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Link and comment: 35.8% of Households Now Cell Only – And 17% of Landline Users Only Get Cell Calls

December 26, 2012 at 2:04 pm · Filed under consumer, Google Voice, Obihai, Telephone, Wireless ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Has the tipping point finally been reached for the demise of landline telephones?

35.8% of Households Now Cell Only – And 17% of Landline Users Only Get Cell Calls (DSLreports)

If you have parents or grandparents that just can’t give up their old wired telephone, and if they have Internet access you can always get them an Obihai device and set them up with Google Voice.  The only thing that stops a lot of people from doing that is that Google Voice won’t port an existing landline number to Google Voice.  It is possible to do a two-step process, where you port the landline number to a “throwaway” prepaid cellular phone account, then port it from there to Google Voice, but that doesn’t always work.  Still, with the cost of landline service nowadays, that’s kind of a hefty price to pay just so you don’t have to change your existing phone number.  In the old days the phone company would give you a new number every time you moved (unless you were moving within the same telephone exchange area), whether you liked it or not, yet nowadays people act as though they simply must keep their existing phone number no matter what the cost, and no matter how many telemarketers have it and use it to harass them at dinnertime.  I really don’t get the irrational attachment to a phone number, but it seems that’s what keeps a lot of people on landlines.

Another possibility for a landline alternative is that if you have an Obihai OBi202 with the OBiBT add-on USB device, you can use it with a cell phone so your parents or elderly relatives can still use their existing phones, but the calls will actually go over their cell phone service.  You will need to have it connected to a computer to do the configuration, but I think in actual day-to-day use it could work with just the BlueTooth connection to the cell phone (I don’t have an OBiBT nor a phone that has BlueTooth capability, so I can’t say for sure).  Most cell providers can port landline numbers, though not in all cases.

Many commercial VoIP providers can port a number directly, though not in all cases (even today, not every phone number can be ported by every provider.  You may find that only some providers can port a particular number, or more rarely, that none of them can).  Nowadays there are many commercial VoIP providers that charge a lot less than what the phone companies charge.

Anyway there are a lot of ways to avoid landlines nowadays. What a change from even just ten years ago, when commercial VoIP was only starting to take hold!  I have a feeling that ten years from now, the landline will be all but dead, except in those rural pockets where absolutely nothing else is available.  The phone companies may still be around, if they can ever bring themselves to ditch their old copper and start converting to fiber only, but they’ll be providing primarily broadband service, not traditional phone service.

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Link: Get Ready For ‘Super Wi-Fi’ To Be A Big Thing In 2013

September 5, 2012 at 1:23 am · Filed under Broadband, FCC, Internet, Wireless

Quote:

… it’s a new kind of wireless network running on unused or underused spectrum known as “white spaces.” It’s championed by the likes of Google and Microsoft.

Get Ready For ‘Super Wi-Fi’ To Be A Big Thing In 2013 (Business Insider)

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OBiWiFi Wireless Adapter for OBi202 now available

May 18, 2012 at 7:13 pm · Filed under hardware, Obihai, VoIP, VOIP News, Wireless ·Tagged , , , , ,

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Here’s one use for the Obihai OBi202′s USB port: WiFi connectivity

April 12, 2012 at 12:41 am · Filed under Asterisk, FreeSwitch, Google Voice, hardware, Obihai, Telephone, VoIP, VOIP News, Wireless ·Tagged , , , , , ,

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First look at the Obihai OBi202 VoIP device: Screenshots of the new functions not available in previous Obihai devices (Part 3)

March 14, 2012 at 2:53 am · Filed under Asterisk, Google Voice, hardware, networking, Obihai, Review, Telephone, VoIP, VOIP News, Wireless ·Tagged , , , , , ,

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Republic Wireless becomes cheapest unlimited wireless service

December 23, 2011 at 9:47 am · Filed under Wireless ·Tagged , , , ,

The deal is this:  You pay $199 for the first month of service, which includes a new LG Optimus smartphone.  After the first month, you pay $19 per month, plus tax. For that, you get “Unlimited minutes, data, & text – No contracts or early termination fees – No overages, ever!”

The company apparently tries to send calls via a Wi-Fi connection where available, and in the past they’ve apparently attempted to force customers to make sure that a certain percentage of calls went via Wi-Fi (rather than over Sprint’s network, which is the fallback option), with a “fair use policy.”  But as of this morning, the “fair use policy” is apparently gone, and customers get unlimited service with no restrictions, or at least that’s what’s being reported here:

Republic Scraps Their Fair Use Provision (DSLReports.com)

Unlimited Cellphone $19/mo. (PBX in a Flash forum)

I suppose a lot of folks will think twice about that first month cost (although the fact that you get an Android-based phone probably makes that a lot more palatable) but the “unlimited minutes, data, and text” will certainly be attractive to many users.  Just keep in mind that no contract means that they can change the terms of the offer at any time, and if too many people fail to offload enough of their traffic to Wi-Fi to make the service financially viable they may be forced to raise the monthly rate at some point down the road.

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Review of the Obihai OBi110 VoIP device, Part 3: 911 on the cheap?

January 25, 2011 at 7:49 pm · Filed under Google Voice, hardware, Obihai, Review, Telephone, VoIP, Wireless ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

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This is the thing that’s going to put the phone and cable companies out of business — someday

May 30, 2010 at 11:35 am · Filed under cable, Editorial, fiber optics, hardware, history, Internet, invention, networking, quantum communications, Telephone, Wireless

I’ve been saying for years now that when quantum entanglement is fully understood, it will revolutionize communications.  And apparently, the Chinese are taking this seriously.  According to an article on the POPSCI site,

Scientists in China have broken the record for quantum teleportation, achieving a distance of about 10 miles, according to a new study in Nature Photonics. That’s a giant leap from previous achievements.

The feat brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal transmission, the researchers note.

Read the rest of the article here (and note that the word “teleportation” is somewhat misused, as it becomes clear when you read the article that they are talking about quantum communications, not teleportation of matter).

Why is this significant?  Well, let’s assume for the moment that right now we understand this technology about as well as we understood lasers in the 1950′s — we knew they were significant and would be very useful someday, but most of the scientists originally had no idea just how useful they would become.  They certainly never imagined that everything from the world’s communications systems to audio and video equipment in your home would become dependent on the laser.

As I have said before, suppose you have two devices that contain entangled particles and therefore are capable of sending data between them, without using radio waves or cables of any kind.  This is what the Chinese are apparently on the verge of achieving, if they have not done so already.  And why is that important? Well, let’s say you are getting your Internet service from a company in New York, or your TV from a company in Colorado, or your phone service from … well, who cares where it’s from.  The Important thing is that in each case, you won’t need wires or cables, nor satellites and dishes, nor a network of cellular towers, to bring the information to you.  Eventually you may have a device the size of a USB stick (or smaller) that you plug into your computer or TV, or that is embedded into your phone, and no matter where you go in the world, it will be capable of communicating with its companion device at your service provider.

