Verizon Plans $20 Upgrade Fee Even If You Pay Full Price For a Phone (macrumors.com) 187
An anonymous reader writes: According to a memo leaked by MacRumors, Verizon is planning to introduce a new $20 upgrade fee starting next week. The new $20 flat rate charge will begin next Monday, April 4, and will be applied to smartphones purchased on a Device Payment financing plan, or at full retail price. The premium will also apply to those who take advantage of Apple's new iPhone Upgrade Program. Verizon cites "increasing support costs associated with customers switching their devices" as a reason for the new fees. The new fee is in addition to the existing $40 upgrade fee for customers renewing a two-year contract with a new device.
I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Verizon's "baby come back" letters are pathetic.
Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago (Score:5, Informative)
I will never go back to Verizon after having went over to T-mobile. Much better prices, free tethering/hotspot, Pandora doesn't count against my data cap (and soon Youtube too), and customer service that doesn't treat me like they're doing me a favor by letting me use their service.
All Verizon has is a good network, and even that is now irrelevant unless you live way out in the boonies (or travel there a lot).
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Please tell me how you were able to get transfered to the English speaking Tmobile support! I need to know.
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Any problems with the German support?
(silently escapes [bedug.com]...)
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Are you trolling, or just an idiot?
T-Mobile has one of the best (least bad) customer support organizations. They did go through a period when customer support was poor, but nowadays it seems to be good again.
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Last time I talked to someone at T-Mobile it was to get a prepaid phone activated in 2014. Took three calls each time I was connected via what sounded like a poor quality voip line to someone that could not understand english very well with an indian accent.
Maybe I Just had really bad luck that day.
But It left me with a very bad first impression of the company.
From the looks of the replies though I must have had really bad luck or they have tremendously improved their consumer service dept since them.
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Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago (Score:5, Insightful)
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Canadian French has a number of peculiarities and anachronisms compared to Parisian French, but the two dialects are as intelligible to the other as Australian English is to North American English.
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Bonza !
Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago (Score:3, Informative)
Wahoo as a native speaker of the Swiss version of French, I never had any trouble to talk with Quebec people or fail to understand them in a conversation (and I can tell you that I had lengthy workshop over the phone). Except from their weird usage of bonjour to say goodbye or their use of the French quatre-Vingt Dix to say nonante (ninety) and of course their funny accent, you get used to it.
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I used to work for a French company and my French colleagues were totally convinced especially Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards will understand French providing you speak it loud enough...
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The only English speaking place I have an inordinate amount of difficulty understanding is West Virginia.
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The marginal benefit to a non-english speaker learning English is huge. The marginal benefit to an English speaker learning any other single language is much less. You'd probably have to learn three or four languages to gain the same benefit as anyone else gets from learning English.
Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago (Score:4, Insightful)
Get yourself an audiobook and start learning Spanish. There are plenty of people in the US to practice with. Not being able to speak Spanish is almost pathetic.
Get yourself an audiobook and start learning English. There are plenty of people in the US to practice with. Not being able to speek the primary language of a region, and planning to live in it, is pathetic.
There, FTFY.
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According to some Europeans with a certified lack of self esteem (Wilders, Le Pen, Winters, Farage) we'll soon be speaking Arabic.
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2. Idiots pour into Spanish class because of #1.
3. #1 becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the class has to be slowed down significantly for them.
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This actually wasn't a spanish problem. I highly doubt the people I talked to to get a prepaid tmobile phone activated back in 2014 could speak spanish with any greater proficiency than they could speak english. The accent was wrong for spanish but sounded right for hindi.
From the other replies it looks like I must have been very unlucky with who the phone tree connected me to.
But those three calls left me with a very bad first impression.
Yeah iirc they tried to teach me spanish for one year in the 8th grad
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How does free data for certain sites not violate net neutrality?
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They can only get away with it because US law is producer and not consumer driven.
For example, my ISP supplies me a 50/50 fiber link and also TV.
The TV bandwidth is additional to the 50/50 internet account, not taken out of it.
They have recently started to offer Netflix, if you take your own account it's running in the 50/50 package, if you take it as part of the TV package it will like HBO run outside of the
Collusion (Score:2)
Then you switch away from Verizon.
