What a bunch of bullshit. When AT&T ruled the earth, you couldn't connect anything but a Company Approved Phone [tm] to their lines, otherwise something might explode. Oh, and you can't buy a phone from the store, you have to rent one from the company store. You can have any color you like, as long as it's black.
I wasn't talking about subscriber level equipment. The service worked, it worked well, and that was what was required of AT&T. How often did your phone service simply not work? Sure, AT&T owned the phones... but they were built like brick outhouses. Their technicians were generally far more competent and well-trained, the network itself better maintained. "Better" is a relative term. All I know is that nowadays (and I have AT&T U-Verse for my phone service) is that I'm subject to more outages, poor quality phone calls, and other crap than I ever had in the days before the breakup.
Really? Our meters were upgraded to eliminate human readers, by sending the data over the phone line (or possibly the electric line - not sure which).
>>>most people will just pay because they have no idea what a gigabyte is
I hope they're smarter than that. If I received a $200 bill from my ISP, even if I didn't know what a gigabyte was, I'd demand an explanation from their customer service associates.
This was a few years ago, I know they were still doing manual reads. Now I know my gas meter was upgraded: they still have a meter reader come by but there's a small black box on the front of the house. I think he just walks by and grabs a reading with a handheld of some kind, or maybe it goes over the power line or something, like you said. I don't know if my electric meter was upgraded or not: I haven't any problems since then.
That's not the point though: I was able to instantly correct the mistake because I had an accurate reference for my actual usage. I didn't have to depend upon some remote computer system to provide me with a tally of how many kilowatt-hours I'd used, a machine that is not under my control, and can't be argued with.
And we're not talking about people getting giant bills. What we are talking about is the potential for deliberate, systematic overbilling: small amounts that the subscriber might not even notice but that add up to billions over time. Matter of fact, that's guaranteed to happen. Didn't Verizon get busted for it recently? It's just too tempting: they just shouldn't be allowed to do it unless there are regulatory safeguards in place.
With a fixed bill every month, you immediately notice a rate increase (or an increase in Local, State and Federal fees, although some ISPs have put fake charges there too, so people will think that it's the "guv'mint" that raised their bill.) With metered billing, how will you know if you're being ripped off if there's an extra buck on your bill each month? Far too much potential for fraud here.
It should have its incorporation revoked and all top executives and board members barred from ever being in the telecom business again.
These are the same players from the time when the first break up occurred. They did not learn their lesson about abusing their position, building monopoly and being bad for the consumer. They had their chance to straighten up and fly right. They can't be trusted to behave.
No they're not. SBC bought the old AT&T, and kept the name AT&T. What you have are the people who operated the worst of the original thirteen Baby Bells now running the show. Which is, I agree, not an improvement. Also, whatever you want to say about the old AT&T, remember that they operated under some very strict regulation, and did provide us, for a very long time, with about the best phone service in the world. Much of the problem we have now is that none of the big ISPs operate under any real regulation anymore, no real service standards apply: they can do pretty much whatever they want with little if any penalty.
But yeah, I think that most of the big players ought to be up on anti-trust charges at some point. What they're doing is not in the consumers' interest at any level.
Eh?
While i'm against the metering stuff to an extent, this statement is just nuts.
This can provide the money TO innovate.
No, it won't: the big boys have a vested interest in only offering us the minimum service levels they can get away with (they've been petitioning the FCC to lower the definition of "broadband" in the U.S.) and have no particular desire to innovate. They just don't: these are money grubbers whose interest is in pleasing the stockholder first and the customer second (if at all.) AT&T is doing this now because they feel they've sucked enough customers off of Comcast's crappy service and can afford to start putting the screws to us just as that Robertson asshole did.
If they are in the public eye, financially, they will have to do something with all that money.
Sure. But if you think that automatically means network upgrades you are just nuts. They'll bank the money, invest it on the stock market, whatever they think will make them more money.
But I think the GP was referring to innovation on the part of Web and Internet services offered by third-parties, not the ISPs themselves (correct me if I'm wrong.) Take Youtube; it's bandwidth-hungry but incredibly popular: would it be so if people were paying by the megabyte? What other services do we enjoy that use substantial bandwidth that might never have existed if providers were nickel-and-diming us to death?
