f13.net

So listening to NPR yesterday they do a report on differing cellular services around the world. Come to find out other than some parts of South America and Burma the US is down near the fucking bottom in terms of what are our capability is.

They were saying in Japan for example you can do the following ALL with your cell phone:
Watch TV...yes HD quality streamed television on your cell phone
Pay your bus or train or subway fare
Scan a barcode sticker at a street corner and have a taxi dispatched to your location without having to know the street names or location.
Pay for anything out of a vending machine

Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.

Not to drag this down a political road but I think this whole situation is a great example of one of the biggest problems currently facing the US. This country and its corporations use to make money and be profitable by being innovators and being at the cutting edge. Now its all about businesses protecting their turf rather than innovating and simply churning the markets to inflate their stock prices to be "profitable." For example cable companies trying to limit bandwidth for their internet customers because god forbid you might watch TV or a movie over the net rather than using their cable television service.

Hell Im in the 16th largest market in the US and we STILL dont have the 3G network.

So question to everyone living outside the US....what cellular services do you currently enjoy? Rub our faces in your technical superiority.

Japan and South Korea are tiny.

Nothing new.  I read similar articles 3 or 4 years ago when cell phones were just hitting their peak in the US and landlines were trending down but still greater #'s than cell lines.  They've been big overseas for a lot longer and had capabilities we're only getting to now for a while.  The example I saw then was SMS cards in Europe.  You could pull it from one phone and plug it in to another as easily as an SD memory card on your digital camera, and be ready to go.  We still don't have that capability when swapping phones from what I see when my wife gets new phones.

We've been way behind on consumer tech vs Japan for a long, long while. Not just in phones, but TV and other areas of 'American superiority' as well.

Just to clarify the Japan cell phone "pay for your train/food/anything" ability, its not really a matter of actual cell service.  Many of the phones just have a chip in them that when you walk up to the ticket taker, you waive it over the sensor and it automatically takes deducts the appropriate amount from your account. 

This is similar to many of the cards we have in the US.  Such as my transbay card here in SF, where when I get on the bus, I just waive it over a sensor and it deducts from my account.  All the Japanese did was stick the little chip in the back of a cell phone to make it slightly more convenient (since the Japanese carry them everywhere), instead of having a separate card for it like we do in the US.  Has nothing to do with actual cellphone service.  They also just expanded it so you can use it to buy things at several places (but thats limited only to certain places/machines at train stations.  Vast majority of vending machines require actual cash).  Biggest block to something like that in the US is getting all the companies involved(retailers/public transit/various cell phone companies) to all agree to work with each other.  This is easier in Japan where they still have the remenents of Zaibatsu's (now called Keiretsu) where a broad range of corporations all integrate deeply with each other.

Its cool and nifty, but just thought I should clarify in case you thought it was apart of some amazing cellphone service technology.  Frankly, I wouldn't keep much money on that cell phones account anyways (like, just what you would need to be buying about than a weeks worth of train tickets) since if you lost your cellphone, somebody could go on a shopping spree with it.

Also, the HD TV thing is something that would be seen as a retarded gimmick that would never be used in the US (IMO), and wouldn't really be a profitable service.  It works in Asia because everybody spends hours and hours a day commuting to and from work/school sitting on a train.  That doesn't happen here.

I agree we are very badly behind on several technological fronts when compared to several other countries, but there are practical reasons as to why we don't have some of this.

Isn't the infrastructure handled at the state level? I can understand hicks in the remote parts of Iowa not getting shit on their phones, but you can't really say the same for many of the smaller and wealth-dense states. I might be wrong on this.

The cell phone companies in the US monopolize their network like you wouldn't believe. Just getting tiny shit approved for use on the network is amazingly difficult and constraining. It's one of the reasons mobile phone gaming has been a wasteland of retread casual games and parlor games until recently. Not to mention I know very few people who like their coverage - most complain about its spottiness at some point or other. Coming from the almost anything goes dev platform that is the Internet, it's quite frustrating trying to do any kind of mobile marketing or development.

They not only monopolize, but they pay off the right guys to make sure the networks aren't declared a public good.  They learned from the cable companies failure to do so.

I'm just glad that competition between the various cell network companies is driving innovation.

Screw you all and your newfangled cell phone ideas!  I just want to go back to 1999 when my cell phone call quality was on par with my land line. 

I like the juxtaposition of the previous two posts.

Russia isnt and they beat us in phones and services offered.

Also couldnt cellular companies release some of these new services at least in the major metropolitan areas such as LA, NY, Chicago, etc? The excuse "America is big uhr" that the cell phone companies give doesnt really hold any weight when there is no legal obligation to offer a service nationwide or not at all. They could take the top 20 biggest cities and start there...but they dont even want to do that.

