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FCC Requires Data-Roaming Agreements
itwbennett writes "The FCC has voted to require data roaming agreements between carriers in a move largely targeting AT&T and Verizon, the two largest mobile carriers in the US. 'What good is [a] smartphone if it can't be used when a subscriber is roaming across the country or even across the county?' said Commissioner Michael Copps. 'Our regulations must reflect today's reality and not make artificial distinctions between voice and data telecommunications.'"
Stop posting stories with summaries that actually make sense. You're confusing us.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Not sure how my Verizon CDMA phone is going to roam its data on over to AT&T's GSM network.
...the FCC can start by abolishing all policies, abandoning all stances and cancelling all position papers that distinguish between a voice network and the Internet. That includes imposing any regulations from regular phone services, such as common carrier constraints, monitoring constraints, price gouging constraints and peering obligations.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
'Our regulations must reflect today's reality and not make artificial distinctions between voice and data telecommunications.'
Then can you guys do something about the ridiculous text messaging fees? I shouldn't have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a minuscule amount of data.
In all reality text messages should be considered part of your data plan, shoot even with a 2 GB monthly cap *cough* at&t *cough*.
Lets see about the math of that-
Average Text message of 140 characters = 140 Bytes
2 GB = 2,147,483,648 bytes
so if you were to use your entire data plan you could send / receive on average approximately 15,339,169 text messages per month.
Now if you were to send those same text messages over AT&T's standard text message rate of $0.20 per message your bill assuming you didn't have unlimited texting would cost you $3,067,833.80 per month.
yea that is not the slightest bit excessive, guess that is why we have those unlimited texting plans. Although if you did this much texting they would probably kick you off of their network. Or more likely start instituting text caps to their unlimited texting plans like they did to their data plans.
Primarily because those text messages have to locate the mobile with a page on the paging channel before sending the actual text itself. Paging channel requires SS7 messages to an HLR, MSC, SMSC and some other machines that do functions other than just text.
Sending 15 million SMS to one mobile would 1. tax the MSC pretty heavily (mobile switching center) and 2. probably get the originating node blocked at the intercarrier connection point pretty quickly.
Why do cellular providers get to make artificial distinction within the data service.
Email to you phone included in data plan. Phone mobile hotspot so your laptop can get email... EXTRA $$$
It's all just 1s and 0s, so stop dicking us with "unlimited" data plans that have limits and advertised service speeds that are far from approachable.
Well, my T-Mobile plan is pretty good. I have a 5 Gig "cap", which isn't a hard cap, it just means that I get throttled if I go over it. I don't, however, ever lose connectivity or get extra charges. I pay for HSUPA speeds, and I actually get about 7-8 mbits/sec out of it (that's using a USB tether to my laptop and running a bunch of speedtests, including broadbandreports.com.) I have a G2, and I track my usage (T-Mobile's site gives you that info as well, and they match up pretty well) and I've never gone above about 1.5 gigs in a month. That's just me ... obviously your mileage will vary. I can tether and use VoIP software without getting yelled at (or charged.) And yes, I'm thoroughly pissed off at AT&T for screwing up a good thing by buying my provider. Fuckers.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"What good is [a] smartphone if it can't be used when a subscriber is roaming across the country or even across the county?"
It's good for someone without $600+ a year to spend on mobile data. My Droid is quite happy with the phone unactivated and running off WiFi.
This is stupid. it's clearly a case where capitalism should find an equilibrium between absurdly good coverage, cost and cosnumer demand.
they shul dbe putting all their eggs in the net neutrality basket.
the only use of this is a gambit to give this chit up to get something else. more likely they will just piss off some libetarian congressman and rue the day,
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I've had roaming randomly kick in while I was sitting in front of my PC at home. If I didn't set it so my web access would be shut off whenever this happened, it would have shown up on my bill.
So if I own a phone company, can I just randomly flick switches that say people are roaming and then charge them an arm and a leg if they want to continue using the service they paid for? It used to be that you weren't roaming unless you actually left your service area; just like long distance calls over land lines.
They charge you so damn much because
a) they are trying to switch you to their unlimited plan (fixed income)
b) punishing you for using a metered service instead of fixed monthly rate billing
moox. for a new generation.
It's nice that the FCC finally had its balls drop and started taking some advances in a (what I consider to be) better direction.