We need to be moving forward, making bandwidth cheaper and faster. Look, they got nearly a hundred billion dollars in tax breaks to build out a nationwide truly high-speed network... they took the money and ran. In the meantime, we're stuck with the likes of cable and U-Verse's VDSL.
So no, I don't expect SBC/AT&T, Comcast or any of these outfits to roll their extra profits back into the network.
but the meter for your time spend making long distance phone calls from you land line isn't. Neither is the meter tracking how much time you spend on a cell phone call.
So clearly certified meters at your home are not a universal method.
No, but Federally-mandated quality-of-service standards with stiff penalties for failure are. The problem with metered billing is that a. there's no way for the majority of users to know if they're being overbilled (and no, some Web page saying "you've used x percent of your monthly allowance" doesn't count) and b. the fact that these companies simply cannot be trusted. Especially the likes of Comcast or SBC/AT&T. These guys lie before breakfast, just for the practice.
It ends up being a power grab, much like the old days were. That, and it has a not-so-nice way of killing innovation.
The issue is largely one of accountability. For example, I have electric and natural gas service at my house. There are meters out back: they're built to government standards, are quite reliable and generally track my usage very well. Occasionally, I get a bill in the mail that has some outrageous numbers on it (I once got an electric bill for some three thousand dollars one month.) Usually that's because the meter reader mistyped something into his computer, or because of some issue with their billing system. Regardless, I still have the meter itself to fall back on, and I can call up the utility and either request a new reading or just give it to them over the phone and have the bill corrected. When I got that big bill, I was asked to go take a manual reading, and to just "tear up that bill, will send you a new one. Sorry for the inconvenience." No problem.
That's not what's going to happen here: AT&T is expecting people to just accept whatever usage they decide to bill for, with no recourse whatsoever if it turns out that they're wrong. And this will happen, with monotonous regularity, and most people will just pay because they have no idea what a gigabyte is, and how it relates to what they actually do with their computer online, and because Internet access is becoming less and less of a disposable luxury for millions of people.
This is a schlock outfit, no better than Comcast: the AT&T of old is long gone now.
What I'd like for them to do is tell me what kinds of traffic are being counted on my bill (do port scans count? What about all the other crap that floats around the Internet that happens to have my IP in it?) Do they provide monitoring tools that I can use to verify my usage, and compare against what my router tells me I've used? If not, then they can make up anything they want and bill me for it, and knowing AT&T^h^h^h^h SBC that's exactly what they will do.
Now we start to understand why the government used to enforce quality of service standards. The fact that these guys got an exception for data services is just too bad.
even have a signed CD cover from him saying I could upload all of his music to torrent sites:D
And you know what the really irritating thing is? The RIAA and/or some music label would probably come after you anyway, claiming that you're pirating their music. That's already happened, actually: they're not too careful about everybody else's rights, it seems.. I rather think they believe that they're entitled to a piece of everyone's pie, regardless of whose pie it happens to be.
Not surprising, I suppose. The average leech doesn't much care if you want him sucking you dry or not either.
I say this from direct experience when my wife's father passed away and T-Mobile refused to remove him from their family plan.
I doubt you tried hard enough. Happened in my family: faxed a copy of the death certificate and that was that. If you think their customer support people don't hear that "uh, yeah, my like, uh, Dad like, uh, passed away and everything, and we'd like to get out of that part of our contract" line a thousand times a day you're mistaken.
I hope approval is swift and merger is complete. I want choice, choice I don't have.
So, you're basing your decision as to whether this massive merger (which has so many downsides for the consumer that it's not even funny) upon whether you can get an iPhone???!!! God, no wonder I hate Apple people. Look, not everyone buys into the Jobs' plan, you know, not everyone has the slightest interest in iPhones or any other part of the Apple "ecosystem." What we do care about is reliable service, good support, reasonable policies, and reasonable prices. AT&T is not going to give you much of that: the bigger they get, the less they work for your business. That's fact, that's history.
Furthermore, if you bought some cheapass Android device and it's proven unreliable that's your fault. I have a G2 running Cyanogenmod, and it's faster and more stable than even the stock firmware. It doesn't crash. You had the choice to pick a solid device: my guess is you didn't do your research, and are blaming Android for your own poor decisionmaking.