It’s my belief that once scientists really understand this, there will be virtually no distance limitation – you could take your phone or TV or Mars and it would still work.  And then there is the other question I really would like the answer to — is this type of communications constrained by the speed of light? I may be wrong, but I have this sneaking suspicion that it is not.  And if that is true, that would in part explain why Chinese scientists are willing to pursue this while Western scientists are afraid to touch it.

The problem is that in the West, our scientists don’t like anything that doesn’t conform to the known laws of science, and we especially don’t like anything that’s “supernatural.” And yet, when you get to the quantum level, science and the supernatural start looking an awful lot alike.  Make no mistake, it’s still science, it’s just science we don’t yet fully understand.  Just as a remote control capable of activating a device that displays pictures and plays sound might have seemed like sorcery to a scientist of 500 years ago, a lot of what we’re discovering about the quantum world seems “spooky” to us now.  People in many Asian nations have an entirely different mindset about such things; they readily accept things that we don’t understand (some forms of Chinese medicine being an example).  So, it does not surprise me that they’d be more likely to embrace this new field of science — it doesn’t pose as great a challenge to their cultural or scientific paradigms.

If we in the west ever hope to get into the forefront of this field of science — the thing that I’m sure will revolutionize communications, if we humans can stay alive that long and not nuke ourselves back to the stone age — we have to we willing to tell the “skeptics” to take a hike and get busy working on this stuff. We can’t take the attitude that because we don’t fully understand why something works, we’re not going to touch it until we do, because if we do that, people in parts of the world that have no such inhibitions are going to get far ahead of us in science and technology.

My prediction is that quantum science (including quantum communications) is going to be to this century what electronics was to the 20th century.  If you think about it, it was only a little over 100 years ago that the very first AM radio transmission took place, and it wasn’t until the 1920′s that radio receivers became a common item in homes. In only about 90 years we’ve gone from AM radios in large, furniture-sized cabinets with vacuum tubes to all the technology we have today. We’re just scratching the surface of the quantum world, and while I may not live to see it, I predict that at some point there will simply be no need for the millions of miles of copper and fiber cable used around the globe, nor all the cellular towers, not to mention the communications satellites in space. Even things like remote controls will use paired quantum particles, simply because they will work through walls, and each remote will control only the device that its paired with (so if you have two brand XYZ devices in a home, one remote won’t activate both devices).

For some reason I just find it really interesting to speculate about this, because I just believe this is truly the Next Big Thing.  The real shame will be if we in the West just ignore it until the scientists in China and other Eastern countries have fully developed the technology, while we’re still trying to prop up up our aging copper infrastructure. In a worst-case scenario, I could see devices that use quantum technology being banned in the United States, at least for a time, so that the big corporations can milk every last dime out of the existing (and by then antique) infrastructure.  I sure hope THAT doesn’t happen!

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A modest proposal to solve (some of) our broadband access and bandwidth problems

December 14, 2009 at 2:35 am · Filed under Broadband, cable, Digital Television, DSL, Editorial, FCC, Internet, invention, Opinion, satellite television, Wireless

I have a modest proposal for how to solve our broadband access and bandwidth problems.  Okay, maybe not all of them, but at least two:

  • The current inability of people in rural areas (with dialup access only) to download larger files in an efficient manner.
  • The virtually non-existent problem of “bandwidth hogs” that consume so much data that they cause congestion in the networks (in most cases this is pure nonsense, but since Big Cable and Big Telco want so badly to sell you this lie, let’s follow them into their fantasy world for the moment and respond with a solution that does NOT involve usage caps or metered service).

Okay, let’s suppose you have a fictitious company, we’ll call it Bingleulu (because no real company could call themselves that!).  And lets suppose this company could do two things:

  • Acquire the equivalent of (initially) 12 television channels worth of bandwidth on repurposed TV frequencies nationwide, and
  • Acquire the equivalent of (initially) 12 television channels worth of bandwidth on a communications satellite (either C or Ku band, but preferably Ku) that is visible from the entire United States (or at least most of it).

Now, this dozen-channel bandwidth would be used as one huge data pipe – let’s call it the Big Fat Pipe, or BFP for short.  If your dial-up modem is like a slow faucet drip, and your cable modem connection is like a low-flow shower head, the BFP would be like an open fire hydrant. Data would be sent up to the satellite in one fat stream, then down to either individual users (mostly those in rural areas not near a terrestrial transmitter) and to the ground station towers that would retransmit the signal over the former TV airwaves.  Why the dual coverage?  Well, satellite is great for use in rural areas and other places where people might have issues receiving the terrestrial signals reliably, whereas the terrestrial stations would require less expensive receiving equipment and would be more suitable for mobile use, and use in locations where satellites aren’t visible due to heavy tree cover.  Plus it gives you a bit of redundancy, since in time the terrestrial stations could be linked by a backup fiber optic link.

So now you have this giant firehose of data, as it were.  Now, let’s say you decide to watch a video.  You jump on your web browser, on your existing dial-up or broadband connection, or even your mobile phone (which would have a built in data receiver) and go to the Bingleulu site, and select your video.  On the pages there’s also a small setting dropdown that says something to the effect of “Number of seconds I’m willing to wait”, and it defaults to 60 seconds, but you can set it to something shorter or longer – even much longer if you’re selecting a large file that you won’t be able to watch until later.

Now, here’s the magic part.  The Bingleulu site looks at whether it has space available in the flood of data it’s sending out, and if possible it sends your file within your specified maximum wait time as part of the the big flood.  It uses a smart algorithm to figure this out, taking into account things like your connection speed and type (dial-up and mobile users might get some preference), whether you’re on an ISP that caps your data usage, and a bunch of other things.  One thing it takes into account is how likely it is that someone else will request the same file within your specified wait time, because one of the things this system attempts to do is send popular files (especially LARGE popular files) to many users at once.

So when you make the request, the video or file or whatever might come back to you the usual way, over your internet connection, and the smaller the file the more likely it is that it will come that way.  But if there is space available – and assuming you give it long enough, there will be – the file will come back to you via the satellite or terrestrial transmitter system.  In that case, your browser will be sent an ID tag of some kind (via your regular connection) and it will then know that it is to look for the data containing that tag on the satellite/terrestrial over-the-air system.  If it misses any packets, it can request retransmission of just those packets, so that the entire file doesn’t have to be resent (and again, these could be sent either the normal way, or over the BFP of data sent through the airwaves, depending on which makes the most sense).

