Verizon CEO Calls Municipal Wi-Fi 'a Dumb Idea' 434
ozone writes "
An interview with Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg quotes him as saying that 'Municipal Wi-Fi is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard' and 'Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house?' -- apparently Verizon's own 'Can You Hear Me Now' ad campaign has given customers 'unrealistic expectations' that their phone service will work everywhere. What?"
This is a good example of how FUD works (Score:3, Interesting)
Verizon is evil generally and since having cable modem and Vonage I haven't paid a bill to them in at least two years. The charity I volunteer just switched to Vonage from Verizon and they are saving a couple of hundred a month.
Verizon has many reasons to be upset but technology marches on. You can't control everything. Learn a lesson from MS and their attempts to FUD Linux.
Re:Bad service (Score:4, Interesting)
It also works in tunnels (which surprised me).
They're even extending service into the subway.
When a CEO bitches like that, he's just scared of competition.
Re:Slashdot: Meet The Shark (Score:1, Interesting)
And Timothy's paraphrasing for the dumbest quote was not misleading and still follows the original pretty damn close. It's just big CEO's afraid of competition they can't match. And that crap about pre-empting the state? That's all we need, for every phone company to behave like the RIAA.
Also, your stupid "Logistics Concern" even if it's using tax dollars, it's creating jobs. Local jobs at that, which can't be outsourced to India or China, or wherever is cheapest at the moment. Do you think verizon cares about the local economy? Hell no, I live in KC, with sprint, seen it first hand.
Re:Slashdot: Meet The Shark (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot: Meet The Shark (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot: Meet The Shark (Score:2, Interesting)
It's also worth noting that the Verizon CEO wants to eliminate as much regulation as possible at the state level and give it to Congress and the FCC. Yikes!
Re:Slashdot: Meet The Shark (Score:3, Interesting)
What really gets me is that Slashdotters, most of whom KNOW how radio works, bitch about it too. They also seem to think that the handset itself is the problem.
a great idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Someone will have to..." (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
Ken Olsen, President, Digital Equipment, 1977
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
Alice Kahn
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
Putt's Law
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman
The 'Airwaves' do NOT belong to the public (Score:3, Interesting)
Radio was a nice way to deliver 'censored' and 'politically correct' information to the masses but....
a new competitor has arrived. It's name is Wi-Fi and it scares the hell out of the cozy 'good ole boy corporate-government' network at D.C. because it costs them $$$ for all that spectrum they paid billions for.
It's just a matter of time before public pressure forces the SELLOFF of the corporate radio networks back to the government or some other WiFi businesses. Nobody wants one way RADIO anymore.
The FCC should NOT be in the position of selling spectrum to the highest bidder.It should be handing spectrum to WiFi networks where it will be used alot more efficiently and help serve the most people.
Re:Slashdot: Meet The Shark (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The money quote -- Customers want too much! (Score:3, Interesting)
No, CDMA is a case of better technology that lost. Though I'll admit that the SIM card is a great feature in GSM, and overall GSM works just fine. There is a reason that all the 3rd generation protocols are CDMA, including the GSM version. CDMA is hard to make work, but once it works it works better.
You seem to be making the classic mistake of picking something, and then defending your choice as better no matter what. Don't do that. GSM works just fine, and is more common. That does not mean it is better, though it might still be your better choice. Nobody goes to hell for choosing the wrong cell phone protocol, so don't get religious about it.
Re:The money quote -- Customers want too much! (Score:4, Interesting)
No thanks. You couldn't pay me enough to put up with their crap again. Between a cell phone that got jacked, a couple of customer "service" people who didn't believe that I hadn't been making long distance calls from Vancouver to Lebanon, middle management after middle management that couldn't possibly grok the fact that their own records showed concurrent usage from the "same" phone in Ottawa and Vancouver, them taking a year to cancel the service, only to not actually cancel it and send me to collections instead, and a year's worth of fighting with them in small claims court, no thanks. And then they wondered why I cancelled my video rental, TV, and Internet with them. Fuckers still call me to offer me bundles on the service, despite being asked to put me on the do-not-call list repeatedly. Ted Rogers can go to hell.
Service was great when it was Cantel. Then they merged with AT&T. Coverage was still good, but customer service was nonexistant. Then Rogers bought Cantel, and the whole shebang went to shit.
I'll stick with CDMA. The coverage map is less than half the story, and besides, I have much better reception and coverage with Bell than I ever did with Cantel/Rogers/AT&T.
Incidentally... you do realise that it's *far* cheaper to buy a phone and use pay-as-you-go when you're in Europe than it is to bring your phone from home?
Re:Slashdot: Meet The Shark (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of it is in hiring the right people. Right now there are large nubmers of very skilled people that are unemployed or underemployed. These people could be snapped up at a good price.
Also, as many developing countries have learned, it's cheaper to invest in modern technology than to maintain and upgrade older networks. A wireless network that uses off-the-shelf modern parts should be much cheaper than a custom network built over a much longer time. Look at all the articles about growth in South Korea and similar places.
A standardized network based on WiFi also would solve Verizon's "customers expect the network to work everywhere" problem because customers could throw up their own antenea on their house. ie It could even reach their basement just fine.
