My brain just committed advertising

[unixronin]

Weird, but true.

Let me explain.  cymrullewes and I have Nextel cell phones.  We've had Nextel service for about the past year, and for about the last three years we lived in California.  (In between those two, we didn't have cell phones because we couldn't afford service.)  We liked Nextel's service because of two principal factors -- first, their network was VERY good in the Bay Area, with strong signal virtually everywhere¹, and secondly because with unlimited phone to-phone direct-connect, we hardly used any billed airtime.  Additionally, when we re-upped in December 2004, we found we could get ruggedized Motorola i305 phones -- they're water-resistant (immersion isn't recommended, but you can use them in the rain without worry), and if you drop one on concrete, it'll just bounce without taking any damage.

Here, though, in southern New Hampshire, we're finding that Nextel's coverage is very poor, and the direct connect feature that we like is sufficiently unreliable that a lot of the time I can spend ten minutes trying futilely to get a DC connection to cymrullewes.  What's worse, it seems Nextel's voice codec, never the best, has become worse -- maybe they're trying to cram more calls into the same bandwidth -- to the extent that what cymrullewes says on the phone to me is often unintelliglble even after several repetitions.  Additionally, Nextel has long had a reputation for being an expensive service priced for business customers.

So, to cut a long story short, we've been thinking about switching carriers.  Around here, we're advised, the best coverage by a long shot comes from Verizon, so we've been liooking at Verizon.  Verizon doesn't offer a comparable service to the Direct Connect; but what they do offer, which pretty much wholly makes up for that, is that all in-network calls between Verizon phones are free.  Not only does this mean that our calls to each other are free, but we would also be able to talk to cymrullewes' mother in Princess Anne, Maryland for free at any time.

The fly in the ointment:  Verizon offers multi-line family plans with a shared pool of peak-hours airtime, much as we currently have with Nextel, but the smallest shared pool you can have on a family plan is 700 minutes.

700 minutes?  We don't use that much billed airtime in six months, let alone in one.  I'm not sure we use 700 billed minutes in a year.

So, here's where my brain took off running.

---

Picture, if you will, a scene of the interior of a cell phone store.  A customer is standing at the counter talking to a sales rep, going over potential calling plans.  In the background, we see a huddle of two or three typical late-teen suburban mall-bunnies.  The sales rep's tone is hyper-frenetic, the customer's harried and frustrated.

• Customer:  "Twenty thousand minutes?!?"
• Sales rep:  "Yes, it's a really popular plan!  It works out to only three cents a minute."
• Customer:  "But that's six hundred dollars a month for airtime!  Don't you have anything less?"
• Sales rep:  "You might be surprised how much airtime you'll use.  Many of our customers feel it's a really great value."

[Camera makes a high-speed zoom-pan onto the mallbunnies, who can now be seen to have two phones each, one held to each ear, and are talking on both at once in an unintelliglble high-speed gabble.  Camera holds for several seconds, then zoom-pans back to customer and sales rep.]

• Sales rep:  "Really, try it, you'll love it.  This is our most popular plan.  The only customers we have who aren't on this plan use our premium plans, which offer even more airtime.  Nobody buys smaller plans."
• Customer:  "But I wouldn't use that much airtime in five years!  Don't you have any cheaper plans with less airtime?"
• Sales rep:  "Well, no ...."  [looks puzzled]
• Customer:  "Well how can anybody buy smaller plans if you don't HAVE one?  Why can't I buy just the airtime I want?"
• Sales rep:  [blank, uncomprehending look]

[Horizontal wipe to black, to a sound-effect of tearing paper.  Slow fade-in to still of a phone and $PHONE_COMPANY logo, with calm, measured voice-over:]

"$PHONE_COMPANY.  Pay for the airtime you used, not the airtime you didn't.  An idea whose time has come."

 

Personally, while you probably wouldn't make as much per customer selling people just the airtime they actually used, I'll bet you'd pull in a big enough customer share that you'd be making money hand over fist.

---

[1]  Contrast this with AT&T, whom I tried for a couple of months when I switched to a digital carrier in 1999.  AT&T swore they made certain they had continuous coverage along all the major highways, but 200 yards off 880, if I went outside on the deck and fully extended the antenna on the GSM StarTac they sold me, I MIGHT be able to get enough signal to make or receive a call.  With the Nextel phones, if I stowed the antenna, took the phone into our laundry/bulk-storage room behind the kitchen, in the center of the building, and held the phone close underneath one of the steel-wire-grid racks we'd installed in there for bulk food storage, I could get the phone's signal strength meter to drop slightly off 100%.  I found exactly two places in the Bay Area where I couldn't get signal from Nextel -- one of those was inside a steel-lined elevator in the central service core of a steel-framed office building in Oakland; the other was in the bottom of the Webster Tube, the tunnel under an arm of San Francisco Bay that connects Alameda Island to the East Bay mainland at the north end.

