's no wonder, seeing as America generally has a better POTS than Europe. In the US, it costs just a little bit of money to have unlimited local and incoming calls on a land-line, plus it never has an error, ever, of any sort. So, it's not much of a surprise that the US has slightly lower cell uptake.
More money where? In corporate accounts or in people's wallets? Because the fact is that we all here envy American's cheap calls. I would love to call more, but I always feel the counter ticking in the background. And telco is a de-facto oligopoly all over Europe, with state owned companies in almost all countries and heavily regulated GSM operators who hardly compete since they know no new players would be allowed on the market.
"...The article mainly discusses mobile phone usage, though."
Well, that's the thing, then, isn't it? In the US, dirt is pretty cheap and plentiful, so land lines and wires that require poles to by strung up everywhere have predominated where the relative scarcity of space in European and Japanese cities has forced a much higher adoption rate for mobile technologies.
Tell me if I'm wrong, eh?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I'm a born and bred American, lived there until I was 20. I've lived in Germany for the last three and a half years. I've made some trips back to the states, a few months here and there.
In the US, for us common rabble, it's "Do you have a cellphone?" Whereas, in Europe, it's "What's your number?" Most people assume that if you're giving them a telephone number, it's your cell phone number. And they will not ask you if you are capable of receiving SMS, they will assume that you are. It is more common in Europe for someone to have a cell and no landline than it is for someone to have a landline and no cell.
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
You know, the population density argument can only be taken so far. Yes, South Korea has an advantage over the US in general for implementing a new system. It's not just population density there: the simply fact that it's small does the trick.
Now move to Europe. If they are to implement standards as a whole, they need to reach all of the European rural areas, just how it hasn't been reached in the US. As the article explains, those areas have been reached there. Whether you're in no-mans land in Scotland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Malta, Lithuania etc... you're connected.
Again my point is that population density doesn't matter much-- land area itself matters more. While a higher population in rural areas (high population rural areas?) would increase incentive for a company to spread there, that only matters so far. Every bit of land you don't cover, even where the population density is zero, will make you lose customers in the more populated areas. I'm from a rural area in Maine. I live in upstate NY. I did not buy a Verizon plan because it did not service my Maine location. Think I'm the only one? Nah.
Oh yeah oh yeah. Poland too.
Actually, I wonder which technology uses more energy if you account for the infrastructure too.
Digging and closing holes to fit many many miles of telephone wire will lead to a fair amount of fuel being used. Also, the copper wires have to be produced which is quite energy intensive too.
I have no idea on the total energy and monetery requirement to operate a mobile vs a land-based service, but I do have a gut feeling that the mobile service will be cheaper to construct in both aspects.
Of course, there is quite a lot of pre-existing landline infrastructure, but that will have to be replaced some day, and new infrastructure is also required when new areas are built up. If you'd have to start from scratch, the mobile solution seems cheaper and faster to construct... many emerging nations even skip most of the landline phase.
Underholdning.info
It's nothing new, all this has been well known throughout the industry for years. Two points that are missing from the Reuter's text are VoIP and Wi-Fi. Both phenomena are a direct result of America's (more) free market approach. And in both cases the explosion goes on in the US with Europe slowly catching on. It's overall cheaper to communicate if you are in the US then in Europe. So, dear Americans, don't whine, you've got a better deal anyway even without fancy ringtones ($2 each) or other stupid stuff like that.
That's why in the U.S. it's been illegal for the telemarketers to call you on a cell if you also had a landline. They had to call the landline number. Now that we have a national 'Do Not Call' list for telemerketers, it's easier to give up your land line, knowing you won't get a bazillion telemarketing calls if you list your cell on the DNC list.
This has absolutly nothing to do with GSM versus other networks but with network coverages.
Americans have made voicemail a way of life, where it often replaces the busy signal. A conversation can be supplanted by voice mail exchanges. Europeans often skip voicemail, although they have sophisticated versions. Their mobiles automatically send a note saying "1 missed call," and tell them who called. People call back even without a message.
Funny, I've had a cell phone in the US going back to 1997 and this feature was on the first one I owned with AT&T. It was also on the second and third one I owned with Sprint, and the fourth one I owned with T-Mobile.
--Americans traditionally have paid to receive mobile phone calls and tend to be less free about giving out cell phone numbers.
This has less to do with the regulatory environment than with call screening and the consideration that if you are calling me on business, I'd rather you talk to my receptionist first.
Overall, this article featured a few stats that could have barely populated the bottom right graphic of the USA Today Money section and stretched it out into a three page article. Fluff journalism strikes again.
Perhaps, you should picture the person on the landline sitting on a plastic chair, in an air-conditioned house, with the lights on. I, on the other hand, prefer to use my mobile phone only while sitting in a bird-sanctuary, on a weathered rock, warmed by the sun's rays.