During times of congestion in the BFP, priority would be given to large files, files that have been requested by many people (you would try to fill as many requests as possible using the same data stream), and live streams (such as live audio or video programming, especially streams that many people are wanting to access simultaneously).

What do we accomplish with this scheme?  Well, for one thing, we get a lot of the largest files off your ISP (so they have a lot more “breathing room” and don’t have to meter usage – and yes, I KNOW there’s no reason they have to do that anyway, but if they’re going to lie about it, this is one way to pull the rug out from under their lies).  And if you have a dial-up connection or mobile broadband connection, where either slow speeds or congestion might be actual issues, this scheme at least gets you access to the large files you may want at something other than a snail’s pace (though at some times of day you may have to wait a while for the download to start, but once it does start you’ll have it quickly!).

Now, who would pay for this bandwidth?  Well, in some countries they might choose to operate it as a public utility, but that likely wouldn’t fly given the political climate in the U.S. (by which I mean, those lousy obstructionist Republicans and “blue dog” Democrats that stand in the way of anything that might benefit the common person unless it gives one or more huge corporations a leg up… sorry, got carried away there). So that’s why I invented out mythical company, Bingleulu.  Just saying, there are several companies that face the problem of potentially having a real difficult time getting their content out to you if the big ISP’s start metering service, and those companies (any one of them individually, or a consortium of two or more) could come up with a solution.

What would you need to make this work?  Well, for starters, an extension to the HTML protocol, or some mechanism so that when you make a request, you will always get some response via your primary Internet connection, but if you have access to the BFP, the response might be, in effect, “get it off the BFP by looking for packets tagged with this ID”, followed by an ID string. In a well-designed system it would even send an estimated time to the start of the download, if there will be a significant delay.

Also, you’d need a receiver for the BFP – initially this could take the form of a card that would go into your computer, or (more likely) a USB-connected receiver, or possibly even a receiver that sits on your local network and can service several computers in your home or small business (something akin to a HDHomeRun® type device).  The receiver should have connections for both a satellite dish LNB, and a regular TV antenna. Note that initially, a company that wants to do this could implement half of this system (the satellite half) just by designing the system and then leasing bandwidth on a Ku-band satellite (Ku usually requires dishes of about two feet up to one meter in diameter for reliable reception, but I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of unused space on Ku-band satellites these days), then wait and see if the FCC will allow them to obtain the bandwidth in the broadcast spectrum.

Some additional things to consider:

First, it’s very likely that sooner or later there would be more than one BFP.  This might be because “spot beams” would be used to increase capacity, or simply because you’d need additional satellites to cover other parts of the world (such as Hawaii and Guam) if this catches on.  So when the system is designed, it need to have some way to know which satellite feed or terrestrial transmitter the receiver is receiving, and if there is more than one BFP, to return the requested data on the correct one.

Second, there may be special considerations for certain types of broadband connections.  For example, what if the requester is using another type of satellite provider (WildBlue, HughesNet, etc.)? Do you try to avoid sending the request back that way (because it might trip a usage cap) or do you treat it like a normal broadband connection (where smaller, less popular, and “immediate gratification wanted” files would sometimes be sent back through the normal connection)?

Third, once we get into the area of live streams, those can eat bandwidth quickly (particularly high-definition quality video streams!).  Unless you have a LOT of bandwidth, you can only carry a certain number of those in real time, so how do you decide which ones?  Do you compress them (and sacrifice quality) during times of congestion? One thing to note – unlike what happens with your cable company, if no one has requested a particular stream, it wouldn’t be sent.  EVERYTHING sent on the BFP is sent in response to an actual request by at least one user.

Fourth, let’s suppose several broadcasters jump on this as a delivery mechanism and now, suddenly, you don’t have enough capacity, but then your satellite provider and/or the FCC manages to find you more bandwidth – but now nobody has receivers that will tune the new bandwidth.  Should receivers be designed from the outset to be tunable over a much larger range than what’s actually used at the start of the service? Seems to me that any service like this should be designed from the get-go with the idea that more bandwidth will be needed, and possibly available, at some point in the future, and that receivers in particular should be electronically reconfigureable to tune any additional bandwidth that may become available. I might even suggest that it should be possible to connect a DiSEQc switch to the receiver, so that if the time ever comes that multiple satellites are used, it will be possible to switch between the satellites.

I’m just tossing this idea out there, to see if anyone else thinks it might be a good idea.  With the economy as it is, there are several of the older-style Ku-band communications satellites that have a fair chunk of unused spectrum space available, and I can tell you from personal experience that in most places a two-foot dish will get you a very adequate signal, and a three-foot dish will get you excellent reception (at least for Free-To-Air television reception). As long as people don’t let idiot installers mount the dish on their roof (making it nearly impossible to use a broom to clean off the snow in the winter), a delivery system that uses now-vacant bandwidth on Ku-band satellites should be quite workable, and even affordable.

If you stop and think about it, the most efficient use of spectrum space would be if the entire broadcast radio and TV spectrum, and all of the satellites, transmitted nothing but the BFP data stream.  Television networks and local stations would simply be data streams.  The BFP could even be smart enough to send you the network TV stream when you are watching a network program (and that network stream would only need to be transmitted once, as a single data stream) but when it comes time to show local commercials, there would be other streams for those, and the beauty is that everything could be configured to use a minimum of bandwidth (hopefully NOT by reducing the quality of the received signal, though) – for example, if Burger King buys the first local commercial spot in “Heroes” in 20 local TV markets, that commercial would only need to be streamed once and your receiver would be smart enough to know that you are supposed to get that commercial, even though people in other markets would be getting different streams. The advantage to viewers would be that you’d be getting the original data stream in full high definition direct from the network – no sub-optimal signals because your local station has crappy transmitting equipment, or is trying to cram three or four stations into one digital television signal.

Who would hate this idea?  The National Association of Buggywhip… er, I mean, the National Association of Broadcasters, who would be just fine with keeping the status quo (and in protecting local stations that in many cases don’t deserve it, particularly when they superimpose their damn useless weather radar graphics and similar useless crap over a network show!).  But if one of the big players really turned their most talented and creative people loose with this idea, it could totally change the way we distribute data in this country – and, as I say, pull the rug out from under those greedy bastards that want to start metering your data usage and charging you extra if they think you’re a “bandwidth hog” (here’s a great funny rebuttal to those morons, but don’t click there if you’re uptight about profanity).