Its like my cable company trying to sell me phone service and wasting millions in advertising for its service. That technology is dead. Move the fuck on.

I'm going to bet that this is only the case in western Russia.  When you consider the area that services are offered in, things change.

This thread smells like Entitlement.

Obviously you have never traveled for work. Being able to use hulu or netflix or some other net based service to download or stream and watch programs would be a HUGE boom in the industry.

The fact that my new amazing Google phone cant do this is fucking retarded as far as Im concerned.


Read the rest of my post about only offering said new services in the population packed major metro areas.

lol try Canada if u want teh sux

Meh, lack of being on the bleeding edge in this case has dick all to do with 'THE MAN KEEPING US DOWN' and everything to do with that we have an incredibly dense and expensive infrastructure already in place.

Power distribution in the US is one of the main building blocks in our society and is one of the aspects of the 'public' works of our country that is most in need of upgrading.

Now, think about the block you live on and what it would cost to rip everything out and put in nice, shiny new components.  Next consider everything withing a mile.  Now start adding in the rest of the country.  Trillions isn't even begging to cover it.

Bridges, roadways, trains, waterworks and the airways are all facing these issues.  We are at where we are because of 100 years of innovation and investment.  It's not going to change overnight or even over a generation.

And my point is it seems the two things in bold have stopped. And that has happened in a generation.

Or maybe I just have PMS.

You are just getting old.

You have PMS.

Seriously, if every time you encounter a problem in your life your immediate instinct is to attribute it to a secret cabal of people fucking with YOU for no discernible reason and in spite of every logical thought that the situation should be otherwise it's probably a pretty good indicator that you are insane.

Hi, former cell company executive here.

There is no cabal, but there are numerous industry forums, groups and so on which allow the companies to stay in touch with each other.

North America is big.

North America has trees and suburbs with trees.

North America has far too many regulatory bodies on the state, regional, metropolitan, city and village level. 

North America also has a nasty habit of nimbyism which prevents us from putting towers in places that are normal in the rest of the world.

All carriers have access to the same network equipment* (well, except Japanese kit and LTE will bring Japan back in to the global standards fold).

All carriers have access to the same handset equipment makers* (well, except Apple's iPhone).

All carriers have access to the same billing, support and value-added service suppliers.

Really what it comes down to is the regulatory environment.  There are things you can get away with in South Korea (in building repeaters and four bars of coverage on basement level 4), there are things you can get away with in Japan (aerial fiber everywhere!) and there are things you can get away with in Europe (hello 900 GSM with your superior building penetration). 

In North America, the regulatory environment is just way too fragmented to allow for a national deployment using the same methods and engineering.   In New York I was not allowed to place antennas on the roof tops of buildings if they could be seen from the street.  Well... err... kind of defeats the purpose of putting an antenna up there if it has to be blocked by tons of metal and concrete.  In Colorado I could not put up a new cell tower to provide improved coverage ( people complained about poor coverage ) in a suburb because the local government refused my building permit.  In San Diego I could not run riser fiber from the basement colo to the rooftop antennas because of city fire regulations.   In Toronto I can put antennas on the sides of someone's apartment building, but heaven forbid if I wanted to put up an antenna on an office building's roof in the downtown core.  Aye ya...  I could go on forever.

Also, releasing spectrum above 900Mhz for mobile use and expecting any form of in-building coverage or coverage in leafy subarbs, that's a big fuck you too.

EDIT, oh and Apple's entry in to the market with the iPhone and Google's Android are the two best things to happen to the industry since LTE was defined.

It's not Broughden, I heard most of the same segment. We really are at the ass end of the world when it comes to mobile utilization. And it's not because of the infrastructure we have. (Though that's crumbling to dust and has been for years). Listening to the things that people in places like Kenya and other third world countries are empowered to do with their mobile devices was amazing. Same other shit like being able to use the built in camera to snap a shot of a barcode on an ad, a rail map, or even a billboard, have the device read the code, and then serve the relevant website with a catalogue, train schedules, whatever is incredibly convenient.

That being said, I hate mobile everything and the only people who should be able to legally own a cell phone are doctors, emergency responders, governors, the president, and their staff. There are literally no other people on the planet who have so much important stuff going on that using a cell phone makes up for the idiocy that people engage in while using the phones in public. Here's three simple questions to determine if you should have a cell phone: 1) Did your cell phone calls in any way save a life/lives. 2) When using the cell phone in a vehicle, did you pull over and come to a complete stop before even thinking of taking the call. 3) While using the phone in a line did you turn off the device while the person in front of you was still being served, ensuring that you wouldn't be one of those assholes who holds up the line trying to take care of business in between making plans for later that night and then gets pissed at the person waiting on you for interrupting your call.

