Say a Final Goodbye to Sprint – T-Mobile Is Reportedly Shutting It Down
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A quick Youtube search gives this commercial [1] from 1987. In another commercial [2] from 1998 the outro still shows a pin dropping, and now the phone number is 1-800-PIN-DROP [3] [4].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4dIDl8sjJk
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O816Z42NSts
[3] Some younger readers may be confused about what is being advertised. For a long time, the first three digits of a 10-digit phone number were an "area code", they literally divided up the country into chunks by population. Calling people in the same chunk was free and unlimited, but calling someone in another chunk would cost money. If you were calling someone in the US but more than a hundred miles or so away, you'd literally get a bill for every minute you spent on the phone. The 1998 advertisement is informing customers that Sprint only charges $0.10 per minute, and you get 200 minutes free.
[4] Some younger readers may also be confused about 1-800-PIN-DROP. It's a phone number, but it expects people to know that a classic phone keypad or dial has letters for each number (2=ABC, 3=DEF, 4=GHI, 5=JKL, 6=MNO, 7=PQRS, 8=TUV, 9=WXYZ). So you'd change the letters PIN-DROP to 746-3767.
Excess numbers are ignored, so it's the same as dialing 1-800-PRIMEST. Confusing!
Far less distance than that. I grew up in the central city of a small metropolitan area, and in the 80s and 90s, calls from one suburb to another (depending on the exact pair) were sometimes long-distance. As little as 15 miles. All within one area code. OTOH, you could make local calls from close-in parts of Northern Virginia to DC even though they had different area codes.
Seems like oligopoly and higher prices are on the horizon. Americans pay way, way more than European consumers do for the same/worse service.
There are also hundreds of other low cost MNVO's in the US depending on which of Big-3 coverage do you prefer. A lot of times, the MNVO's as much cheaper than going with Big-3(AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon) but can get deprioritized during high traffic situations. [2]
[1] https://www.metrobyt-mobile.com/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mobile_v...
What we do have, is the availability of more expensive plans and companies.
It's the same argument I keep hearing people make about "dur dur college is expensive in the states." It's not. 2 years of community college for gen-eds, 2 years state school, BS costs $25k over 4 years, and if you finish in 3, it costs less. You can also take college courses or get a full year of college credits in high school if you study. You can get a bachelor's for under $20k total from a good state school. But yes, my little brother spent 40k/year and has 6-figure debt and a 5-figure salary.
Stupid people, make stupid choices. In the land of the free, we make the guidance and information available, and let them fail. Good.
Norway is sparely populated? That country the size of Montana (one of many states), with five times the population? Dare I say, have you ever Driven across the US?
I don't believe you. Find me any plan in the USA that is cheaper than what can be had in France. And I won't even bring up how terrible mobile coverage is in the USA, even in big cities.
> Dare I say, have you ever Driven across the US?
Yep, the long way (four days virtually nonstop) and the slow way (a couple months).
not everyone is allowed to fail. the banks for example are not. it appears people who failed basic civics were also allowed to pass high school.
Making loans to people who are reasonably likely to pay the loan back used to be the primary business of banks. I guess you are correct and I don’t understand why banks are now in the business of making loans to people who can’t pay.
I'm not going to bother reading your reply, because you seem to regurgitate the same thing over and over again, without understanding that what you are saying is factually wrong. All I can say is, good luck in life without comprehension of simple things. You're gonna need it.
I generally found reception to be better in the very sparsely populated areas in the Alps etc.
Also at least in some of Europe roaming between operators (for domestic users) is not really a thing and generally companies have independent subsidiaries in every country. Surely that would lead to higher operating costs to some extent?
Cost:
Canadian Cell Phone Providers: Generally, Canadian cell phone plans tend to be more expensive compared to their US counterparts. This is often attributed to factors such as the smaller population, vast geography, and limited competition in the Canadian market. However, the exact cost can vary depending on the plan, provider, and region.