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Killing the Golden Goose

November 25, 2009 at 3:35 pm · Filed under Broadband, cable, consumer, corporation, customer service, Editorial, government, Internet, invention, networking, Opinion, Wireless

I wonder how many folks saw this article yesterday on the Stop the Cap! site:

Cable Companies’ Big Internet Swindle: They Charge You $40 For Broadband That Costs Them $8 To Provide

I had sent this article to a friend and his response was, “if all these huge profit margins are true, then why is Charter in bankruptcy?” Well, a possible reason is that even what ought to be a hugely profitable company can be sunk by bad management and horrible customer service (and I have seen allegations of both with regard to Charter).  But in a way, Charter is the reason for this article. As I mentioned in a previous article,  Charter wants to move to what they call “consumption based billing.”

I just want to point out that while people may be slow to react, they are not stupid.  America is littered with the remains of once-great corporations that in their day were at the top of the heap, but then got greedy.  At one time, the American railroads controlled much of the country, especially the in the west.  It took a while, but shippers finally figured out that trucks were less expensive and more practical.  The thing is, the railroads at one time had all the advantages, including friends in government and economies of scale, but they just plain got greedy and priced themselves out of the market.

I’ve previously mentioned Western Union, which at one time owned electronic text-based communications within the U.S.A.  But even as they became more automated, moving away from guys pounding brass keys and into the age of teletypewriters, fax machines, and microwaves, they kept raising the per-word prices for telegrams. At the same time, the price of a phone call kept falling.  Had Western Uninion been a bit smarter, they might have been a major player in today’s world of electronic communications.

Then we have landline phone service.  While this is a bit of a unique story, since in part it’s a story of the landline business being cannibalized by the wireline side of the business, it still is an example of many customers finally getting sick to death of being overcharged for service.

So what do we have today? We have cable companies and phone companies that overcharge for service, particularly with regard to broadband and cable television. The cable companies complain that they are being practically held up at gunpoint by the broadcasters and content providers, who demand higher fees, and therefore they need to pss those fees onto customers – however, they won’t even consider the one easy solution that would virtually eliminate that problem – allowing customers to pick and choose the channels they want, rather than being forced to subscribe to tiers of channels they don’t want in order to get channels they do want.  If customers were allowed to vote with their wallets, a lot of the alleged extortion by content providers would quickly end.  Yet the cable companies fight the very idea of à la carte programming tooth and nail.

As for metered billing for broadband – it’s totally unnecessary and it leaves customers open to possible fraud by the provider (this is sometimes even a problem with utilities where you can physically see the meter, so how much more of a problem will it be when the meter exists only in software, and customers have no possible way to check the accuracy of that meter).

But what I see here is a convergence of a “perfect storm” that’s going to totally reshape communications in the U.S.A. Here are a few, somewhat related points:

  • Many other countries, particularly our competitors in Asia, are providing far higher broadband speeds to their customers, at a lower monthly rate.  Only so much of that can be explained by population density; I think a larger part is that in many of those countries it’s just not socially nor politically acceptable for companies to exhibit unbridled greed, and to gouge their customers for every penny they can get. The U.S.A. simply cannot afford to have its citizens giving up their broadband connections to avoid being gouged.
  • The much-hated Universal Service Fund should be abolished, but instead it’s going to be expanded to include broadband.  However, the possible silver lining is that any time the government doles out money, it gains more control.  If the government used that control in a beneficial manner — by, for example, imposing network neutrality and a prohibition on metered billing on those companies that receive USF subsidies — it could nip some of these gouging attempts in the bud.  That’s not a long-term solution, however, since those regulations can and do change depending on the party in power.
  • It looks like competitive broadband providers are finally going to be allowed to use “white space” (e.g. unoccupied television channels) to provide wireless service.  If the FCC can make sure that smaller providers get a fair shake, this could allow competitive wireless providers to offer broadband service at reasonable rates (note to such providers – PLEASE don’t assume your users will be happy with an upload speed only one-tenth of download speed.  People want to make and share thir own content, and you should allow them to do that without making them die of boredom).
  • Also, when the large cable and DSL companies start gouging their customers, it creates a market for all available competitive services delivered via more traditional means (competitive DSL, current-technology wireless, etc.)
  • Then there is “the ‘x’ factor” (see below).

What do I mean by “the ‘x’ factor”? I mean the new technology that’s not been fully explored yet.  Technology doesn’t stand still, and there may be a breakthrough soon that will cause all existing technologies to essentially become obsolete. Have you ever noticed that the SETI project, and other attempts to “tune in” to advanced civilizations “out there” haven’t met with any success? Maybe that’s because the aliens aren’t using old-fashioned radio waves. Our current forms of electromagnetic radiation are very inefficient and often, very power-hungry. I suspect that the world of quantum physics is going to provide us something much better, if our governments will allow it.

For example, Google “quantum entanglement” – now suppose there were a way to place two particles in a state of entanglement, such that when you change the state of one particle, the other changes instantaneously, withour regard even to the speed of light limitation on traditional electronic communications.  Imagine that you had a box at your ISP, and a companion box at your location, and each box contained two (or more) matched pairs of entangled particles (probably in some kind of plug-in module) – at least one pair of particles for transmitting data, the other for receiving.  These boxes wouldn’t use radio waves or the electromagnetic spectrum, so there would be no bandwidth limitations to worry about.  Furthermore, communications would be totally secure, because only the entangled particles would communicate with each other. That last part is why some governments would hate it – no more intercepting data mid-stream. But if that principle were developed commercially, your ISP could be on the moon for all you’d care, running off solar power and providing communications for half the planet – and if they started gouging their customers, someone else could set up a competing system, anywhere in the world. Maybe you could set one up in your basement, if you wanted to.

Sure, it sounds farfetched now – but so did the whole idea of radio before it was developed. We’re not talking some nebulous idea here, “quantum entanglement” is now a known principle of quantum physics. It’s just so new that either it hasn’t been commercially developed yet (much like the laser in the middle of the 20th century), or it’s being used in secret for totally secure communications, and the governments that are using it would rather you (and their enemies) didn’t know, not that there’s much an enemy could do about it.

My point here is that if today’s communications companies want to be around for the next revolution in technology (which will surely bring about opportunities that haven’t even been considered yet – who could have envisioned the opportunities the World Wide Web would create?), they had better re-think their ideas about alienating their customers. Sadly, American companies are notorious for not thinking ahead – as long as the current C.E.O. gets his golden parachute when he retires, what does he care what happens to the company in the future?  But the stockholders ought to care, and customers ought to care, and the government ought to care if they don’t want America to become a third-rate nation.

It will be interesting to see which companies survive the next few decades, and which ones kill the golden goose to get the immediate big windfall. But if I had to take service from one or the other, I’d rather get it from the one that plans on being around for the next century, and treats their customers accordingly.

