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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.
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.
No. The real question is: Can you hear me now?
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. . . .
Because communication is essential. Try applying for a job without phone/internet access. Try contacting emergency services without 911. Government rightfully so mandates the available of phone access to pretty much everyone within the United States. This, honestly, is one of the few positive aspects of government: people collecting their resources into a centralized pool (tax dollars), and directly using that resource to benefit the people as a whole (communication between each other).
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.
Ask yourself, do you enjoy eating? Now look around the city or suburb you live in and count the total acres of grazing land or crops you see growing.
"Why is the government giving handouts to unprofitable carriers?"
You're right, the government shouldn't be doing that. Carriers which cherry pick coverage areas and don't fully utilize the public airwaves assigned to them should be the one subsidizing rural buildouts.
(And yes, despite the whole spectrum auction BS the RF spectrum is a public resource, but that's another discussion)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This is related to the old style phone system. In exchange for a monopoly AT&T/Bell was required to provide universal service. This was because the free market refused to serve all customers, but it was in the government's interest to have universal service. Today, the internet and wireless service are being considered essential services even for people who don't live in cities.
The handouts are not to unprofitable companies, the handouts are to anyone willing to provide service where no service exists. If the big players want to step up and provide this service then they can do so.
As a liberal from a rural area (which is liberal), this is *exactly* what makes rural voters pissed off about people like you.
You don't even *question* all the subsidization of urban living (cities are not self-sufficient), or sometimes you refer to even those as paying people to live nowhere, such as when people complain about funding roads. To their cities. So that supplies can get to their cities. They don't want those, apparently.
When it comes to universal access to communication, your response is "fuck everybody for not believing what I believe, I got mine".
It benefits everybody in the end, including you, when communication is universal. Until then, for instance, everybody has to maintain separate systems, businesses have to degrade their UIs, etc. -- the "paying people" gets distributed anyway, it just means everybody has to suffer too.
I'm shocked! SHOCKED, I tell you!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The spectrum auctions should be by region, with the carrier who wins the contract legally required to cover all of it. Or have the government handle the cell towers nation wide just like roads, billing the phone companies for bandwidth their customers phones use.
You apparently stopped thinking too soon. If those rural areas can't communicate and get on with the business of producing food, the urbanites will have nothing but rats and litter to eat. And that won't last long.
I guess you missed "logic day" in school. Who are they going to buy 4G from at any price if there is no service in their area?
Perhaps they'll need to get together and organize some sort of joint action. A sort of comming together of Citizens for mutual benefit. They can call that a "government".
OH wait! we already have one of those. Perhaps it would be more efficient to use the one we already have.
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.