To whom? Just as all four U.S. carriers raised their SMS rates in lockstep a few years back, they can all raise their data rates to unapproved domains in lockstep.
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It is important to understand why prices and fees are so high. In economic theory, 4 competitors should be enough to drive down prices as they compete for market share. But there is only an illusion of competition, because much of the stock for these companies is owned by the same big investors, including BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, etc. These investors are more concerned with aggregate profit, than profit from any single investment, so they frown upon measures that one company could take to win marke
SMS for two-factor authentication (Score:2)
Does anyone even use SMS anymore?
You can't (or can't in my country) sign up for Yahoo! or Gmail without it, as the providers want to ensure that each account is associated with a real person who is less likely to abuse the service by sending automated spam. In addition, numerous providers are moving toward two-factor authentication by receiving SMS. Twitter, for example, produces an error message to the effect "Carrier is not supported" if I try to add a landline instead of a mobile phone.
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They also tend to not have be
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The only problem is T-mobile's network is completely inferior to Verizon in any major city or populated area.
Outside of a metro area it's not even a contest, verizon completely stomps t-mobile.
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Outside of a metro area it's not even a contest, verizon completely stomps t-mobile.
Living and working where neither of them go above GSM speeds, I don't see much of a difference.
Geographical coverage in the US sucks. Big time. It's all based on cities and highways and people not travelling except between cities, on highways. Countries that are less populated have far better geographical coverage, even where few people live. The coverage here in the US is still not on par with what it was in Norway and Finland in the 1990s.
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The coverage in the US seems much better then in Canada, prices are cheaper as well.
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"All Verizon has is a good network"
They don't have that, either. Smack in the middle of University California, Riverside, and only 1X data service and one bar of signal almost anywhere on campus.
Fuck Verizon's useless crap.
Compare to 1 Mbps scene releases of old (Score:2)
1.5Mbps [...] means getting blurry 480p videos with Binge On enabled.
Back when the warez scene was using MPEG-4 Part 2* as a video codec, it was common to squeeze a movie into a 700 MB AVI file to fit onto a single CD-R. A 93 minute movie would have allowed 1 Mbps for video and audio combined. And nowadays, it's more common to use the more sophisticated MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka H.264) video codec. Did the blur somehow get worse, or did user expectations get better? Or is this blur caused by some sort of peaking behavior, in which a scene release at 1 Mbps ABR can have short burst
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Did the blur somehow get worse, or did user expectations get better?
You already answered your own question.
Ah, the good old mathematician's answer [allthetropes.org]: funny to some, but unhelpful. Which of the above was the answer?
It's caused by being low resolution and stretched across a much higher resolution display.
PC monitors in the DivX era had a typical resolution of 1024x768 or 1280x1024, but DVD-Video source material in North America and Japan was 704x480.* Movies were commonly encoded at resolutions even smaller than that due to preference for square pixels. So things were already stretched even then. And a 1024x768 pixel phone display would have roughly Retina-class resolution. Are you referring specifically
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Yeah, well my television is 65" with a native resolution of 3840×2160 and 480p looks like shit on it.
Then don't watch Binge On on a 4K living room TV. Instead subscribe to wired broadband. Move if you have to.
Watching video directly on my 5" phone screen is already straining enough, I don't need to compound the problem by also using low resolution garbage.
The bottom line is 480p is not acceptable.
If it's unacceptable enough to get you to pay to remove the unacceptability, then disable Binge On and instead enable pay per bit.
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Defaults are for the majority (Score:2)
Let's try this again:
People who want crap video should have had to opt-in instead of making everyone opt-out.
Defaults ought to meet the preferences of the majority. I imagine that more people want to save money by accepting "crap" video that's still superior to DivX-era torrents than have a philosophical objection to defaulting to said "crap" video.
Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago (Score:4, Informative)
AT&T similarly charges $15 per smartphone added or upgraded with AT&T Next, and "bring your own" devices. Sprint also charges an upgrade or activation fee up to $36 per device. T-Mobile does not have upgrade fees.
You can always tell who's behind in the market, can't you?
Re: I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago (Score:3)
Hmmm, I'm on ATT and I've bought 3 phones, never been charged, just swapped the sim (after hacking into it with scissors).
Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago (Score:4, Informative)
Went to Ting, which subcontracts with Tmobile in my case. I average 14 bucks a month. Perfect for people like me who have light phone usage and rare data usage. I hate multi year contracts for anything.
Why, Verizon? (Score:5, Insightful)
We do it (Score:2)
because we CAN!
Even on 04/01....
We don't need no stinking upgrade fees (Score:3, Informative)
In the UK, upgrade fees are unheard of. You're being ripped off.
Re:We don't need no stinking upgrade fees (Score:4, Interesting)
In the UK, all phones use GSM, which means that you can move service to a new device by moving the SIM card. The phone company actually has to do stuff on their side to switch service to a new CDMA device, which usually requires a phone call to their customer service team. So there's a decidedly nonzero cost to switching to new devices. With that said, they could probably set up an automated system if they wanted to drive the cost down into the single-digit cents range instead of the single-digit dollar range. There's just not enough competition in the pathetic U.S. cellular service market to force them to bother.
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If your technology requires so much work that the upgrade cost is needed to cover the work involved, your system is broken and you shouldn't charge your customers for your failures. It's embarrassing at the least. Who would want to do business with a company with such bad planning skills?
On the other hand, it could be that the most profitable market segment in the country which requires the most upgrades are lower income people.
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Welcome to 2016. I've had to do nothing but move the UICC [wikipedia.org] ("SIM") card to a new phone for the past several phones (so, going back at least 6-8 years). Prior to that, one could do an ESN change via the web, so again no interaction with customer service needed. I think the last time I had to call CS to get an ESN change was in the 1990's. I'm o
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Interesting. On Sprint, moving the SIM does not seem to work, because I tried that first when I moved to my iPhone 6S from my iPhone 5.
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If that's true, they're doing it wrong. I have Ting, running off Sprint's CDMA network. I've swapped phones on the same account back and forth a half dozen times in a single day for testing. All I used was a web form. It just a couple of minutes each time to activate. No call required and certainly not $20 worth of effort for them.
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It is true that you can do it online, but think about the average cell phone user for a moment. Now ask yourself if an average cell phone user know what an MEID is.
You tell your carrier about your new phone? (Score:4, Informative)
I've always just bought my phone on my own because I have an inexpensive plan and put the SIM the new phone. Turn the new phone on and it just works. When I've needed a new SIM because the size changed I've just gotten a new one for the new phone and changed the SIM for my phone number on the website.
Re:You tell your carrier about your new phone? (Score:5, Informative)
Verizon is a cdma and not a standard gsm network, they don't use sims like gsm networks and plans are directly tied to the phone. Support for sim cards are only used for 4g. US cell companies generally suck. Only t-mobile and at&t are gsm with somewhat different frequencies, while verizon and sprint are cdma networks. So yeah, half of our choices are proprietary networks that are locked down to a single phone often including "connecting" fees.
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This is the reason I dropped Bell many years ago back in Canada. The audacity of asking for a $35 fee to activate my new phone that I just paid full price for. And activation consists of no more than scanning a few bar codes into their computer. I will never go with another provider that doesn't use SIM cards. I should have the freedom to use the device that I choose, and upgrade when I feel like it, with no cost other than paying for the phone.. I'm pretty sure Bell has switched over to using SIM cards now
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Bell uses SIM cards. They are a LTE based network.
Telus is the one that is CDMA based.
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Bell and Telus use the same network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and see below for LTE
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Maybe it's time for the networks themselves to upgrade and go to a somewhat modern system. It's always hard to realise CDMA is still so much in use there.
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Because historically, the nonstandard network may have had better voice and data coverage in the area where a subscriber lives and works than the standard one.
Re:You tell your carrier about your new phone? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most 3G data service on GSM use CDMA or wideband CDMA [wikipedia.org]. CDMA is just vastly superior at allocating bandwidth between users than GSM's original protocol (TDMA). GSM couldn't compete so they were forced to license CDMA and add it to their spec for data services. You know how you can talk and use data simultaneously on GSM phones? That's because it has a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. Pure CDMA phones like Verizon/Sprint originally couldn't do this because they only had a single CDMA radio which is used for both voice and data, but not simultaneously.