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60 Minutes Australia: Mobile Phones Cause Cancer

May 14, 2009 at 9:11 pm · Filed under Wireless

If you use a cell phone frequently (or have kids that live on one), you really should watch these!

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In a Twitter

January 4, 2009 at 8:05 pm · Filed under consumer, corporation, customer service, Twitter, Wireless

There are many reasons I don’t blog much anymore, but one of the reasons was that when I did post something it was rare to get any comments, and the ones that I did get were sometimes more negative than I cared for.  But also, very often I found myself writing a paragraph or two just to say, in effect, “I found this article on another site, you should check it out.”

In the last few months I have been posting most of my links to other articles on Twitter (under the user name MichiganTelepho – damn their 15 character limit) and this tends to work out well because it discourages me from being too verbose, and yet I am far more likely to post a link when I don’t have to write a long article about it.

That’s worked pretty well until tonight, when I posted a link to this article:

The high cost of high-tech teens

…..which is basically an article about how parents are getting cell phones for their kids, totally unaware of the pitfalls of extra charges for texting and other “extras”, some of which are buried in the fine print of the contract. I thought it was a good article because it educates parents about the problem and encourages them to act responsibly (by, for example, not getting a cell phone for a child until they have reached an age where they can use it responsibly).

Now, keep in mind, it was just a link to an article I thought was interesting and useful.  I didn’t write it.  I was, therefore,  not prepared for the responses I started to get.  For example, one of the early commenters said:

is this really a consumeraffairs type issue? It seems to me that the parents have no one to blame but themselves..

Uh, what?  Where did that come from? Then another person chimed in…

Hard for me to feel sorry for parents who give their kids mobile phones and not understand the consequences. Prepaid FTW!

I could not understand where these comments were coming from.  The article was intended to educate parents so they would not be irresponsible.  On the other hand, I do feel that the carriers share some of the blame by failing to conspicuously disclose the things that might cause extra charges, and  by (in some cases) failing to give parents an easy way to block access to those extra-cost services.  I also noted that as adults become smarter about corporate ripoffs, corporations are increasingly going after teenagers and pre-teens, knowing that they are not as wise to the ways of the world and can be more easily influenced to spend, spend, spend (particularly if the parents are picking up the bill – which they shouldn’t, which was one of the points made in the article).

In any case, things got a bit heated after that. Why was I getting all these negative comments about an article I thought was helpful?  And where was this “blame the victim” mentality coming from? My take is that many parents only use their cell phones (if they own one at all) for making phone calls, and that’s it.  They are, in many cases, totally clueless about text messages, charges for web access and so on.  If you are reading this blog you are almost certainly not among those people, but they are out there – maybe they are your parents or grandparents. So when their child asks for a phone, they think they are buying a phone that can be used for, you know, making phone calls, as in voice calls.  And very often the phone companies sell usage plans but do not explain about possible extra charges that may be incurred, so the parent is totally blindsided when they get their first bill.  I don’t think this is right at all, and yes, I do think that people have a right to complain about such things on consumer sites, if only so that others might read their experience and not fall victim to the scam.

Maybe I just don’t understand the ways of Twitter, but it seems to me that if someone posts an article they thought was helpful, and you disagree, you should post your disagreement as a comment on the original article – not go off on a tangent in Twitter, which just seems like an attack on the person who posted the link to article (especially if you send it as a direct message to that person).  Then again, at my age maybe I just don’t understand how these social network things are supposed to work.  Maybe I’m looking for something more akin to “60 Minutes” and the younger crowd is expecting “Jerry Springer.”  Anyway, at one point I got really pissed off at the tone of the comments, to the point that I un-friended two people (after taking a few deep breaths I re-friended one of them). Is Twitter really supposed to bring about that type of discussion?

For the record, when I post a link to an article I did not personally write in Twitter, that simply means I thought it worthy of consideration, NOT that I want to defend it against people who have nothing better to do than find something negative to post!  And, also for the record, I am NOT advocating irresponsible parenting, and parents should not yield to pressure to buy kids everything they want – but on the other hand I am sick of the “blame the victim” mentality when corporations set out to deceive and cheat customers. There is a mentality among some younger folks that I just don’t understand, that basically says it’s okay to cheat people if you are clever enough about it, or can trick them into signing a contract that allows you to cheat them.  I have no idea when this mentality became so pervasive – sure, the P.T. Barnum types have always been with us, but in the past they were more often seen as scoundrels. Today’s young people seem to have a much higher tolerance for being taken, but when someone complains about it their first response seems to be “It was your fault!  You should have known!” – at least until they are the victim.

Anyway, I hope Twitter doesn’t degenerate into a Fidonet-type experience (for those too young to have experienced it, Fidonet was a network of dial-up BBS systems that carried “echomail” conferences, in which discussions often became so contentious that some people took to calling it “Fight-O-Net”).  If you disagree with an article that someone posted, first please be sure you have read the entire article (I suspect that the people who commented on the link I posted hadn’t got past the first page) and then place your comments in the comment section for that article, if a comment section exists.  Don’t direct message the person who posted the link and start attacking them – they didn’t write the article and may not even care to defend it.  If you must comment on Twitter, just send out a general message that says something like “I just read the article at (short link address) and disagree because…” – that way the person who posted the link doesn’t feel obliged to return a comment. Keep it friendly, and you won’t be causing people’s blood pressure to shoot through the roof!

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The NEW way phone companies gouge customers – SMS charges

January 23, 2008 at 12:15 pm · Filed under consumer, Wireless ·Tagged , , ,

Engadget notes:

If you’ve been paying attention to mobile carriers’ SMS pricing lately (and something tells us you haven’t) you’d be surprised to discover a fairly disturbing trend amongst providers: price hikes. ….. What’s most insidious about the inflated costs is the fact that SMS data is particularly low-bandwidth, and analysts say that the price increases aren’t related to higher operating costs — these companies are simply gouging customers for a service which they have embraced.

See the full story here:
Cell phone bill on the rise? Check your SMS charges – Engadget

It has always struck me as odd, and somewhat repugnant, that there should be any charge at all for these short messages – as Engadget notes, they use next to zero bandwidth compared with the bandwidth taken up by voice traffic.  You wouldn’t pay a per-message charge to use instant messaging on your computer, yet some folks will pay these ridiculous charges on their cell phones. What’s even more insidious about this is that a primary group of users is kids (teenagers), who send messages to each other simply for social purposes – which means that if a parent cuts their kids off from using the service, it could potentially have a somewhat negative social impact.  In such cases the cost causer (the teenager) is often not the one who pays the bills – it’s the parents (of course this is not always the case, but it probably happens in enough families that the phone companies make a tidy profit).  I have to wonder how willing the kids are to text with wild abandon, when the charges are coming out of the money they have earned at a summer job?

