Verizon forced to allow data roaming

[ggore]

This is not a complete list, but Cricket, VM, and Boost don't have roaming, Republic seems to have full data roaming, at least on Verizon native and some but not all other Sprint roaming partners, and Ting has full voice/text roaming on Verizon and other Sprint partners.



Is anyone arguing that Bluegrass Cellular, Appalachian Wireless, Thumb Cellular, USCC, C-Spire, Alaska Communications or others shouldn't get mandated roaming agreements with Verizon? I'm not. It's in Verizon's best interest anyways, as Verizon needs reciprocal roaming agreements to fill out the map.

I'm arguing that Sprint, as a nationwide carrier, shouldn't get government-mandated roaming rates. They should be free to negotiate a roaming a deal if they would like, and if not, then Sprint just has 911 ability in those areas.

No, I wasn't arguing that point, I agree with you. Some are saying that the little guys don't matter, and by extension their customers, who are the ones being harmed by all these byzantine roaming rules and restrictions that do anything but make it easy for them to use their phones when they have to work or travel anywhere outside their immediate home area.

[ShortSxit]

When you are dealing with "public" airwaves in addition to public, city ordinances pertaining to the installation of cell towers and their limitations thereof, I think you are involved in a situation in which you have to force companies to allow for roaming onto their networks. If not, you are allowing for a monopoly to exist.

The argument stating that Sprint is free to build its own towers holds no water if the citizens of the community have already stated that they do not want additional towers installed.

On the one hand, yes Verizon owns the towers and the infrastructure, but on the other, the city where it's towers reside may have already stated that it does not want any more towers built. So if not, Verizon may have a monopoly in that city that Sprint cannot touch. The citizens have on the one hand stated that they do not want addition towers installed, but on the other, they want competition in the cell industry in this city.

If a city doesn't want additional towers, they are free to be known as a cell phone "dead spot." That's on them, not on the current tower owners.

[jseah]

If a city doesn't want additional towers, they are free to be known as a cell phone "dead spot." That's on them, not on the current tower owners.

The funny thing is the NIMBY's who are the first to complain when a company wants to erect a new cell tower, power line, etc. are also the first ones to complain when their coverage sucks.

[jseah]

Not true. My example involved privately owned bridges, and there are plenty of those in the U.S. In fact, one of them is one of the most popular bridges between the U.S. and Canada.

In any case, the spectrum is publicly owned, and the public (via the FCC) licenses its use to Verizon and others. Verizon's towers are private property, but they transmit on public airwaves, through public and private spaces.

I believe the one big difference that you fail to consider is that for a private bridge, while the government can dictate that the bridge owner cannot discriminate on who gets to use the bridge, the government cannot dictate how much the bridge owner can charge to use the bridge.

What the other posters are saying is that while the government can tell Verizon that they have to allow roaming by their competitors, they should not be able to dictate to Verizon how much they can charge for that roaming.

[jseah]

No, I wasn't arguing that point, I agree with you. Some are saying that the little guys don't matter, and by extension their customers, who are the ones being harmed by all these byzantine roaming rules and restrictions that do anything but make it easy for them to use their phones when they have to work or travel anywhere outside their immediate home area.

I don't know if you were referring to me, but I never said that the little guys don't matter. My position was that a roaming agreement benefits the little guys much more than the big guys. Let's use Verizon as an example. They have a huge network, and yet they have coverage holes. Then compare it to a smaller carrier like Pioneer, which has coverage where Verizon is lacking. However, because their company is smaller, their native coverage may only cover one state (or whatever). If Verizon and Pioneer signs a reciprocal roaming agreement, Pioneer benefits much more than Verizon. The roaming agreement gives Verizon coverage in a state where they had none before. But Pioneer now gets coverage in the 49 states where they had none before. The Pioneer customer will be much more likely to end up utilizing the extended area under the roaming agreement than a Verizon customer would.

