Re: Maps to Compare AT&T, T-Mobile, US Cellular, & Verizon Mobile Coverage and US State of the Mobile Union 1H 2021

On 10/6/2021 1:34 AM, Robin Goodfellow wrote:
> Joerg Lorenz <[email protected]> asked
>> Your iPhone uses 4G as fallback. And what you wrote here suggests that
>> is fairly often the case.
> 
> I find it kind of amazing that Joerg is repeatedly arguing _against_ speed.
> 
> While you may not _need_ 100Mbps to 600Mbps speeds, to get those speeds for
> free (all my Android 5G phones were free, for example), is not a bad thing.
> 
> My only "complaint" is all the cellular towers inside my house are 4G so I
> actually "can" get better speeds now outside my house (with 5G) than inside.
> 
> Up until 5G, it used to be the other way around.

Yes, that's a big issue with T-Mobile int he Santa Cruz mountains. You 
need your own "towers" connected to your home broadband to get coverage 
in many rural parts of the Bay Area if you have T-Mobile. The maps 
clearly show this.

I recall, many years ago, when T-Mobile could roam onto AT&T in the 
Santa Cruz mountains. Then those roaming agreements expired and that 
coverage went away. When AMPS was turned off, AT&T also lost a lot of 
coverage in the Santa Cruz mountains. The seven year roaming agreement 
that AT&T agreed to, as part of the failed acquisition of T-Mobile in 
2011, had expired, but in any case it did not appear to have helped 
T-Mobile in the Santa Cruz Mountains when it was in effect. I had 
T-Mobile for a short time when that roaming agreement was in place and 
had no coverage in much of that area and quickly switched back to AT&T 
(I had gotten T-Mobile prior to a trip to England and Ireland in order 
to get the included foreign SMS, the 20¢ per minute calling, and the 
included low speed data, though the data was so slow that it was not 
usable for much). You can still see the large coverage differences in 
the Santa Cruz mountains by looking at the maps 
<https://i.imgur.com/ER7Gv9p.png> though T-Mobile has been adding 
service in that region.

I recall when T-Mobile ran to the FCC complaining about the cost of 
roaming onto AT&T. In 2011 the FCC mandated that carriers allow 
competing carriers to roam on their data networks at "fair prices," but 
didn't define what "fair" is 
<https://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=14234>. No doubt AT&T 
and Verizon feel that since they spent large amounts of capital to 
expand their coverage into rural areas, including by buying smaller 
carriers, that it would be "fair" for them to be able to recoup some of 
that Cap-Ex. What really infuriated T-Mobile was that AT&T and Verizon 
were charging MVNOs less for data than they were charging T-Mobile for 
data. But the MVNOs were buying all of their data from AT&T and Verizon, 
not just buying data for roaming.

People complain that Verizon is too expensive, but Verizon has their own
version of the law of supply and demand--"We have all the supply so we
can demand whatever the f%$k we want." We travel a lot, throughout 
California, including to less populated areas. The Sierras are a prime 
example of how Verizon benefited by buying a smaller carrier, Golden 
State Cellular, which had spent a lot of money putting in towers in 
sparsely populated areas. It's very evident if you look at the maps 
<https://i.imgur.com/jPmiGtR.png>.