That Tall Dude.com

The Wall Street Journal has a new article by Amy Schatz, Exclusive Phone Deals Assailed.  While it’s nice to see somebody going on the offensive to help more people get the phones they want, the ‘cool’ phones, it is only scraping on the issue that plagues us outside of the city.

I make no secret about it, I am a geek.  I am very demanding of my gadgets, my internet connection, and my phone service.  When the iPhone came out, I was ecstatic, thinking that has so much of what I am looking for!  However I live in North Dakota, which at the time had no AT&T coverage.  There was some GSM roaming provided along the interstate, so I thought about getting one anyways, for the 3 days a month I’d be able to use it as a phone (yeah, I’m that geeky).  However, there was some wording in the iPhone agreement, that if you used X amount of data in a roaming area over X amount of time, they could cut off your service.  Your billing address also had to be in an AT&T service area.  So I was out of luck.

After literally dozens of emails to AT&T, they finally brought native coverage to ND, just a few months ago. This now allows people who live in Fargo, Bismarck, and Dickinson to be eligible to get an iPhone.  The rest of the state still can’t do anything.  This is what is plaguing us, lack of quality coverage.

I live about 90 miles southwest of Bismarck, in the Elgin/New Leipzig area.  Until a couple of years ago, we had no wireless coverage.  Alltel finally built a tower north of Elgin, which helps, but it’s still flawed.  I know one guy who can step onto his back porch, have a clear line of sight to the tower, 6 miles away, and get no reception.  A few months ago, Verizon put some of their gear on that tower, which is better, but not by much.  The next closest wireless tower is about 30 miles to the west.  Before most of these people can worry about phones though, they need to know that they’ll have coverage where they need it.

Now that’s just a simple matter of building towers, but what about all of America in general?  Do you have 3G coverage?  I didn’t think so.  As I repeatedly see stories about Japan, Korea, China, large chunks of Europe, all surfing the internet faster on their phones than I can over DSL with my desktop (internet speed, another rural America issue), I have to wonder what the likes of Verizon and AT&T are up to.   Even if we had access to better phones, cooler phones, we couldn’t take advantage of their feature set, with the wireless providers taking their dear sweet time rolling out network improvements.  It boggles the mind, why they would build a brand new tower without 3G capabilities.  The technology is there, put it in right away, don’t come back in 4 years to upgrade it to 3G, after 4G has become available.  If the technology is there, give it to us now.  It’s a waste of your own time to not do it right the first time.

This brings me back to the phones.  Once you have coverage, and have coverage with the latest technology, now the phones are an issue.  At the end of the WSJ article, they quote Joseph Farren, spokesman for the CTIA.

Does this guy have a clue?  That’s like saying there is more software available for Windows than the Mac.  Doesn’t mean anything, except that there’s more.  Most of that software, and most of these phones, are junk.  What we want to see are the cool phones that Europe has, that NOBODY in America has.  We want to see the phones that we do get from Europe, at the same time they have them, not 8 months later.

Whoever wants to truly take over the wiress industry has 3 things to do:

1. Blanket the country with coverage, quality coverage, and waste no time rolling out improvements, like 3G/4G.
2. Treat your customers well.  When they call with a complaint, don’t brush them off, listen intently, and take action, because that’s probably one voice speaking for another 20 who don’t know who to talk to.
3. Bring us cool phones, that are easy to use, in rapid fashion.  We want the new phones now, not 8 months after Europe, not a year after Asia, NOW.

If you build it, they will come.  I can’t even begin to describe the realization I’ve had over the last month, as to how many people would move to Small Town, USA to work, if they only had really fast internet, and quality mobile coverage.  So get to work.