If the answer to any or all l of those questions is "no", you should not have a cellphone to begin with. If the answer to 2 or 3 is no, you're also a piece of shit as a person in general. Get some fucking manners.

The Japanese are not watching HDTV on their cell phones, they are watching *digital* TV on their cell phones. The Japanese mobile TV standard broadcasts at a video resolution of 320x240, which is roughly VHS quality.

Well since the current standard I have seen in the US is 0x0 resolution then any quality of theirs beats ours.

None of this explains why my cellphone in 1999 was a better PHONE than anything I have experienced since.  Somewhere along the way we traded call quality for a bunch of buzz words and feature rich bullet points. 

I guess it all has to do with AT&T's extensive network of CDMA/TDMA coverage that was scrapped for GSM.  Yeah yeah I realize all the 3g type of crap would never be possible with CDMA but all i wanted was a phone that fucking worked anytime/anywhere, 10 years ago this was available with a standard plan, today it isn't.

Too bad there wasn't some CDMA/GSM hybrid phone out there that did CDMA for voice and GSM for bells and whistles, naturally even if that existed cingular has managed to fuck up their network beyond the point of no return.  I sincerely hope they wake up one of these days to all their customers being gone.

In some areas in the US you can already get TV on your cell phone.

Your belief that a phone from 1999 is somehow superior to phones available today is amusing. 

ATT was never CDMA based.  The majority of ATT networks were D-AMPS (TDMA) based prior to their rollup and conversion to GSM.  Which is beside the point because CDMA versus GSM has nothing to do with anything above.  ATT also suffered from having so many networks integrated in to the national company, the legacy PacBell and Bell South networks being the major sore points. 

The main issue here was spectrum, when ATT moved to GSM the majority of the network switched to 1900MHz.  The D-AMPS system was in the 824-849 / 869-894MHz range which provided better building penetration and coverage in areas with trees.  1900MHz, not so much.  So yes, in a sense you could have had coverage under TDMA that you would not get once ATT upgraded to GSM.  But this had nothing to do with the technology itself, it had to do with the regulatory environment which allowed the FCC to grant spectrum in such a high band.  In fact, with GSM you suffer from dramatically fewer dropped calls due to switching issues and higher capacity per cell site assuming you have coverage.

As to your point about bells and whistles Verizon, Sprint, Bell Canada and Telus are the major CDMA carriers in North America and they all provide 3G connectivity.

But hey, don't let the above stop you from ranting like an idiot Salamok.

Provided you can make the call right?  :grin:

Good post about the regulatory environment. People tend to forget that national companies don't get some special federal mandate to bypass all the State and Local regulations. As a country, we're much more fractured in this regard, so rolling out anything national is a pita.

Exactly, no signal due to trees, structures or whatever and you will not be able to do anything. 

ATT and RogersCanada started to seriously refarm the 850MHz block last year after shutting down TDMA services in late 2007 (or early 2008 depending on the local regulatory agency).  So, if it makes you feel any better, you should be able to get the same signal strength you used to have if you have a phone that supports 850MHz and 1900MHz. 

As I said above, LTE will change the industry dramatically.  It supports the 700MHz band (holy crap awesome building penetration and way better signal strength in areas with trees) and uses multiple input / multiple output antennas to work some serious engineering magic on what is possible with wireless connectivity.

Oh, and this was covered by an NDA up until six months ago, but you want to know why we never had some of the interesting services like the Europeans had or the Japanese?

Advertising agencies.

Every time we would have a vendor pitch some new feature (Nokia and Nortel most often) we could deploy on the networks we would then take the thing to our customers and pitch it to them to see if they would be willing to use the thing.  For instance, localized SMS push advertising which was big in Europe and being used by McDonalds.  I was in a meeting with Saatchi & Saatchi where we pitched it to them for use as a test case.  We showed them the reports from Europe and they were very polite, but they never followed up or pushed it to their clients.  We even showed them how we could segment our marketing data for them, and then allow them to send an SMS in a specific geographic area at a specific time to a targeted market group.  Send an SMS with a coupon code for reduced price happy meals as the customer is about to go by if the weather is bad on a Sunday afternoon, and so on...  (and yes, customers could opt out or in anytime)

Electronic payments via your cell phone for vending machines and such?  No, because that would dilute the Visa brand since their was no card to be seen.  Why no logo?  Because Nokia was worried about diluting their brand by sharing space on the phone with Visa.

Blah, I could go on.

You should. It's somewhat interesting.

