{"id":417,"date":"2003-10-27T15:45:02","date_gmt":"2003-10-27T19:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/benadida\/2003\/10\/27\/cell-phone-insanity-the-fcc-to-the-r"},"modified":"2003-10-27T15:45:02","modified_gmt":"2003-10-27T19:45:02","slug":"cell-phone-insanity-the-fcc-to-the-rescue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/2003\/10\/27\/cell-phone-insanity-the-fcc-to-the-rescue\/","title":{"rendered":"Cell Phone Insanity: the FCC to the rescue?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

My friend Dan says to me today “I can’t help but feel that the cell phone industry has failed humanity. They don’t even have the right intentions.” I can’t help but agree with Dan.<\/p>\n

At a mall this weekend, a customer argues with a sales person: “they give you a discount on the phone if you’re a new customer, but not if you’re an existing, loyal customer? That’s backwards!” For the customer, yes it is.<\/p>\n

My contract with T-mobile just expired, and I’m getting calls from the store that sold me the phone trying to convince me to sign on for another year (there’s some kind of cash incentive). A t-mobile store rep tells me that I cannot get a new phone with a new contract because I am “already a t-mobile customer.” So I’m not allowed to pay t-mobile two monthly fees even if I ask nicely? He backtracks. “Ummm, no I guess that’s okay.”<\/p>\n

My friend Eric has the T616 from Sony Ericsson with AT&T and I want the same with T-Mobile, but they don’t carry that one, they carry the T610 which looks the same, acts the same, but has a different name. I think. There may be a feature difference, but the Sony Ericsson site isn’t telling.<\/p>\n

My sister is told by her peers that “AT&T is the best network on campus.” I write to her asking “is that the TDMA or GSM network?” She says “huh?”. Siemens now makes a phone that does both TDMA and GSM for AT&T (no other provider has both). They call it dual-band. But if you see a tri-band phone, that actually means tri-band GSM, no TDMA. You’d think tri-band is better than dual-band, but you’d be wrong, or at least not quite right.<\/p>\n

I once got a call from Sprint PCS implying that, having gone past the expiration of my contract, it was very unstable for me to stay “month-to-month” and I should sign on to one of their year-long contracts “very soon.” Yes, I can imagine that it’s indeed unstable for Sprint’s revenue predictions.<\/p>\n

Is anyone confused yet? Whatever happened to keeping things simple for the customer? How many graduate degrees does it take to figure out this mess? Is cell service taking a page from air travel’s voodoo pricing book?<\/p>\n

In a few days, FCC-mandated Number Portability goes live. This means you can move any phone number you have, land-line or mobile, to any other service. It’s the best thing in the telecom market since the early 1990s advent of spread-spectrum cell phone service. And it’s coming from a government regulatory agency.<\/p>\n

I never thought I’d say it, but thank you, FCC. Thank you, Michael Powell. You’re the sanest force in the cell service market today. What a testament to everyone else’s complete insanity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Dan says to me today “I can’t help but feel that the cell phone industry has failed humanity. They don’t even have the right intentions.” I can’t help but agree with Dan. At a mall this weekend, a customer argues with a sales person: “they give you a discount on the phone if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}