Cell phone woes
To quote Howard Beale, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." I'm not talking about the war or even the Patriot Act; I'm talking about cell phones.
Cell phone service sucks.
It's bad on several levels:
- The coverage sucks. Every carrier has huge dead zones, some in the middle of large metropolitan areas. They're supposed to be a utility...we wouldn't let the power company get away with this.
- The rates suck. They're all over the map.
- GSM sucks. Everyone else in the world has working GSM. It's still a curiousity here outside the big city areas.
- Customer service sucks. Just try and fix a billing problem.
So what I'm wondering is why this is? Is crappy service built into these business models? This kind of thing has become endemic to American businesses and it's not what we used to be known for.
People joke about the perpetual "I can't hear you, I have a bad connection" conversations that are a daily event for most of us.
Isn't there something that Congress or the FCC can do to hold the mobile carriers to some minimum level of service?
Posted on March 13, 2006