But if he does go on, it will either totally debunk Broughden's "ZOMG THE CORPORASHUNZ IZ KEEPING US DOWN" outlook on this, or give him more fuel because he will see Oban as an 'insider' who is trying to woo all of us in the unwashed masses into believing that the cell phone companies are all really a bunch of old softies who are working hard for us.


EDIT: woops, did not realize this wasn't in politics, changed  color accordingly.

Actually the latest generation of this is a little fancier -- they allow the software on the phone to query the state of the integrated stored fare card, so you can use your phone UI to check on how much cash you've got on the card, the last N train stations you've used it at, etc, etc.

See, and that works fine in a country that has an RFID payment standard mandated by a strong centralized regulatory agency.

What are the odds that your SF translink pass will work in NYC, Toronto, Chicago or DC?

My mobile phone from 1996 was superior in certain ways.  It was a higher wattage phone (3-5W I think?), more durable (droppable), and behaved more "phone-like" (make calls, answer calls).  No voicemail, forwarding, GPS, video games, etc.  It did have 2 different color snap-on cases you could get - black and grey.  I don't for one second really feel that it was technologically superior to anything today.  My first cell phone I bought of the more modern style in 2001 was a piece of crap compared to then and now.  It wasn't until I bought a Palm phone that I felt cell phones had anything serious to offer.  Not like I'm in a rush to upgrade technology or anything, I have a rotary phone at my desk for all of the house calls I make.

Thanks Oban. Finally understand why I'm able to get a signal through Telus that my friend on Rogers can't get. It's even more ironic when you're in the Rogers Center and no Rogers customer can get a signal.

I'll debunk one of those features: TV on phones. They pimped that like a year or two ago up here in Canada and it failed. The cost vs. practicality just didn't make sense and someone made the point up above, we just don't share the same culture that would make it appeal to consumers. Heck, I'm sure statistics will show that a majority of people in North America spend most their time sitting on their ass watching TV on the couch.

A former employee of mine worked on that Telus TV project.

The main issues were limited content made available for the Canadian market, the drain on battery life and the fact that the software was only licensed for a small subset of the total phones sold by Telus.

At one tradeshow I went to they had a sample of the video they were broadcasting to users, I was shocked at the poor quality.  Hell, /gif/ has better quality video.  I honestly still believe that the reason why video on cell phones failed was because of the shit quality, not anything else.  Hell, I have watched videos from youtube and iTunes on my iPhone quite a few times.

EDIT:

Oh, and Rogers is the fucking great Satan of the Cellular industry.

Sky do a TV to mobiles service in Europe.

But you gotta admit watching something on an iPhone screen is very different from your average RAZR or newer LG things. I still believe that while the tech infrastructure seemed to be there, it was the devices themselves that held back the user experience. I've always wondered if other countries are using mass transit so much more than the US and therefore have a culture more adaptable to different viewing habits versus Americans who are predominantly driving between places with TVs.

All of your points are very interesting though. Glad you mentioned that you're abiding by NDAs based on what you know  :grin:

Do other countries have as many freakin' models of handsets as we do? I swear the only reason they can do this is because they stop caring about the end user experience beyond the signing of the 2 year contract. This is the part I think Apple took the most advantage of. Seems like they designed a smartphone for end users and then shopped it around until they found a carrier. This is very different from ceding control to the carriers.

Yes on the iPhone, but not on the infrastructure.  A lot of cell sites out there past the suburbs are still being fed by T1's or bundles of microwave based DS1's.  Perfectly fine for voice and sms, not so good for anything that requires sustained speeds over 112Kbps.

With an iPhone, you are able to:

…watch television, several apps available (here is one - http://www.slingmedia.com/go/iphone , wifi only but I heard that it can do 3G, just temporarily gimped)…

…take bar codes and/or pictures and immediately pull up catalog product page on internet for ordering and delivery, camera on iPhone needs autofocus to make this work better, but there are addons that enable this now…

…record and stream video (if jailbroken)

But still no cut + paste (though coming in v3.0 or again if jailbroken)

And use your phone as a personal digital assistant, coming in a few months — http://azspot.net/post/114923308/siri-demo

My big peeve is the all the mobile network capping now - 5G/mo, kind of dampens media consumption… …or Apple gimping certain features — like I can DL videos and .mp3 in the background but it will only enable on WiFi and not 3G (though my present iPhone is still the Edge network, which is OK for email and textual stuff, most of the time, though it seems to flake out at inconvenient intervals). It's really gotta suck if you don't have cable/DSL in the boonies, and your only option is satellite (which is giant suck, and capped even lower, unpublished rates) or mobile cards/

Even new MiFi (Verizon) that geeks gone gaga over is capped at 5G/mo at $59 (250M for a $39 plan).  Overage costing $.05/$.10 per MB…

I used my cell phone when the IHERN would go down on the ambulance to call in patient reports, and sometimes a cell phone is nice to have for a secure line because of the idiots with scanners we had in our areas.  It isn't as bad now, since we went to 800 MHz, it isn't as bad, but I'm sure more people will buy freaking scanners in that range and we will be back at ground zero on security again.  800 MHz isn't that great either, we still have dead zones out in the hills, but we are a mix of urban and country area, so setting up repeating info happens sometimes.  I can remember one fire we had to no coverage to dispatch (no cell or 800 or old EMS frequency), so we had to set up a relay from one truck that could hear dispatch and one that could hear us on the fire.  

