RSSThe wireless carrier conundrum: Perpetuating the myth of connectivity
By Carmi Levy | Published September 11, 2009, 10:26 AM
I'd hate to be a wireless carrier. Customers don't like you, regulators are constantly sniffing around the edges of your operations and you're perpetually faced with the Hobson's Choice of investing billions in new network capability or risk falling behind other, similarly vilified competitors. In short, you can't win. And the recent spate of negative publicity surrounding the real-world experiences of customers using 3G-capable smartphones suggests this situation won't improve anytime soon.
It's their own fault
In many respects, carriers are victims of their own marketing. In trying to sell us sleek, next-generation handsets like Apple's iPhone and Palm's Pre, they almost always use the same kind of demo to illustrate just how insanely great these things are. Typically, a disembodied hand swipes the screen, deftly navigating from a GPS-enabled app to a messaging application before finishing off with an almost-mandatory trip through the Facebook app. These carefully crafted videos illustrate the ideal usage scenario -- where you live and work in the shadows of your very own cell tower, and your neighborhood is surrounded by friendly police officers who actively keep every other 3G smartphone-carrying user miles away. In reality, you couldn't buy this kind of network performance even if you could afford it. But illusion sells, so the carriers' unrealistic marketing campaigns continue to set ridiculous expectations.
So given the huge gap between expectation in reality, when you get home with your new wonderphone and realize you live in a 3G dead zone, you're forgiven for cursing under your breath that maps now load in minutes and not seconds, and you often find yourself re-sending e-mail messages because the process fails more often than it succeeds. Forget 3G speeds: You'd be happy with any connection at all.
Yet 3G underperformance is the industry's dirty little secret as it continues to market next-generation, blazingly fast wireless for all its worth. Left to their own devices, consumers are stuck either asking friends who live nearby for their anecdotal experiences with a given carrier, searching online forums and blogs for anything remotely relevant, or crossing their fingers and hoping they don't live or work in the wrong area.
Urban spooning -- less fun than it sounds
For users of certain high-end smartphones in densely populated urban areas, even 2G service is a distant pipe dream as advanced handhelds spin their virtual wheels waiting for some form of network connection. These data-rich devices place so much more strain on the underlying wireless infrastructure than earlier smartphones that when enough of them show up in the same geographic area and start reaching out, they end up in the wireless equivalent of a traffic jam.
Users in smaller population centers are luckier in this respect. Outside of densely populated urban areas -- or heavily attended conferences like SXSW that have generated their own form of wireless network gridlock -- they rarely run into the kind of end user crush that prompts some city dwellers to walk the streets looking for better signal.
To most of us, the answer is simple: The carriers should build more capacity in areas where high density meets high demand. Unfortunately, nothing is ever simple in the Byzantine world of wireless. Even if carriers wanted to load the equipment in their trucks and fan out to every cell tower in the city, regulations from overlapping jurisdictions ranging from local/municipal for zoning to the FCC for transmission rights and spectrum use often mean delays of months and years before long suffering customers see any kind of improvement.
By then, of course, many disenchanted wireless users may have already bolted to competing carriers. Where, doubtless, some of them will run into similar bandwidth issues. For now, it's a problem with no immediate solution.
It wasn't always this way
I don't remember this being as annoying before 3G became prevalent. Perhaps earlier generation smartphones based on the now seemingly ancient CDMA and GSM standards could get away with pokey, inconsistent performance because we already had such low expectations. Like the early days of dial-up Internet access, simply getting online and staying online was considered an achievement. If you lost signal every once in a while, that was the price of going wireless. Or so it seemed. The user experience, in all its text-only e-mail and stripped down half-baked WAP browser glory, was so lame to begin with that not even a substandard network could ruin the experience. We simply didn't know better, and even if we did, our expectations were still pretty limited.
These days, as smartphones have sprouted advanced, high-resolution touchscreens and browsers that easily replicate the desktop experience, such back-end shortcomings are a little more obvious. And a little more painful. It ticks us off to have come so far with such incredibly capable hardware, only to be let down right at the gates to heaven itself by a network that just can't deliver the goods. Or would deliver the goods if only the darn carrier would chime in to and spend the money on things that don't necessarily make for great commercials, but nevertheless improve the real-world experience for real-world customers.
Is it worth it?
It's easy to conclude that carriers do themselves a disservice by misrepresenting their ability to deliver acceptable network performance. It's also easy to conclude that long-term customer retention needs to take precedence over short-term subscriber growth.
But as long as the cost-benefit ratios to carriers for tactical improvements to their existing 3G networks tilt toward the status quo, nothing will change. Carriers will continue to oversell 3G capability, and they'll repeat the same process when the industry inevitably transitions into even higher capacity 4G infrastructure.
For their part, consumers, wowed by ever cooler demonstrations from carriers more interested in flash than substance, will continue to buy into the myth that what they see on television will closely reflect their actual ownership experience. Carriers will certainly continue to deserve their tarnished reputations, but consumers unwilling to take the time to understand the differences between 3G fact and 3G reality deserve at least part of the blame as well.
Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.
Well Put Carmi:)
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|I do live in a wireless dream world. I'm in a small town where not very many people have smart phones but I have a 3G tower about 3/4 of a mile from me. I sit in my living room with 5 bars on my iPhone and get 2.25 Mbps down and 280 Kbps up. Couldn't be happier with the service.
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|"you can't win" except for the billions and billions and billions in profit the top telcos make every quarter.
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|Personally I'd be happy if I could just get reliable voice service in Los Angeles. Forget 3G, I can live without email while I'm on the road, it's the dropped calls and poor signal I can't stomach.
