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Verizon 'Grossly Overstated' Its 4G LTE Coverage In Government Filings, Trade Group Says (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Verizon "grossly overstated" its 4G LTE coverage in government filings, potentially preventing smaller carriers from obtaining funding needed to expand coverage in underserved rural areas, a trade group says. The Federal Communications Commission last year required Verizon and other carriers to file maps and data indicating their current 4G LTE coverage. The information will help the FCC determine where to distribute up to $4.5 billion in Mobility Fund money over the next 10 years. The funds are set aside for "primarily rural areas that lack unsubsidized 4G," the FCC says. If Verizon provided the FCC with inaccurate data, the company's rural competitors might not be able to get that government funding. "Verizon's claimed 4G LTE coverage is grossly overstated," the Rural Wireless Association (RWA), which represents rural carriers, told the FCC in a filing yesterday. "Verizon should not be allowed to abuse the FCC challenge process by filing a sham coverage map as a means of interfering with the ability of rural carriers to continue to receive universal service support in rural areas," the RWA wrote. "RWA's members are in the middle of the Challenge Process but are expending enormous time and financial resources in their efforts due to inaccurate data submitted by Verizon," the group said. "RWA requests that the Commission investigate the 4G LTE coverage claimed by Verizon and require re-filing of Verizon's data to correct its overstated coverage."
According to the RWA, Verizon claims to cover almost all of the Oklahoma Panhandle, an area of 14,778.47 square kilometers, but estimates that the actual coverage area should be approximately 6,806.49 square kilometers. "[That's] not even half of the LTE coverage area Verizon publicly claims to serve," the RWA wrote.
According to the RWA, Verizon claims to cover almost all of the Oklahoma Panhandle, an area of 14,778.47 square kilometers, but estimates that the actual coverage area should be approximately 6,806.49 square kilometers. "[That's] not even half of the LTE coverage area Verizon publicly claims to serve," the RWA wrote.
Why is the government giving handouts to unprofitable carriers?
Real fines. In this case, $ Billions. Only a couple would work. Oh, and either ban from spectrum auctions or, even better, surcharge their winning bid by 50%.
Of course all this Lifeline and Universal Service stuff ought to go, but rural service is a fundamentally less lucrative market. this will lead incumbents to fight off competition with the available tools, fraudulent claims being an easy one. I'm almost surprised this was caught.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
They are just that. See who supported Ajit's musings, the dismantling of Net Neutrality. Fuck these guys, fine them to death.
Current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, and former Associate General Counsel at Verizon Communications, shrugged, and remarked, "Eh."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I stopped considering coverage maps long ago, because as far as I could tell they were absolute bullshit for every carrier.
I stayed with T-Mobile after verifying it worked well enough in most places I am, including long road trips and areas where I know service is unlikely from anyone.
Verizon despite being a liar it seems like still has the widest actual coverage. But they are just too expensive for the service I need. (global coverage costs were a huge issue for me).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is just make-believe, but wouldn't it be wonderful if the government agency with oversight authority had Justice successfully prosecute the executives responsible and they received large fines and long jail sentences?
But we all know how this works in the real world; regulators go after the corporation instead, then announce to the public what amazing heroes they for a large financial settlement against an evil corporation. Then Elizabeth Warren has an orgasm and proclaims how wonderful is government regulation. Also, if you are the Obama administration, then you misdirect the proceeds of settlements to left-wing political activists instead of to Treasury. (Really. They did that routinely.) The stock holders, who are at no fault themselves, pay the penalty and the executives who committed the crime are granted immunity in exchanged for testimony and continue on happily with their outsized salaries. Summary: The government responds to corporate crime by punishing the innocent and exonerating the guilty.
Corporations would act less criminally if officials enforcing the laws sought penalties for those who actually perpetrated the crimes. Achieving that depends on replacing regulation with rule-of-law and reforming a grandstanding and ethically corrupt Justice Department.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
They literally have billions of dollars to spend giving handouts to companies to build cell towers, but they can't support the lifeline program to provide a small subsidy so people can afford the service they're proposing to help companies build?
Can you hear me now?
Trump supporters lick Hillary Clinton? That doesn't sound right, but ... whatever.
I'm shocked! SHOCKED, I tell you!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Oh boy those facebook forwards from Qanon have you too woke. You sure got us figured out grandpa.