If I still was on the squad more, I would kill for this phone (Nebu, Broughden, Sky, and all you others that run around in the woods would too) http://www.toughestphone.com/
But since it doesn't have a ton of bells and whistles I doubt it would do good here, I would hate to go back to text messaging on the regular screen, wonder if they could come up with a fold phone with waterproof keys that are large enough to push.  It says when I dig around the site, that the North American launch is this summer, who is going to carry it?  I'm pissed at Verizon right now, but they have the best coverage in my area.  I could see getting a phone that combines a PDA with a phone, as there are some great drug guides, pt Dx, treatment guides, burn calculations, etc... that we have been sharing with each other at work.  It is a pain since we all have diffrent gear.  One PA has a ton of stuff on her PDA, but won't give it up, since another FNP had a hellish time reinstalling the programs to her Iphone.


Hell I live in town and I have crappy coverage in my subdivision.  I keep looking at cell phone antennas, as I think it would fix it, but I have to do it so my damn housing association doesn't bitch at me.  I think I'm going with Wilson Electronics (http://www.wilsonelectronics.com/) for either an antenna, I don't think I have the space to mount and use a cell phone booster.  JDTECK has a nice system (http://jdteck.com/signal-booster-kit-deluxe-complete-kits-p-314.html) , but I wonder if it is a repackaged Wilson system.  Anyone else have any luck with other antenna or booster units?

Ah good to know. I used to read about companies making big investments to drive multimedia on cell phones, but I always wondered how far and wide that spread. I could totally see them focus just on major cities and bone everyone not in one.

@naum: thanks for the heads up on Siri. I really need that thing, driving as much as I do. However, it's only useful if it'll work with a hands-free headset (I'm on my fourth one atm). Any idea if it will?

There are quite a few rugged phones out there for CDMA and GSM networks.

I would contact the business office for your carrier of choice and ask about one since they may not be available at retail stores.

Samsung makes a rugged flip and a rugged candy bar.  Casio has a nice, slightly gimmicky, product too. 

Personally I never went for the rugged phones since there is usually an http://www.otterbox.com/ (http://www.otterbox.com/) that fits whatever the current flavour of the day is.

I miss my Iridium, that was a fucking tank of a phone.  Hell, it could disrupt tv's and other phones during call setup.  It could also be used as a personal defense baton.

As for cell phone repeaters, just wait.  If you are using ATT the picocells are coming out soon...

I left them for Telus. Terrible service all around.

Now go back and read my FIRST post about companies stupidly being stagnant and protecting thie turf versus innovation. Samething you just said.

Which has nothing to do with me thinking this is the fault of some secret cabal, I have no idea where some of you get your ideas from.

Which is actualy why the woman in the NPR program said we should just import the Japanese protocol rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, but that it was once again an example of how backwards we were becoming.

If we do that then we are suppressing American innovation and allowing those foreigners to win.

I call bullshit on this one as far as cell service goes.  They've already rebuilt the networks 3 times and are going for a 4th, and each time they've deliberately crippled it to keep it "closed" even as they gladly share each others infrastructure.  It's pure rent-seeking behavior.

Simple example: I used to have a RAZR phone, and I wanted to load my MP3's on it, something I knew it could do, except...I had Verizon for a network, and Verizon deliberately and specifically crippled their RAZR's so they could not be loaded with MP3's, if you wanted music you had to buy it from them, at $5+ a track.  Yes, there were hacks to get around it, if you were savvy enough and didn't mind risking bricking your phone, which is why nearly all phones are now "OTA" (Over The Air), they can have their firmware checked and reloaded over the network.

My phone is a general purpose computing device that has been deliberately crippled so I have to pay $10 (or $3 a month) for a shitty app to check my email because trying to use the integrated browser on GMail never seems to work no matter how many times they rewrite the server feed trying to work around it.  Apple won't let Flash on the iPhone even with severe limitations, because then they couldn't sell you apps that reformat a Google search for $20 a pop.  Android is trapped between Google's intent to make it an open general purpose always-on network device, and the network provider's desire to cripple it.  It is so useful to be always reachable, that we don't stop to think how much more useful it would be to always be *really* connected.

