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New rules govern U.S. wireless
skippydumptruck
begin againRegistered User regular
begin againRegistered User regular
So, 3 big changes:
So you should be able to take your cellphone from one carrier to another, or use one you bought from a 3rd party (like a regular land line)
I don't really know what this means. Maybe the end of outrageous data plans?
I think this means that smaller, local carriers are still blocked out. If they were required to lease them at wholesale prices, then you have potential for additional carriers.
Entire story
So, um, Google cellphone?
Under the FCC's rules, companies purchasing one large part of the airwaves would have to allow any handheld device to be attached to the network they eventually put in place. This could dramatically change competition in the U.S. cellphone industry.
So you should be able to take your cellphone from one carrier to another, or use one you bought from a 3rd party (like a regular land line)
They will also be forced to allow access of any type of application on the network, which could mean that consumers can get easier access to the open Internet rather than the private networks to which cellular carriers often currently offer access.
I don't really know what this means. Maybe the end of outrageous data plans?
The FCC failed to mandate that this 22 megahertz swathe of spectrum be used for wholesale purposes.
I think this means that smaller, local carriers are still blocked out. If they were required to lease them at wholesale prices, then you have potential for additional carriers.
Entire story
So, um, Google cellphone?
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I look forward to the tech heads explaining how this will affect all of us.
You can thank digital television for making this possible.
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...not that anyone uses a landline these days.
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Right -- I think it's about being able to take your 3rd party phone to whichever provider you like, and not have to have your phone approved by them?
Yeah, and you can run any applications across their network, download what you want, and if you decide to rent part of it setup your own cell phone company.
I think that means that carriers are no longer able to block applications such as skype or instant messangers etc.
edit: oh look, everyone has already said that.
For instance, I can't think of any other consumer service that penalizes you for canceling the service, as opposed to rewarding you for staying on. Seriously, that's just incredibly retarded. Just think if they did that with anything else.
"I'm sorry to hear that you don't want to continue your subscription with the local newspaper. That'll be $175."
Of course, I made the mistake of signing up with Verizon, which means I'd have to hack my phone to get even the most basic use out of it. They seriously want you using VCast, so fuck your blue-tooth connectivity. You can use a Micro-SD card though! Too bad we won't let you access ALL of the music on it.
Not too mention that I don't use the phone that much, anyway, so I get to pay a monthly fee for 400 minutes, of which I use 200. No rollover available. They couldn't even apply the remaining balance to data fees. Because they NEED your money. More money. More.
Not to mention that production costs on the phones has plummeted, but they're still marked up ridiculously high to 'encourage' you to sign a long-term contract.
Honestly, cell phone companies are just corrupt as all hell.
I'm glad to see it worked.
Hey dumbass
You were free to supply your own cell phone and not sign a 3 year contract to get service
It's no ones fault but your own that you decided to do that. They made you a deal and gave you an expensive piece of hardware at a low price or possibly even for free in exchange for that contract term.
This is like getting a free TV with your cable television package in exchange for agreeing not to cancel for 3 years. It actually usually works out to be a pretty damn good deal for the consumer.
EDIT:
And again, no one told you to sign up with Verizon before researching which features you'd have access to on your phone.
Your failure to do any homework whatsoever before signing legally binding contracts makes you an idiot, it doesn't make them corrupt.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
I've had Verizon pull more bullshit than any other company I've had service with. I used to have a Kyocera 7135, awesome little smartphone till it died one day. I had insurance and wanted to replace it but I was told that I simply couldn't activate it on the network. Some bs about the phone having high fail rates. I was told I could get a Treo650 for free as a replacement.
Awesome I thought, until I found out that minutes of use for data had changed to being billed per kilo of use on data. Not fucking cool. They wouldn't go back to the old way of billing despite the fact that that's the way my plan was set up. I eventually dropped them for t-mobile and couldn't be happier. Verizon can burn for how greedy they are about thier data rates.
Well that was unnecessarily harshly worded.
Yikes.
Wow, that was a pretty angry response there.
While I agree that he probably should have done more homework, I would also argue ... why do we even need to? I don't like having to do massive amounts of research before buying a product, which (unfortunately) seems to be more and more of the norm these days. If I want to buy a land-line phone, it's pretty easy. I just go to the store, read up on the features on the box, compare prices, and then make a decision.
