Cell Phone Service Remains Weak

KTRE ^ | 1/12/04

[_Jim]

... Cingular has great ones.

AT&T has the most complaints on file of any cell phone network.

That makes some sense - AT&T bought the rights to the old McCaw Cellular and Linn Broadcasting interests in a whole bunch of A-band cellular properties around the county back in the nineties -

Whereas Cingular (who was Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems until the name change) was a product of the wireline (Bell/SouthWesternBell/BellSouth etc) or "B" band system.

Sprint just has lousy network engineering/ops department I'd say ..

[Tax-chick]

AT&T has the most complaints on file of any cell phone network.

So of course that's what we have :-). I've always been happy with their regular telephone service, and their dial-up ISP was fine, too, but the cell phone is crummy.

[Orange1998]

I have Cingular here in Houston it works great. I really like the fast forward feature. I get all of my calls on the land line for no cost.

[Orange1998]

Whereas Cingular (who was Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems until the name change

I had Cingular for many years the previous company name was Houston Cellular.

[_Jim]

Another excerpt - some of these guys are working together/own each other or are providing service to their customers through each other's physical networks I would say:

(e) Affiliations

53. Three of the nationwide operators also have extended their coverage through contractual affiliations with smaller carriers.

These affiliations create a "family" of operating companies with much closer relationships than those formed by traditional roaming agreements. All of these affiliations were established to accelerate the build-out of the larger companies' networks by granting smaller affiliates the exclusive right to offer mobile services for those companies, in some cases under the larger companies' brand names, in selected mid-sized and smaller markets.(195)

54. AT&T Wireless - The AT&T Wireless family consists of AT&T Wireless, as well as its affiliations with two companies:

• Triton PCS and
• Edge Wireless, LLC ("Edge").(196)

In the case of Triton PCS, AT&T Wireless sold portions of some of its broadband PCS licenses to the company in exchange for a minority ownership interest.(197)

While Triton PCS is marketed under the brand name SunCom198 and Edge is marketed under its own name, both companies provide service as a "Member of the AT&T Wireless Network." These affiliates, like AT&T Wireless, have committed to upgrading their TDMA networks to GSM/GPRS.

55. Nextel - The Nextel family consists of Nextel and Nextel Partners, Inc. ("Nextel Partners").

In an arrangement similar to that of AT&T Wireless with its affiliates, in 1999, Nextel sold some of its SMR licenses to Nextel Partners in exchange for a minority ownership interest in the company.201

Nextel Partners is building out an iDEN network compatible with Nextel's, and Nextel assists Nextel Partners in obtaining terms similar to those Nextel receives from vendors for equipment and services.202 Both Nextel and Nextel Partners market their services under the Nextel brand name.

56. Sprint PCS - The Sprint PCS family consists of Sprint PCS and 10 affiliates.(203)

Each of the affiliates has an agreement with Sprint PCS to use the latter's PCS licenses to deploy CDMA technology and Sprint PCS-branded service in specific areas of the country.

In return, Sprint PCS receives 8 percent of the affiliates' local service revenue. In addition, Sprint PCS performs back-office tasks at cost for most of its affiliates, giving them the benefits of economies of scale for billing and customer service. Sprint PCS affiliates now provide service to more than 2.5 million subscribers.

Footnotes:

(195) See, e.g., Nextel, Automatic and Manual Roaming Obligations Pertaining to Commercial Mobile Radio Services, WT Docket No. 00-193, Comments, at note 20 (filed Jan. 5, 2001) ("To facilitate rapid deployment of its network throughout suburban, tertiary and rural areas of the country and move towards more ubiquitous nationwide service, Nextel entered into an agreement with Nextel Partners . . . to construct iDEN coverage using Commission licensed frequencies disaggregated by Nextel to [Nextel Partners], and offering its services to the public under the Nextel brand according to strict service quality standards.").