--Dave

Well, some of your points are valid. 

The expensive legacy infrastructure is usually written down and/or paid off by the time we roll around to the next technology.  Oh, and hey we get to keep most of that equipment around anyway to support legacy customers which is just money in the bank.  Plus the fact that new equipment is always better/faster/cheaper...  As for infrastructure sharing, those large towers you see are generally owned by one of the two major tower companies and then we all have to lease space and buy power from them.  Roaming agreements allow for network sharing, sure, but we have to pay for that ability in a bilateral relationship.  What do you mean by crippled to keep it closed?

CDMA carriers are able to lock down their phones and subscribers to a greater extent than GSM providers simply because of the lack of SIM cards and readily available unlocked phones.  The whole ringtone thing still amazes me.

The point about flash and Apple, not so much.  Considering the fact that google search is built in to the browser, I am not quite sure what you are getting at here.  Also Flash really does kill the battery in phones, at least as it is currently implemented.  Can you elaborate on this point?

Flash, in general, is going to suck on mobile devices.  Hell, a lot of flash content has trouble on my 2.4GHz core2duo laptop with 2GB ram.

I think the "kill the battery" argument is total crap though.  Give the user the choice -- if they really want to run something cpu intensive that's going to impact their battery life, maybe to them it's worth it.

Modern smartphones really are little handheld computers, and with recent ARM cores having MMUs (and soon, virtualization capabilities), running full operating systems (linux, osx, etc) that can manage resources and ensure that core functions (phone, etc) are not starved by less essential apps, it's kinda silly to pretend they have to be locked down single-function embedded devices.

Network operators don't want to be "dumb pipes", because they're desperate to "monetize" their users as much as possible, but the trend seems to be toward more openness, not less.  The apple store is still a walled garden, but it moves the point of control to a third party (that still imposes stupid restrictions on developers, but it's hard to be as stupid as a cellular carrier).  The android market is more open (no human approval process, but malicious, copyright-violating, etc apps can be removed), and android devices allow app installation from PC or web too.

I'd like to see more mobile hardware shipped where replacing the entire OS does not require defeating dumb "protection" mechanisms, if people want to do this.  I think we'll be there in the next year or two.

Amen to that, brother!  I worked for them for all of 10 weeks (IVR Customer Experience Team).  8 of those were my desperately trying to get out.  Seeing it from the inside, I am shocked when _anything_ Rogers owns or has ever touched works.

I have yet to meet an employee at Rogers that has been in their position for more than six months.

Because Flash / Flex3 is the best damn stateful UI over http developed ever. Creating an application in Flex makes you realize just how big of a damn hack every other UI over the browser is.  Meh. 10" touchscreen fliptops it is.

Flash sucks.

Only good for video and even there, sucks aardvark balls compared to H264, in terms of video quality per file size.

UI tactile response is poor - compared to HTML or even worse, to old school terminal setups where response time is measured in sub-seconds. Flash, OTOH, stutters and memory leaks like a sieve. It runs reasonably on modern Windows OS machines, but sucks on any other platform. And in case you haven't noticed, non-Windows platforms (not just Apple and the minute Linux desktop, but all the mobile platforms which are soon going to be the de facto manner in which users access online content.

Flash, for video, is just a player and it can handle many different video codecs. The most popular codec, thanks to the blazing fast encoding speeds of the open source tools is Sorenson Spark. There are other better codecs out there, though, that the Flash player supports including H.264. It doesn't even need to be packaged in an FLV container, the Flash player can read an H.264 MP4 directly.

Yes, I am aware of that.

But Flash player still sucks compared to native players.

I just wish that I could hear people on my cell phone like I do on my landline.

Isn't this a phone problem rather than a network problem?  My father-in-law nearly deafened me today and we are on different networks.

Why the fuck would you want television on your phone?  :uhrr:

If you find yourself watching tv on your phone, I think it's time to consider your lifestyle and maybe re-prioritize.

Then again, I don't use a cell phone. Leave me the fuck alone. Also, I dislike people who call me from a cell phone and tell them to find a real phone so I can understand what the fuck they're saying and hang up on them.

Tell them to get a better phone or stop talking on those piece of shit bluetooth headsets they get for free.

The Flash player is a buggy, incoherent piece of refried monkey shit infected with AIDS, SARS and the goddamn Swine Flu. It is almost as slow and shitty as Java, and it's implementation is so badly variable from platform to platform that I hesitate to ever tell someone something I've developed with it will work. And it just seems to get worse and worse with every iteration. And this is from someone doing nothing more elaborate or processor-intensive than creating a fucking animated banner. Flash is a wonderful program that does some great shit. But Adobe needs to take their fingers out and stop trying to release a new version of CS every 6-12 goddamn months and make sure their current version works well. Also, they need to fix the Adobe Reader which has become the most bloated, sluggish useless piece of shit program in existence.

