Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Posted
16 minutes ago, Sprke said:

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/2017/09/14/verizon-montana-drop-affect-emergency-services/666350001/

Somebody is quoted in this article they used .07 GB the last 3 months. Also the rural carrier in this area is not signing up new customers so people have no other options. 

 

With verizons unlimited accounts, it is probably more profitable with less headaches to just steer people to verizon so you can sit back and enjoy that sweet sweet roaming revenue.  if you go on the facebook page of that maine provider in the OP you will see how they talked about downloading and streaming to your hearts galore.

Posted

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/verizon-kicks-8500-rural-customers-off-network-for-using-roaming-data/

Unfortunately, Ars comments in general have declined in quality from their higher standards of a few years ago.  Too many people spout off about subject matter on which they are not knowledgeable.

AJ

Posted
21 hours ago, WiWavelength said:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/verizon-kicks-8500-rural-customers-off-network-for-using-roaming-data/

Unfortunately, Ars comments in general have declined in quality from their higher standards of a few years ago.  Too many people spout off about subject matter on which they are not knowledgeable.

AJ

Ars has really gone down hill since Jon Stokes left. IMO

Posted

Seems like this was a long time coming.  Not too surprising VZW is doing it.  VZW should have made more clear on their LTE coverage map when you are not on native coverage, but if you check 3G or Prepaid it is clear where they roam.  It isn't like these customers won't have an option.  They will still have their regional provider who already provided their service.

Posted
15 hours ago, red_dog007 said:

 They will still have their regional provider who already provided their service.

USCC is also an option for those customers. They have fantastic coverage up in Maine.

Posted
16 hours ago, red_dog007 said:

They will still have their regional provider who already provided their service.

At least for the maine problem, the LTE roaming partner did not provide end user service to begin (which makes it even stranger verizon got into this deal with them) with so they can not be switched to but it doesnt matter, USCC is king up there.

Posted
9 minutes ago, swintec said:

At least for the maine problem, the LTE roaming partner did not provide end user service to begin (which makes it even stranger verizon got into this deal with them)...

Not so strange.  VZW wanted the LTEiRA coverage for its own transient roamers passing through the area, not for permanent resident of the area.

AJ

Posted
4 hours ago, WiWavelength said:

Not so strange.  VZW wanted the LTEiRA coverage for its own transient roamers passing through the area, not for permanent resident of the area.

AJ

And yet Verizon allowed these people to become customers. They showed the coverage. They allowed the customers to join.

Even though Verizon really is being asshats to rural customers and is giving rural Mainiacs the big middle finger here, I do respect that they have the right to do this. But I kind of like them getting the black eye publicly for this.  They created the issue and they are showing their true colors. They really have no interest in rural customers. They just want a cheap place for their urban customers to roam when travelling. And now rural customers can make their buying decisions accordingly. USCC is a better fit for them anyway.

But Verizon deserves to take this on the chin publicly. They could have stopped these customers from joining to begin with. They didn't. They were hoping they wouldn't use the network much. And now they want to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It's a one way street with Big Red. The house always wins.  In every single county. Every day. 

  • Like 8
Posted
14 hours ago, S4GRU said:

They could have stopped these customers from joining to begin with. They didn't.

Ive been reading some comments in various local facebook groups and what not and it seems the customers up in this county who signed up for verizon did get some pushback initially.  One woman, while at the verizon store signing up, was declined service based on her home zip code so the nice rep simply put in the zip code to maines largest city to establish service (and obviously establish his commission) and then once the account was up and running the woman then went and updated her address to her actual address in this roaming partners area.

there was only about 2,000 customers effected by this up this way so i do not think it would be far fetched to think many of these people were signed up under similar circumstances.  i put cell phone sales reps in the same group as car salesmen.

  • Sad 1
Posted
5 hours ago, swintec said:

there was only about 2,000 customers effected by this up this way so i do not think it would be far fetched to think many of these people were signed up under similar circumstances.

