WSJ: Americans' Phone Bills Are Going Up 273
There's been some positive news in the last year (and the last few) for American cellphone customers: certainly there's more visible competition for their business among the largest players in the market. Nonetheless, the Wall Street Journal reports that while more competition may translate into some more attractive service bundles, flexibility in phone options, or smoother customer service, it doesn't actually mean that the customers are on average reaping one of the benefits that competition might be expected to provide: lower price. Instead, the bills for customers on the major wireless providers have actually gone up, if not dramatically, in recent months — which means U.S. cell service remains much more expensive than it is in many other countries. The article could stand a sidebar on MVNOs and other low-cost options, though -- I switched to one of these from AT&T, and now pay just under $40 for one version of the new normal of unlimited talk and text, plus quite limited (1GB) data, but still using AT&T towers. Has your own cost to talk gone up or down?
Virgin Mobile (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And (Score:0, Insightful)
Yes! You the customer can have unlimited text/data for $70/mo (...belch...2GB...burp...CAP...fart... Can you hear me now?). Makes no difference whether we're talking about gas prices, health insurance, cable Internet or phone, corporate America motto is "Pay the CEO $40M+/year and screw the customer!!!" Oh yeah, we can make a profit this year, let's layoff 9,000 more!
Re:And (Score:4, Insightful)
Landline sound quality in 1975 was better than any mobile phone sound quality in 2014.
This suprises you somehow? A landline provides a lot more bandwidth without any worries of signal interferance from walls or other radio sources. The switches were also analog, no need for converting analog sound into digital bits, compressing and then sending them in discreete packets.
Re:False advertising. (Score:4, Insightful)
If it were purely taxes that the company must collect and hand over based purely on what you pay, I could agree with that, but when it is nebulous "fees" that are really cost of doing business that the company incurs, it's not reasonable. Furthermore, some of the fees relate to Federal fees that are the same in all states.
In the example I was quoting (renting a car at an airport), the company has enough information to quote the exact price with all fees at the time of booking.
The "good" old days (Score:4, Insightful)
Landline sound quality in 1975 was better than any mobile phone sound quality in 2014.
Do you really want to go back to 1975? There was no such thing as mobile service. There also was for all practical purposes no data service. There was no voice mail and no answering machines. Text messaging didn't exist and email wasn't available outside of academia and some research labs. You had precisely one company to deal with in the US (AT&T) and they're weren't exactly friendly what with them being a monopoly and all. You would get charged an obscene amount of money to call anyone more than a few miles from your house and you didn't even want to think about the cost of calling someone outside your country. Rotary dial [wikipedia.org] phones were still commonplace. And I'm old enough to remember all this.
Yeah they had voice service that was optimized for voice and nothing else. Cell phones might have their problems but I'm not exactly eager to turn the clock back.
Re:And (Score:4, Insightful)
Analog phone service sounds better than digital landline - because it was all analog and very little filtering happened. Then in the mid-70's or so AT&T was switching to digital systems. They did research (heavily) into finding out what bandwidth they could limit to and still have intelligible speech, which was decided that the good chunk of human vocalizations exist below 4kHz or so.
This gave rise to the 8KHz sampling with 8 bits (or a 64kbps channel), uncompressed. Which is why our phone systems use 64kbps channel allocations. (56k modems were derived from the fact that every 8th byte or so, a bit was robbed from the audio and used for control purposes. Since you could never tell when this happened, they assumed you only had a 7-bit channel).
Of course, that voice is carried at a full 64kbps. GSM and other digital mobile telephony only really have datarates of 4kbps or lower, necessitating use of highly compressed, highly distorting codecs meant to get the most out of every bit - and let the brain do a lot of the error correction and such (speech has low enough entropy that the powerful organic audio processor running rather advanced wet software can do very good forward error correction to extract out what is being said, despite all the distortion).
Of course, with 3G and LTE and such, codecs are available that let you use more bandwidth to get higher audio quality, but like all things, it requires both ends to support it.