Sit back and think outside your self-centeredness for a moment or two. AT&T (pardon me, SBC) owning an ever-larger share of national infrastructure and wireless spectrum is not going to give you more choices, it's going to give you less.
With all due respect, Consumer Reports have their heads up their asses on this one.
Agreed. A week ago Saturday my G2 stopped working (no connectivty, voice or data.) I called up T-Mobile's support, and the technician ran a few tests, and asked me if I had another phone I could plug my SIM into. I did, and it didn't work, and she told me that the local T-Mobile corporate store was only a mile from my house, would be open for another couple of hours, and would give me a new SIM, free of charge. So I took it over, the guy there plugged my SIM into a reader and copied all the data to a new SIM, and that was that. I have never had a problem with T-Mobile's service, their support, or their billing. Sprint, on the other hand, while offering decent voice service just failed miserably in the billing department. Every month I'd get thirty or forty bucks worth of charges for videos that I'd supposedly streamed, on a phone that had no data plan, and no ability to view videos anyway (it was an old Sanyo flip phone.) Every month I'd have to call and talk to a nearly incomprehensible Indian support person and beg to have the charges removed. Usually they would, sometimes they wouldn't. They also continually spammed me with text messages about products and services from their "partners", and had the balls to bill me for each message! I also told them I don't want you to advertise to me. They would ask if I was sure I didn't want those valuable messages, and promise that I wouldn't get any more, but of course I would. Sprint pissed me off so much in that regard that I went to T-Mobile. Not thrilled about going back to Sprint, if this buyout proceeds I may not have much choice. Don't want AT&T or Verizon (gagh! The GP is either a shill or just lucky.) So far as Sprint goes now, at least they're reasonably friendly towards tethering, but I don't know how they're going to handle me when I root my phone and put Cyanogenmod on it.
However, the deal is still a year away and subject to regulatory lobbying and bribery.
Simply an observation:
Whenever something goes wrong for the geek in the law or in politics, his first thought and talk is about "Bribery!"
Dude, we're talking American Telephone and Telegraph here. They were the government-instituted monopoly for phone service in the U.S., and know their way around the corridors of power like nobody else. Believe me, if you're concerned about lobbying and bribery in the telecommunications industry, it is AT&T of which you should most be concerned. And, given the current regulatory stance in Washington, the odds of ATT& getting exactly what it wants are very high.
I guess this is the end of subsidized Nexus phones, for GSM networks anyway. But really, now Sprint is the only non-evil carrier left!
Sprint is hardly non-evil. Their billing system is about the worst I've ever experienced. Service was okay though. Still, I was irked when I read about the possible Sprint/T-Mobile merger. Now I'm devastated that AT&T is going to absorb T-Mobile. I like my T-Mobile service, I like the way they are friendly towards Android and rooting, and I like their billing practices. There's nothing I like about AT&T. This is truly bad news.
I used to hope the Feds would re-grow a pair and enforce some standards (like they used to) but given Congress' and the current Administration's stance on regulation I expect nothing of the sort.
But you can only reduce your demand up to a point. After that, you will need to pay the electricity no matter the price.
You're thinking of things like food. Demand for electricity is much more elastic.
Is like trying to live without air conditioners in Phoenix's summer or heaters in nordic countries at winter.
Before air conditioners came to people's homes in Phoenix, people would hang wet sheets up in their windows, or they would go to the air conditioned movie theaters to cool off.
Tha's ridiculous. How far back do you want to go? Caves?
When people are insulated from their costs, they have no incentive or ability to economize. THAT is what screws poor people.
What? What screws poor people is what has always screwed poor people: corporate types who rip off those who have no disposable income, and have to choose between necessities.
When peak hour electricity prices rise high enough, why wouldn't those landlords install solar panels and charge their tenants for the electricity?
Show me a landlord willing to make a major capital investment for his tenants and I'll show you a saint. Not going to happen. The reality is that rental property owners operate on fairly narrow margins (getting narrower here in my State where property taxes just keep going up, and you can only charge so much for your units.) Besides which, providing enough power to offset grid costs in any meaningful way is going to require a. a LOT of space for a LOT of solar panels, which aren't exactly cheap, plus a heavy-duty synchronized inverter and switching gear. Unless banks make cheap credit available for such investments, and assuming a reasonable payback period, there's no reason for a landlord to bother. This is not his problem.