Besides, energy consumption shouldn't be nearly as great a concern as the process by which that energy has been generated.
To the best of my knowledge, most member states have sold their telephone companies - certainly, the big ones (UK, France, Germany) have done so. Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of a country in the EU with a state owned telephone company - I'm not saying one doesn't exist, I just don't know of one.
The "heavily regulated GSM operators" aren't that heavily regulated in most juristictions, and most countries have at least four nationwide mobile phone operators (two on 900MHz, two on 1800MHz), with 3G operators opening in addition to these. Far from knowing no new player could enter the market, most operators are putting up the auctions of 3G frequencies at the moment that's resulting in precisely that - new players being given an opportunity. The original opening of PCN (1800MHz) by the UK government in the early nineties was specifically to create an opportunity for new operators to emerge, and the rest of Europe followed suit.
The situation isn't directly comparable to the US - I have a choice of about five or six operators where I live in Florida, but "nationwide" is still a relative term. Verizon, Cingular, Sprint PCS, T-Mobile, and Nextel (soon to become part of SPCS) would probably all describe themselves as nationwide (and would probably be the only US operators who reasonably could do so), but all have massive holes in their coverage maps, frequently omitting entire, relatively populous, counties while covering the neighbours. It's only because of transparent roaming and operators gobbling each other up we're seeing anything approaching usability in these networks. Sprint PCS is rapidly becoming a service network for operators like Verizon, Nextel and SPCS are merging, T-Mobile is a prime takeover target, probably for Cingular.
Outside of that four and a half, there's a bunch of ultralocal operators who seem to live in some era where mobile phones are just cordless phones with a longer range, frequently covering single cities, for all intents and purposes aimed at an entirely different application.
I don't want to suggest everything's great in Europe, it isn't. Operators in the US are generally now offering better plans. Much of this is because of the monetary culture that's different between the countries rather than regulatory. Europeans tend to be interested in spending as little as possible, resulting in large numbers of users choosing $20-30 a month "plans" (frequently pay-as-you-go) with very few minutes. Americans are more interested in trouble free/worry free usage, and have to pay for incoming calls, so tend to spend more, which gives the operators disproportionally more money after they've bought their infrastructure, so allowing them to offer more bundled minutes and features like unlimited calling.
But that's entirely seperate from regulatory pressures.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
That's why I try not to use my cellphone while I'm drivin' my Hummer...
When I studied aboard in Ireland (Spring, 02') I was absolutely amazed at how mobile phones kept people connected and governed most young peoples' social lives.
Personally, I was very anti-mobile phone when I arrived there, but I was told that you really needed to have one if you wanted to be at all socially active. My first weekend there was a home stay with a family in rural Limerick (rural meaning they lived on a farm, had cattle, but no shower). The entire family had mobile phones, even their 10 year-old daughter.
The flat I stayed in (with 6 other Irish students) didn't even have a land line, (ironically enough, it was wired for LAN; however, I was the only person with a laptop) everyone used mobile phones. The crazy thing was, they rarely actually TALKED to each other, they simply sent text messages back and forth. Most of their plans were pre-paid, so, to get the most use out of their Euros, they would simply text each other.
The funny thing is, now that I'm back home and with a phone, despite my x amount of minutes a month for free and free "in calling", I still text message all of my friends.
I guess I'm just proud of my l337 phone typing skillz I accrued while abroad.
Respect It.
This article is BS. It basically says "Americans get more minutes of talking for less money than Europeans, but don't use the call management features as well, because the US government has only recently started leaving telcos alone, while Europe's governments have meddled with their telcos". What does any of that have to do with the US GSM dropping calls all the time? How about the unreliability of US callerID, because there's no universal inter-telco standard?
Consider the effects of US market saturation with landlines before mobiles appeared, compared to Europe's many "first time callers" without any phones when mobiles were first offered? How about Europeans many languages, in which people can more easily communicate with short SMS messages, rather than demanding interactive multilingual voice calls? Or the role mobile phones play in teenage consumer cultures, in car-hungry America vs. poorer teenage Europe?
No, none of those answers would blame the government for interfering with culture. Some of them might even blame corporations for bad service! And when you get your info from a London telco marketer and an FCC PR flack, why would you bother to validate that solid-gold wisdom "from the horse's mouth"?
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make install -not war
Uh dude, Europe the continent is pretty damn huge too and my family can use the same phone w/o roaming charges anywhere from Norway to North Africa from Spain the the Ukraine. That's about twice the number of people as the US or didn't they tell you that at Rush school?
I have no idea on the total energy and monetery requirement to operate a mobile vs a land-based service, but I do have a gut feeling that the mobile service will be cheaper to construct in both aspects.
;)
That's my gut feeling as well. Which is why I wonder why GSM calls are (still) an order of magnitude more expensive than POTS calls?
Just like CDs never became cheaper than LPs when the technology matured. And where's my damn flying car?
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