It used to be the same with other electronic equipment, such as TVs. If it looks good in the store, I'll buy it. But unfortunately, we now live in an age of confusing terminology (HDTV, EDTV, component vs HDMI, 720 vs 1080, etc.) which makes research, sadly, a requirement now.
Anyway, there are lots of things that happen in the cell phone industry that don't make common sense. For example, phones being tied only to specific carriers, or being locked into contracts for long periods of time. I don't think it's bad at all to rant and ask for changes that would be positive for consumers.
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The difference between 0.002 cents and 0.002 dollars? 100x
Getting double billed by Verizon? A year of being ignored, bad credit, and eventual lawsuit.
Bench warrant issued for Verizon? Priceless.
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Could read it as a few things.
1. No more closed APIs -- Carriers can't lock out their phones for 3rd party software.
2. No more closed networks -- Carriers cannot prevent you from hooking up your Cellphone to your computer and using it as a broadband modem.
3. No more locked cellphones.
Seriously, I'd be very happy if we could get a Japanese style Cellphone API standard. US Phones suck.
That's great, it really is, but what about the fact that Cingular/AT&T, as well as T-Mobile, phones won't work on Verizon or Sprint networks anyway unless they're not just GSM-based phones? I suppose this only applies to phones that might be compatible with either of the three network types but I wasn't aware of any that are anyway.
Forgive my ignorance... I haven't been keeping up on phones and the link for a couple of months now. Even then, I only kept up on as much as I could from January of 07 till about May when I quit my shitty job as an indirect Cingular sales agent (read: franchise agent). I don't even know why I bothered getting that job-- I can't fucking stand telephones, much less mobile phones, and that's an understatement. I have some sort of underlying hatred, fear of talking on the phone and I hated every second selling them to people. Crazy, huh?
Even more weird is the fact that I obtained an HTC 8125, which is essentially a decent PocketPC based mobile phone, and the only service I will have on it is prepaid. I REFUSE to go into a cellphone contract and the closest I ever did was with my employee demo line. Though, that was hardly something you could consider a regular contact since I wasn't obligated to keep it, and make payments, and I was paying about $40 a month for more than two-thousand minutes and unlimited texting. That's about as high as I would pay for a cell phone service considering I only used maybe 50-70 minutes and thirty or so messages a month.. hah. As I said, I use the phone on prepaid service but I mostly just use it as a USB drive (2GB) and organizer.
Meh...
TL;DR: I hate phones, bleh bleh blah.
Oh yeah, and:
Stop being an asshole.
That was 8 or so years ago though. Have things changed dramatically? I gave up on digging through the mess and just didn't get a phone then. When I finally did... well I just get a contract. I get the phone for free and with Verizon I can just get a 300 minute plan, which isn't too expensive. I don't want music and all that shit anyway, so I just don't pay for it. Verizon's coverage was actually fantastic out here which is more than you could say for the other carriers when I first signed up.
Oh, it turns out that Congress won't let 'mom 'n pop' wireless services rent part of the spectrum that's currently for sale. The big four companies think it'll cheapen the worth of the network. So no regional carriers
We probably won't see anything changing until ~2009 if we're lucky.
I work at T-mobile for Customer Care and soon-to-be Customer Loyalty (retention). We just came out with the new [email protected] service, which is basically VOIP, and it looks like things might not have been fully thought-through.
Basically, you get free calls on your cellphone whenever you're connected to a wireless access point, whether it's your home router, your friend's, the airport's, or an unsecured random connection.
The thing is, the calls are completely free (aside from international long distance) and take no minutes, no matter where you make the call from.
This includes other countries. O_o
So, apparently, people learned that they can take their $50 tri-band phone and go all over the world and make totally-roaming-free calls for no extra costs. Good times.
We're technically not supposed to sell that as a benefit of the service, but still... it's difficult not to.
And you know what
That's completely different than failing to understand the most basic terms of the contract you've signed
Yes, Verizon probably pulls a pretty good amount of legitimately shady moves
Offering you a term based contract in exchange for a free phone is hardly one of them
Especially since it's pretty much impossible to get into one without understanding the limitations of the agreement you've entered into without plugging your ears, screaming LA LA LA LA LA and signing every piece of paper pushed in your direction without reading a single one.
At which point, you're a fucking idiot and anything that happens to you is your own damned fault. It's not like they gave you a free phone with no strings attached, and then three months later decided that in fact there was a 3 year term on the contract with early withdrawal penalties without contacting you to indicate such first.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Twice in a row I've been burned by shoddily-made phones that don't last long enough for me to sign a new contract, and I've had to fork over the money for either a cheap replacement phone in the interim or take a huge hit to get a new contract.
