I Think US Phone Carriers Are Unfair

[Syndrome]

Its smaller over there too though, I mean.. I have to drive 20 miles just to get a grocery store. And to get the cellular towers around here to cover the population then it is going to take way more towers per capita. Plus we all know that cellular companies here in the usa are insanely greedy.

edit: I'm trying to find an article about how much the major cell companies charged their customers just by simply passing on the bills, which in many cases are fraudulent. I think over 10 years it was over 5 billion dollars or something.

[CrowdAds]

[Jeven]

I think the UK and other European countries being small does help and that's why data prices are so cheap compared with the US. Plus we aren't locked-down by greedy cellular companies.

The gas/petrol prices - I don't know why they're so high, a lot of that is tax to the government. I sometimes see the argument that we don't have to drive as far, but that's not always true - it can be a lengthy commute between home and work - 50 miles or more isn't uncommon.

[saratoga]

Originally Posted by Syndrome

Its smaller over there too though, I mean.. I have to drive 20 miles just to get a grocery store. And to get the cellular towers around here to cover the population then it is going to take way more towers per capita.

This isn't really true. More Americans live in cities in the Europeans, and Verizon et. al don't cover the really rural parts of the country anyway, so the actual customers per area is probably very similar between the US and EU.

What really happens is that as you get more rural towers are placed further apart and run at higher power. As you get more urban towers are placed closer together and run at lower power to conserve spectrum. Generally you place towers so that they have a constant number of users per antenna per channel and adjust the power to make this work. Of course you can't do this indefinitely, so eventually you have to build more towers and under utilize them or just not provide coverage. Usually they do the latter

Originally Posted by Syndrome

Plus we all know that cellular companies here in the usa are insanely greedy.

This. The carriers are all colluding with each other to keep prices high and avoid competition as much as possible. If the US actually had a competitive market for cell coverage you'd probably have marginally worse coverage and a fraction of the cost per minute of coverage.

[Syndrome]

Not sure how that works, as the population of the usa is 311,591,917 and the population of Europe is 739,165,030 in 2010 and 2011 respectively. The population is over double, where as the square miles are 3,119,884.69 for the continental usa, and 3,931,000 for Europe.

Not sure which area your talking about verizon in, but here in the usa Verizon is the only company that actually covers the areas that don't have high population(Utah is what I'm talking about, very large area's and verizon generally has the best signal).

[saratoga]

Originally Posted by Syndrome

Not sure how that works, as the population of the usa is 311,591,917 and the population of Europe is 739,165,030 in 2010 and 2011 respectively.

Large portions of the USA are uninhabited (and also have no cell phone coverage) because most Americans live in a much smaller and much more densely populated subset of the total area. Therefore looking at total population and total area is not a useful thing to do. Instead you have to look at the percentage of people living in densely populated areas.

Originally Posted by Syndrome

Not sure which area your talking about verizon in, but here in the usa Verizon is the only company that actually covers the areas that don't have high population(Utah is what I'm talking about, very large area's and verizon generally has the best signal).

I'm from Arizona. Probably 60% of the state's surface has no cell phone coverage at all. Yes Verizon is quite good, but they only cover places where people actually live as well as the interstate. Go 25 miles from Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon park, or a highway and you don't have coverage anymore because there are no people there to use it.

[JK98]

Half the US population lives on just 1.2% of the land area. These are the 69 largest metropolitan areas.

http://www.demographia.com/db-ua2000compare.htm

Another statistic. 19.3% of the US population is considered rural. They are scattered on 90.4% of the US land area.

http://www.newgeography.com/content/...-data-released

That leaves 30.7% of the population on 8.4% of the land.


Serving these three segments of the population with cell phone service requires different approaches.

[saratoga]

Just to drive this home, Alaska is 17.5% of the total area of the USA. Verizon doesn't offer any cellular service at all there. None. Almost 1/5 of the total country and the largest carrier offers zero coverage.

So serving this half of the population with cell phone service requires a different strategy than serving the other half of the population.

20% of counties account for 80% of the population. Even this is misleading given the huge rural counties out there. I think the general strategy is to offer those 20% modern 4G service, some of the remainder 3G from high power, sparsely placed towers, and just write off everything else.

[nathan]

There was a report that claiming that Americans pay up to 10 times more than European counterparts per Gigabyte of LTE data. The report authors believe the main causes of Americans paying a lot more than Europeans is lack of competition and the American carriers practice of bundling the data with other features in contracts contrast to the prepaid, pay for features separately models dominant in Europe.

http://www.androidauthority.com/gsma...merica-122979/

[TechyguyDR]

Yeah that's what sucks about these plans. I've been looking to get a smartphone, but there just all these bundled plans with 400+ minutes or 200+ texts and what not. I rarely use more than 100 minutes and 200 texts, but if I want data I'd have to go with a plan that gives me way more than I need.

The closest thing to the European model is Ting, which lets you choose what features you want separately. the only thing is that they run on Sprint (although they do allow voice roaming on Verizon). Aside from that this type of thing is virtually impossible to find. Traditional paygo (not the monthly plans that now dominate prepaid) is the next closest thing to that.