Neither. Lighten up, Francis. Although, working in this industry we get a lot of insight into how some peoples’ brains work. Like the people that complain that they can’t make a call to their neighbor’s cell phone, even though it’s right across the street. “They’re so close- how come my call didn’t go through?!?!”
The advertising arm of the company doesn’t give a rusty rat’s ass whether there’s service in that area. If they did, it would be a constant battle between the tower licensing division and the advertising division. “We can’t advertise in that area until you put up antennas for all the new customers!” “Well, we won’t put up antennas until we know there will be customers, so start advertising!”
Ha. I can top that. I live in a suburb of Kansas City. The neighboring suburb is Overland Park, the global headquarters for Sprint. (The Sprint/Nextel merger complicated this a bit, but I digress.)
The Sprint Campus is gigantic. 240 acres. 14,000+ employees. When they built the campus in the '90s, and for a few years thereafter, there was NO Sprint reception on or near the campus. Sprint employees who wanted to use their Sprint mobile phones during work had to use digital roaming.
They put up a tower on the campus a couple of years ago and killed the irony.
So, you’re equating failure to understand the difference between cell phones and walkie-talkies, and thinking it a touch odd to spend money advertising a service to people who can’t use it. Gotcha.
Just for the record, in your hypothetical argument, Person 2 is a dumbass. By the time the tower IS constructed, the only thing you’ll have accomplished is chasing off however many potential customers already tried your advertised service and found out it didn’t work. That’d be like the bank I used to work for advertising itself in areas where the nearest branch is 50 miles away. Why the fuck would we want to do that?
I understand that, working in a given industry, you develop a gut-reaction tendency to defend it against the most common complaints of the masses. Once you give it some thought, you then divide it up into “things people bitch about because people are stupid”, and “things people bitch about because they don’t have an insider’s perspective”. What may take some time to realize is that there’s actually a third category there: “things people bitch about because, hey, those things really are pretty fucking stupid”. Advertising phone service in areas where that service does not work would fall into that category. I’m sure it’s done; hell, it’s probably even common, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t idiotic. (For a relevant banking example, see “unavailable funds fees”. I’d talk to fifty people a day who’d been hit with those fuckers, and I’d waive 'em every time; I couldn’t justify them then and I wouldn’t try now.)
Actually, it’s not like that at all. Each antenna only has a coverage range of a couple miles. If the billboard you referred to upthread is on a road that a hypothetical commuter might take between his home and office ten miles apart, he probably passes through 3-4 cells. So in the location of the Sprint billboard, maybe there’s no Sprint coverage. Or could be that there is coverage, but there’s interference from antennas or buildings that block reception right in front of the billboard. Or could be that there’s no Sprint antenna covering that particular cell, and it’s a dead spot in the center of an otherwise covered area. Or it could be that there is a Sprint antenna covering that cell, but the advertising has been so effective that the users have exceeded the antenna’s capacity. Regardless, it’s advertising to the community at large, which community will no doubt pass through numerous Sprint cells during their day-to-day travels.
If the billboard you mentioned is sitting smack dab in the middle of rural Nowheresville and there are in fact no antennas of any kind for 50 miles around, then maybe you have a legitimate complaint. But since you identified it as the “Sprint billboard downtown”, I reckon that’s not the case.
Oh no they didn’t, at least not totally. Fierra and I live in OP, and we can both attest that Sprint-using friends we know, including freaking Sprint employees on that very campus, still have a lot of trouble making calls.
You could get a satellite phone, but you are looking at much more then $100/month for 500 mintues.
Very unlikely, there just is not enough bandwidth in the electromagnetic spectrum. Currently in order to accommodate as many calls as the cell network does with the limited em spectrum the area each tower covers is actually fairly small. If you get more users more towers are required and the area each tower gets progressively smaller. This is to allow reuse of the same part of the EM band in different locations (covered by different towers).
[Edited out some sarcasm here; tempting as it was, it’s not relevant to my point and can only do more harm than good]
I understand your point about how cell towers and antennae work. I understood most of it before I started this thread. The point of the thread was to complain about the lackluster coverage offered by pretty much every major carrier out there. As an example, I offered the fact that my Sprint phone doesn’t work in a number of areas in Roanoke (a city where the service is heavily advertised and we have multiple Sprint store locations), and as a particularly ironic example of that, I mentioned the billboard. If the service doesn’t work in those areas because the infrastructure isn’t there, well, that’s pretty much my complaint in a nutshell.
Like I said, the billboard comment was mostly just meant as a snarky example to illustrate the larger point, but really…you don’t see anything inherently ridiculous about me, upon seeing a billboard telling me to use Sprint’s service, attempting to use that service, and discovering that I can’t?
I should add: if that billboard was the only place in Roanoke, or one of a small few, where the service did not work as expected, then yes, it would be stupid of me to complain about Sprint based solely on the fact that they happen to have a billboard in that one dead spot. It’s not, though. As I said, there are plenty of areas around town where, despite Sprint’s many proclamations of their service’s virtues, you can’t make a phone call to save your life (in some cases, literally).
My Cingular phone gets reception just about everywhere. The only places I’ve ever found no reception is in the bowels of buildings or way out in the middle of the desert. I get fine reception on the beach in the Virgin Islands.
No it’s not. It’s the first PDA EVER to do what a PDA should do standard. It’s not fancy and shiny, it’s the baseline of what a phone should be, and what a phone will be. It’s the first real pocket computer. Everything else was a half-assed halfway measure. A Treo and a Blackberry comes with 64 megs standard, it comes with 4 gigs standard. It is the future of computing. Soon everything will be done remotely from servers with personal portable interfaces. You see bells and whistles, I see the computer finally coming of age.
It’s not all that easy. Fifteen U.S. states are larger than the entire area of the island of Great Britain. The most populous state (California) has twice the area of Great Britain, but only slightly more than half its population. All of Europe, with an area about 10% greater than that of the U.S. has well over twice the population.