Google a "Happy Loser" In Spectrum Auction 162
Large cell service providers won almost all of the licenses in the recently concluded FCC spectrum auction. Google didn't get any and won't be entering the wireless business. Verizon Wireless was the big winner, laying out $9.4 billion for enough regional licenses in the "C" block to stitch together nationwide coverage, except for Alaska. On this spectrum Verizon will have to allow subscribers to use any compatible wireless device and run any software application they want. AT&T paid $6.6 billion, Qualcomm picked up a few licenses, and Paul Allen's Vulcan Spectrum LLC won a pair of licenses in the "A" block. One analyst called Google a "happy loser" because it got the openness it had pushed for. The AP's coverage does some more of the numbers.
Android (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Android (Score:5, Funny)
"Oh sorry, internet acccess requires our patented "poopboost" technology. and we are not ready to license it yet. it's only available on verizon licensed phones."
You bet your arse they will do everything they can to lock you into their crap-phones with everything disabled. They will find a loophole, they hate the customer that much
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Re:Android (Score:5, Funny)
Or in some strange parallel universe, they might just go right on doing business without any consequences to them whatsoever. Thank god we don't live there and companies are actually held accountable, eh?
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Re:Android (Score:5, Insightful)
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Corporate Culture (Score:5, Insightful)
While I understand your point and agree with to a certain point, my experience has been that corporations or their divisions or other business entities develop a corporate culture that is more than the sum of its parts. Individually, the people in it can be quite nice away from the office, but when they are in the workplace, they become part of the entity. A couple I have seen (and thank all gods never worked for) were run like Nazi concentration camps. They hated everybody, and the places were run on total fear. More commonly, you do see businesses that have a culture of looking at their customers as victims to be abused. You can go to work in such a place as the nicest guy in the world, but if you stay long enough, the hive mind will take you over, and you'll start abusing grandmothers. Fortunately, most of us will quit such a place before we're too badly damaged.
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Man, Corporate America is worse than even I thought.
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Of course. You wanna know what the whole key to getting you as a customer to accept what is told to you? Get some one like the customer to tell it to them. Or better yet, get their neighbor to convince them
The call center kid your talking to in most cases is just trying to maintain some sort of 'level' of quality and quote a script. They are giv
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My point is, that even you, who are saying not to sign if you don't understand what you're signing, cannot follow that advice.
Contrary to popular belief, NOT having a cell phone is not hazardous to one's health. You don't even need a contract to get a cell phone these days. You can just get a pre-paid phone and swap the sim cards around when you travel. If you don't like the pre-paid phone then just take the card out and swap it into your "regular" phone.
They won't find those answers in the contract, in any attached materials or plan descriptions, or in the heads of the sales reps.
If the contract is completely opaque then why agree to it? I did not say the contract was guaranteed to be understandable, but rather that one should either not agree or be will
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Again, a non response
No it is not, it makes perfect sense. If you don't want it or don't like the price then don't buy it, it is that simple. We are not talking about food, clothing, or shelter here and driving is a privilege too, it is not a right. What do you want to do? Have the government come in and nationalize the cell phone companies or the gas pumps because you want these things but don't like the policies or prices of the companies that provide them? Should they be regulated out of existence or made to "pay" for their
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Only if it's for profit.
I'll pay to watch.
Re:Android (Score:5, Insightful)
Businesses that hate their customers (Score:2, Insightful)
The point is that customers should be patrons of businesses, not enemies.
Hear! Hear! It is all about the mindset of the business. Here is what "good" and "evil" business ask themselves:
Good: How can we provide our customers with the best possible service, and at the same time make a buck?
Evil: How can we change our service to make customers pay us more money?
Of course, business is about making money, the difference is just that the "good" business believe that the long term key to making money is customer satisfaction, while the "evil" business is more concerned about short te
Re:Android (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, if it weren't for a company trying to "circumvent" monopoly regulations, there would never have been a "Berkley Standard Distribution." So I suppose sometimes good can come from their "evil" ways.
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Then you should count yourself very fortunate, for you have lived a life sheltered from actual evil. I'm sure the victims of genocidal warlords would be quite happy to live under Verizon's reign instead.
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I don't really see it, both are just as evil as each other and should really be treated that way under law.
Personally I find those corporate executives who are utterly indifferent to the harm the cause to hundreds of millions of people to be far more offensive and contemptible,
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Count yourself lucky that the world is not as you would have it. I'm sure there's millions of people in this country right now who are indifferent to your life. If even
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However, the actions of a particular corporation, should not be viewed in a good or evil way, but rather from the standpoint of a completely amoral and dispassionate entity who seeks to maximize his profits.