[ggore]

I don't know if you were referring to me, but I never said that the little guys don't matter. My position was that a roaming agreement benefits the little guys much more than the big guys. Let's use Verizon as an example. They have a huge network, and yet they have coverage holes. Then compare it to a smaller carrier like Pioneer, which has coverage where Verizon is lacking. However, because their company is smaller, their native coverage may only cover one state (or whatever). If Verizon and Pioneer signs a reciprocal roaming agreement, Pioneer benefits much more than Verizon. The roaming agreement gives Verizon coverage in a state where they had none before. But Pioneer now gets coverage in the 49 states where they had none before. The Pioneer customer will be much more likely to end up utilizing the extended area under the roaming agreement than a Verizon customer would.

No, I was referring generically to the "cellphone as luxury" crowd. Of course roaming affects the smaller companies more, but the benefits far outweigh the costs, to the customers and they are what is important in the end. Without roaming, customers of these smaller providers sometime have to have 2 phones, one to use at home and one to use when they travel outside their immediate area. Quite often there is only one GSM provider and one CDMA provider in a rural area, with all the other providers having to roam in one form or another on those two. And when roaming is not possible, the customers are just flat out of luck. This is a common thing across the country.

A prime example is here, as you say, where Pioneer is the ONLY CDMA provider to have ever built a system here. First on their own, and then in partnership with Sprint, where they shared tower cost and Pioneer used Sprint's construction unit to actually build the new towers and sites. In return, Sprint got a roaming agreement which allowed them to advertise and show on their coverage maps that a good bit of their coverage was native and not roaming (false advertising in my opinion, roaming is roaming, and should be displayed as such). Now Pioneer got in bed with Verizon in their LTE in Rural America program and dumped the roaming agreement with Sprint, which covers HALF the state of Oklahoma. So now our choices of carrier on the CDMA side are either Pioneer or Verizon, who now has the roaming agreement. Sprint customers are just out of luck since Sprint has strict limits on how much roaming you can do.

Things are better on the GSM side, since both AT&T and T-Mobile have built pretty good systems, and the one GSM regional carrier, CellularOne, has called it quits and sold itself to Pioneer.

It's a ridiculous situation, and one that occurs all across this country. The people living in the big cities have NO idea what a process it is to find a carrier that suits your needs and has coverage where you want and need to go, if you live in a rural area. You can live in one county and your situation might totally change, phone won't work, etc, right in the next county.

[GSMinCT]

If a city doesn't want additional towers, they are free to be known as a cell phone "dead spot." That's on them, not on the current tower owners.

That depends on the state. In Connecticut, siting is under the sold jurisdiction of the Connecticut State Citing Council. On the whole NIMBY thing, it is not that people don't want wireless systems installed, it's just that the carriers often try to do it in atrocious ways. For example, T-Mobile tried to put a tower on the property behind where I live, which is in a heavily wooded, exurban area between three neighborhoods, and would have been a totally inappropriate place for a cell tower. The way that we resolved it was by rallying public support (because it was on town-owned land, not because the town has anything to say over siting) for an alternate location at a former landfill site where virtually no one would be able to see the thing, and it also provided better coverage for the schools, but had there been no alternative, we would have had a hard fight at the state level.

Admittedly, the tower would have been advantageous for Verizon and T-Mobile, since AT&T could theoretically just whip out a DAS to cover a mile or three of road here or there if they want to, since they are the incumbent carrier (Sprint doesn't seem to build tower sites anymore, their coverage sucks), but it was sited for a totally inappropriate location, and they wanted to go to the 150' level, instead of using a couple of smaller, less intrusive sites.

Also, the CT State Citing Council is a benefit in general to the state because they are basically mandating near 100% land area coverage over the whole state, whereas if every local town had control over tower sitings, it would cement AT&T and Verizon's already massive lead in the state, and many towns would be dead spots, leading to a swiss cheese map. However, there are downsides, like a few idiotic tower sitings, like a pair of towers near each other in Old Saybrook that haven't been forced to co-locate, and in Storrs, where there is an 80' tower, a 250' tower, and the ugliest of them all, a 327' guyed wire tower all sitting next to each other, when a forced co-location of the 6 carriers, radio station, and various communications radio systems on a single 250' freestanding tower would accomplish the same thing as all three towers do now. In general, however, they are much better than other states with forcing co-locations or other existing structures to be used before a company is allowed to erect another structure.