A decade ago, the phone companies gouged us on long distance charges – now that those are going the way of the dodo, I guess they feel they have to gouge us however they can, while they can.  Because of course, as wireless broadband becomes more ubiquitous (giving customers access to services like AIM, ICQ, GTalk, etc.), the need for the phone company’s SMS service will all but disappear – and none too soon, in my opinion!

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Petoskey News-Review: Making connections: Some eye regional cooperative to expand broadband availability

January 18, 2008 at 12:54 pm · Filed under Broadband, Wireless ·Tagged , , ,

Those of us who live in places where there are two or more choices for broadband access may sometimes forget that there are large areas of Michigan where no broadband access is available.  The people who live in those areas, however, are getting tired of waiting for the phone and cable companies to hook them up, and are exploring other options:

This week, many potential stakeholders met in Gaylord to consider a new regional approach to broadband expansion.

Internet providers, public officials and economic development and information technology professionals were among the 100 or so people gathering at the University Center Wednesday.

Three dozen or so volunteered to be part of an exploratory committee, which will consider possibilities for forming a regional broadband cooperative.

Counties tentatively proposed for the cooperative’s service area include Emmet, Charlevoix, Cheboygan, Otsego, Antrim, Kalkaska, Crawford, Oscoda, Alcona, Alpena, Montmorency and Presque Isle.

“A cooperative is a business that’s owned and controlled by the people who use its services,” U.S. Department of Agriculture representative Traci Smith said. “This cooperative allows them to purchase their supplies at a lower rate than they would otherwise.”

Read the full story here:
Petoskey News-Review – News – Making connections: Some eye regional cooperative to expand broadband availability

I hope this works out – if the phone and cable companies are dragging their feet in bringing high speed connectivity to certain areas, then other options are needed.  Actually, this is true even in areas where you wouldn’t think it should be a problem to get broadband.  I’m aware of a situation in northern Muskegon County where some folks want broadband but can’t get it – they are too far from the Verizon central office, and they are on a side road that’s between two main roads, each of which is served by a different cable company, and neither of those companies has run cable down their road.  A strange situation but frustrating for them, and I’ve heard other stories of people who are just beyond reach of the cable lines, and the cable companies refuse to extend their lines (or won’t do it unless the customer pays a fee roughly equal to the local branch manager’s annual salary).

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Why hidden fees are a big deal – Gotcha Capitalism

January 15, 2008 at 11:34 pm · Filed under cable, consumer, customer service, DSL, Regulation, satellite television, Telephone, VoIP, Wireless

FINALLY the major media is starting to see this as a problem, though I fear this will not stay on their radar long.  The following is an excerpt from the book “Gotcha Capitalism: How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day and What You Can Do About It” by Bob Sullivan, as posted on MSNBC’s site:

When I was a child growing up just outside New York City during the 1970s, I learned to be afraid of getting mugged. But this is not that. The criminals I’m talking about don’t bop anyone over the head and steal hundreds of dollars. These criminals slowly take $5, $10, and $20 from me, often with a smile. They pop a surcharge onto my monthly phone bill. They pad my TV bill with services I didn’t ask for. They drain my bank account — drip, drip, drip — when I’m not watching. These hidden fees keep me up late at night like the sound of a leaky faucet. I feel like I have to watch everything all the time, because it’s so easy to miss some statement on some form with some asterisk that means the company can take even more money from me. And when that happens, I suffer from what I call small print rage.

Read a much larger excerpt here:
Why hidden fees are a big deal – Gotcha Capitalism- msnbc.com

Mr. Sullivan has figured out that these sneaky fees are costing the average American $946 a year. In another article at MSNBC’s site he has listed ten tips to avoid sneaky fees and demand fair treatment. Readers of this blog may find tips 3, 4, 9, and 10 especially interesting and enlightening.

You want to know what I think?  Personally, I think that the companies and executives that come up with these fees … well, let’s just say that I’d really like to tell you what I think of them, but there might be minors reading this, and I don’t think I could truly express how I feel about them in any manner that would be acceptable in a blog intended for readers of all ages.

BroadbandReports.com also mentioned the above article. They’ve been great about shining the spotlight on companies that engage in this type of false advertising, and I hope they continue to do so.  The problem is that a lot of people post their gripes in their forums, when they should be sending their complaints to their state Attorney General or Public Service Commission. If you’tre going to complain in a forum, you might as well save yourself the effort of typing your complaint, and just call up one of your siblings, or go out on the street and find someone to complain to – it will have about the same effect. People, please, stop just putting up with corporations stealing from you.  Would you let someone walk into your home and smile as they carted off your possessions, or took a few bills out of your wallet or purse? Heck, would you let your kids do that? Then why do you let big corporations do it to you, without a word of protest?

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MSN Money (and other sources): Cell-phone spending surpasses land lines in US

December 19, 2007 at 4:24 pm · Filed under consumer, Telephone, Wireless ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

I’ve been saying this was coming for quite some time now.

“What were finding is theres a huge move of people giving up their land line service altogether and using cell phones exclusively,” said Allyn Hall, consumer research director for market research firm In-Stat.

Full story here:
Cell-phone spending surpasses land lines in US – MSN Money

This was all over the news yesterday so I’m probably late to the party in reporting it, but I will just say that in my opinion the wireline phone companies have brought this on themselves. The ones with the most to lose are the small rural telephone companies that have traditionally ripped off their customers, either by charging high rates, having minuscule local calling areas, or providing a quality of service that’s barely above tin cans and string (all three in some cases). But even the larger ones have not understood that there’s no good reason a typical customer should pay $25 or more for a basic landline with no extra “custom calling” features, and with a relatively small local calling area. In other words, they price their services as if they’re living about 40 years in the past.

I know they’d be quick to say that maintaining all that “outside plant” costs money, particularly with the rising price of copper. But then, that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense to run a copper pair to every home anymore. If you must run a wire, it should have a lot of capacity (which at the very least means coaxial cable), but the real answer for the 21st century is fiber to every home, so that you can deliver HDTV, near-unlimited broadband, voice and video personal communications (without the 3000 Hz bandwidth limitation of a traditional wireline circuit), and whatever else may be coming down the pike. Copper pairs are 19th century technology (they used ‘em back in the telegraph era!).

Then there’s the matter of phone company accounting. Here’s the way a typical phone company executive thinks: When a phone switch starts showing its age, buy a new one, an expensive one, and plan on it lasting for at least 15 years (was 30 years not so long ago). Collect revenue from all the customers served by that switch and it pays for the switch many times over, plus you get to go before the Public Service Commission and claim your costs are so high because you have to buy these expensive switches, in order to justify a rate increase. Oh, and even though the switch comes loaded with features that don’t cost you a penny extra, you break these out and sell them individually to your customers, at a few bucks a month for a limited bundle of services. Hmmm, wonder why a customer might prefer a cell phone with no long distance charges and all features included?