You assert this but give no reason for it. And to a lot of people (I'd venture to say _most_ people), seeking to maximize profits without considering the other repercussions of your actions can easily be evil (depending on the actions it leads you to take).
The rational (i.e. profit maximizing) behavior for a monopoly firm in any market is to price discriminate or in other words they charge each customer the maximum amount that he or she is willing to pay for a particular amount of goods or services (or as close to that amount as their metered pricing schemes and various contracts can get).
Most people believe that to be bad, hence the heavier legal regulation of firms that have monopolies.
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The problem with evil is that it is ultimately subjective, even though there are actions which the vast majority of people living on this planet would consider to be evil.
That's hardly a problem unique to evil. It's true of almost any public policy decision made. It is precisely because people vary in their thoughts that we have invested so much effort in coming up with representative governments.
In the case of the corporation "amoral profit maximizer" results in a more accurate and complete analysis of why certain actions are taken
It also fails to characterize anything but why they were taken, so it's horribly incomplete for describing the actions themselves--let alone making public policy decisions.
And at any rate, you need to do the value judgement just to do that "amoral profit maximizer" analysis in t
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this time their method will be very straightforward. Simple, even: "Oh, you want to run anything on our network? Well that obviously will cost us more, or at least trim our relative per customer profit margin. As such, to main
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You don't think the decisions are made by individuals?
Executives care about their compensation. They only care about you personally if you have some perceptible effect on that compensation, otherwise they are indifferent to your existence. You flatter yourself to think that you personally figure into their decisions in any meaningful way for either good or ill.
Monopolies don't charge the maximum you are willing to pay
Yes, they do. Please re-read the chapter in your economics textbook on "monopoly".
they charge the maximum they can possibly get
Which is equal to the maximum amount that you are willing to pay, up to and possibly including every last cent you've
Re:Android (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Android (Score:4, Insightful)
Verizon still blocks USB pictures (Score:2)
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Phone company idiocy (Score:3, Interesting)
I got a new Nokia/T-Mobile phone recently. According to Nokia's documentation, the phone has an email client. I have been through the menus (including the ones in the manual that reference email) and there is no email client in the phone, so I assume that T-Mobile has disabled this feature.
Now, since there is no e-mail client, why would I want to have Internet access on the phone? I probably would have signed up for Internet access, but since T-Mobile doesn't want me to use email
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The worst you'll have to do is change the product ID. Nokia even fix phones thus modified under guarantee (as they are running official Nokia firmware) as long as you didn't break it by fucking up the upgrade.
Of course you'll lose the T Mobile branding.. but you didn't want that did you?
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Re:Phone company idiocy (Score:4, Informative)
You needed to change the product code first, so the software update gets the unbranded version. You could find that you now have the most up to date firmware and you'll need to wait for the next Nokia release.
However, you may find third parties who are able to flash the phone to the generic firmware. You'll need to pay a fee though.
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Re:Phone company idiocy (Score:5, Informative)
Does Open = Without charges? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Does Open = Without charges? (Score:5, Informative)
Recall that the original auction specs had a mandate to re-sell bandwidth in bulk (costs + reasonable fees), but Verizon lobbied hard to get it dropped for some reason. My random guess is that they wanted to have monopoly and set their own prices (translation: you are screwed).
Also, Verizon is making a killing selling those $100/month "unlimited" plans and $2 ringtones. Therefore, there is no way in hell they would undercut that by allowing something like a reasonably priced VoIP over their network.
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Also, Verizon is making a killing selling those $100/month "unlimited" plans
Are they? Really?
Do you have any numbers to back that statement up?
Last time Verizon (IIRC) tried to do "unlimited" was back in the 90's and they pulled the plan after a few months because it was costing them waaay to much money.
The only reason Verizon is offering unlimited anything is because Sprint took that rather desperate plunge to pull in new customers and everyone else felt compelled to follow suit.
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Re:Does Open = Without charges? (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing new here, the rest of the world has been doing this for over a decade and a half.
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" FCC Open Access Requirements Paragraph 222 in FCC 07-132
No charges for using the device by the consumer. Of course, you are still charged service fees and if the contract is 10cents/kilobyte transfered there is nothing to stop Verizon from doing that so long as they cha
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Who won Alaska (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who won Alaska (Score:4, Funny)
LOL
Re:Who won Alaska (Score:5, Informative)
https://auctionsignon.fcc.gov/signon/index.htm [fcc.gov]
Login to Auction 73 and click 'results'.
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Looks like a newly created VC company made for the express purpose of bidding on this. That sucks for us. The last useless company that won lots of spectrum in Alaska never paid for it, never used it, and it was tied up in court for years because the FCC tried to repo it like a car that wasn't paid for, and the bankrupcy courts said they couldn't take it back. By the time it was done with, the spectrum had dropped in price (they speculated when the bidding was high a
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I've always wondered why a tiny cell phone can transmit data to a cell tower miles away, when cordless phones and wi-fi cards have a range of only a few hundred meters. Is there a technical/cost reason, or just a legal one?