(196) In addition, AT&T Wireless has close relationships with a number of other operators.

AT&T Wireless and Dobson own equal interests in a joint venture, ACC Acquisitions, LLC ("ACC"), which provides service primarily in rural and suburban areas of the midwestern and eastern United States.

Dobson Communications Corporation, SEC Form 10-K, Apr. 1, 2002, at 72. Dobson operates the ACC markets under the brand name Cellular One.

Dobson Communications Corporation, SEC Form 10-K, Apr. 1, 2002, at 3, 8. AT&T Wireless owns approximately 12 percent of Dobson.

On December 2002, as part of a license swap with Dobson, AT&T Wireless agreed to transfer to Dobson its shares of Dobson Series AA preferred stock, which AT&T Wireless Services purchased in

(197) AT&T Wireless owns 15.7 percent of Triton PCS and 40 percent of Edge. AT&T Wireless, FCC Form 602 (filed Mar. 10, 2003).

(203) Five are public companies and five are privately-held. Cannon Carr et al., Avoiding the Hotel California: An Equity /High Yield Wireless Weekly, CIBC World Markets, Apr. 7, 2003, at 4.

[_Jim]

"the previous company name was Houston Cellular."

From: http://www.dwightsilverman.com/sprint.htm

I'm seeing other connections between Houston Cellular - but not from Cingular -

- - - - - -

November 06, 1998, 09:19 p.m.

Sprint set for wireless inaugural
Company's towers sparked opposition
By DWIGHT SILVERMAN
Copyright 1998 Houston Chronicle


Sprint PCS plans to launch its digital wireless telephone service in Houston the week before Thanksgiving, bringing its reputation for aggressive marketing and cutthroat pricing to an already crowded local field.

...

But Sprint PCS, a joint venture between the long-distance giant and several cable television companies, may have come to the game too late in Houston to cause a commotion.

Sprint PCS will launch almost two years to the week since Primeco, one of the first digital-wireless providers, began serving customers in Houston. In November 1996, Dallas-based Primeco was the first new wireless-phone company in years, joining veterans Houston Cellular, GTE Mobilnet (now known as GTE Wireless) and Southwestern Bell, which resells GTE's service.

Today there are six players -- Houston Cellular, GTE, Southwestern Bell, Primeco, Aerial Communications and NexTel.


- - - -


From: http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~wlad/stamina/UStop10.html

I find:

City: Houston

A-band Houston Cellular (Lin/McCaw)
B-band GTE Mobilnet

Houston Cellular is a partnership between AT&T Wireless (previously McCaw Cellular) and Bell South Cellular Corp.

[_Jim]

Related article excerpt:

Switching Cell Phone Providers - Why Bother?

By Jay Lyman
Wireless NewsFactor
October 15, 2002 10:30AM

The factors wireless subscribers must consider -- in addition to sign-up fees and contract duration -- include when they use the service, whether they use long distance and, incredibly, whether they actually can converse with others on the carrier's network.

...

Paying for Performance

But Forrester senior analyst Charles Golvin told Wireless NewsFactor that quality of service is just as likely as price to be the impetus for change.

"They may be spurred by price or expiration of their contract," Golvin said. "Still, the number one thing, in terms of complaints, is the quality."

[Orange1998]

Houston Cellular is a partnership between AT&T Wireless

Houston Cellular was part of AT&T in some way but recently the name changed to Cingular.

[_Jim]

Recommended site - a presentation of the technology and driving force as well as history behind 'cellular' phone technology:

Cellular Telephone Basics: AMPS and Beyond

Cellular radio provides mobile telephone service by employing a network of cell sites distributed over a wide area.

A cell site contains a radio transceiver and a base station controller which manages, sends, and receives traffic from the mobiles in its geographical area to a cellular telephone switch. It also employs a tower and its antennas, and provides a link to the distant cellular switch called a mobile telecommunications switching office. This MTSO places calls from land based telephones to wireless customers, switches calls between cells as mobiles travel across cell boundaries, and authenticates wireless customers before they make calls.