And that may be why VZW is willing to throw under the bus this Maine LTEiRA partner.  While VZW may have promised the partner only roaming revenue from VZW's transient subs traveling in the area, the partner intentionally helped permanent residents of the area sign up for VZW service.

AJ

Posted
On 9/12/2017 at 5:41 PM, WiWavelength said:

I side with VZW on this one.  Perma roaming on LTEiRA partners is not okay.  Those subs should be signed up directly with the LTEiRA partners that they are using nearly 100 percent of the time.

AJ

I think that LTEiRA partner in Washington County does not sell services directly. It just builds and operate the network for Verizon 

Posted
1 minute ago, dnwk said:

I think that LTEiRA partner in Washington County does not sell services directly. It just builds and operate the network for Verizon 

That already has been noted.  Read the thread.

AJ

Posted
On 9/14/2017 at 4:14 PM, Sprke said:

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/2017/09/14/verizon-montana-drop-affect-emergency-services/666350001/

Somebody is quoted in this article they used .07 GB the last 3 months. Also the rural carrier in this area is not signing up new customers so people have no other options. 

It was a little more nuanced than that. Their quote was the following

Quote

Like other small carriers around the US who are dealing with the same issue, we did not know this was coming. Because we have been losing cellular customers to this company's active marketing in our area for years, we did not have any excessive inventory of devices on hand or other resources needed to support a large influx of new cellular customers." 

They appear to be putting people on an interest list with the intent of accepting them as they have the resources to do so. It isn't as if they're going to need substantial network build outs to accommodate them, as they've effectively already been using the company's network. I can get a rural operator in Montana not having phones on hand or staffing levels to accommodate an influx of customers. What is a little more inexcusable on their part is the first sentence and a half. If as their statement does, you acknowledge you were fully aware that you were losing customers to Verizon who in turn were predominately roaming on your network, it should've been entirely foreseeable that this was coming at some point.

On 9/17/2017 at 4:10 PM, WiWavelength said:

Not so strange.  VZW wanted the LTEiRA coverage for its own transient roamers passing through the area, not for permanent resident of the area.

AJ

The Maine situation is still strange. If you are Verizon and you want a quasi-protection type network in rural Maine to cover your transient roamers/cut down on your roaming costs, why do you partner with this company instead of doing that yourself? In the reciprocal cases it is quite clear why Verizon was partnering with LTEiRA rural provider partners, in this case not so much.

The only thing that make sense is that if Wireless Partners, LLC was qualifying for some kind of assistance be it small business programs or rural economic funding that Verizon itself was incapable of meeting. 

Quote

Portland-based Wireless Partners LLC said it is planning to expand high-speed cellular and broadband service to underserved Down East areas.

The telecommunications firm on Thursday said the 4G LTE expansion is moving forward after it was recently approved as a Pine Tree Development Zone company by the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development.

The Pine Tree Development Zone program was set up by the state to support job creation and new business development in selected state regions. It gives multi-year incentives for certified companies to encourage capital investment in new operations and create high-quality jobs.

Link

And if Verizon had these guys build the network there because they were cheaper due to their ability to get get assistance for providing service to under-served rural areas, that is a much murkier situation than the other LTEiRA deals.

 

 

  • Like 1
Posted
On 9/17/2017 at 7:43 PM, S4GRU said:

 They could have stopped these customers from joining to begin with. They didn't. They were hoping they wouldn't use the network much.

 

On 9/18/2017 at 10:39 AM, swintec said:

Ive been reading some comments in various local facebook groups and what not and it seems the customers up in this county who signed up for verizon did get some pushback initially.  One woman, while at the verizon store signing up, was declined service based on her home zip code so the nice rep simply put in the zip code to maines largest city to establish service (and obviously establish his commission) and then once the account was up and running the woman then went and updated her address to her actual address in this roaming partners area.

There is plenty of blame to go around on all sides here.