Technical. Check out wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for details, but it's basically about how the waves propagate, with a secondary reason being absorption spectra of common materials. 802.11a/b/g/n is in the 2.4GHz or 5GHz spectra. Mobile phones operate on 850MHz, 900MHz, 1800MHz or 1900MHz, depending where you are in the world and what type of network you're using.
Except Alaska... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Except Alaska... (Score:4, Funny)
There, I fixed your spelling...
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That won't end well (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Except Alaska... (Score:5, Funny)
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If you wanna do something useful, cut yourself in half and make them drop to third place.
Any phone? Really? (Score:1, Troll)
From the summary:
So what is it? Anything, or just some phones Verizon deem 'compatible'? I hope it's really anything because I have an old Motorola DynaTAC 8000X I've been itching to dust off.
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That's being disingenuous. Proceed with a grain of salt, but I think Google may have landed something far more valuable than the spectrum itself.
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Conspiracy Theory (Score:4, Insightful)
And, after all, you've already signed a two-year contract for "unlimited" talk at $100/month. Why would they want to upset that gravy train? It's not like any of the other carriers can use it...
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I don't believe there is a requirement they have to use it for phone service though.
Re:Conspiracy Theory (Score:4, Funny)
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Google (Score:1)
Does it have to be a cellular network? (Score:4, Interesting)
They could run a completely wireless 'cable' network over this spectrum and the only compatible device would be a set top box with a wireless interface that was compatible with their head end equipment. Was there something in the auction that requires the spectrum to be used for Cell phones or Internet access? I missed it if there was. Anyone know?
Re:Does it have to be a cellular network? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Google is not a loser (Score:1)
Google DID win (Score:5, Insightful)
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Come on down! (Score:1)
AT&T's Spectrum Does Not Hanve Any Restriction (Score:4, Interesting)
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I don't think we have to worry about that happening though, 'cause Verizon will simply price their open-access service out of the market. Then when nobody buys it they can tell the FCC how terrible an idea it was.
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I live in one of only several counties in Ohio for which Aloha was successfully bid against, several years ago, and where the license is still held by a small company or individual.
So I, for one, will not be welcoming my deathstar overlords.
AT&T kicked Verizon's butt (Score:5, Insightful)
And there are no open network requirements on AT&T's spectrum.
Sounds like AT&T came out on top of this deal.
yuck (Score:3, Insightful)
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How naive. (Score:2)
How naive.
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Okay I goggled "a Happy Loser" (Score:5, Funny)
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Click the very first result [slashdot.org], of course!
Forgive me for sounding socialist... (Score:2)
(Yes, I'm aware that it was auctioned off. Nevertheless,
Oh Joy..... (Score:2)
Sprint + Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Google's lobbying for open access was incredibly smart. What they didn't pay for spectrum could buy a whole phone company, one competing against companies burdened by all that auction debt.
Google is lucky (Score:3, Informative)
Antenna design scales linearly with frequency. Lower frequencies invariably require larger antennas. There are some ways you can get around this, i.e. accept low efficiencies, or narrow bandwidth, etc. Either way, you DO NOT want to lower your center frequency.
Secondly, and most importantly, the next gen for wireless communications will involve MIMO. I assure you, from practical experience and graduate research, you will not see multiple antennas in the 700 MHz spectrum. Nor will you see it at the 900 MHz spectrum. You might be able to pull it off at 1800 MHz, but you'll get at most two antennas. One needs to move into the 2.5 GHz and above to make a reasonably sized handheld WITH multiple antennas. You can't just place the antennas any which way and expect MIMO to work. The antennas need to have low coupling between them, so you need significant electrical distances between them. It's EASY to design multiple antennas for different frequencies (i.e. Quadband), but VERY difficult to design multiple uncoupled antennas at the SAME frequency (i.e. MIMO).
Sore loosers (Score:2)
Not impressed (Score:2)
Huh? [google.com] All I found was a dozen copies of the article.
Re:Call me ignorant (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fair warning. This magic GSM mojo works for 3G and GRPS, but not EDGE. If your Asian phone has to touch EDGE it becomes an Asian brick. Otherwise my HTC Trinity would have been perfect.
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Also, EDGE is only a GSM supplement. Every EDGE phone will work on a non-EDGE GSM network and vice-versa. Strangely enough, the Trinity's a quad band device (should work on all continents flawlessy); your bad experiences with it may be AT&T's fau
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Re:Where's the money? (Score:5, Informative)