Fundamentally, yeah, the phone companies are allowed to rake consumers over the coals for as much money as possible, so yeah, why wouldn't they? This doesn't mean I have to like it.
the idea of not being restricted to a carrier's phones while at the same time having a phone with completely custom or different software sounds neat.
Why do we need to?
Because it is not the company's job to make you an info4rmed consumer.
Don't want to get ripped off? Then learn about what you're buying.
Wanna know why there are so many crappy deals? It's to segment the market. The people too lazy to do any reasearch pay a premium for their laziness. Those of us who actually know what we're buying before hand pay $30 a month for 500 minutes and unlimited data, and get a Treo for free AR, etc.
Would you go to a car lot and say "give me something blue."? Why do people sign up for cell phones like that?
edit: bah, I just realized that I'm agreeing with DrD AGAIN. That's like, twice this week. SOmething must be wrong.
I would guess that most people (not people like you per se, but people who spell informed without using numbers) do some research though. To compare rate plans from different companies, along with coverage quality/areas. 'Cause, you know, I think most people still buy cell phones to make calls. Not to download email.
Yeah, the fact that I don't spell check my posts twice means my points are invalid. ;-)
So, what you are saying, in the bolded section above, is that only large purchases are worth researching? Personally, I care about ALL of my money, not just some of it, so yeah, I reasearch my smaller purchases too, ESPECIALLY when I am signing a contract that includes an ETF.
There's another thing: folks don't bother to read contracts before signing them. You have a reasoning for that, or is the question irrelevant because I use capital words for emphasis sometimes?
I've been with Unicel for a little over 3 years. Most folks won't know what Unicel is... it's a rural cell provider. It cover northern New England (NH, VT, ME, upstate NY, a bit of MA). There are also a couple coverage areas (I believe one is MO/ND/SD/MI). It's all run on GSM towers.
The service, in the past 3 years I've been with them, has been absolutely amazing. My dropped calls are negligable (on the level of 1 every 2-3 months), I get decent prices, and the customer service folks are the most friendly group of people I've ever worked with. They're flexible as well... the plan I'm on is a local plan, covering their entire area, but there is another, national, 100% no roaming plan. It's a bit more, but I don't need it. When my grandmother died two years ago, they switched me over for only as long as I was in the midwest, and I only had to pay the pro-rated difference. They were fantastic.
Well, Unicel has just been bought by Verizon. If you want to make any changes to your plan, you have to buy a new phone, and do a new contract. Verizon is going to let the GSM towers rot, force everyone back into CDMA, and say "hey, fuck you!" to us in the rural areas.
We don't have any other real options. We tend to go north, rather than south, when we travel, and neither Cingular, nor US Cellular have a presence northward. T-Mobile stops at around the Mass border. Alltel is.. who the hell knows where.
What I'm trying to say is, this whole "just say no to mom n' pop providers" thing is fucking bullshit, and really screws a lot of us over. There's nothing that can be done about it, because the different companies have various congressmen in their pockets, but it's a rant I needed to get out.
Way back when, before I switched to Sprint (which I love) I was with AT&T during the period when they were bought by cingular. I had gotten a contract just a few months before hand, which seemed to piss Cingular off, because I was paying AT&T rates, instead of cingular rates.
They kept harassing me to switch to a cingular plan, and I kept asking them to incentivize it for me, because otherwise I have no reason to. The best that they EVER offered was "we'll waive the fee that is involved with switching to a cingular plan."
Yeah, I bet you can guess what I did.
My parents though, are an entirely different matter. First of all, English is not their primary language. Second, they don't really understand or have too much interest in technology. No, you can't expect them to be an "informed consumer". But that doesn't mean they deserve to be ripped off. Or that they should call their kids everytime they want to buy a damn cell phone.
That's why we have things like consumer protection regulations to protect the rights of consumers. Personally, though I'm not a fan of big government. I do believe that being fair to consumers is ultimately a better business model, moreso than screwing them over. (Can we say ... DRM?)
You imply laziness, but again I will say that you're being rather disparaging. Yes, for us techies, it's cool being able to take advantage of great deals. But I don't see how that should be mutually exclusive to preventing everyone from achieving similar benefits.