Verizon while it does appear they had a basic zip code block in their system could've been much more proactive about flagging accounts that were fraudulently setup by customers or employees at their own and third party stores and "moved" to the correct address. They also could've caught on a heck of a lot sooner that they had a high propensity of negative accounts that happened to correspond to LTEiRA areas.

LTEiRA It has been outright acknowledged by the Montana partner that they were losing customers to Verizon. All of these partners had to have realized they were getting more in Verizon roaming revenue than they realistically should've been from "transient" VZ customers. And any basic data audit would've shown them it was the same VZ customers using their data month after month. Instead of protecting their territory, as as been noted in this thread they turned a blind eye. They were getting roaming revenue without having to deal with any of the costs associated with having a customer.

Users I'm somewhat sympathetic but not really. I've seen multiple examples like swintec's above perusing LTEiRA facebook pages and local newspapers in impacted areas. At a fundamental level, even if we plead ignorance on the customers' behalves, people had to realize something wasn't right when you couldn't sign up using your own zipcode or in some cases it wasn't possible for you to get a local area code number. Beyond that there are numerous cases on the internet of people outright flaunting that they knew what they were doing. They wanted unlimited data, access to more phones than their rural provider sold, cheaper rate plans, etc. I have zero sympathy for them.

Posted
22 hours ago, S4GRU said:

It will be interesting if Verizon answers the last two questions. And what its answer would be.

I'd be surprised if they did.

7. Should be an absolute yes, but my guess is no.  Which leads into 8.

8. It probably depends on the partner. If roaming is being charged on a per usage basis, pretty much the industry standard; then it depends on what Verizon is paying per MB to the partner, how much data a person is using, and what revenue the person is providing Verizon. I get the impression they're only really going after unprofitable accounts right now.

  • Like 2
Posted

it makes very good sense to me. verizon obviously has to pay their partner for the usage so i can agree that is a better move for them monetary wise.

  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

One of these days one of the big 4 will end up buying USCC remaining footprint, kind of like when Sprint took over in Chicago. I'm not saying it will happen but it could, seems like regional carriers are getting less and less. 

Posted
1 hour ago, joshnys8913 said:

One of these days one of the big 4 will end up buying USCC remaining footprint, kind of like when Sprint took over in Chicago. I'm not saying it will happen but it could, seems like regional carriers are getting less and less. 

yeah it maybe sprint that buys it...it makes more logical sense to me.

  • Love 1
Posted
1 minute ago, danlodish345 said:

yeah it maybe sprint that buys it...it makes more logical sense to me.

IF the T-mobile/Sprint Merger fails (which I hope it does, but that's is just a personal opinion I am not really in favor of it), I would love to see Sprint buy the rest of USCC's remaining. I was super excited when Sprint got n telos (even though that was indirect from Shantel). 

Posted
IF the T-mobile/Sprint Merger fails (which I hope it does, but that's is just a personal opinion I am not really in favor of it), I would love to see Sprint buy the rest of USCC's remaining. I was super excited when Sprint got n telos (even though that was indirect from Shantel). 

It will be interesting to see who acquires US cellular. But the executives at US cellular have to be willing to sell it.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
  • Like 1
  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

My guess is the CCA will use their collective bargaining power to fight tooth and nail against any sale of U.S. Cellular. Isn't USCC their largest single member besides Sprint?

Posted
My guess is the CCA will use their collective bargaining power to fight tooth and nail against any sale of U.S. Cellular. Isn't USCC their largest single member besides Sprint?
Sprint is larger Then US cellular