What they should be doing in this day and age is buying cheap switches, and figuring on replacing or upgrading them every 3-5 years tops. There are probably small companies that could serve all their customers off of one or more PC’s running Asterisk. Then give the customers all the features bundled in the switch, and nationwide local calling. When cables go bad, remove them and replace them with good wireless technology, perhaps a wireless mesh network system mounted on power poles, or better yet, run fiber to all the homes in their service area and offer broadband and video services. And stop looking for ever increasing government handouts and subsidies, and stop trying to game the system with termination fee ripoffs – you need those other companies to complete your customers’ calls as much as they need you.

But traditional phone companies just don’t think that way – it’s not in their corporate DNA. And that is why this tipping point is upon us. It would not surprise me if in about five years, wireline penetration is at about the 20% level, and the majority of new wirelines installed will be in businesses (and even they will often opt to go with alternative offerings).

Actually, I think there’s one major thing that’s still propping up the wireline business, and Google could solve that problem in about a week if they put their mind to it. It’s the phone book. Fewer people use it nowadays, preferring to go online to look up a business or individual listing. The problem is that all the online “Directory Assistance” services get their numbers from the phone companies, and also, if you are looking for a local company (to do repair work on your home, for example), there are few sites that will let you search for a business geographically (so you can find one in your local area) AND that will then give you comprehensive information about the company. What we need is a good, easy to use, online equivalent of the white and yellow pages, that makes it easy for people to list their own home and business phone numbers, and particularly their cell phone numbers. Google is the first company that comes to mind that could pull this off without breaking a sweat – after all, indexing and searching is what they do.

Imagine being able to go to Google and type in “Find me a local plumber” (or something of that nature) and seeing a list of all the plumbers within a 25 mile radius, including a short summary of their services and a link to their web site OR “yellow pages” equivalent hosted at Google itself. In other words, don’t make me search all over the web, or go to web pages that haven’t been updated since 1995 – if I want to see a list of local plumbers I want a page with their name, address, phone number, and ad (or at least a summary) all on one page. If they have more to tell me than what can be put in a summary, let me get to their full ad or web site in one click.  I know companies have been working on things like this – YellowBook comes to mind – but the primary failing of such services is they usually have no mechanism for people or businesses to add their own listings (which could be especially useful for cell phone users, or customers of certain CLEC’s).  And besides that, none at present have the ubiquity of Google – when you want to search for something, which search server comes to mind first?

It’s the phone company lock on the traditional phone book that probably keeps a lot of businesses with the traditional wireline company – for now. But here’s the thing to keep in mind – cell phone users generally do not carry a printed telephone book around with them! As the phone book becomes less important, so will business wirelines.  Why do you think the phone companies now deliver a phone book to every home in their service area, even to homes that have no wireline phone service.  In my area we get phone books from AT&T, Verizon, and YellowBook, plus one or two other smaller publishers, and these are distributed to every home in the area regardless of what sort of communications service the home may or may not have. And I am lucky if I use one of these even once a month.  There are times when I need a certain service, and having all the local listings on one page (or a few pages) is invaluable, but lately I’ve found that if a business includes a web address I’ll go to their page and check it out (mind you, this sometimes works against them, because I see something that leads me to believe that business probably charges more for their services than I want to pay – but at least I have more information that I get in the printed phone book ad).  So do I really need a printed book? At the present time, yes, but it’s far less important to me than it was five years ago.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to ramble on, but I think we either have reached, or are very close to reaching the “tipping point” for the demise of wireline phone service.  Ask Western Union (if you can still find them) how fast a service can fall out of favor with the public when something better comes along.

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Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers

December 6, 2007 at 4:28 pm · Filed under AT&T, consumer, Wireless ·Tagged , ,

Is AT&T really going to open up their cellular network? If you’re a reader of USA Today you might believe that, but Cynthia Brumfield of IP Democracy offers a different take:

USA Today’s Leslie Cauley has this puzzling piece today that carries the headline “AT&T flings cellphone network wide open.” Say what? Just like that AT&T is following in Verizon’s footstep by allowing any application, any device to work on its network?

Ms. Brumfield isn’t quite buying it yet…

For one thing, as Ryan Block notes, this is a PR game by the nations top mobile provider. AT&T is no more open today than it was yesterday. What AT&T means by “open” is that you can take your SIM subscriber identification module card out of your AT&T phone and plop it into any non-AT&T phone and run on AT&Ts network.

Full article here:
IP Democracy: AT&T is Open??? I Need More Information Here

We certainly welcome any willingness by wireless carriers to open up their networks, but we seen one to many cases of telecommunications companies appearing to promise the moon, and then when you read the fine print you’re lucky if you get a couple shovelfuls of comet dust.   We’re still waiting for the “Naked DSL” that AT&T has promised (as a condition of the AT&T/BellSouth merger) – some say it actually is available (in certain parts of the country, and maybe then only if you know exactly how to order it), but here in Michigan it seems to be a hard thing to come by. So I’m naturally inclined to wonder if AT&T will actually only open their network to customers willing to go the extra mile, and jump through a series of hoops in order to use an unlocked device (and yes, I wonder the same thing about Verizon).

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Some cold water on Verizon’s ‘Any Apps, Any Device’ Option announcement?

November 29, 2007 at 12:06 am · Filed under consumer, Verizon, Wireless ·Tagged , , ,

Following up on the earlier report of Verizon’s announcement, some folks might think that we should know not to expect too much from a big telephone company. Karl, in an article at BroadbandReports.com noted the following:

Silicon Alley Insider‘s Dan Frommer was one of only a few writers who seemed to get what this announcement was really about — the injection of a per-byte billing model into consumer consciousness:

Some people think this will open the door to devices running new services, like free Internet phone service or video calling. But Verizon (VZ) has no intention of turning itself into dumb pipe. You can expect service plans for non-Verizon phones to include data-network fees based on usage — meaning those “free” calls could cost a bundle.

(Read the complete article)

And Erick Schonfeld, in an article on the TechCrunch web site, made this observation:

Verizon’s newfound openness when it comes to its wireless network is not all that open after all. As I reported yesterday, Verizon Wireless announced that it would allow “any device” and “any app” to operate on its existing network. But that is not exactly so.