And in the U.S., at least, most rental properties don't include electric power as part of the rent anyway: that's billed separately to the tenant by the power company. Consequently there's not motivation for a landlord to do squat in that regard. Many do include heating, but that's usually natural gas not electric.
Well, how about the Reagan administration decision to leave the choice of cell transmission system up to the free market? I'm not saying there were *no* advantages to doing things that way, but net I don't think it produced such great results.
Yes and no. As a consequence, there was no choice of cell transmission system. Instead, we have multiple incompatible systems, but then again the tech is still fairly new, and it wasn't obvious then which way we should go. So they experimented... different companies doing things differently. Eventually things will shake out.
The 60 Hz power in the U.S. is monitored on a cumulative basis. Over time, it is very accurate. My Dad worked at a power plant in the '40s and said he had two clocks: one running on Western Union and one running on the generated power. If the clocks deviated by more than a second, the generator speed would be adjusted slightly to get the clocks back in sync.
I'm sure the method has been updated, but I'll bet the concept is the same.
Yes. During periods of heavy load, generator RPM (and hence line frequency) may drop slightly. That is compensated nightly by increasing the frequency so that the total number of A.C. cycles output each day is the same. That guarantees that any devices (such as synchronous clocks) that depend upon line frequency will, at the end of the day, still be keeping proper time.
It's not just residential equipment, either. There's still a lot of stuff out there that depends upon stable power line frequency for one purpose or another. Too much drift will cause problems.
Slashdot Mirror
False. Back in 2009 the FCC definition of broadband was the same as the OECD's definition - 256 kbit/s.
Dude, I read it on Slashdot, so I presumed it was true.
What a bunch of bullshit. When AT&T ruled the earth, you couldn't connect anything but a Company Approved Phone [tm] to their lines, otherwise something might explode. Oh, and you can't buy a phone from the store, you have to rent one from the company store. You can have any color you like, as long as it's black.
I wasn't talking about subscriber level equipment. The service worked, it worked well, and that was what was required of AT&T. How often did your phone service simply not work? Sure, AT&T owned the phones ... but they were built like brick outhouses. Their technicians were generally far more competent and well-trained, the network itself better maintained. "Better" is a relative term. All I know is that nowadays (and I have AT&T U-Verse for my phone service) is that I'm subject to more outages, poor quality phone calls, and other crap than I ever had in the days before the breakup.
And they were worried about Google?!!!
oh the days when they forced you to buy their overpriced equipment or else expect huge overcharges
my bad
You're missing the point. At least AT&T was competently run from a technical standpoint, and that was because the government required them to do so.
They personally did not get the money to build a nationwide network.
No, they personally got some 90 billion dollars in tax breaks, took the money, and ran off with it. What they delivered was 1.5 mbit/sec DSL.
If your numbers don't match mine, than you're padding the traffic.
Sure. But they're not going to care about your router's stats.
what AT&T of old being gone? sorry but I disagree back in 1996
I said "old". As in, pre-breakup days. 1996 is way after that.
>>>meter reader mistyped
Really? Our meters were upgraded to eliminate human readers, by sending the data over the phone line (or possibly the electric line - not sure which).
>>>most people will just pay because they have no idea what a gigabyte is
I hope they're smarter than that. If I received a $200 bill from my ISP, even if I didn't know what a gigabyte was, I'd demand an explanation from their customer service associates.
This was a few years ago, I know they were still doing manual reads. Now I know my gas meter was upgraded: they still have a meter reader come by but there's a small black box on the front of the house. I think he just walks by and grabs a reading with a handheld of some kind, or maybe it goes over the power line or something, like you said. I don't know if my electric meter was upgraded or not: I haven't any problems since then.
That's not the point though: I was able to instantly correct the mistake because I had an accurate reference for my actual usage. I didn't have to depend upon some remote computer system to provide me with a tally of how many kilowatt-hours I'd used, a machine that is not under my control, and can't be argued with.