It's funny you say that. I'm not a car guy. "Give me something black and fast" is pretty close to what I want in a car. Sure, I could spend weeks doing all sorts of competitive analysis, learning more about car mechanics, reading all sorts of articles on how not to get scammed by car salesmen, etc. but I'd much rather spend that time doing something else (like playing games). Of course, I know plenty of people (car enthusiasts) who would think I'm crazy, but that's just my personal preference. (Likewise, they're probably the ones who go into Best Buy asking the clerk to build them "A really fast PC!", and I'd think they're insane)
Going back to the car analogy, that's why Saturn dealerships were created. Some folks just don't care for all the BS. You could argue that they're probably paying a premium for the "service of having good service", and I would agree ... and say that's stupid. As consumers, I shouldn't care all that much about a company's profits. What I just want is a good product and decent service to go along with it. Otherwise, I'll take my business elsewhere.
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As a consumer, no, you SHOULDN'T have to worry about a company;s profit.
Just as the company shouldn't have to worry about your pocketbook either.
See what I'm getting at?
If you don't put in the effort when buying something, you don't really have the right to complain that you didn't get the best deal out there. Shopping around isn't difficult, nor is reading through the contract before you sign it. If you choose not to do these, don't be suprised when it turns out you got something shitty. When a CSR tells you that they can replace your phone with another phone, read the paperwork before signing it. Don't complain about changes to your contract after the fact.
Companies should not be actively dicking customers over, which DOES happen sometimes. THAT is wrong, and not the fault of the consumer. It is NOT the job of the company to cater to uninformed consumers, though. Some companies do it anyway to build loyalty, and others do it and charge a premium for it, but what I am getting at is that it is not something that we are ENTITLED to.
Edit: And your parents, honestly, CAN be informed consumers, if they want to be. Saying "oh, they aren't interested in this stuff, so don't expect them to know it" is no excuse. We have consumer protection laws because they define a company's minimal requirements to consumers. Anything beyond that is the ultimate responsibility of the consumer. If your parents can't be bothered to learn anything about what they are buying, but insist on buying it anyway, why should that be the responsibility fo the company?
I should point out that I'm not the one who has problems dealing with cell phone companies. If you read my post again, though, what I'm trying to do is stick up for other folks. For example, my parents, who aren't technical, aren't terribly proficient in English (much less contract legalese), but still want a product and not be ripped off or taken advantage of, in an undue matter. Of course, we can argue all day what "an undue matter" means ... that's probably going to be rather subjective.
I agree that it's not something we are necessarily entitled to. As I mentioned before, I'm not at all a fan of "big government" stepping in and making sure companies don't screw over consumers, because generally they'll probably screw things up even more. Rather, I'm a fan of capitalism taking care of things.
If enough consumers seek good service (that is, companies that don't try to screw them over, will help customers even if they're uninformed, etc.), then it'll happen. Again, I think Saturn is a good example of that. Enough people became fed up with the typical car salesman model, and thus was born a dealership that actually does cater to "uninformed consumers". Another example is the Geek Squad from Best Buy.
All I'm saying is that one guy complained that cell phone crap doesn't make sense, and all of a sudden people are jumping over him, insinuating that he's an idiot whereas I think he's being quite reasonable.
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You should spend time watching non-technical folks struggle with programs and technology. They could be the smartest individuals you've ever met, but since they're not techies like we are, they're often derided as mere "idiots" or as being "lazy".
To me, this whole cell phone thing seems very similar. You've already seen several messages in this forum from posters who got burned or are confused by cell phone companies and their dealings. If we're confused by this stuff, then you know that tons of regular folk are being raped in the ass by charges and penalties they're not familiar with.
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It's not that my parents "can't be bothered to learn anything about what they are buying". They know what they want: a cell phone so they can make and receive calls. Frankly, that's what many people only care about.
The issue that's been brought up is when cell phone companies start to make demands that go outside of that, or beyond the norm. Again, for the vast majority of services, there's no penalty for cancelling. TV, cable, Internet, power, local phone, etc. So it's not hard to imagine that your average, non-technical person (much less ones like my parents, who may not speak English as a primary language and nearing retirement age), would complain that it's confusing and frustrating.
It's everyone's right to complain, and I'm not saying that companies have to change. Verizon doesn't have to do anything. Consumers aren't entitled for better service (although they can certainly demand and ask for it).
But I think it's improper to call people idiots just because they're complaining (like DrD did to Drav), or imply that anyone who does so is being lazy, or assume that anyone can suddenly be informed consumers (it's easy for us, don't assume it's easy for others). That's just being pompous.
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