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


  • large.unreadcontent.png.6ef00db54e758d06

  • gallery_1_23_9202.png

  • Similar Content

  • Posts

    • Vinegar Hill is getting the Brooklyn Heights treatment now with regard to small cells. I mapped two more small cells in the neighborhood in the past few days so now T-Mobile is up to 8 of them in such a tiny neighborhood. While it's cool they're doing this since it means outdoors you get a consistent 400Mbps+ almost everywhere, it sucks because they're obviously deploying so many of them to make up for their lack of a macro site in the entire neighborhood. Because there isn't a macro, the small cells have a greater coverage area than you see in other neighborhoods and you often connect to them while indoors but coverage and speeds fall off indoors much faster on small cells than on macros in my experience.  Even Dish has better coverage than T-Mobile in Vinegar Hill since they added the site on top of the Extra Space Storage building alongside AT&T and Verizon. T-Mobile needs to get in line with their competitors there.
    • It seems like that is the smallest Google Play System change that google releases. I see 12 MB updates really regularly. 
    • Went back to Greenville last week and what an insane change 4 years has made! Every site in the city has n25/41/71 now and T-Mobile has even added new sites in the city since the last time I was there. As a result, their coverage and speeds are great everywhere. Unfortunately I don't have my Verizon line anymore so I'm unable to compare their performance to T-Mobile but they definitely had better coverage and speeds than AT&Tin my testing.  On the LTE side of things, T-Mobile has 5MHz Band 71, 10MHz Band 66, and 5MHz Band 2 deployed. On the 5G side, they have 190MHz n41, 15MHz n25, and 15MHz n71 deployed. As you'd expect 5G is several times faster than LTE here because of that. One thing I noticed though is that T-Mobile's speeds pretty much never go above 1Gbps here. I'm not sure if it's a backhaul limitation or if they're seriously pushing their 5G home internet product here but on most sites I was seeing 500-600Mbps with some sites having peaks in the high 800s-low 900's. I also noticed that upload speeds weren't nearly as good as they were in NYC. I attribute this to the fact that site spacing often cause the phone to drop to n25 or n71 for uploads as opposed to using n41. I have a handful of high (>100Mbps) upload speed tests but that was with me virtually right next to a site. Since I drove my own car instead of riding with family, I used the opportunity to map a ton of rural roads outside to Greenville to see what kind of coverage I'd get. T-Mobile has stepped up their game a ton in this regard as I found that coverage matched and in many cases surpassed what I was seeing on AT&T. areas where AT&T dropped to 1 bar or even no signal, I held onto weak n71 and was still able to place calls using VoNR. There are still areas where I would drop signal but those were areas where I'm certain the only carrier available was U.S. Cellular since they still have a ton of macros that they're the only tenant on. The U.S. Cellular merger won't add much to T-Mobile's spectrum coffers there; they'll increase 600MHz from 20MHz to 30MHz, gain another 10MHz of AWS, and acquire the rest of the 24GHz band, but they'll gain a ton new sites to bolster their rural coverage in this area and make it pretty much the best in the region.  — — — — — I also mapped Dish while down there. Dish's doesn't have much spectrum in Pitt County, they only have 5MHz n71, 25MHz n70 and 5MHz n29. This lack of spectrum combined with what is pretty much a skeleton/license protection network meant that in most cases I was only on 1-2 bars of n71 indoors and while outdoors I wasn't seeing speeds nearly as good as I get in NYC. While directly in front of a site I could get over 300Mbps but in most cases while out and about I wasn't seeing over 100Mbps. In fact, at my hotel I was only able to get about 5Mbps down and 2Mbps up on n71. Maybe as they densify I'll see more consistently high speeds but their lack of spectrum will remain a huge bottleneck much like it was for T-Mobile pre-Sprint merger. — — — — — AT&T and Verizon are the only carriers with small cells in Greenville. Verizon has a significantly larger deployment than AT&T though, with AT&T having it along some roads where they have weaker coverage while Verizon seems to be using them for added capacity Uptown and especially around ECU. They started being installed around 2019 but none of them have 5G as far as I can tell, only LTE. AT&T also has C-band and DoD deployed on every site in the city, giving me speeds in the range of 350-400Mbps in most areas. — — — — — Here are some photos of small cells in Greenville.  
    • Just checked and found a 12MB Google Play System update ready to download.    Still October 1 for the date after however. 
    • Looks like my little area finally has some decent mobile connectivity. Still have a few dead spots on both tmo and firstnet... https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/10549791800  
  • Recently Browsing

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...