I want to mind rape Abode some days.

Since their business model is to now sell a new product every year, I don't think they're concered about any given iteration.  Why fix it when there will be a new one a month later?

I don't know wtf is up with everybody's phone.  I almost never have a problem with understanding people on a cell phone.  Comes in perfectly.  The "cut in and out" thing only happens very rarely, or when I'm waaaay out in the middle of nowhere (and it actually sounds even better, in case of my parents shitty ass land line  :awesome_for_real:).

Also, the quality of the phones, both in physical ability and in sound quality has gone up at a constant rate since I can first remember using cellphones in the 90's.  And every cellphone I used in the 90's had significantly worst sound quality and breakup than any phone does now.  Seriously, fuck those phones.

Which one of us is in the bizarro world because half the comments in this thread make no god damn sense to me.

I do bag on Verizon and I seem to be in the minority when wishing I was on Cingular again, but I've decided that it must be because I have a Blackberry.  Fact is that I usually had 4-5 bars with Cingular but I'm lucky to get three with Verizon, maybe four if the Magic Cellphone Unicorn happens to be shitting a rainbow where I am standing that moment but this is rare.  On the other hand, I have my pitiful one or two bars in More Places_TM, as the man says.  So, I'm willing to blame this one on my hardware since everyone else loves Verizon and I don't know any better.

It really depends on where you live. At my old location AT&T was the only provider that I could get a signal from cause they were the only provider the city allowed to put up a cell tower. At my new location my AT&T reception sucks.

Please, don't mock the magic rainbow shitting cellphone unicorns.

1998-1999 AT&T + Nokia 6120 (at least i think that was my phone) = best sound quality/reception I have ever had.  Of course since then I have only experienced Cingular and although they have gotten slightly better in the last year or so they still suck by comparison.  I think it is time for me to switch carriers.

Are bars a uniform system of measurement?  I have pretty much come to the conclusion that if you get any signal at all Cingular starts counting at 3.

I also love how there is a spot at the busiest section of the busiest freeway in Austin that seems to drop your call 4 times out of 5.  The fact that it is right after the on ramp I use daily makes it extra special.

You shouldn't be on the phone while driving anyways.  The intersection is just looking out for you by telling you to hang up and drive.

The busiest section of the busiest freeway at 5:00pm goes like 5 miles an hour and being a freeway it has no intersections. 

It's still functionally equivalent to driving around with a .08 blood alcohol level (http://www.psych.utah.edu/AppliedCognitionLab/)

It's the only measuring tool I have.  However your description fits with my experience.

Well, the one thing we do have over Europe is better broadband. Or at least we used to. Lots of residential customers in continental Europe are stuck with ADSL (1.5Mbs) and there is no FiOS effort over there. The best TV is still satellite. The cable plant is slowing catching up to satellite, but it is not there yet.  Strange since the landmass of North America favors satellite while the density of Europe would seem to favor cable.

So you're saying it's perfectly safe?  :grin:

Nobody's allowed to make laws that provide for "within reason", because it only takes one yutz shaving while eating while on the cell to screw up a whole highway worth of days. Politicians get to pat themselves on the back with joke-easy laws like "no talking while driving", when the result is not actually solving the "problem" as it is forcing people back to retail to by headsets.

Some people are better equipped to drive while talking than others. If someone's gonna get in an accident because they were distracted on the phone (even with an earpiece), chances are they'd have gotten in that accident arguing with their wife, or loading a CD into the dash, or yelling at the kids, or any of a hundred other things that people do in a car when they're a) stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic; or, b) traveling on a laser-straight road for an hour.

(http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg)

Does the Canada figure include Satellite?  Because right now I am not playing WoW because grinding single mobs in the overworld exceeds my bandwidth capabilities.

We recently had Strayer here in the studio to discuss his research for some online material for a psychology course relating to cognition and attention.  I haven't finished the postproduction yet, but some tidbits from the material:

Some 2-3% of the population can hold a cellphone conversation while driving without impairment.  Problem is, the other ~97% of the population is convinced that they're all part of that 3%.  It's also apparently not something you can train yourself to do; that is, you don't get better at it with practice.

The actual accident risk increase is about 4x normal, which is about the same as being over the legal limit.  Texting while driving?  Not surprisingly, about 8x the normal danger.