And we're not talking about people getting giant bills. What we are talking about is the potential for deliberate, systematic overbilling: small amounts that the subscriber might not even notice but that add up to billions over time. Matter of fact, that's guaranteed to happen. Didn't Verizon get busted for it recently? It's just too tempting: they just shouldn't be allowed to do it unless there are regulatory safeguards in place.
With a fixed bill every month, you immediately notice a rate increase (or an increase in Local, State and Federal fees, although some ISPs have put fake charges there too, so people will think that it's the "guv'mint" that raised their bill.) With metered billing, how will you know if you're being ripped off if there's an extra buck on your bill each month? Far too much potential for fraud here.
It should have its incorporation revoked and all top executives and board members barred from ever being in the telecom business again.
These are the same players from the time when the first break up occurred. They did not learn their lesson about abusing their position, building monopoly and being bad for the consumer. They had their chance to straighten up and fly right. They can't be trusted to behave.
No they're not. SBC bought the old AT&T, and kept the name AT&T. What you have are the people who operated the worst of the original thirteen Baby Bells now running the show. Which is, I agree, not an improvement. Also, whatever you want to say about the old AT&T, remember that they operated under some very strict regulation, and did provide us, for a very long time, with about the best phone service in the world. Much of the problem we have now is that none of the big ISPs operate under any real regulation anymore, no real service standards apply: they can do pretty much whatever they want with little if any penalty.
But yeah, I think that most of the big players ought to be up on anti-trust charges at some point. What they're doing is not in the consumers' interest at any level.
Eh? While i'm against the metering stuff to an extent, this statement is just nuts. This can provide the money TO innovate.
No, it won't: the big boys have a vested interest in only offering us the minimum service levels they can get away with (they've been petitioning the FCC to lower the definition of "broadband" in the U.S.) and have no particular desire to innovate. They just don't: these are money grubbers whose interest is in pleasing the stockholder first and the customer second (if at all.) AT&T is doing this now because they feel they've sucked enough customers off of Comcast's crappy service and can afford to start putting the screws to us just as that Robertson asshole did.
If they are in the public eye, financially, they will have to do something with all that money.
Sure. But if you think that automatically means network upgrades you are just nuts. They'll bank the money, invest it on the stock market, whatever they think will make them more money.
... they took the money and ran. In the meantime, we're stuck with the likes of cable and U-Verse's VDSL.
But I think the GP was referring to innovation on the part of Web and Internet services offered by third-parties, not the ISPs themselves (correct me if I'm wrong.) Take Youtube; it's bandwidth-hungry but incredibly popular: would it be so if people were paying by the megabyte? What other services do we enjoy that use substantial bandwidth that might never have existed if providers were nickel-and-diming us to death?
We need to be moving forward, making bandwidth cheaper and faster. Look, they got nearly a hundred billion dollars in tax breaks to build out a nationwide truly high-speed network
So no, I don't expect SBC/AT&T, Comcast or any of these outfits to roll their extra profits back into the network.
but the meter for your time spend making long distance phone calls from you land line isn't. Neither is the meter tracking how much time you spend on a cell phone call.
So clearly certified meters at your home are not a universal method.
No, but Federally-mandated quality-of-service standards with stiff penalties for failure are. The problem with metered billing is that a. there's no way for the majority of users to know if they're being overbilled (and no, some Web page saying "you've used x percent of your monthly allowance" doesn't count) and b. the fact that these companies simply cannot be trusted. Especially the likes of Comcast or SBC/AT&T. These guys lie before breakfast, just for the practice.
It's because they're charging you by the naked breast viewed.
I found I can reduce my bill by only look at the left one.
It ends up being a power grab, much like the old days were. That, and it has a not-so-nice way of killing innovation.
The issue is largely one of accountability. For example, I have electric and natural gas service at my house. There are meters out back: they're built to government standards, are quite reliable and generally track my usage very well. Occasionally, I get a bill in the mail that has some outrageous numbers on it (I once got an electric bill for some three thousand dollars one month.) Usually that's because the meter reader mistyped something into his computer, or because of some issue with their billing system. Regardless, I still have the meter itself to fall back on, and I can call up the utility and either request a new reading or just give it to them over the phone and have the bill corrected. When I got that big bill, I was asked to go take a manual reading, and to just "tear up that bill, will send you a new one. Sorry for the inconvenience." No problem.