Re:Slashdot: Meet The Shark (Score:5, Interesting)
Before we got the local (municipally owned) power company's broadband/cable service, the local Comcast affiliate was "waiting on equipment" for broadband rollout (waiting forever almost.) And since SBC (Phht. ACK. Spit on their GRAVES) doesn't roll out DSL city-wide, we were waiting for some competition to spur on the monopolies. (put it in the poorest section, don't get many subscribers, then claim there's no market for it? GREAT IDEA local phone monopoly!).
Once the vote for our power company to do cable/internet service was in, not more than a week later, broadband was suddenly available from Comcast "city-wide." Uh huh. Must've been waiting for the universal remote to control the broadband or something, and it came in via UPS in the nick of time.
Imagine if we had voted no?
Re:Municipal WiFi is Coming (Score:1, Interesting)
This would very likely improve education and also allow for better services like ambulance that can that set up a video confrence with a doctor as they rush a patient to the hospital. By the time they would get to the hospital the doctors could be completly ready and not making last minutes changes and running around trying to figure things out. Police would be able to instantly locate on a map where any crimes were happening and keep track of car chases while being given updates on road conditions up ahead. Public wi-fi is not unAmerican, its an improvment to the quality of life. When did improving the quality of life become unAmerican.
Re:Mobiles in the UK (Score:2, Interesting)
First and foremost is our decentralized government. In order to put up cell towers, permission of the local government authority is required. In New England, this is at the town level. There are 351 of these in Massachusetts alone. In some cases, like the towns of Lexington, Weston, or Wellesley, cell coverage is very spotty for all vendors because the towns won't let the carriers put up enough cell sites to blanket the area. The excuses given are varied, but tend to revolve around not wanting to "spoil the view", or earth-and-crunchy concerns around "not wanting to bathe the neighborhood in "radiation" that Could Cause Cancer or other fine diseases.
Other than that, the rest of the reasons probably devolve down to logistics: can the phone companies get power (redundant if possible), equipment, and fiber-optic cable (to carry the calls) run out to where the cell site is without incurring drastic costs? Even in built-up New England there are still plenty of places where the answer to that appears to be "No", or perhaps "Not Yet".
At least this is what it seems when I drive along U.S. highways and some Interstates and see "No Service", "Digital Roam" or "Analog Roam" on my cell phone.
The landline phone companies operate under the requirement to provide Universal Service. I wonder if it's time for the cell phone companies to be put under the same requirement in order to keep their chunk of spectrum?
Verizon the bloodsuckers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot: Meet The Shark (Score:4, Interesting)
Re-hashing a 1992 usenet post from alt.folklore.urban: [google.com]
"I, too, have heard the story about an architect who planted grass instead of laying sidewalks, let people walk where they would, and retrofitted sidewalks over the ruts in the lawn."
What do you think this could imply if we make relevant analogies; pure chaos?
Re:Slashdot: Meet The Shark (Score:4, Interesting)
And slashdoters are backing these creeps up. It's shocking really, the amount of corporate-monopoly cheerleading you see on slashdot these days. I can't help but wonder if posts like the grandparents are done by "public relations" for company X and then the lackies run around modding it up.
Any blind idiot can see that Verizon dude is just scared of competition, consumer choice, and being forced into a business model that takes care of customer needs, not his. But you pegged the attitude perfectly -- "pay us, fuck you".
Re:FYI: Verizon != Verizon Wireless (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Thats why (Score:1, Interesting)
The sooner there are mobile VoIP phones, the better.
Scalable Mesh Systems are better for that (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, most DSL systems are fairly oversubscribed, in terms of number of users per megabit of upstream bandwidth. So to do a rooftop network, you put more real bandwidth in the wired sites and do the oversubscription out on the radio side instead of in the DSL router side, and it works fine.
A prime example (Score:3, Interesting)
Is Universal health care in other countries perfect? No, of course not.
But UHC is better than a sixth of the population simply having no health care coverage whatsoever and many beyond that having inadequete health care coverage. Better than half the people declaring bankruptcy doing it because they got killed by medical costs. We're getting screwed by the insurance companies here.
And before some dittohead chimes in with "malpractice costs" talking points, insurance companies are screwing us there too. Lawsuits and payouts have been trending downwards for years but insurance rates keep going up. Some of it is due to the insurance companies making poor investments and getting killed in the stock market. But mostly it's just greed. If you need any more proof of how malpractice "reform" solves nothing, check out how rates in the states that have imposed limits have gone up faster than the states without them. Go figure. A Bush-sponsored solution that solves nothing. Whatta shocker.
Universal health care would slash huge amounts of overhead out of the costly and inefficiently run health care industry, provide better health care for Americans and make businesses here(especially small ones) more competitive with each other and with others overseas.
Re:Thats why (Score:2, Interesting)
Here in Denmark the providers are required to cover the entire country (of course it isn't that big,) and vendor lock-in is avoided by forcing them to transfer your phone number to another provider if you want to.
I notice that imperial CEO's always self-destruct. (Score:3, Interesting)
I notice that imperial CEO's always self-destruct, like Jerry Levin of Time-Warner, who sold his company to AOL just before the Internet company crash. Perhaps that's why the Verizon CEO sounds so arrogant.