Cellular uses a principle called frequency reuse to greatly increase customers served. Low powered mobiles and radio equipment at each cell site permit the same radio frequencies to be reused in different cells, multiplying calling capacity without creating interference. This spectrum efficient method contrasts sharply with earlier mobile systems that used a high powered, centrally located transmitter, to communicate with high powered car mounted mobiles on a small number of frequenices, channels which were then monopolized and not re-used over a wide area.

MUCH more - see link above.

[_Jim]

Houston Cellular was part of AT&T in some way but recently the name changed to Cingular.

Here's what happened - AT&T sold their share of Houston Cellular when they bought the PrimeCo PCS property:

AT&T owned 55 percent of Houston Cellular, but divested that stake when it acquired PrimeCo.

BellSouth, which owned the other 45 percent of Houston Cellular, bought out AT&T's share of the company.

Houston Cellular then became part of Cingular Wireless when that national company was created in January 2001.

From: http://houston.bizjournals.com/houston/stories/2001/10/08/story4.html

[eno_]

Depends on what you want:

Verizon for the best service in the U.S.
Nextel for the second-best, and/or if you like push-to-talk, and you don't care if the phones are a bit large and ugly.
AT&T if you want GSM and cute Nokia and Siemens handsets, and for portability to Europe.
If you travel to Europe a whole lot, and you want a plan that covers Europe and the U.S., and you don't mind really abysmal coverage in the U.S., T-Mobile.

I don't pay for my own phone, so I have no idea about pricing.

But the above are only true nationwide. If you want only service in and around your hometown, you have lots of choices, and criteria depends more on local service.

[eno_]

Sprint also chose an oddball combination of technologies: CDMA and J2ME (for phone-based applications). This limits their handset providers to those willing to do CDMA and to defy Qualcomm on BREW. But this only matters if you care about selection of handsets and about application (mainly games) availability.

[Myrddin]

I travel all over the U.S. A Verizon wireless CDMA cell phone (Kyocera 2235 or Kyocera 2325) with the America's Choice package covers me everywhere. There are very few places where I am out of my plan area. I also have the CDMA 1XRTT service so I can make an internet hookup to turn in my web-based timecard.

I avoid PCS service as it requires many more towers, thus you find it mostly in large metro areas and along major freeways. You lose service if you get off the main road.

GSM service is a European variant of TDMA with lots of standardized protocol services layered on top. Internet connectivity via GPRS packet is about 1/3 the speed of 1XRTT, but has the characteristic of being better interactively. 1XRTT works great for "bursty" activity like web browsing and file transfers. An interactive editor e.g. "vi" to a Linux host would be fine over GPRS and nightmarishly bursty over CDMA. Ditto for simple telnet sessions. If PCS coverage is bad, GSM is the absolute worst. Only a few major metro areas have it at this time. The single "nice" feature of GSM phones is the ability to move a "SIM" card from one cell phone to another. All your service account info is on the SIM card and manufacturers do a fairly decent job of adhering to a "one size fits all" on SIM cards.

[Orange1998]

I did not know it was convoluted. Appreicate the clarification so the next time I get mad at Cingulars' service I can call them BellSouth in the same breath.

[Mannaggia l'America]

It's a crap shoot as to whether I can make a cell phone call from my house. When I get within about a mile the area where I live, the phone falls back to Analog Roaming.

Most likely the reason is that there are not enough towers - we don't have full coverage here, and it's not Timbuktu either. One reason there aren't enough towers is that a bunch of ninnies start whining every time a tower is proposed.

They even had them bolt on fake evergreen tree limbs onto one of the towers! It looks awful - it looks like a really bad (and big) artifical Christmas tree.

[_Jim]

I did not know it was convoluted.