If the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA networks, the data speeds on your GSM phone today would be down near 1 Mbps. We wouldn't have LTE today either - it is very similar to CDMA, using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA was needed as a "proof of concept" market test case that this orthogonality stuff really worked when scaled up to about a hundred simultaneous users per cell.
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There are a few inaccuracies here. First, WCDMA does not license the Qualcomm CDMA patents. It's similar, but not enough so as to require patent licensing.
There are two types of LTE. The first generation (and the one most commonly deployed currently) is FDD-LTE, which does expand on a bit on the CDMA concept. But the trend is moving more toward TD-LTE since it's more spectrum efficient. FDD-LTE (frequency division LTE) splits the allocated frequency into two equal sized segments, one dedicated for upload, a
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I know if I moved to the US I would not sign up with a carrier that was so behind the times.
The problem with that is that verizon for the most part has the best coverage and at this point it would cost too much for them to switch all their towers. If you have to have a sim card you can go with att with the second best coverage but even then they many times lock down the phone so that it only works with them.
So even if you assume that CDMA is worse, it still offers the best coverage. Honestly, a $20 activation fee in the grand scheme of things wouldn't be a deal breaker for me as I only upgrade e
"increased support costs"... (Score:2)
"Verizon cites "increasing support costs associated with customers switching their devices" as a reason for the new fees. "
The reality is "we want to continue increasing our profits, and nickel and diming our customers with added junk fees is the way to do it."
Every time I change my SIM? (Score:2)
I don't get how this would work. This $20 fee would be triggered every time I take my SIM and insert in a new phone? So when my phone battery is dead and I pop my SIM onto my wife's phone just for a quick call I'll be charged $20?
Re:Every time I change my SIM? (Score:4, Informative)
Verizon uses CDMA. There is no SIM card (except for the one used to provide LTE data, where applicable).
Re:Every time I change my SIM? (Score:5, Informative)
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Does the swappable card include both the CDMA2000 subscriber information ("CSIM") and the LTE subscriber information, or only the LTE subscriber information?
Please explain (Score:3)
Can someone please explain this for us dumb foreigners? I never could make any sense of the US telephone system.
Its crazy with being charged for *incoming* calls, and roaming charges when you have not even left the country.
Why would the network care if you change handsets? Can't you just buy a new phone from the local tech-shop and swap the SIM over?
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Verizon hates its customers. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc. just want to make money, but Verizon is too big to care about lame stuff like mere profit. They have to be dicks about it.
Re:Please explain (Score:5, Informative)
There are two main systems for providing cellular voice communication in the U.S.: GSM and CDMA. GSM, as used in most of the world, uses a SIM card to determine which cell towers it should connect through, and then uses a database that maps the SIM card's identifier to a subscriber account. CDMA uses an MEID, which is an identifier that is baked into the device itself (similar to an IMEI). The towers/billing systems then use a database that maps the device's MEID to an account number. As a result, your account is quite literally tied to a specific physical device, not to a card that can be moved from device to device.
To add further complexity, many CDMA-based devices do actually have a SIM card, but it is used exclusively for talking to the LTE portion of cell towers (or when roaming overseas) and is not used for primary voice communications or for 3G data.
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Its crazy with being charged for *incoming* calls,
This part is a side-effect. The original intent was to make sure that if you called a mobile phone, you would not be charged more than if you were calling a landline.
The Congress is usually against regulations, but in this case, it actually added more regulations than Europe. In Europe, they had operators solve that issue by giving different area codes to mobile phones that required more money to call them (that being said, a European can still choose to pay for incoming calls if he wants to, so that people
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The US was the first country to introduce mobile phones on a significant scale, and they made a few odd decisions.
In the US, mobile phone number are just regular local phone numbers, there is no "mobile" area code. So if you receive a call on a mobile, you have to pay for the cost of the mobile network, because the caller pays a standard landline rate. (And that actually makes some kind of sense.) And if you are not in your home are, you may be asked to pay an additional charge (even that makes a bit of sen
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It used very large cells, I've had connection and made calls some 80 km. off the coast.
The disadvantage was anyone with a suitable radio receiver (me) could listen in on the various calls.