That's not what's going to happen here: AT&T is expecting people to just accept whatever usage they decide to bill for, with no recourse whatsoever if it turns out that they're wrong. And this will happen, with monotonous regularity, and most people will just pay because they have no idea what a gigabyte is, and how it relates to what they actually do with their computer online, and because Internet access is becoming less and less of a disposable luxury for millions of people.
This is a schlock outfit, no better than Comcast: the AT&T of old is long gone now.
What I'd like for them to do is tell me what kinds of traffic are being counted on my bill (do port scans count? What about all the other crap that floats around the Internet that happens to have my IP in it?) Do they provide monitoring tools that I can use to verify my usage, and compare against what my router tells me I've used? If not, then they can make up anything they want and bill me for it, and knowing AT&T^h^h^h^h SBC that's exactly what they will do.
Now we start to understand why the government used to enforce quality of service standards. The fact that these guys got an exception for data services is just too bad.
even have a signed CD cover from him saying I could upload all of his music to torrent sites :D
And you know what the really irritating thing is? The RIAA and/or some music label would probably come after you anyway, claiming that you're pirating their music. That's already happened, actually: they're not too careful about everybody else's rights, it seems.. I rather think they believe that they're entitled to a piece of everyone's pie, regardless of whose pie it happens to be.
Not surprising, I suppose. The average leech doesn't much care if you want him sucking you dry or not either.
I say this from direct experience when my wife's father passed away and T-Mobile refused to remove him from their family plan.
I doubt you tried hard enough. Happened in my family: faxed a copy of the death certificate and that was that. If you think their customer support people don't hear that "uh, yeah, my like, uh, Dad like, uh, passed away and everything, and we'd like to get out of that part of our contract" line a thousand times a day you're mistaken.
I hope approval is swift and merger is complete. I want choice, choice I don't have.
So, you're basing your decision as to whether this massive merger (which has so many downsides for the consumer that it's not even funny) upon whether you can get an iPhone???!!! God, no wonder I hate Apple people. Look, not everyone buys into the Jobs' plan, you know, not everyone has the slightest interest in iPhones or any other part of the Apple "ecosystem." What we do care about is reliable service, good support, reasonable policies, and reasonable prices. AT&T is not going to give you much of that: the bigger they get, the less they work for your business. That's fact, that's history.
Furthermore, if you bought some cheapass Android device and it's proven unreliable that's your fault. I have a G2 running Cyanogenmod, and it's faster and more stable than even the stock firmware. It doesn't crash. You had the choice to pick a solid device: my guess is you didn't do your research, and are blaming Android for your own poor decisionmaking.
Sit back and think outside your self-centeredness for a moment or two. AT&T (pardon me, SBC) owning an ever-larger share of national infrastructure and wireless spectrum is not going to give you more choices, it's going to give you less.
With all due respect, Consumer Reports have their heads up their asses on this one.
Agreed. A week ago Saturday my G2 stopped working (no connectivty, voice or data.) I called up T-Mobile's support, and the technician ran a few tests, and asked me if I had another phone I could plug my SIM into. I did, and it didn't work, and she told me that the local T-Mobile corporate store was only a mile from my house, would be open for another couple of hours, and would give me a new SIM, free of charge. So I took it over, the guy there plugged my SIM into a reader and copied all the data to a new SIM, and that was that. I have never had a problem with T-Mobile's service, their support, or their billing. Sprint, on the other hand, while offering decent voice service just failed miserably in the billing department. Every month I'd get thirty or forty bucks worth of charges for videos that I'd supposedly streamed, on a phone that had no data plan, and no ability to view videos anyway (it was an old Sanyo flip phone.) Every month I'd have to call and talk to a nearly incomprehensible Indian support person and beg to have the charges removed. Usually they would, sometimes they wouldn't. They also continually spammed me with text messages about products and services from their "partners", and had the balls to bill me for each message! I also told them I don't want you to advertise to me. They would ask if I was sure I didn't want those valuable messages, and promise that I wouldn't get any more, but of course I would. Sprint pissed me off so much in that regard that I went to T-Mobile. Not thrilled about going back to Sprint, if this buyout proceeds I may not have much choice. Don't want AT&T or Verizon (gagh! The GP is either a shill or just lucky.) So far as Sprint goes now, at least they're reasonably friendly towards tethering, but I don't know how they're going to handle me when I root my phone and put Cyanogenmod on it.
they now work in Japan as well.