A prime example is here, as you say, where Pioneer is the ONLY CDMA provider to have ever built a system here.
...
Things are better on the GSM side, since both AT&T and T-Mobile have built pretty good systems, and the one GSM regional carrier, CellularOne, has called it quits and sold itself to Pioneer.

No one cares about CDMA vs. GSM. Who cares if Verizon and Pioneer share the same physical infrastructure, they are still two options you have. Better partnered with Verizon than with Sprint. Sprint is generally non-existent in rural areas.

The one big issue I have is that there are some areas that only have GSM coverage, or only have CDMA, and right now, there is no way to cross-roam. It's getting even worse with 15 different LTE bands. I wish one carrier, whether it be AT&T (when hell freezes over), or Verizon would step up and overbuild every last square mile of the other system's coverage.

Back to data roaming, I don't feel bad for Sprint or T-Mo customers, as they picked a carrier with crappy coverage.

[mgerbasio]

Water is a necessity, cell phone coverage isn't.
Cell phone's are like any other business and follow the laws of supply and demand.
The town is a local government. Verizon Wireless is a for-profit company.
Verizon built the infrastructure at their own cost. The town didn't "build" the water supply.
There is no stockpiling involved here. Other cell carriers are free to built their own towers.
Using the excess water doesn't affect everyone else. More users on a tower does.

Cell phones are *unlike* virtually all other businesses as the federal government is THE major player controlling the limited resource the companies sell. It isn't a free market as say the PC business where some knowledge and a garage is all you need to build a company. I know from prior posts, some see it this way, others don't.

Ultimately you'll have an oligopoly, a regulated marketplace like other "utilities", or a market where smaller companies can still compete offering choice and keeping downward pressure on prices. I'm not in favor of the first two, so either limit the amount of bandwidth the companies can own (similar to how mass media is regulated) or let them continue to buy spectrum but force them to wholesale a portion of it.

This is done all the time where companies aren't allowed to gain a monopoly in a market, wireless should be no different. Google is continually being looked at and the internet is about as open as a marketplace can get. Otherwise, you'd still be getting your phone service from the old AT&T and just buying gas from Exxon. What Verizon is trying to pull off with the cable companies is nothing short of a cartel.

[Endeavor]

You are exactly right! And anyone who favors eliminating government regulation of this area (or worse, consolidation of the existing carriers) is favoring moving us back to the days when one source controlled everything, and only business users could afford a mobile phone and long distance calling.

Cell phones are *unlike* virtually all other businesses as the federal government is THE major player controlling the limited resource the companies sell. It isn't a free market as say the PC business where some knowledge and a garage is all you need to build a company. I know from prior posts, some see it this way, others don't.

Ultimately you'll have an oligopoly, a regulated marketplace like other "utilities", or a market where smaller companies can still compete offering choice and keeping downward pressure on prices. I'm not in favor of the first two, so either limit the amount of bandwidth the companies can own (similar to how mass media is regulated) or let them continue to buy spectrum but force them to wholesale a portion of it.

This is done all the time where companies aren't allowed to gain a monopoly in a market, wireless should be no different. Google is continually being looked at and the internet is about as open as a marketplace can get. Otherwise, you'd still be getting your phone service from the old AT&T and just buying gas from Exxon. What Verizon is trying to pull off with the cable companies is nothing short of a cartel.

[Cares]

Funny I was just researching this. My fiancé has zero to one bar of reception while inside her work building but fine outside. Data is nonexistent. Sprint is running full bars there. We went to Verizon to get reliable service and it's frustrating when you can barely use your phone half the day. I was searching for a roam only hack to Sprint for this purpose. Don't think it exists?