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Can someone please explain this for us dumb foreigners? I never could make any sense of the US telephone system. Its crazy with being charged for *incoming* calls, and roaming charges when you have not even left the country.
While neither make sense, the reality is most people never exceed they minute allocations nor get charged roaming fees. Given the proliferation of plans that make cell to cell calls not count against minutes so your existing monthly allotment is often not used. Roaming charges were more common when carriers were regional, but since now the major ones are nationwide and have exchange agreements those are pretty much history as well.
Why would the network care if you change handsets? Can't you just buy a new phone from the local tech-shop and swap the SIM over?
Money, although you can often negotiate a credit for the charge.
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Phone service in the U.S. was originally like the rest of the world. When you made a long distance call from a landline, the person making the call paid the long distance connection fee of x cents/min. But by the time mobile phones rolled onto the market, most of the U.S. landline market had switched to fixed rate monthly billing. That i
binary fool (Score:2)
I'm seeing in "You may like to read:" a story "10 Confirmed Dead In Shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College".
And find myself wondering, is that ten or two? All part of the light-hearted fun of April Fools.
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On a day where idiots are expected to out themselves, slashdot has a lot of celebration going on.
They get one day a year to turn the world stupid. It sucks, but we can't kill them, so deal.
What "support costs" are they talking about? (Score:2)
Re:What "support costs" are they talking about? (Score:4, Informative)
Well...CDMA requires a record change at the carrier side, not just a SIM swap. So you have to call a 3rd-rate call center, repeat your phone number and personal identity info a half dozen times, half to a machine and half to a human, and talk to someone who's never even seen a non-GSM phone try to follow a script to find out the IMEI number of the new phone. They will fail at least once and may need to involve a supervisor. That costs them at least $1.30. The rest is pure profit.
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The part I don't understand is: I walk into an Apple Store, and I buy/replace my iPhone. If I pay for it, no charge from Verizon. If it's on Apple's payment plan, $20. The way the payment plan works is that Apple signs you up for a loan with a third party bank. What does Verizon care how I pay for a phone I buy from somebody else?
On top of that, Verizon is rarely involved. Apple Stores have access to activate phones and update accounts, and the labor is done by an Apple employee. This part at least is a pur
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That's only been possible since the rollout of LTE voice. Not every phone on the network even has that.
Will their retention specialists waive the fee? (Score:2)
Many companies have "customer retention specialists" who will waive fees if you threaten to bail to a competitor AND you are a "valuable enough" customer to make it worth their while.
In many companies, almost all customers are "valuable enough," so unless you've made a nuisance out of yourself so much that you are a "net loss" for them, they'll probably work with you.
On the other hand, if this company's attitude makes you want to quit just on principle, then by all means quit. If enough people do, it will
what marketing tool thought this up? (Score:3)
guaranteed to make people walk.
rent seeking (Score:2)
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Re:Why would I upgrade? (Score:5, Funny)
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as far as switching carriers is concerned, thats not my decision, its a family plan and my mother-in-law is in charge.
Way to take your adult life into your own hands.
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But still no swappable battery (as far as I've heard).
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What's the difference between Larry Ellison and G-d? G-d doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.
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Re:You Yanks Are Stupid! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not like Europe where there are 2-10 mobile service providers within a country and as soon as you cross to another country, you roam onto another network cleanly. Creating an LTE network in Europe costs nothing and the population density is much higher so the costs are covered more quickly. Also the governments understand the absolute critical importance of a functioning LTE network and fund their build out in to rural areas.
The US is too busy deciding between Trump and Clinton... It's like "Would you prefer to be shot in the left temple or the right temple?"... Either way, NATO will be going to war large scale within 3.5 years.
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Not sure why you have such positive view on mobile networks in Europe..
Of course, the situation differs a bit per country but in mine (densely populated netherlands) not all providers have optimal coverage, and when crossing borders roaming does exist - at excessive charges up to several pennies a MB and euro's per minute called - in contrast to relative cheap national calling&net.
G4 has largely been rolled out by 2 1/2 provider, but personally i find the reliability far from 100% - as in - my G3 only p
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Also the governments understand the absolute critical importance of a functioning LTE network and fund their build out in to rural areas.