Probably only parts of Japan now.
However, the deal is still a year away and subject to regulatory lobbying and bribery.
Simply an observation:
Whenever something goes wrong for the geek in the law or in politics, his first thought and talk is about "Bribery!"
Dude, we're talking American Telephone and Telegraph here. They were the government-instituted monopoly for phone service in the U.S., and know their way around the corridors of power like nobody else. Believe me, if you're concerned about lobbying and bribery in the telecommunications industry, it is AT&T of which you should most be concerned. And, given the current regulatory stance in Washington, the odds of ATT& getting exactly what it wants are very high.
I guess this is the end of subsidized Nexus phones, for GSM networks anyway. But really, now Sprint is the only non-evil carrier left!
Sprint is hardly non-evil. Their billing system is about the worst I've ever experienced. Service was okay though. Still, I was irked when I read about the possible Sprint/T-Mobile merger. Now I'm devastated that AT&T is going to absorb T-Mobile. I like my T-Mobile service, I like the way they are friendly towards Android and rooting, and I like their billing practices. There's nothing I like about AT&T. This is truly bad news.
I used to hope the Feds would re-grow a pair and enforce some standards (like they used to) but given Congress' and the current Administration's stance on regulation I expect nothing of the sort.
You're thinking of things like food. Demand for electricity is much more elastic.
Before air conditioners came to people's homes in Phoenix, people would hang wet sheets up in their windows, or they would go to the air conditioned movie theaters to cool off.
Tha's ridiculous. How far back do you want to go? Caves?
When people are insulated from their costs, they have no incentive or ability to economize. THAT is what screws poor people.
What? What screws poor people is what has always screwed poor people: corporate types who rip off those who have no disposable income, and have to choose between necessities.
When peak hour electricity prices rise high enough, why wouldn't those landlords install solar panels and charge their tenants for the electricity?
Show me a landlord willing to make a major capital investment for his tenants and I'll show you a saint. Not going to happen. The reality is that rental property owners operate on fairly narrow margins (getting narrower here in my State where property taxes just keep going up, and you can only charge so much for your units.) Besides which, providing enough power to offset grid costs in any meaningful way is going to require a. a LOT of space for a LOT of solar panels, which aren't exactly cheap, plus a heavy-duty synchronized inverter and switching gear. Unless banks make cheap credit available for such investments, and assuming a reasonable payback period, there's no reason for a landlord to bother. This is not his problem.
And in the U.S., at least, most rental properties don't include electric power as part of the rent anyway: that's billed separately to the tenant by the power company. Consequently there's not motivation for a landlord to do squat in that regard. Many do include heating, but that's usually natural gas not electric.
Well, how about the Reagan administration decision to leave the choice of cell transmission system up to the free market? I'm not saying there were *no* advantages to doing things that way, but net I don't think it produced such great results.
Yes and no. As a consequence, there was no choice of cell transmission system. Instead, we have multiple incompatible systems, but then again the tech is still fairly new, and it wasn't obvious then which way we should go. So they experimented ... different companies doing things differently. Eventually things will shake out.
The 60 Hz power in the U.S. is monitored on a cumulative basis. Over time, it is very accurate. My Dad worked at a power plant in the '40s and said he had two clocks: one running on Western Union and one running on the generated power. If the clocks deviated by more than a second, the generator speed would be adjusted slightly to get the clocks back in sync. I'm sure the method has been updated, but I'll bet the concept is the same.
Yes. During periods of heavy load, generator RPM (and hence line frequency) may drop slightly. That is compensated nightly by increasing the frequency so that the total number of A.C. cycles output each day is the same. That guarantees that any devices (such as synchronous clocks) that depend upon line frequency will, at the end of the day, still be keeping proper time.
It's not just residential equipment, either. There's still a lot of stuff out there that depends upon stable power line frequency for one purpose or another. Too much drift will cause problems.