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Verizon CEO Calls Municipal Wi-Fi 'a Dumb Idea'
ozone writes "
An interview with Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg quotes him as saying that 'Municipal Wi-Fi is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard' and 'Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house?' -- apparently Verizon's own 'Can You Hear Me Now' ad campaign has given customers 'unrealistic expectations' that their phone service will work everywhere. What?"
Verizon (and comcast for that matter) are fighting Philly's attempts at free wireless network.
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/11410060.htm
-- soldack
But private telephone companies aren't doing it. Governments and enthusiastic hoppyists are. Private restaurants and bookstores are. Private phone companies are trying to get individuals to pay through the nose by the megabyte for 4G services and selling them data-enabled phones that they can't access their preferred data services from.
I have a Verizon phone. It's more powerful than my PDA, but I can't run any of my own software on it... in fact I can't run ANY software on it, except by paying exorbitant rates to Verizon for "Buy It Now". Verizon has a cash cow in their captive customer base, and they don't just milk it... they bleed it. Is it any wonder people don't see them as the natural providers of high speed data services, services... I note again... they they're not even providing.
"Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house?" he said. "The customer has come to expect so much. They want it to work in the elevator; they want it to work in the basement."
You're selling me a telephone, and you tell me it's good enough to replace my landline. Why shouldn't I take you at your word?
AT least your coverage is better than T-Mobile. T-Mobile I had to walk to the other side of my street to get a signal. Hell with "in my house" how about "in my back yard"?
Last year, the California Public Utilities Commission ordered all phone companies to give customers 30 days to test a service without slapping them with hundreds of dollars in early cancellation fees.
A few years ago I had a nice PDA-phone combo. I went to the phone companies that were compatible with it, and tried to get it activated with the pre-paid card they were selling.I didn't get far enough to find out about "early cancellation fees".
Open your books, mister Seidenberg, quit treating your customers as criminals and fools, and then maybe people will quit turning to government because the free enterprise system has failed them... because the cellphone market doesn't resemble anything so much as a parody of a soviet health-care program. Homeopathic levels of service and no accountability...
As for indoor reliability of cell phones, my Sprint works quite well at home, but only after they built a new cell-phone tower quite close to where I live. I probably have the Chicago Bears to thank for that, as they played their home games here in Champaign a year or two ago while their stadium was modernized, and the cell phone capacity probably had to be upgraded for the temporary flood of Chicagoans.
Cell phones could easily be upgrade to work indoors by either of two ways. A repeater station with a larger antenna, possibly pointed in some general direction of the nearest cell if the signal is really week. Secondly, smart or dynamic bandwidth use. The electronics probably aren't cheap enough yet, but no doubt soon will be to dynamically use only as much bandwidth as is needed for reliable data transmission. A benefit of this would be the ability to pay a little more for a higher quality voice signal, say using a full 32K or 64K of bandwidth instead of the over-compressed 16k one-size-fits-all chunk used today. In the digital realm a weak signal can be compensated for by using more bandwidth. You can also go the other direction, more reliability by keeping the bandwidth constant but slowing the data rate.
In any event the cell phone is a specialized device, the early ones where analog, the latter ones hard wired to handle a very specific chunk of 16K voice data. Adding on cameras and the like are really just kludges and I suspect true 3G services will never truly arrive being side stepped by the advent of an internet everywhere sea of data always flowing, flowing, flowing. When out of range to reach the internet backbone some devices will probably be courteous enough to hand data along in bucket brigade fashion until it gets to where it needs to go.
Letter To Iran
The FCC gives out some tiny sliver of the spectrum that can be used by the everyman without a federal license; why should private businesses be allowed to use a significant portion of the spectrum for their own for-profit business? It'd be kind of like Clear Channel setting up radio stations on the walkie-talkie and CB bands.
It just seems like a rip off for consumers to get a useful radio technology and then get it essentially taken away by someone making a buck off it.
San Francisco is 46.7 square mile
Most government run programs in the US cost far less than comparable private sector alternatives. Most things that are private in the US that are public elsewhere cost far more. There is simply no evidence that government costs more to do projects, this is republican propaganda.
Now it is the case that government run programs can involve lack of choice. But in general you are sacrificing utility and low cost to get increased choice by going private.