[2]  I wrestled with AT&T's crappy service on that phone for almost three months before I finally got to a third-tier AT&T engineer who told me that it was a known problem, that AT&T's software didn't work properly with that StarTac model, and that AT&T had known about the problem for at least a year and a half.  At this point, I marched down to the AT&T store, cancelled the service, and told them, "You WILL waive the early disconnection fee, considering that you (AT&T) sold me this phone in the knowledge that you have a known service problem with it and failed to warn me."

Comments

[skellington.livejournal.com]

Does Sprint have decent coverage? Maybe the Virgin Mobile pre-paid might work better for you guys?

And locally we have a company offering flat rate unlimited use for $40. I think that's the future...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Prepaid plans generally have a "use your airtime in 45 days or lose it" clause. And Sprint's coverage map in New England isn't even close to as good as Verizon's.

[skellington.livejournal.com]

With Virgin Mobile, it's $20 every 90 days, to keep your account active. You can build up minutes indefinately.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Yow.

In New Zealand it's $20 every _year_ to keep an account active. (We don't pay for incoming calls, either.)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Nextel periodically offers a year of free incoming as a promotion. But as a rule, US wireless phone companies get you coming and going. (aka the BOHICA business model.)

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

I have a prepaid cingular phone. I have to put at least $25 on it every 90 days or $100 a year. cingular to cingular calls don't eat time so I don't use up the minutes. Plus I know a website that sells the cards for under face value. However I am not sure the plan I have even exists anymore since I actually have an AT&T plan.

Verizon doesn't seem to have anything like that. However I will probably be switching us to Verizon when my phone dies. Bfudlmint looks around to make sure leiacat isn't reading this because he hasn't discussed changing her phone plan with her yet.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I went and looked at Verizon-offered phones today. If we switch to Verizon, I'm currently leaning towards the Motorola V325 (http://search.vzw.com/?market=05065&q=Motorola%20V325). It has a pretty decent feature set without too much crap we don't care about, it's semi-ruggedized, it looks and feels decent, and it comes with voice-and-map navigation. (I don't yet know for sure whether it's GPS-based or uses cell-tower triangulation. I'm assuming triangulation, but I could be wrong; after all, our current Motorola phones are GPS-enabled.)

[bratling.livejournal.com]

I don't yet know for sure whether it's GPS-based or uses cell-tower triangulation

ISTR that all cell phones now sold must include a GPS for 911 services location -- even if the phone does nothing else with it. i can't document that, though. take it as hearsay until you confirm it.

Garmin and Sprint have done a rather clever thing -- using the GPS in the phone with Sprint's (lame-ass) WAP gateway to provide walking directions.

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

cingular has a 30 day clause

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Subscription service providers now live or die on their ARPU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPU), in so far as investors are concerned, i.e. how many dollars can you get out of the subscribers every month.

In the cell phone business, the game is to get the user to pay for minimum number of minutes per month at a low rate per month, but whack them hard for minutes consumed above the monthly paid for, thus encouraging users to buy more minutes (at the low rate) than they'll use on average.

Particularly as the commodity price of voice-mile-minutes has fallen drastically over the last decade or two, all voice telecomm companies in the USA want you to pay as much as they can get from you on a recurring monthly basis, rather than try and make money on whatever minutes you actually use (their margin on that last is probably way too small anyway). In this way, they stabilize their financials, too.

What I want to see is independent, deeply technical reviews of the cell networks (precise coverage maps, capacity commitments, plus actual performance measurement), and the same for the phones (first, proper compliance tests against the GSM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM) and CDMA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDMA) standards, then a careful review of the actual capabilities of the transciever section, and the quality/performance of the CODEC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CODEC)s).

Of course, now with phones as fashion items, and places to hang "features", that ain't gonna happen.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see that myself. I do know the iDEN codec has the reputation of being the worst in the industry.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

And the afterthought ... while I was doing some hands-on phone research today, there was a young chica in the store who'd just bought a brand-new Motorola RAZR. $200-or-so phone. Her criterion for making this selection? ....It was pink.

Meanwhile, technically informed opinion on the NEDoD list is that the RAZR is a fragile, unreliable, overpriced piece of crap. Amusingly enough, as she was selecting hers, the was standing within 6 feet of a guy who was bringing his back because the battery life on its ultra-slimline battery (to fit into its ultra-fashionable, ultra-slimline chassis) sucked.

[bratling.livejournal.com]

technically informed opinion on the NEDoD list

that was an awfully long way of saying "Roger"!