By “any device” Verizon means you can bring any CDMA device to its network. Verizon has a CDMA network, so only CDMA phones will work on it—fair enough. It was always clear about that. But what exactly does it mean by “any app”? I dug a little deeper and asked Verizon whether any of the new apps developed for the bring-your-own devices would also be available to its existing customers who bought their phones through Verizon. The answer for now is, “No.” Although a spokesperson tells me that they are looking into it. Unless it figures that out, Verizon is not really building an open network. It is building a two-tiered network: One for its preferred customers who play by its rules (i.e., its current 64 million subscribers), and one for the rabble not satisfied with its choice of phones and apps.

That complete article is here.

Right now, of course, it’s all speculation to some degree – after all, this option probably won’t be available for about a year, and I suspect that at the moment nothing about the upcoming offering is cast in concrete.  Indeed, the press release itself may have been put out with the intent of gauging the reaction from both potential customers and competitors.  If the competitors react to the announcement by offering truly open networks, then Verizon will likely feel obligated to do the same.

One other thing I will point out is that nothing will kill an otherwise great service quicker than per-byte billing.  I have probably said it a thousand times in my life, but people just hate having meters running when they use a service – and in particular, they hate invisible meters.  What I mean by that is, any situation where you have to trust the company doing the metering to bill accurately, with virtually no way to verify that they are doing so.  Customers don’t mind electric and natural gas meters because those are attached to our homes, and if we ever suspect they are faulty, we can turn off the main circuit breaker or shut off the main gas valve and see if the meter is still registering anything.

With metered telephone service or broadband service (wired or wireless), we don’t have even that level of comfort.  If we don’t have flat-rate service, then we’re supposed to accept a bill from a company that would profit by inflating the usage a bit, and that (in most cases) has a bit of a reputation for not always dealing fairly with customers.  People have accepted metered billing when there is no other option available for a particular type of service (though not everyone does – some simply choose to do without the service) but quite often, the moment a company with a flat rate offering comes along, customers tell the company with the metered offering where they can shove it (unless the flat rate option is significantly higher in price than what they are currently paying for the metered service).

Verizon can choose to implement their offering in a manner that is truly customer-friendly, and win the loyalty of customers for perhaps decades to come.  Or they can try to impose hidden charges and limitations on service, so that customer expectations are dashed, and their customers start looking for another company to do business with.  Maybe Verizon has seen the light, and finally understands that Lily Tomlin’s old line (as Ernestine the operator), “We don’t care, we don’t have to – we’re the phone company!” is not the way to do business anymore.  They really need to care what their customers think about them, and if they understand that, they won’t try any funny stuff.  If they don’t understand that, it will be a public relations disaster.  Stay tuned and see what happens!

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Verizon Wireless To Introduce ‘Any Apps, Any Device’ Option For Customers In 2008

November 28, 2007 at 1:07 am · Filed under consumer, Verizon, Wireless ·Tagged , , ,

Excerpt from a Verizon press release:

BASKING RIDGE, NJ — Verizon Wireless today announced that it will provide customers the option to use, on its nationwide wireless network, wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company. Verizon Wireless plans to have this new choice available to customers throughout the country by the end of 2008.

In early 2008, the company will publish the technical standards the development community will need to design products to interface with the Verizon Wireless network. Any device that meets the minimum technical standard will be activated on the network. Devices will be tested and approved in a $20 million state-of-the-art testing lab which received an additional investment this year to gear up for the anticipated new demand. Any application the customer chooses will be allowed on these devices.

This new option goes beyond just a change in the design, delivery, purchase, and provisioning of wireless devices and applications.

“This is a transformation point in the 20-year history of mass market wireless devices – one which we believe will set the table for the next level of innovation and growth,” said Lowell McAdam, Verizon Wireless president and chief executive officer. “Verizon Wireless is not changing our successful retail model, but rather adding an additional retail option for customers looking for a different wireless experience.”

The press release actually goes on for several more paragraphs, which you can read if you want to see a corporation pat itself on the back, but I think you get the gist of it:

Verizon Wireless To Introduce ‘Any Apps, Any Device’ Option For Customers In 2008

This is definitely a sudden about-face for Verizon, but we hope other wireless carriers will take note and do likewise. People in Europe and other parts of the world have long had the freedom to do exactly what Verizon will finally allow its customers to do in a little over a year from now. However, if you’re a customer of one of those other U.S. wireless carriers, you may have to wait a little longer – or maybe not.

Edit: Rich Tehrani also covered this on his blog, and had some interesting comments on this announcement.

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No love for Verizon in The Consumerist today

November 13, 2007 at 10:03 pm · Filed under Broadband, consumer, DSL, Verizon, Wireless ·Tagged , , , , , ,

The Consumerist had not one, but two articles about Verizon today. The best one contained an embedded video, in which a guy phoned up Verizon Wireless fifty-six times to ask two basic questions about their rates. Take a guess as to what percentage of the time he received the correct answer, then see how close you came to guessing right.

And in the other article, they note that Verizon has changed their terms of service for DSL customers. Now, they claim, they have the right to disconnect your DSL and offer you FiOS in its place. While many users would be thrilled to death if they could even get FiOS (although, as The Consumerist notes, you might want to keep a working fire extinguisher handy during the install), there are folks that are happy with plain old DSL. That might be particularly true of customers who took advantage of Verizon’s recent promotion that offered a fixed price for life for a very basic tier of DSL service (more commentary on this issue at DSLreports.com).

Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I will say that I would not assume that just because a company sticks something in their Terms of Service document, they can automatically make it stick. If that were the case, some company would doubtless try to sneak in something to the effect that once you’ve been signed up for their service for a year, you must give them the contents of your bank account, your home, and your firstborn child. Even if only a few people didn’t bother to read the ToS, a shady company could make out pretty well doing that. But the reason nobody does that is because courts won’t enforce unconscionable contract terms. I don’t know if a “sleeper” provision in a ToS document that could effectively force a customer to upgrade to a more expensive service just because Verizon happens to choose to install the fiber on their street would be considered unconscionable or not, but it would not surprise me if some court somewhere had a real problem with the idea of forcing customers to take the more expensive service, even when there’s no technical reason why Verizon could not keep providing DSL.

Of course, it may be that Verizon has no intention of enforcing this right away, but the day may come when the copper in those old cables is more valuable when sold at the scrapyard than when used to provide phone and DSL service to the one old codger in town that still refuses to upgrade, despite the fact that all his neighbors moved to FiOS (or some other alternative) many years previous. In other words, this provision may simply be there so that when they are finally ready to stop using copper wires altogether, they won’t have few diehard DSL users holding them back. There might be a good reason to think that could be a problem – after all, when the phone companies finally stopped offering party lines, you’d be surprised how many older folks threw a fit because they’d have to pay a buck or two more a month for a private line!

Edit (November 14): DSLReports.com has communicated with a Verizon spokesperson about this issue.

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