Via UHub, the differently-winged WaveMaker (Peter Morin) says it’s the NIMBY municipalities, not the cell phone companies, that are responsible for dead spots:
This is why people have complaints about service. Some local zoning boards and politicians make it practically impossible to site new facilities to eliminate service problems. For instance, some communities prohibit a wireless installation within any residential zoning district, even if the entire town is zoned residential and the installation is a stealth installation inside of a church steeple. A carrier must therefore seek a series of zoning variances, face strident neighborhood opposition, be denied by the board and file a federal law suit, in which case the Court itself orders the issuance of all development permits necessary to permit the facility to be built.
In other words, Morin implies that Sen. Morrissey’s bill is a redirection of ire away from municipalities and onto cell phone companies. Could be.
And as far as getting rid of onerous long-term cell phone contracts, sharpchick pointed out that the new law proposes a limit of one year. Uh … that’s not exactly what we had in mind. Everything should be month-to-month: make the market fluid. The telcos will doubtless say that they’ll have to raise prices, since they can’t make money on shorter contracts … don’t believe it for a second. They’ll charge what the market will bear; and right now the market is in a state of “non-coordinated collusion”, if you will: Since everyone does the same restrictive policy, they each enjoy the ability to charge high prices. This is similar to the effect of price-matching or “lowest-price guarantee” policies in retail: The actual effect is often to fix prices among retailers, not necessarily at the lowest possible price.
By the way, Sen. Jarret Barrios has chimed in on the previous thread:
Sharp eye, sharpchick
As the lead on the Senate side of the complete version of the Cell Phone Users Bill of Rights (along with State Rep Steve Walsh of Lynn on the house side), it was painful to see the enormous influence of Big Telecom on the fate of this little bill. While I was unaware Sen. Morrissey was filing this new bill, I can only view it as a partial step in the right…er, left direction.
Again, who runs this state? Verizon? Cingular? Getting hard to tell. There’s an enormous good-will-creating opportunity for incoming Governor Patrick and the legislature, if they actually call the telcos’ bluff and pass a real Cell Phone Users’ Bill of Rights. I wouldn’t fear a big TV-waged campaign if I were a legislator — those have failed before, and they’ll fail now.
“Call your state rep now and demand longer, less flexible cell phone contracts!
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This ad was paid for by People for the Verizon Way.”
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by the way, perhaps I’m late to the party, but since when does MA have jurisdiction to dictate these sorts of things? I’d have guess it would be up to someone like the FCC?
for example, I’m almost positive that a municipality can not prohibit a cell phone company from installing coverage. The town doesn’t have to let the company build just anywhere, but if the town doesn’t work with the company the company can sue in Federal Court.
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IIRC, this came up in Brookline. First the cell phone company wanted to build a tower in the golf course, and when that got shot down, they wanted to build one in the cemetery, which also got shot down. Or maybe visa versa. In any case, I think they ended up using smaller antennae attached to currently existing poles or somesuch, but it was an issue in the town for years.
Care to guess who Mr.Morin works for when not blogging??
Greetings, bluesmen — it is a pleasure to be summoned forth.
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Ruppert, you will note that the purpose of my post was to articulate why it is that so many customers complain about unreliable service. It seems to me that the challenge from a public policy standpoint is to solve that problem — smacking the Big Bad Industry upside the head is always a popular approach, but it doesn’t do anything for your service, does it?
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When you think about it, the end result of Morrissey’s proposal would simply be that everyone has the right to freely bounce from one unsatisfactory carrier to another, lugging around their newly portable number, but compelled to purchase a new phone each time (which will be more expensive, since the companies won’t be giving them away any longer) (different phones are necessary for different carriers because they use different technology).
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One doesn’t need to “guess” what I do, I suppose — but I think I’ve tried to provide an honest description of the source of the problem.