U.S. Mobile Phone Carrier Practices Questioned

[ccrandall77]

Umm... WiMax is still years away from deployment, and even then, it will be in few, select areas. The best thing to do will be for them to implement EVDO Rev. 0 fully, then Rev. A, Rev. B, and so on. Rev. B and Rev. C have already been discussed. Curious, why do you see WiMax as the future? The CDMA networks will always be that, a CDMA network. The only thing they might use WiMax for is data as of right now, but CDMA is a superb network and does not need to be replaced anytime soon.


I ask again, why WiMax? It is extremely expensive to roll out right now, so it will be a few uears before it is even put up.

Really? Sprint is investing $1Billion in 2007 and up to $2Billion in 2008 to roll out WiMax:

http://www2.sprint.com/mr/news_dtl.do?id=12960

It's already scheduled to be available in trial markets by the end of this year... that's a far cry from it being years away.

Eventually, technology like WiMax could replace CDMA/GSM/etc by using it the same way you'd use Vonage or Skype... VoIP.

 

[CalBoy]

What your calling for government to do is the very status quo that you're complaining about. In other words the politicians promise they will serve the citizenry at election time. However, when the election is over and they return to Washington, they only serve the corporations. In other words they give public goods to corporate monopolists; they pass laws that favor those corporatists over the general population. I don't even see why you complain about government. Unlike me, you seem to be very happy with what government is doing: in other words, for you, its first rate already.

Actually, I think he's saying that making government larger will only lead to more of what's happening now. It seems that with American government, the more responsibility it has, the worse it performs. In which case, let the people do it themselves, afterall, government has the power to govern because we allow ourselves to be governed by it.

When others will loan you trillions of dollars, that's an indication of how much faith they have in your business: and believe me they run the US government like a business (in the worst possible meaning of that phrase). If anyone would loan me more money, after I was trillions of dollars in debt, I would never take that as an indication of my failure. That is a sign of wild success: whether it is a government or a person (at least financial success).

Agreed. There's nothing wrong with having a national debt. As long as it does't go out of control (more than 60% of GDP, which it has been doing since Bush took office), having a debt is actually a good thing. It allows people to receive more services than they pay in taxes. It also provides an avenue for investors to secure their savings.

 

[CalBoy]

Really? Sprint is investing $1Billion in 2007 and up to $2Billion in 2008 to roll out WiMax:

Yes, and Sprint is also dropping thousands of customers in NYC because they complained to customer service. Talk about bad

 

[rob@robburns.co]

Actually, I think he's saying that making government larger will only lead to more of what's happening now. It seems that with American government, the more responsibility it has, the worse it performs. In which case, let the people do it themselves, afterall, government has the power to govern because we allow ourselves to be governed by it.

That is definitely what I understood jarbake as saying saying. And that's the question I addressed. The difficulty in seeing my response addressed jarbake's statement/question is what makes the swindle so easy to accomplish.

The government is not the problem. The corporations are not the problem. The size of the government is not the problem. Government should be so large or so small as is necessary to serve the needs of its citizenry. Even if you believe the size of the government is too big, the corporatists have made it larger than ever. Also, with a corporasts state, the boundary between government and not-government: between government as the arm of civic society and the corporations that use it for their whim is blurred. So I would say that when assessing the size of government you have to include all those corporatist influences as a part of government. Make governmen t smaller by getting rid of the corporatists.

As far as the people doing it themselves. Natural monopolies are the most apt example of what the people cannot do for themselves. We cannot — each of us — create our own interstate system; our own telecommunicatons network; nor our own national defense system. These are the types of natural monopolies that we institute governments to do. If it weren't for natural monopoly, we might have no need whatsoever for a government.

Agreed. There's nothing wrong with having a national debt. As long as it does't go out of control (more than 60% of GDP, which it has been doing since Bush took office), having a debt is actually a good thing. It allows people to receive more services than they pay in taxes. It also provides an avenue for investors to secure their savings.

I didn't mean to suggest there's nothing wrong with a national debt. The size of it may be one indication of a problem. What the purpose of the borrowing was would be another issue. How its financed? There are all sorts of criteria one could use to decide whether the debt was justified or not or whether more borrowing should be pursued or not.

However, Applehero was trying to suggest that the large national debt was an indication of the financial insolvency of the government (or something to that effect). I'm saying that no one that can borrow at the rate the US government borrows can be considered financially insolvent. The private financial institutions that finance our national debt are basically saying we think the US is doing a great job. As democratic citizens should we trust the financial elite of the World, when they say that. No not at all. They have their own interests in what the US pursues. And we , the US citizenry (who only a small minority of us bless the US business acumen by financing the debt), have our own assessments of what US policy should pursue. We might not agree that, just because financial interests are eager to fund US operations, those operations are sound.

 

[ccrandall77]

Yes, and Sprint is also dropping thousands of customers in NYC because they complained to customer service. Talk about bad

That's a bit of an exaggeration. They only dropped 1000 - 1200 nationwide because their call volume into customer service was 40-50x greater than average.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19681390/

I've had my share of problems with Sprint's service, but come on, that's just plain ridiculous. These people are tying up lines so regular customers have to stay on hold longer. I'll bet most of these people are lunatics anyway and no matter how good the service is they'll still find a way to complain.

I say good riddance to those customers and thank Sprint for dropping them so my customer service experience is just a little bit better. Now if they could just get rid of their Latin American call centers I keep getting during normal business hours....

 

[MikeyTree]

Unfettered capitalism works about as well as unfettered Communism. Or do you advocate abandoning all services to disabled people, the absolute buying and selling of votes, the right of companies to take over public utilities like water and refuse to sell to any except the rich, to create a virus that infects everyone then charge for a vaccine?

Exactly. And even without the social and legal aspects, regulation is also essential to the long-term economic workings of capitalism. Just look at the SEC, which improves the market by keeping it stable and ensuring that the information people are relying on is accurate. For capitlalism to work we need compettition in the market, and regulation like we're discussing here is aimed at improving competition. They're analogous to anti-trust laws that improve competition by stopping anti-competitive monopolies.

 

[mccldwll]

"In some cases they were calling customer care hundreds of times a month for a period of six to 12 months on the same issues even after we felt those issues had been resolved," she said.

Speaking of exaggeration. Why would people keep calling on same issue if had, in fact, been resolved. I'm sure many were nutcases who couldn't be satisfied, but I'm also sure a large percentage were customers with legitimate complaints (and recent stories have documented some of those legitimate complaints).


"And even without the social and legal aspects, regulation is also essential to the long-term economic workings of capitalism. Just look at the SEC, which improves the market by keeping it stable and ensuring that the information people are relying on is accurate."

That certainly is what the SEC is supposed to be doing and the desired result but often, in practice, it's just window dressing to give the appearance of a level playing field. It's not.