Schumer: New York is full of cell phone 'dead zones'

AP via WCBS2 TV NEW YORK CITY ^ | November 24, 2002 | KAREN MATTHEWS

[Pharmboy]

NEW YORK (AP) Sen. Charles Schumer charged Sunday that cell phone service in New York City is ``abysmal'' and called on the Federal Communications Commission to take measures to improve it.

``Every one of us knows the frustration of dropped calls, and the problem seems to be getting worse,'' Schumer told a news conference at his Manhattan office. He added he had lost service five times in four minutes recently on the FDR Drive.

Schumer, D-N.Y., said a report by J.D. Power and Associates found that cell phone service in the city ranked ``dead last'' in customer satisfaction and call quality among the 27 largest cell phone markets in the United States.

He released a list of 200 ``dead zones'' in the five boroughs, on Long Island and in Westchester County where cell phone users have reported problems.

Schumer distributed copies of a letter he sent to FCC Chairman Michael Powell calling on the agency to implement regulations that ``could go a long way toward helping consumers make informed decisions about their wireless providers.''

The recommendations included:

The FCC should work with wireless companies to devise maps showing where their signals are weak. The companies would have to provide the maps to new customers.

The FCC should not allow cell phone companies to charge for the minute in which a call is dropped.

Cell phone users should be able to keep their numbers when they switch companies.

New York state should create a system that uses global positioning technology to trace 911 calls from cell phones to the user's location.

``The FCC is in the unique position to help push the cell phone industry in the right direction,'' Schumer said. ``If these common sense suggestions are implemented, In think we will see better service in New York City and across the nation.''

The FCC did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

[Pharmboy]

Glad to see the gun-grabber has something important to get excited about. Did her heinous assign chuckie this essential crusade?

[JRandomFreeper]

``The FCC is in the unique position to help push the cell phone industry in the right direction,''

LOL! All chuckie wants is for the FCC to repeal the laws of physics. Sorry, Charlie.

/john

[DouglasKC]

Let's see...war looming. Society disintegrating. Evil proliferating....and Chuckie is worried about dropped calls on his cell phone. Yah.

[Alberta's Child]

Maybe they ought to let terrorists destroy half the tall buildings in Manhattan -- then I'll bet Chuckie will have no problems with his cell phone service.

/sarcasm off/

On a more serious note, maybe he ought to use Verizon Wireless -- from what I understand, it's the only cell phone service that works in the tunnels in New York.

[Larry Lucido]

Hey, chuckie, take it up with the naysayers that block every proposed cell tower site. Oh, never mind, they're just seeking "reasonable regulations" on new cell towers.

[Abcdefg]

Is a strong cell-phone signal going to become a Civil Right now?

[APBaer]

The NY Times had an article about three weeks ago on this.

These "dead zones" pop up in unlikely (i.e. heavily trafficed) places in midtown that you would think would be fine.

[Sam Cree]

I agree with you that all that concrete and steel probably interferes with cell phones.

Schumer is a jerk.

[Alberta's Child]

All that concrete and steel interferes with radio and television signals, too. I can't get a single AM station on my radio at work unless I have it right next to the window.

I have a couple of radio stations in my building, and I get a better signal 25 miles away in New Jersey than I do eight floors above their studio in New York. LOL.

[Cultural Jihad]

Number portability is a good idea, which would foster better competition and hence better service.

[gcruse]

He's a jerk who can't read the election tea leaves.
Cell reception in New York City is not a concern of
the federal government and probably not of NY state, either.

[diode]

"He released a list of 200 ``dead zones'' in the five boroughs, on Long Island and in Westchester County where cell phone users have reported problems."

Hey Charles,why don'e you take a flying leap into one. There, problem solved.

[Maximum Leader]

Bullseye!

I'm a lawyer in the wireless phone industry, and believe me the cell phone carriers know exactly where the dead zones are and the engineers know exactly where to put antennas to give perfect coverage. The problem (and with very few exceptions, it's the same situation in every major city) is that the planning commissions do everything they can do delay or deny our zoning applications.

