Seems like all the latest sexy gizmos in the world of cel phones are in Europe and Japan. I’ve also heard tales of amazing cel reception no matter where you go in either place. Meanwhile the experience of your average cel phone customer in the US is :smack: at best. Any particular reason that the US seems to be a couple of years removed from the cutting edge when it comes to cel usage?
I’d imagine part of it is a matter of scale. Japan and most of Europe are much more densely packed than the US, and it’s presumably a lot easier to get good cell coverage. Also, both Japan and Europe quickly standardized on one digital system: GPS. The US, on the other hand, has three major competing standards (TDMA, CDMA and GPS, although TDMA is rapidly being phased out), which means that resources which may have been better spent ensuring better coverage are instead spent duplicating coverage in areas served by a different system.
Japan uses CDMA, not GSM (which is what I presume you mean). In fact, GSM coverage is quite poor in Japan. As well, Japan’s CDMA is not compatible with North America’s.
I don’t buy this as an explanation. Finland is a world-leader, and ranks between Arizona and Colorado for population density.
I’ve heard a more mundane explanation for the slower takeup of mobile phones in America - the prevalance of pricing systems which charges/charged the recipient for the call. Never a good sales point. The European system where a caller pays a higher rate when calling a mobile appears to have worked better, because it doesn’t put anyone off getting a mobile themselves.
Another factor that can be added to MilTan’s points is that North America was originally way ahead of Europe and Asia in cellular technology. It was just all analog. When the rest of the world started to adopt cell phones, their investment in analog infrastructure was much smaller and so they were therefore able to move to digital more quickly.
More attractive pricing schemes may have been another factor. The introduction of contract-free Pay As You Go schemes here c. 1998 prompted a surge in cellphone ownership. Text messaging became insanely popular, whereas I understand that in the US, the recipient pays some or all of the cost of a text, which may have held it back. And cellphones may have been cheaper here relative to landlines, which were more expensive than in the States.
I did a piece on Japan/USA cell phone tech in the WSJ a year or so ago.
My findings there was that the adoption by Japan of one standard for cell technology and therefore all firms could invest capital, both money and thought, into developing the actual phones and services instead of investing in infrastructure. This led to a faster adoption and less user confusion as the technology matured.
Europe I couldn’t speak to but a pal of mine in Italy told me once it was because the actual landline phone system sucked so bad that everyone switched as soon as they could and that drove innovation and market acceptance. I don’t know directly, though.
Heh, by that time, opening a student bank account got you a free pay-as-you-go phone.
Wish I’d kept mine, just to show some of the kids what Us Old Ones used to carry around.
Moving from Australia to the US, I think there are a couple of institutional issues that have caused things to stagnate. In the US, you choose a cell phone provider first and THEN pick your cellphone based upon an approved list. In every other part of the world, you buy a cell phone first and then pick any provider to go with. The provider-centric model leads to a lack of choice and retards innovation.
The whole pay to recieve thing is also very annoying. I almost never use text messages in the US because the social dynamic of the situation is completely different. In order for me to send a text message, I have to believe that the text message is worth at least 10c to the recipient otherwise they will react negatively to it. This means I only send text messages for very important things and dont bother texting whole bunches of trivial minutae like I would in Australia.
That contracts are locked in to a standard 2 years is also something annoying. You can either choose a very expensive pay-per-call contract or a cheaper pay-per-month contract but on a 2 year contract. There’s no real pay-per-month contract which you can break at any time which misses out on a huge portion of the market.
I think especially high school students who only make calls infrequently are a huge underserved part of the market. I know in Australia there are lots of people who have a cheap phone with no credit on it. Because you don’t pay anything to recieve a call, they can still catch incoming calls and have a perfectly functioning phone but they don’t spend any money on maintaining it.
It seems like the US made a couple of fundamental market decisions in the early days which may have seemed good ideas at the time but really came back to bite them later on.
You’re right that this sector is wiped out by a pricing scheme which doesn’t make a profit for the companies on received calls. I could never make a call or send a text from my pay-as-you-go phone, and it would still be profitable for the provider, because of the extra cost incurred by calls to it.