Having a conversation with an adult (who is aware of the driving conditions and rules of the road) does not impair driving.  Having a conversation with a child *can* increase your risk, because the child doesn't really know what's going on and may actively seek to divert your attention--so strap the li'l pests down and duct-tape their mouths shut (Ok, he didn't say that part... :grin: )

Incidentally, talking with a blind passenger poses the same risk as a cell phone conversation.

This is interesting, is it because the driver is focusing on the blind person to gauge their reaction to the conversation?  I tried to do a google search, but nothing came up other than the dangers of hybrid cars smooshing blind people.

Normally, passengers will adjust their conversation if the driving conditions demand it, and can even act as extra eyes (or completely back-seat drive, for that matter).  Blind passengers don't have that same situational awareness of the driving conditions and the driver's needs, so tend not to know when they should stop distracting the driver. 

Edit:  just a guess, do hybrid cars sound different enough to catch blind pedestrians unaware?

Hybrids that can run on the electric-motor only (like the Prius) are very very quiet in that mode.

Yeah.  My Corolla often catches people unaware (much, much worse now that all college students walk around parking lots not paying any attention with their damn ipods).  Electric cars though?  Whisper silent.  When you're used to hearing an engine it can be quite eerie.

Well I can only comment for Germany.

We have 4 Providers here. All of them provide Service to 99% of the Population (roughly 96% of the Area). 2 Providers only operate in the 1800 MHz Band (because they started a few years after the first two when the 900 MHz Frequencies were already sold), the other two operate in the 900 MHz bands.

All of them provide very good to decent indoor coverage, even in the 1800 MHz bands although Germany has a lot of trees and most buildings are concrete or brick and mortar.

All providers provide nationwide 3G coverage and all metropolitan areas are now HSPA capable (7.5 MBit/s up and 5 MBit/s down). Vodafone and O2 even offer DSL-like intrenet access over 3G networks.

All of them tried music subscription services, internet portal services and other crap for sometime but all of their efforts tanked so nowadays they tend to offer bandwidth packages or even flatrates and even stopped selling crippled branded phones (except logos and background images).

T-Mobile even ofers a VoIP package for their contracts.

The euivalent of an AT&T iPhone contract (1000 Minutes, unlimited texts, internet flatrate) costs 79 Euro, 100 Minutes are available for 10 Eur, 1 GB also.

The networks are already planning their LTE introduction in 2010 and 2011. Cellular service in Germany is so good that a lot of people actually abolished their landlines and just use cellular services for phone and internet access.

You can also get DSL only services (not bundled to a cable TV or phone service) from any provider so a landline is not strictly necessary.

DSL coverage is also quite good and you usually get 16 MBit/s up/ 1 MBit/s down for as little as Eur 20 with 50/10 MBit/s VDSL being the upper limit at the moment.

TV on the other hand is quite bad in germany. No network offers HDTV broadcasts at the moment and most of them won't for at least another two to three years.

I drive a loud, large car. It catches people unaware constantly on the campus of the local college. I blame it entirely on their ipods. And their inability to look either way before stepping into the street.

During college, I drove a transit bus for work on the campus of Northern Illinois University.  It was one of the best jobs I've had, but the cluelessness of people in general, not just college students, was astounding.  The drivers used to make a game of seeing how close we come to missing someone who wasn't paying attention.  I still don't understand how people could be completely unaware of a 44' red-and-black bus bearing down on them, but it happened all the time. 

People driving around busses are just as clueless as well.  I also drove coaches (think Greyhounds) for charter jobs, which also included driving in downtown Chicago doing shuttle runs for conventions.  There wasn't one convention that went by without some sort of incident between a bus and a taxi.  Of the git on Lake Shore Drive one day sitting level with my back wheels who wouldn't give way for me to change lanes.  This was with plenty of room all around us and my blinkers being on for quite some time.  Let's just say they weren't too happy when I forced the issue and started to move over on them. 

/off topic
/on topic

Buying cell phones anymore these days just makes me nuts.  Our contract is up at the end of the year and the husband wants to change phones (again) to get a Blackberry Storm.  He's done research on phones and on this model from Verizon and thinks it's what he wants.  He has trouble using the small qwerty keyboards on most phones (we both have enV's right now) because his hands are so huge, but testing with the Storm seems to be fine for him.  I just hate the whole process of picking from the gazillions of plans, poking through phone after phone after phone trying to find one that suits me and the whole enticement purchase of models to choose from.  What if he wants a Blackberry but I prefer the LG touch screen phone instead?  Oh, but you can't mix models or plans when you're doing the family plan thing.  Annoying.  So chances are, I'll be getting a Blackberry of some flavor by the end of the year, and I'm not even sure I need something with that much "power" since I work from home and pretty much always have access to the internet that way.