US Cell Phone Providers: The cost of cell phone plans in the US can vary widely depending on the provider and the specific plan you choose. Generally, there is more competition among US providers, leading to a wider range of plan options and potentially more affordable prices compared to Canada.
Quality of Service:
Canadian Cell Phone Providers: Canada has a vast geographical area, which poses challenges for cell phone coverage, especially in rural and remote areas. The quality of service can vary based on the provider and location. Some major Canadian providers include Rogers, Bell, and Telus, which offer extensive coverage in urban areas but may have limitations in more remote regions.
US Cell Phone Providers: Due to the larger population and market size, US cell phone providers generally offer better coverage across the country. Major US providers such as Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint (now merged with T-Mobile) have extensive networks and often provide better coverage in rural areas compared to Canadian providers.
Overall, US cell phone providers tend to offer more competitive pricing and better coverage due to the larger market size and increased competition.
This is going hand-in-hand with browsers increasingly putting up roadblocks to configuring said IoT devices. Guess what? The tiny device setup webserver on my low power embedded device isn't going to be able to https sorry. So now you have to dismiss more and more warning dialogs.
Is the Helium network a viable replacement for IoT devices? It’s a crypto thing but you earn the crypto by hosting a Helium “hotspot”, which is a LoRa (915MHz in the US) radio that actually has decent coverage and building penetration- of course the speeds are comparable dial-up, but that should suffice for IoT.
Also Helium doesn't let me use my own LoRa radios, so I'm not even sure I consider that democratizing it. It still feels like it's a network that belongs to Helium rather than individuals
I think it's impressive that Amazon managed to deploy what at a glance looks like an identical network with superior coverage without all the blockchain/crypto bullshit... AND it's free for non-Amazon devices to use. I'm pretty sure Helium costs some fake token money to consume data from.
One concern I had was if someone were to use an IoT device to use my Internet connection to download CP. I don't think it's pragmatic, but there are lots of dumb people on this Earth and I can pretty much guarantee someone, somewhere is going to try it, and the poor guy hosting that Helium hotspot is going to have to lawyer up and probably have his computers seized until law enforcement figures out what happened. Same applies to other illegal activities. Imagine if the ransomware attack on that US company that resulted in them paying some amount of Bitcoin... that transaction was made on a random IoT device connected to someone's Helium hotspot. How would the FBI track that one down?
Perhaps, then, that is a/the benefit of Helium over Sidewalk, because presumably Amazon will comply with any/all requests from government/law enforcement for data on which devices connected to what and when. With Helium, I'm not sure the FBI would have been able to figure out anything beyond the county and state the ransomware host collected his Bitcoin ransom at.
Also because of how Bitcoin is P2P, it's impossible to declare where the transaction is coming from. Transactions are all cryptographically signed and freely shared between nodes until picked up by miners. To figure out who the original sender is, you would need to host the majority of nodes so that the sender gives you the transaction first. Even then you can't prove they are the original sender rather than a rebroadcaster. There's a also few services that will broadcast a transaction for you: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_broadcasting
I don't disagree with you that Helium (or any crypto) is a scam. I couldn't dissuade one of my friends from buying the hotspots, and he has not made any money on them. There's also some sentiment that "Amazon should be paying me for the bandwidth they're using!" with Sidewalk. Also I don't think networks like Amazon Sidewalk or Helium get direct access to the internet: they wanna go through Amazon's API or Helium's to be able to charge the company fees for the broadcast. Probably to track and log it too since it's only a few bytes anyways.
I guess the main issue with both Helium and Sidewalk is that anyone who hosts their own LoRa radio probably isn't using any IoT devices that would be outside Bluetooth or WiFi range at their home/business, so it's kind of a chicken-egg problem where presumably the people who would leverage a LoRa network are also NOT the people who would host a LoRa radio... hence the argument from people that they should be compensated by Amazon for hosting Sidewalk.
At least it was written by a human…