Now if we can only get Congress to stop screwing everything up by voting on issues they have no idea about that'd be amazing.
That and a more radical president.
No... they're not like standard data. They're more like the overhead involved in connecting a phone call.
When was the last time you saw a mobile carrier charging you $0.10 or $0.20 per mobile-to-mobile call to connect the call? Oh right... they don't... because it costs less than $0.01 per call to do that; you could make 100 calls in a day, and they probably won't care. Now calls you make to subscribers of other telephone companies, meaning the provider of the person you called gets to collect the few-cents per-call fee for terminating the call (Carrier Access Billing), might be a problem.
I wouldn't claim an individual SMS messages is as cheap for the carrier as an IP packet.
It may have more parity with the cost of transmitting an e-mail message through a mail server.
"15 million SMS to one mobile" is totally unrealistic -- it would hurt the MSC just in the same manner as it would hurt a mail server if a user suddenly sent 15 million e-mails..... I believe the term for that is called spamming
God forbid the consumers vote with their feet who are unhappy with bad roaming service.
Go look up the word 'contract'.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Yep - T-Mobile is awesome if you're in an area where they have coverage. I dread to think what will happen once the AT&T acquisition really kicks in.
Sadly when I'm in the US I'm mostly in Wisconsin, which other than in Milwaukee, has no T-Mobile service. Have to use AT&T. I'm not American but I visit and pop a local SIM in my (unlocked) GSM phone when I do ... and would much prefer to use T-Mobile over AT&T if I could.
Has a daughter at 25, who has a kid at 24. Bam, 49 yo grandmother.
And go where? That's the point. The only way you can avoid this is by either not having a phone at all or restricting yourself to landlines. And if you're in public, good luck finding one of the increasingly hard to find pay phones.
Then they should start their own cellular carrier!
CAPITALISM! CAPITALISM! USA! USA!
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Voice and data are not the same, they are not 0's and 1's as you say.
GSM carriers have what is called a link budget. Basically it is the amount of time slots available on any given channel. You can assign multiple voice calls to one channel simply by using an alternate time slot combination.
However, when on a PS call (packet switched), chances are you phone is at least a multislot class 10 or 12 device, which means that you are taking up 5 slots!
Thus, there is less room for another caller.
Or course networks will automatically reduce your slots to fit a new voice caller by design.
UMTS is similar in concept, though the mechanism is more complex than GSM.
Roaming is nothing compared to the rip off of txt messages. That is happening on the control plane, which are bit that must go to you phone anyhow. The actual cost really is as close to zero as one can get without being zero.
That's weird. My AT&T service works elsewhere than Milwaukee.
There was a story about the worlds youngest grandmother a few weeks ago.
IIRC the grandmother got pregnant as a pre-teen and her daughter decided to make that a tradition.
That's precisely what I'm saying. AT&T works elsewhere. T-Mobile, at least according to the coverage map on their website, has no coverage north of MKE/MSN. Certainly none in Green Bay/Fox River Valley area where I am most of the time. So sadly, I am stuck using AT&T when I'd prefer T-Mobile.
Voice and data are indeed exactly the same. It's all binary on the T1 / E1 (or multiples thereof), the distinction is entirely arbitrary these days and your explanation is apples and apples (and a little bit wrong). Whatever your phone does in the local loop will almost always be converted to something else as soon as it hits the first junction box or cell site. That conversion is always in favor of the carrier, be it DCME or lossy encoding to increase capacity - this is how it has always been, the mindset is a hundred years old. Increasing capacity for voice is cheap and easy. The carriers are not complaining about this.
Along comes the internet, people want it on their phones, they want it on their laptops, in the car, motorbike, train, bus, everywhere. The carriers are definitely whining because they have to start aggregating T1's just to appease our need for bandwidth. We pay them, they make billion dollar profits, they use hardly any of that money for better infrastructure. Gravy train will not leave the station without some kicking and screaming along the way.
The problem has been solved already.
Remember this, the 'rip off txt messages' - that same concept extends to absolutely everything the carrier does. Everything.