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|Perhaps, Carmi, your article would have more impact if you had stated the real reason for the issue instead of beating around the bush:
Although the iPhone is a cool device (I have a 3G model), it is a data sucking hand held Apple box that is singularly (pun) killing the ATT network in most population areas.
ATT is investing billions to add more cell sites, migrate some to 800 MHz (better building penetration) and retuning their network in order to get their collective act together. This is a catch-up game that can never be won.
Who's the blame? Cingular who signed the exclusive contract, Apple who demanded the 'exclusivity' and ATT who inherited the whole mess are the players that caused this issue. I believe that ATT is anxiously waiting for the exclusive contract to expire. When iPhones are sold by other carriers, the 'pain' will be shared.
Gosh, maybe the Apple geniuses miscalculated.
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|"Yet 3G underperformance is the industry's dirty little secret"
It's *mostly* the nation's dirty little secret. Most developed European countries have good 3G signal and speed. America is... well... big. You simply can't sanction spending millions or billions on covering everyone. It simply doesn't add up.
Britain is small and coverage is good. So it's not a dirty secret nor is it the industry's fault that coverage is patchy in a country 38 times the size of the UK.
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|I'm just waiting for the government to drop billions to cover everyone just like we want to with broadband access for the people in the boonies.
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|"Carriers will continue to oversell 3G capability, and they'll repeat the same process when the industry inevitably transitions into even higher capacity 4G infrastructure."
NEWSFLASH: Services sell more capacity than they can carry! People keep using them (because really...what are their options?)...
Sadly, even lawsuits won't change this. False advertising has spawned many a class action lawsuit...all of which have changed nothing. We still get misleading adds, we still don't get the kind of performance and service shown, and we, as a society, bend over and pretend to like it.
Same with Cable, same with DSL, same with EPA mileage estimates...and so on and so on....
Until function trumps form and we as a society decide to not purchase products that fail to meet the marketing gimmicks, this will continue.
In other words, this will never end.
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|As we said in other postings, you should start writing articles for their website, you do a much better job saying whatever people attempt to say.
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|What, write an article titled "Advertising is misleading: People bend over and buy the products anyway. No end in sight."?
Hardly newsworthy... It is painfully obvious and there is *nothing* the article, the discussion that followed, or actions taken based on them that will ever change it.
As long as there are people, there will be other people trying to make a buck off of them.
Although the chance to remind people how incredibly little control they have over themselves (or anything else, for that matter) is always entertaining.
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|That's your standard Betanews article lately... stating the obvious...
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|It must really be terrible to only have the iPhone on one carrier in the States, I can see why a lot of people carry on about the cell/mobile reception in built up areas when (completely guessed figure here) say 30 to 40% of the smart phones are possibly iPhones or Palm handsets stuck on one network that basically wasn't built for the technology.
Perhaps some RnD into new technology would be better spent than continuing the current "flog a dead horse". Methodology most Telco's seem to follow.
I must admit that even distribution would go a long way to settle any issues (at least for At&T) as it stands in Aus for instance the iPone and serveral other "exclusive in the US" handsets are available on most networks with the leading few made up of;
Vodafone (which absorbed At&T australia since it shut it doors)
Optus
Telstra (formerly Telecom)
Virgin
You can also purchase full outright handsets (non carrier locked/bricked) and prepaid as well as the common post paid services(of the iPhone). It's not common to have 3G based service locks and with a relatively high volume of WiFi hots pots most high usage apps and services are accessed in this manner. Mapping being the most common of all the smart phone services to be used on the fly/go.
Exclusivity needs to go to at least alleviate the issue and by some time to redo the infrastructure.
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|Since than Betanews became the place to rant?
This blah-blah post has no new or useful information whatsoever. Why even post this?
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|I think Beta_News_ should have a better identification method for us RSS readers. Maybe...
"Opinion: Article Name"
"News: Article Name"
I just hate opening up pages to find out that they're simply a page long rant on something I don't care about. Nothing personal.
Oh, and no, I didn't read the article. /shrug
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|I am sick and tired of reading these articles by a "professional journalist" who can't write an actual news article and instead uses this site as a personal blog. I am also sick of a journalist who takes every article and responds in a troll-like manner to every comment. Look at past articles, Mr. Levy has given comments such as "Thanks for your deep, insightful comments". Rather than just leaving the comments alone, he has to get the last word in. It's like watching a little child who has had his feelings hurt because you didn't like what he said/did.
Blogs are for opinions, news sites are for....get ready for it....NEWS.
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|And if you buy something believing all the hype, than you are just as big of a fool. Cell phone companies always use the disclaimer that service/reception is not guaranteed everywhere you go.
Just like your home broadband service. You rarely get the speeds advertised. All specs and demonstrations advertised are an ideal case. Who gets the advertised mpg of a car?
It is shoddy marketing by the cell phone companies, but at the same time, the consumers are just as much at fault. A little common sense goes a long way.
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|"Cell phone companies always use the disclaimer that service/reception is not guaranteed everywhere you go."
So this gives them carte-blanche to market it any way they want, when even under optimal conditions in the Real World™, such performance is still not possible?
Here's a thought: If the device cannot be marketed well showing normal operating conditions...fix it; then market it.
Common sense? May he R.I.P....
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|I agree with you that they shouldn't have carte-blance to market it any way they want. But let's get real, how many things look great under ideal circumstances, are marketed that way, but really operate ideally?
Common sense goes along way and its the idiots who believe everything they see on TV... I mean come on, my truck was suppose to get 19 MPG on the highway and 14 MPG on the city and that is the way its advertised. Any person with common sense can tell you that you only get those ratings under the ideal government testing situations.
It's just that people need to use a little common sense and your an idiot for beleiving all the hype.
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