It's gotten so bad one needs a scorecard to keep the players straight! Once upon time it was easy: A band and B band, no PCS 'blocks' to be concerned with. Now, the industry is building dual-band phones (cellular at 800 MHz and 'PCS' at 1800MHz) along with the capability to operate with two or three air-interface specs (like analog/AMPS and digital) and calls can hand off back and forth between 800 and 1800 MHz base stations without anyone knowing the difference (unless the phone is put in 'tech' mode!) ...

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

1. Sprint isn't going GSM, the majority are.
2. GSM is simply evolve or die, and it's a small step.
3. Way back when sharing was mandated (still exists), it allowed all to participate and some to take the lead. Sprint is a perfect example.
4. Eventually your computer will no longer be on your desk and TDMA ain't going to get you there.
5. Imagine transmitting Perl over anything.

[paul51]

I've had verizon nationwide with a tri mode phone for years. The service seems to get better all the time. I'm not sure if it's improvement in the coverage, the phones or both.

[_Jim]

GSM is simply evolve or die, and it's a small step.

The evolution path laid out by the leaders in this game is:

GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) -->
GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) -->
EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for Global Evolution) -->
WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access)

GSM/EDGE/WCDMA migration path as laid out by Ericsson.

The next evolutionary step is "W-CDMA" or just WCDMA (Wideband CDMA) as established by Ericsson and Nokia for "3G" (3rd Generation) wireless 'phones' ...

Ericsson [says they are] number one in WCDMA.

And a quick bit from the FCC's 8th annnual report issued last year:

(131) For purposes of this report, all of the network technologies beyond 2G that carriers have deployed, as well as those that they plan to deploy in the future, are generally referred to as "next-generation network technologies."

The International Telecommunication Union ("ITU") has defined 3G network technologies as those that can offer maximum data transfer speeds of 2 megabits per second ("Mbps") from a fixed location, 384 kbps at pedestrian speeds, and 144 kbps at traveling speeds of 100 kilometers per hour. See Fifth Report, at 17695.

There is ambiguity among other industry players, however, as to which network technologies constitute 3G and which constitute interim technologies, often labeled "2.5G." See Seventh Report, at 13038. Therefore, the Eighth Report uses a more general label to describe all of the technologies beyond 2G.

(132) See Seventh Report, at 12990. This upgrade is also labeled GSM/GPRS because many TDMA/GSM carriers are upgrading their TDMA markets with GSM and GPRS simultaneously.

(133) Id., at 13042-13043. T-Mobile USA, Inc. ("T-Mobile") advertises GPRS speeds of 56 kbps but also reports that its average GPRS user gets speeds around 40 kbps.

AT&T Wireless Services, Inc. ("AT&T Wireless") reports that, during times of high usage, its GPRS users can download data at 20 to 30 kbps.

3G Americas states that GPRS's average, customer-experienced throughput is 30 to 40 kbps.

See T-Mobile, T-Mobile Internet Overview (visited Jan. 24, 2003) ; U.S. Carriers- New Wireless Networks Said to Barely Match Dial-Up Speeds, CTIA Daily News, Dec. 6, 2002 (citing ZDNET NEWS); 3G Americas LLC, NOI Comments, at 7 (filed Jan. 27, 2003) (?3G Americas Comments?).

[eno_]

In the U.S., CDMA technology is dominant. Verizon, Sprint, and a handful of smaller carriers use it, and Verizon is by far the dominant carrier in the U.S., followed by Nextel, which uses iDEN technology, which, in addition to being one of a handful of oddball mobile telephony technologies, is proprietary to Motorola. The TDMA to GSM migrating carriers are behind these two.

The world will not converge on GSM. CDMA2000 has a big lead over WCDMA/UMTS ("U" is for "universal" - oh, the irony), and China is going TD/SCDMA for 3G. FOMA is not quite WCDMA/UMTS. China is also breeding proprietary 2.5G systems focused on low cost.