Believe me, Chuck Schumer is pointing his finger in the wrong direction. If you gave cell carriers the same exceptions from local zoning laws that public utilities have, there would be no "dead zones" in any city in America.

[IncPen]

Believe me, Chuck Schumer is pointing his finger in the wrong direction

Limbaugh likes to say that liberals' programs have the exact opposite effect intended.

[Brad’s Gramma]

Ha! And I was going to say that this whole thing is probably Rush's fault in the first place!!!!! :-)

[okie01]

He's a jerk who can't read the election tea leaves. Cell reception in New York City is not a concern of the federal government and probably not of NY state, either."

Five will get you ten this affair has nothing to do with politics. Or the public.

What has Chuckie Schumer steamed is that "lost service five times in four minutes recently on the FDR Drive." And the senior Senator from New York doesn't like being inconvenienced in such a manner.

If he ends up whipping the cell providers into better service for himself, so much the better for everybody else. But it's not the consumer Chuckie is concerned with. It's himself...

[Illbay]

I hate to break it to you, Chuckie, but the entire U.S. is full of "dead zones"!

P.S. Think this is what the Founders REALLY had in mind when they created the Senate?

[the_Watchman]

What has Chuckie Schumer steamed is that "lost service five times in four minutes recently on the FDR Drive." And the senior Senator from New York doesn't like being inconvenienced in such a manner.

. . . and was he DRIVING while on the phone, or is he driven everywhere?

[X_CDN_EH]

The other problem is movement from cell to cell. If a cell is a maximin capacity, you get dropped once you go into it. Sen Schumer would be better off not trying to get the Federal Government into micro managing the cell phone companies.

Too bad Barry Goldwater is no longer alive. he was an amateur radio operator and would have told Sen Schumer to mind his own business.

I'm a ham operator and an EE.

[dennisw]

Real deal is dead heads such as police, rescue and fire departments and municipalities are hogging up the electromagnetic spectrum. They were granted huge chunks of it for free many years ago and shamefully under use it. Their analog radio systems are bandwidth hogs.There are other culprits too.

Was a great article about in the print edition of PC Magazine. May be on line

[Jarhead_22]

He released a list of 200 ``dead zones'' in the five boroughs, on Long Island and in Westchester County where cell phone users have reported problems.

Something else we can, at least in part, lay at the Islamofascists' door: there were a few wireless phone arrays covering most of southern Manhattan mounted on the roof of the WTC.

New York state should create a system that uses global positioning technology to trace 911 calls from cell phones to the user's location.

Shades of "Enemy of the State?" Pardon me while I screw down my tinfoil hat a little tighter, but when jewels like this come from Sen. Chuckles' office, I feel the need to apply another layer of Reynolds' best.

Remember: Shiny side out!

[AlaskaErik]

The biggest dead zone is the space between Chuckie's ears.

[Lokibob]

 

Think Chuckie has problems?

Cell Phones Kills 40 Million Birds (23/7/02)
Tramès per Klaus Rudolph (Citizens' Initiative Omega)

---

Jeffrey St. Clair sitka@home.com
Tue, 09 May 2000

May issue, The Gull, the newsletter of the Golden Gate (San Francisco) Chapter of the Audubon Society. MILLIONS OF BIRDS KILLED EVERY YEAR BY TELECOMMUNICATIONS ANTENNAS    by Christopher Beaver, 394 Elizabeth Street, San Francisco CA 94114