At the end of the day this boils down to plain and simple theft. Verizon and AT&T (and their customers via bills) have put respectively very large capitol investments in their networks. Now they are being forced to allow other carriers who did not make these investments access to their private property. The cost of maintenance and other such elements will not be accurately passed on to these smaller carriers, and as a result Verizon and AT&T subscribers will pay more... If the government wants to compete in the wireless space so badly why don't they go build their own network funded by tax dollars, and then compete that way rather than stealing money from private industry. For the record.. I don't believe the government should be involved in any of this, and instead they should allow capitalism to work as intended.. If the space wasn't already so locked down (due to the less than open FCC control of spectrum and auctioning process) then we wouldn't have been in this non competitive environment in the first place.
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
My guess is that AT&T will keep T-Mobile as a "competitor." That way they can have two parts of the market. Just like Tracfone and NET10. They're both owned by Tracfone - and have entirely different charge schemes.
How many people are going to feel bad for poor ATnT or Verizon? I don't know anybody who doesn't have some hate for ATnT.
I still find it amazing how well the corporate propaganda has worked to brainwash so many people into screwing themselves; I'm sure I'll be surprised if we ever find out how many fake online identities marketing firms are using to spew more BS.
To put this into proper perspective, traditional phone companies have had to share their networks for a long time without huge marketplace disasters, they simply get a small break using their own network and pay a small fee to use another's network. All the DSL and dial-up providers have been sharing networks in various ways thanks to the FCC requiring them to do so. Yes, the private monopolies would have banned dial-up internet providers if they could have. (AOL wouldn't have existed so 1 good thing would have come out of that.)
LIMITED RESOURCES:
It is OUR airwaves they buy monopolies on and our institutions manage them - if they do so poorly its because we the people are incompetent. We currently have a system which sells off bandwidth to the highest bidder and barely regulate the monopolistic usage; this is about as free-market as it can get without the costly chaos of letting anybody make radio noise. I suppose we should allow Verizon to install signal jamming devices or should we regulate that nobody can jam the competition? What constitutes jamming? Who decides? What if two providers bump heads over bandwidth-- the stronger signal and client hardware wins... a temporary battle...
People seem to forget that something as basic as FIRE and POLICE have been privatized in the past and that insanity resulted-- in something that is morally simplistic and necessary; yet they somehow other areas are going to be more civil and more effective by introducing free market anarchy??
Anarchy has a PR man and its the US Chamber of Commerce. "Free market" is just a PR creation.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
My grandmother became a grandmother at 45, you insensitive clod!
(Mom was born when grandma was 25, I was born 20 years later.)
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
"Nothing stops you throwing a 'smartphone' on a plan without cellular data and still using it to make calls and SMS." ... if you [use] a phone that THEY consider a smartphone [...] they will automatically detect what kind of phone you [are using] and change your plan to a smartphone plan without telling you.
Sounds like smartphones need a "user agent switcher" feature, to let them masquerade as dumb phones when using no-data calling plans.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
My family of five sends about 6000 texts per month. For that, we pay $20 for unlimited texting. If you're too stupid to get that from your carrier, you deserve to get hit with all those extra charges.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The 15 million was from the OP statement of equating data to equivelent text messages.
I wasn't really addressing what the carriers charge for SMS .. they will charge what the market will bear and the market bears around $20USD per month for unlimited SMS service on a contract plan. My main point was that while SMS might be cheap to provide .. it is not entirely without cost.
The paging channel is a finite resource and ramping up the number of sms pages like the OP implied would qualify as a mass calling event like any other (new years, mothers day, natural disaster).
That's precisely what I'm saying. AT&T works elsewhere. T-Mobile, at least according to the coverage map on their website, has no coverage north of MKE/MSN. Certainly none in Green Bay/Fox River Valley area where I am most of the time. So sadly, I am stuck using AT&T when I'd prefer T-Mobile.
T-Mobile plan (for which I pay $65/month for what I listed above) also includes unlimited voice roaming AND unlimited data roaming. Coverage maps be damned, and that's a good part of why I hate this impending merger. T-Mobile was offering a good nationwide service at a reasonable price, and I know I'm going to lose that. "Good for consumers" my ass.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
My guess is that AT&T will keep T-Mobile as a "competitor." That way they can have two parts of the market. Just like Tracfone and NET10. They're both owned by Tracfone - and have entirely different charge schemes.
Which is hysterical in its own right. "Owning" a "competitor". Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha.
Really though, what it comes down to is that they want to position themselves to serve different markets, have brand recognition for different types of service, and that's one way to do it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.