Trade group representing carriers that would get more government money if Verizon exaggerated its coverage... says Verizon exaggerated its coverage.
Hmmm.
If only there were an independent distributed non-biased source of network coverage data that the FCC could verify. Ha just kidding; they don't really care about rural connectivity.
Well, that depends on which metric you use. If you go by the official poverty rate, California is actually #30, behind 29 other states. If you go by the *supplemental* poverty rate, it is at #1. And if you look at the difference between those two metrics, you will conclude that the primary reason for that difference is the cost of housing in California. It has nothing to do with government programs and everything to do with the tech sector driving up the cost of housing to bats**t crazy levels for a large chunk of the state, and the entertainment industry doing the same for another large chunk of the state.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
> primary reason for that difference is the cost of housing in California. It has nothing to do with government programs and everything to do with the tech sector driving up the cost of housing to bats**t crazy levels
You seem to have momentarily forgotten how prices are determined - by supply vs demand. If people want more homes like the did here in Dallas, builders build more homes, like they did here in Dallas. If the wood and other materials to build the condo costs $30K and the labor costs $12K, the builder can make a nice profit selling it for $55K. That's what they've done in Dallas.
I bought my house in Dallas two years ago. I paid $240K for 3,500 square feet. There was demand, and builders supplied.
Prices go sky high when supply isn't allowed to meet demand - when someone makes it very difficult or impossible to build new housing. In California, that includes things like proposition 13 and CEQA.
Under prop 13, cities and counties aren't allowed to get much property tax revenue if they allow land to be used for housing; they have to zone it commercial or office so they get much more property tax revenue from a given parcel of land. So each city is very strongly incentived to approve a shopping center being built on a particular piece of land rather than an apartment complex.
CEQA is another California law that adds an average of 2 1/2 years to each construction project, and sometimes five years, according to the California government's own Legistlative Analysts' Office.
The costs of both labor and materials is also higher in California. With the largest number of immigrants of any state, you'd think construction labor would be inexpensive on California. Government mandates make it one of the most expensive places to hire people. Materials such as wood and dryall also cost more. With such a large percentage of the nation's timber being produced right there in California and Oregon, lumber should be inexpensive in California, but it's actually cheaper for California's lumber producers to send it half way across the country than to deal with the bureacracy required to sell it in California.
If the supply of housing matched the demand, you wouldn't have sky high prices. Builders can't suppy the needed housing affordably because of the tens of thousands of pages of red tape BS, and many years of bureaucracy required to even hope that maybe the project will eventaully be allowed to be built.
This isn't theory. The population of Texas has been growing quickly, including a lot of refugees from California getting tech jobs here, and my 3,500 square foot house actually cost $240,000. It's not maybe getting rid of the nanny state could work; it does work. We're doing it and we've been doing it.
I changed providers from AT&T to Verizon when I moved from Indianapolis back to my hometown of Midland. Mainly because AT&T didn't have the coverage. The Verizon rep assured me that they would have the coverage. You know in hindsight the coverage is about the same.
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
Verizon has always had a blighted eye regarding service and support for small and rural communities, oftentimes treating them with contempt and poor QOS, both consumer and commercial. They recently have been shedding exchanges like a husky blows its pelt, selling out to cut-rate operations like Frontier. This oftentimes has a nasty effect of degrading services in these communities, or worse, services being cut due to a lack of complete information on the infrastructure. One organization needed 15Mbps MPLS, and was forced to order EIGHT T-1s to establish that service. The cards that went into the router alone cost two thousand dollars EACH. PLUS they have yet to receive any configuration data to set up the equipment for th site. And this was two+ months ago. The comment given regarding this lack of engagement Frontier has with the org, "That's Frontier for you".
Big Bell System Monopoly, anyone?
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Why we already know where the $4.5 billion in Mobility Fund money over the next 10 years will go if Ajit Pai has his way.
Right into the pockets of the big telcos.DSL will still cost more then broadband everywhere except urban areas and the US will continue to have the most expensive, slowest and poorest coverage.
I don't know much about the subsidy issue -- but I do know that the coverage maps for the big four have been largely inaccurate at their fringes for quite a few years. Everyone knows it, but nobody has ever really tried to do anything substantive about it.
