AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile Team Up To Eliminate 'Dead Zones' Across US (droid-life.com) 42
AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have agreed in principle to form a joint venture (JV) aimed at reducing U.S. mobile dead zones through satellite connectivity, especially in rural areas and during emergencies when ground networks fail. Here are three of the customer benefits listed by the JV (as highlighted by Droid Life):
Fewer coverage gaps: Will nearly eliminate dead zones in the U.S. currently without mobile service, reaching previously unserved areas.
Reliable connectivity in emergencies: Redundant connectivity will become available when existing ground-based networks are unavailable due to extreme natural disasters or other unusual disruptions.
Improved network performance: Will give customers more consistent performance and simpler access to satellite services across providers. This will speed up feature updates and improve connectivity for everyone, everywhere. "It will still take time for these improvements to be available to customers, but this all seems like a positive step," writes Droid Life's Tim Wrobel.
Reliable connectivity in emergencies: Redundant connectivity will become available when existing ground-based networks are unavailable due to extreme natural disasters or other unusual disruptions.
Improved network performance: Will give customers more consistent performance and simpler access to satellite services across providers. This will speed up feature updates and improve connectivity for everyone, everywhere. "It will still take time for these improvements to be available to customers, but this all seems like a positive step," writes Droid Life's Tim Wrobel.
Interoperability should have been law long ago. (Score:3)
Re:Interoperability should have been law long ago. (Score:5, Insightful)
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People who lived in a big county could have to pay fees to call people in the same county! They were called "local toll" calls. Telcos have always been parasites.
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Seems like half the guys I know racked up a $300+ phone bill at some point calling a girl one town over.
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Those days sucked, and for no apparent reason. It was the same damn phone company! Not sad about those going away.
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Same here. Mine was downloading a pirated copy of Resident Evil over dial-up using Kazaa... took like (I think it was) 3 weeks running the download overnight.
Neither me or the parents knew about that crap at the time, but very quickly, we collectively decided downloading movies like that was not a good idea (once cable modem came to the area, quickly needed a DVD burner and bigger harddrives).
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Yes we so quickly forget the Original Evil that Big Tech disrupted, but it never really went away.
Re: Interoperability should have been law long ago (Score:2)
That was what GSM gave us for a little while
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What property were they stealing from the people? Won't be a telephone pole, those are almost always owned by a phone or power company.
On land owned by someone else. The government compels the landowner to make that land available to whoever put up the pole. It's not like the landowner had any say in the matter.
Dead Zone. (Score:3)
There are enough dead zones within a major metropolitan area that this should have been done ages ago. I mean, I'm sitting on a major street next to a major freeway down the middle of the city of LA and there are spots I can walk along and not get good service. Then again, I know spots in the city where SiriusXM service is bad when there's not a building within several hundred feet and I cant imagine what's blocking the signal.
Re: Dead Zone. (Score:3)
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Yeah, that's definitely a possibility, but these are literally the same areas where the coverage just drops out, which tells me there's coverage gaps between cell towers.
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Not to mention, skyscrapers don't mix well with cell signals, which have trouble going through a lot of steel and concrete.
Shockingly, one of the very best places to use a cell phone in downtown Houston, is in its labyrinth of tunnels, that connect all the major skyscrapers. This is because the tunnels have their own cell network, in the form of little boxes fastened to the tunnel ceilings at regular intervals.
Re: Dead Zone. (Score:3)
Trees block the SiriusXM signal, in my experience. They don't need to be seeveral hundred feet. Just a few dozen feet, and dense. For example on highway 17 near Santa Cruz.
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A lot of it is modem quality (Score:3)
If you buy one of the cheaper mediatek phones, some of which get up to about $500, they have good performance on the soc but the modems suck and they don't maintain connectivity.
The Google modems stunk too, I've heard some people say the very latest ones are better but I haven't tried them. If I'm going to drop $700 on a modem I can just pick up a OnePlus 15r with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 and an x
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The actual Apple modems when they use their own really suck. Although I think they still use Qualcomm modems in a lot of their hardware. You do have to pay attention though.
If that's true, it likely won't be true for long. Qualcomm modems sucked when Apple started using them, too — constant baseband crashes, etc. It took a couple of years before they were even kind of stable.
The nice thing about the Apple modems is that they are in control of the entire stack. That means when there's a bug, there's no fighting back and forth between two companies about whose problem it is. That means every baseband crash, no matter how rare, likely has enough stored data to figure ou
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the mountains are the worst (Score:3)
NZ did this and it works well (Score:1)
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Unfortunately for the US, its land area is 37 times larger than New Zealand. It's a whole order of magnitude more effort and cost.
We'll see (Score:2)
I trust these three to be about as honest and upfront about future plans as I do a drug addict guarding drugs from other drug addicts.
Starlink Mobile (Score:5, Informative)
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Nowhere to run to, Baby (Score:2)
How "bout those removable phone batteries?
Re: Nowhere to run to, Baby (Score:2)
It's an excuse to charge more (Score:2)
Dead zones in strange places (Score:1)
Believe it or not, one of the stranger dead zones for T-Mobile has a T-Mobile customer service center.
MVNO access? (Score:2)
US Radio Quiet Zones (Score:2)
These are set up as areas served only AT&T. People who live in such zones have to bring boxes of carrier pigeons around by horseback if they want to communicate person to person.
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... "boxes of carrier pigeons ..."
Allegedly a solved problem. RFC 1149 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc... [rfc-editor.org] :
"A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers"
Or then again, maybe not.
You're missing the big picture (Score:2)
Those people who are allergic to wifi are being targeted this time. Don't book a flight on the next shuttle -- they're adding more Starlink satellites in the cargo bay. And that passenger next to you insists on making a phone call as you're taxiing down the runway...
few (Score:2)
Recently drove across Nevada several times. There are very few places even in the middle of nowhere without a usable cell signal.