Plans in the US are so cheap and you generally get so many minutes, does anyone really “pay” any more to receive calls? My cheap-o Cingular plan gives me 500 minutes good any time for the entire month during prime time – that’s 8 hours. For casual, non-business use, that’s one hell of a lot of time, and that’s the cheapest packager there is. If you’ve got a teenage girl, then maybe I can understand the need for a larger package of minutes, but really – I’m “charged” minutes that are surplus anyway.
Text messages, though, piss me off. It’s $0.10 every time I get one. For a while, every single friggin’ time I crossed the Blue Water Bridge into Ontario I’d get some stupid “Welcome to Ontario” text message on my phone. That’s $0.20 when my wife’s phone’s with me too.
I think the USA was way ahead of many countries with wired phones when cels were first introduced. There was less of a need for celphones since the wired system worked pretty well.
In contrast, some countries had poor wired service, and when celphones became available, people grabbed them as a quick solution and the penetration was larger.
Also, if there is a strong base of technology A in country 1, a new, competing technology B has a harder time dislodging the base than in country 2 which has no base at all. This could explain why once the US was pretty strong in analog phones, it took more time to move to digital. Compare that to a country that had no significant analog service. When digital became cheap, it filled a waiting void and had relatively litle competition.
Of course there are many other forces at work that have already been suggested, such as pricing & marketing plans, demographics that encourage gadgetry, etc. I don’t think there is a simple answer.
Sorry, that doesn’t make sense at all. Quite apart from whether the wired system in Europe was up to scratch (and given that it provides the vast majority of broadband internet, via ADSL, I suspect it was in the main OK), you’re suggesting that a main reason to get a mobile was in place of a landline. Most people here have both.
I don’t think that’s a relavent comparison. We’re comparing cell coverage over the country as a whole, not just certain states. A country like Finland has some large population centers in the south, and then decreasing population as you go north. The US has large population centers separated by large amounts of nothing (well, almost nothing). Cell coverage in densely populated US areas is generally pretty good.
Kind of my point…on a larger scale (with a larger population and therefore everything is scaled up), the populous areas could be supplied efficiently and a large takeup of mobile telephony would ensue…but this didn’t happen, so there needs to be other explanations.
And FWIW if independent, England would rank as the most densely-populated country in mainland Europe, yet mobile phone coverage is far from comprehensive…and this isn’t seen as a problem.
All the salient points have been covered:
Competing technologies
Being tied to a vendor’s selection of phones
Charges for receiving calls.
Text message charges.
One thing missing was resistance in many communities to placement of cell towers. There are still pockets on Long Island in very affluent areas where there is no cell coverage because the local populace will not allow cell towers on their property.
And as opposed to what someone mentioned about having both land and cell services in Europe; here, I see movement towards dropping land phones in favor of cellular only service. In fact I replaced my “land” line with VOIP. I use this line for mostly long distance calls that would “bankrupt” my cell plan.
To my mind, this is analogous to a wider disparity in the socio-economic models of the two regions. The US innovated earlier on in a free market, and various systems proliferated, causing relative stagnation until recently. The EU held off (though not entirely - we had our own unregulated disasters), then voluntarily restricted its systems and allowed enterprise to work only within that constriction - and the product flourished.
(Note this is not a generalized observation: the world of IT stands in direct contradiction of my tentative thesis.)
Just like the application for a mast which would have let me get a signal at home, because everybody is a friend of someone on the council (maybe I need more friends…)
It depends. No chance of getting online in many places other than through ADSL.
To continue GorillaMan’s earlier disagreement: this is a spurious argument, because this was also true of most of the rest of the western world, and Japan, at the time that cellphones began to be feasible. The French even had quasi-internet terminals in their homes in the 1980s, based on their wired phones, well in advance of other countries at the time.
I remember this from dreadful '80s French textbooks (no wonder I opted for Spanish GCSE) - and I’ve heard suggestions that it is a reason that France has been relatively slow in adopting the internet…“but I can already see if my train is leaving on time (which it is) and when my supermarket is open until and the telephone number of my cinema”.
OK, that is definitely the French text book talking.