e-mail: idgfilms@earthlink.net, tel: 415-824-5822

Each year as the great autumn and spring migrations of more than five billion birds unfolds across the North American continent, more and more of the migrants are being killed in collisions with wireless telecommunication antennas. These include antennas for cellular phones, radio and television. Most of the collisions take place at night as does much of the migration. Birds that generate a great deal of heat in flight, such as ducks and geese, avoid the warm temperatures and direct sunlight of day-time. Smaller birds also seek darkness, but for purposes of stealth, to hide from predators. To navigate, the migrating birds track the stars and gauge the shifting magnetic fields of the earth. The problem, according to Vernon Kleen, an avian ecologist for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, is that under adverse weather conditions, night-flying birds seem drawn to the antennas' warning lights. The lights are required by the Federal Communications Commission for all antennas over two hundred feet. In the vicinity of airports, towers above 500 feet must carry either red blinking lights or white strobing lights. When birds encounter these lights, they appear to become confused. On radar screens, scientists have observed groups of birds as they circle the antennas in an apparent and often futile attempt to regain their sense of direction. In January of 1998, some 10,000 Lapland Longspurs were killed in a single night as they collided with a 420-foot tower and its guy wires in western Kansas. Many of them were found impaled on stubble left over from the wheat harvest in surrounding fields. The birds appeared to have flown full force into the ground.

Read the rest of this crap here:

http://www.grn.es/electropolucio/omega06.htm

[krizzy]

Whats the problem? Those of us without a chauffeur are not allowed to use a cell phone while we drive.

[supercat]

Hey, chuckie, take it up with the naysayers that block every proposed cell tower site. Oh, never mind, they're just seeking "reasonable regulations" on new cell towers.

Maybe someone needs to plan and build a carilon tower which just so happens to also have communications gear in it. Seems to have worked in Naperville, IL (no small thing either--a 72-bell six-octave carilon).

[Sonny M]

He's a jerk who can't read the election tea leaves. Cell reception in New York City is not a concern of the federal government and probably not of NY state, either.

Actually this should be a federal issue, under the interstate commerse claus. To be honest with you, the solution is simple, just put up more cell phone towers. I do agree that if the call is dropped, you shouldn't be charged on that minuit. This is not important legislation, but hey, It would benefit me, and for once, he's not doing something that hurts us. I'm actually glad that he's taken up this "noble cause" of cell phone users everywhere.

[Lokibob]

Drones playing increasing number of roles

November 14, 2002

From this web site:

http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/000353.html

Uncrewed, remotely-controlled, and semiautonomous, Predator drones are playing an increasing number of roles, including civilian ones. For example, one recent experiment used a drone to host cell phone traffic.
The increased speed, flexibility, and integration with intelligence information such drones offer also carries new ethical issues about legality and distributed responsibility.

Seemingly overnight, unpiloted aerial vehicles, or U.A.V.'s, have become a centerpiece of military planning; just last week, a missile-firing Predator drone was used by American forces to attack operatives of Al Qaeda in Yemen. Now drones are starting to edge their way into civilian life as well, and not just in Alaska.

They have been used in Hollywood to film high-flying action scenes, in Hawaii to look for the ripest coffee crops and in Japan to drop rice seeds into paddies.

[Shooter 2.5]

He should quit his job before the voters finally get him out of office and get a job building towers. New York City is the last place anyone needs to make a cell phone call.

My son was trying to walk the Continental Divide Trail in Early May starting on the Canadian Border. The people up there could really use the cell phone coverage as a matter of life and death.

[KingNo155]

lol

[LibWhacker]

Ha ha, chuckie's been relegated to squawking about pothole repair.

[c-b 1]

The problem (and with very few exceptions, it's the same situation in every major city) is that the planning commissions do everything they can do delay or deny our zoning applications.

Government creates the problam, now they have to take money from you, and I to correct it. Very typical.

[lizma]

Limbaugh likes to say that liberals' programs have the exact opposite effect intended.

I think liberal programs are intended to have no effect at all. Therefore election after election they can whine about the same issues.

[garyhope]

If Chuckie really wants something to complain about, he should drive upstate NY a little bit to get really lousy cell phone service. I've gotten better cell phone connections in the middle of nowhere New Mexico than in upstate NY.

There's plenty of birds and deer though. I hope it's not true about the birds crashing into cell phone towers. I like birds. And no, I'm not a fluffy wuffy.

[Myrddin]

New York state should create a system that uses global positioning technology to trace 911 calls from cell phones to the user's location.