Personally, I think that one of the reasons that these maps are so inaccurate is that they're rarely updated to account for non-network changes to an area, which adversely affect coverage. My own anecdote is illustrative of this particular problem: Back when I had AT&T, their coverage map showed me a very small triangle of poor coverage, coincidentally centered directly over my townhouse. I mean, you could literally walk two doors down and watch the bars go up two clicks. As such, I could usually make phone calls from the top two floors of the house, but the reception dropped off dramatically on the bottom floor. I lived with it... because at least the coverage map was accurate, so I couldn't exactly claim that I was being lied to, or anything like that.
Time passed, and my reception did not improve -- but you wouldn't have known that from their coverage map! That small triangle? At some point, they decided that they didn't need to represent that small weak area on the map anymore. I never figured out why, but as far as AT&T was concerned, my coverage was now perfectly fine. (It wasn't, really.) I shrugged it off, because while it was vaguely annoying, it was by no means the end of the world, nor was it even the highest priority issue in my life, not by a long shot.
Some more time passed, and construction crews started building an overpass at a major intersection, just under two miles from my house. Not long after they'd started, my reception started getting much, much worse. I did some research on my own, and determined that this was most likely because AT&T's nearest tower was immediately behind that intersection, from the point of view of my house... and a crap load of new cement, asphalt and rebar was being erected directly between me and that tower. It got to the point where the reception problems which used to only affect me in the basement had extended upwards to the top floor -- and the lower two floors got no reception at all. I called up AT&T and explained about the signal degradation I was experiencing, and asked if they were going to be able to do anything to remediate the situation. Then -- and I kid you not -- the lady on the other end deadpan responded with, "Well you know sir, we don't actually guarantee coverage inside of your house."
I was shocked by such an apathetic response. Who actually treats customers that way?? I went straight to the store that very day, switched to another carrier, and never looked back. And AT&T's coverage maps? Nah... they never once changed to indicate that things might be in any way sub-par around that tower. (Not that I actually expected them to, of course.)
So it's not just Verizon, and it's not a problem that's going to go away. My take-away from this article, is that those rural subsidies might well be their financial incentive for that misdirection... and all this time, I had naively assumed it was just to get new customers locked into an inescapable contract.
Silly me.
Dallas isn't land-locked. It can expand almost infinitely. The Bay Area has mountains on basically all sides, and the land is all in active use. Builders *are* building homes as fast as they can, but it is hard, because before they can build, they have to buy something smaller and tear it down. If the land under that condo costs 12 million dollars and can only realistically handle 30 units, the builder would lose almost half a million dollars selling it for $55K. That's what's happening in the Bay Area. If you want to live in Sacramento, you can probably get a condo for $55K. You'll just have to commute for two hours each way every day down a highway that goes through one of only a handful of mountain passes into the Bay Area.
First, you're wrong. Commercial property is covered under Prop 13, too. This is one of the serious problems with that law that many Californians would like to fix, because it would bring in a lot of much-needed revenue from big businesses.
Second, most of the new construction is mixed-use these days, with shopping on the first floor and housing on the upper floors. You're right that in some areas (San Francisco in particular), efforts to build more housing have sometimes been thwarted by government idiocy, but the bulk of the problem is actually caused by allowing a few businesses to become too big to fail.
Basically, there are three big employers: Apple, Google, and Facebook. These three employers have a very disproportionate impact on hiring.
The problem is that they are all close together. With no traffic, it takes about 14 minutes to get from Apple to Google, and ten minutes from there to Facebook. More importantly, traffic going to Google and Facebook are basically using highway 101, taking nearly consecutive exits. The peninsula is a nightmare as a result, traffic-wise. And more importantly, they are all three towards the northwest corner of the South Bay, relatively speaking. So any housing built towards the southeast (the only remaining direction for expansion, down a narrow valley) requires everyone to travel the same highway for most of their trip.
Because they are so close together, the housing within driving distance of those companies is untenable. And there is almost no business construction in areas like Gilroy where housing is more affordable, which otherwise could create reverse commutes and make the whole traffic situation more sane, because business leaders think that somehow they won't be able to get people who live in the South Bay to commute out of the South Bay. Fixing this would help somewhat.
Finally, as previously noted, the Bay Area is largely land-locked, with mountains in nearly every direction. So unlike other cities that just expand over time, the Bay Area really can't.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Thanks for writing all that.