So what you're saying is you sit back and gently let you get screwed from both ends at the same time?
This is part of the point. If the government deems functional LTE to be a priority for the rural population and they are funding it, why do you then except an additional bullshit fee from the private vendor.
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So with all your riches and technological know-how you can't even get a mobile network to cover your country cheaply, e.g. by making a tower reach further?
Heck, even sparsely-populated countries like Sweden and Finland have nationwide coverage for decades already and always had better prices.
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Heck, even sparsely-populated countries like Sweden and Finland have nationwide coverage for decades already and always had better prices.
The issue isn't population density as much as size. Sweden may not be as densely populated but it is a small country, so it doesn't take as many towers, and resultant costs, to provide coverage. Increase that by a 10 or 20 or so times an date cost doesn't justify the added subscriber base.
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Population density of the USA (including Alaska!!) is almost twice that of Sweden: 35 vs 21 people per km2. It should be easier (more economical) to cover the USA - especially if you would exclude Alaska which is mostly completely uninhabited anyway - than it is to cover Sweden.Finland is even worse, just 18 people per km2. Yet even there you have nationwide coverage.
The typical subscriber base of a US based carrier is a lot greater than that of a Swedish carrier, compensating for the larger area to cover.
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Population density of the USA (including Alaska!!) is almost twice that of Sweden: 35 vs 21 people per km2. It should be easier (more economical) to cover the USA - especially if you would exclude Alaska which is mostly completely uninhabited anyway - than it is to cover Sweden.Finland is even worse, just 18 people per km2. Yet even there you have nationwide coverage.
The typical subscriber base of a US based carrier is a lot greater than that of a Swedish carrier, compensating for the larger area to cover. After all it's subscribers that bring in the money. The US has more potential subscribers per area, less carriers (less competition) and far higher fees for mobile phones - yet they can not even build out a nationwide coverage??
You can't just look at density, you must also look at how the population is distributed. While the overall density is greater, there are far larger tracts of sparsely populated areas, so many more towers would be needed than in say Sweden to provide similar coverage. That makes it much more expensive since you need many more towers to reach a very small slice of the US population. If you look at Sweden's cell of coverage map, it appears the very sparse regions in the north west have poor coverage, a situati
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The calculation is simple, how many users (=paying subscribers) per tower.
For a comparable population density that's the same calculation for small and large countries.
Btw, Sweden is slightly larger than California and nearly 2/3 of Texas, Sweden's population is nearly 10 million.
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It has everything to do with population density! The calculation is simple, how many users (=paying subscribers) per tower. For a comparable population density that's the same calculation for small and large countries. Btw, Sweden is slightly larger than California and nearly 2/3 of Texas, Sweden's population is nearly 10 million.
The problem is that population is not evenly distributed across the US; so you have some vey dense areas and large swatches of sparsely populated ones; so if you look at average population density you get a distorted view. That is why I said it isn't a function of density per se but rather population distribution. In Sweden, for example, population distribution is somewhat split 50/50 between the south and east, which is dense, an north and west which is much more sparse. If you look at a coverage map, it
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But I can tell you in Sweden they'll have the more densely populated areas subsidise the sparsely populated areas, very similar to the law the US had re. fixed line telephony.
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Indeed, that's why the calculation of paying subscribers per tower. But I can tell you in Sweden they'll have the more densely populated areas subsidise the sparsely populated areas, very similar to the law the US had re. fixed line telephony.
Th eUS created rural telephone and electric services, some of which exit today in areas that are no longer rural; it's a shame they didn't look to do cell phone and broadband similarly.
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New Jersey has 90% of the population of Sweden in 5% of the area. Why can't New Jersey have as good coverage as Sweden?
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New Jersey has 90% of the population of Sweden in 5% of the area. Why can't New Jersey have as good coverage as Sweden?
Toxic waste dumps.
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Oh great, another repeat of the bullshit population density argument.
1) The US, like anywhere else, does not have a uniform population distribution.
2) The thing about areas with low population density is that most people *are somewhere else*.
While low population density may be a rational excuse for not covering every square inch of Montana, it doesn't explain why New Jersey should be expected to have bad coverage.