The federal government already mandated this in 1998. It's call E911. GPS doesn't work very well in "urban canyons" typical of large cities like New York City. The view of the sky needed for GPS is frequently blocked. The TDOA type of location using round trip time between a hand-off handshake and the reply from the phone works better in that environment. You still need 3 towers for a fix. There is a company doing statistical mapping of the TDOA responses that vastly improves the positioning quality derived by TDOA. Cities pose another problem. Your LAT/LON isn't enough. What floor are you on? TDOA can estimate that information from a phone inside a building. GPS is useless in the same situation...no view of the sky.

Even with the FCC mandate, the carriers are way behind on the implementation schedule. The electronics in EACH tower runs $10,000 to $30,000. In addition to the hardware, you have to put together a very sophisticated software package to correlate and calculate the location. Next, you have multiple carriers. Someone needs to build a "clearing house" that can map a given phone number to the correct carrier so the location query can be performed on the correct network equipment. There is much work to do and mountains of money to spend to achieve a usable E911.

[Maximum Leader]

You're absolutely right. In many case, the dead zones in urban areas are not really "no coverage" areas.

Rather, the cell site (which can be mounted on a tower, or is common in urban areas, on the roof of a building) that covers that area is being used at max capacity and doesn't have room for your call. You can tell if that's the problem if you can make a call from the same spot at 3am and you get through fine.

As you know, we hire a ton of EEs whose job is to tell us where we need to put new cell sites to provide seamless coverage. Basically as a cell carrier gets more customers, they just make the area covered by any particular cell site smaller and smaller and just build more sites.

As an engineering problem, it's a piece of cake. However, once you start dealing with the politicians, the "just build more sites" part of the equation can get very sticky.

[Maximum Leader]

Good point about the E911 system.

Chuck Schumer doesn't miss a trick. I understand New York State is going to release a huge statewide construction contract to build out a E911 network in January. HUGE contract, lot of folks in my industry have bid on it.

Even though Schumer has nothing to do with it, looks like he's already laying the groundwork for taking credit for this project.

[Myrddin]

I just built a system that will leverage E911 as half the solution to generating turn by turn routing. The demo system was built using various means of getting GPS lat/lon via inband modems over cellular phones. Mobitex and GPRS are usable in limited areas as a means of transport for GPS information.

[NYCVirago]

``Every one of us knows the frustration of dropped calls, and the problem seems to be getting worse,'' Schumer told a news conference at his Manhattan office. He added he had lost service five times in four minutes recently on the FDR Drive.

Schumer is correct in that NYC has plenty of dead zones where cell phone connection dies out. However, he broke state law when he was talking on the phone while on the FDR Drive -- it's illegal to talk on a cell phone while driving.

[Doctor Raoul]

When a liberal is born, when the doctor slaps it, instead of "Whaaaaaa", it goes, "There outta be a law...."

[Reactionary]

I bet that it isn't New York; I bet that the cell phone "dead zones" occur when Schumer's feeble brain attempts to communicate anything other than Das Kapital.

[meyer]

LOL! All chuckie wants is for the FCC to repeal the laws of physics. Sorry, Charlie.

Or alternately, they can order the removal of all those tall buildings that block the signal. Frankly, it must be extremely difficult to get saturation coverage in cities with that many buildings. And costly. Does Schumer think that the rest of the country's cell-phone users should subsidize the additional hardware necessary to provide good coverage in NYC?

Interestingly, the concern of lost signals will eventually butt heads with the desire to not have towers all over the place. Probably not a big issue in NYC where you can put the antennae on top of the buildings, but that is essentially the issue outside of the city.

[Republican Landslide]

New York state should create a system that uses global positioning technology to trace 911 calls from cell phones to the user's location.

Gee, Chuckie. If you want the Gooberment to know where you are at all times, I guess that's your opinion. I prefer not to be a red blinking light on some JBT's map 24/7.

[Gone_Postal]

I hope old chuckies not driving while trying to use his cell phone

[Jonah Hex]

Even though Schumer has nothing to do with it, looks like he's already laying the groundwork for taking credit for this project.

You nailed it. Chuckie Boy's looking for any political advantage to give him a leg up on the Republicans and Hillary!(tm). And if it's a free con job, then so much the better!

[wita]

Anything relating to chuck shumer, self censored.