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> Everyone wants to buy the cheapest cellphone plan, then they complain when it doesn't work in buildings. Your location matters here, but at least in the more

> Everyone wants to buy the cheapest cellphone plan, then they complain when it doesn't work in buildings. Your location matters here, but at least in the more enclosed bars in san jose, AT&T and T-mobile are super unreliable; Verizon works fine. In the UK we have one set of physical lines, owned and run by BT. BT has to, by law, lease the lines out to sub providers at it's own "internal" costing rate so that there is competition in telephone providers. It remains bemusing to me that Mobile Towers weren't treated in the same way, with every provider using the same network of towers and sharing. We do it for emergency calls (999 will route the nearest/strongest tower irrespective of owner), and frankly you'd have fewer towers over-saturating the high population areas for the 4-5 networks.

tyfon 8y ago
Here in Norway we have two mobile networks (Telenor and Netcom). Telenor is the old state company like BT, that used to be called Televerket. They also own most of the physical lines like in the UK. Netcom is the only privately started company that acquired a license in the 90s. When Telenor were privatised the license required them to sell capacity at cost to other operators. The same license requirements hold for mobile towers so all the small operators can piggyback on their infrastructure at cost. The result is that we have over 50 operators competing on services and add-ons while having approximately the same base network quality. This is largely the case for ISPs too and it works great I think.
- lsc 8y ago
  >The result is that we have over 50 operators competing on services and add-ons while having approximately the same base network quality. what kind of services or add ons would you possibly want with a cellphone? most of the "features" they offer around here are things I'd pay money to not get. I mean, I guess tethering, but I personally am a little bit offended I have to pay extra for that rather than just paying for the data (I do pay extra for tethering, because if you want the good network, that's another fee you have to pay if you are being honest and don't want to spend a bunch of extra time sysadmining your phone)

tyfon 8y ago

Here in Norway we have two mobile networks (Telenor and Netcom). Telenor is the old state company like BT, that used to be called Televerket. They also own most of the physical lines like in the UK. Netcom is the only privately started company that acquired a license in the 90s. When Telenor were privatised the license required them to sell capacity at cost to other operators. The same license requirements hold for mobile towers so all the small operators can piggyback on their infrastructure at cost. The result is that we have over 50 operators competing on services and add-ons while having approximately the same base network quality. This is largely the case for ISPs too and it works great I think.

lsc 8y ago
>The result is that we have over 50 operators competing on services and add-ons while having approximately the same base network quality. what kind of services or add ons would you possibly want with a cellphone? most of the "features" they offer around here are things I'd pay money to not get. I mean, I guess tethering, but I personally am a little bit offended I have to pay extra for that rather than just paying for the data (I do pay extra for tethering, because if you want the good network, that's another fee you have to pay if you are being honest and don't want to spend a bunch of extra time sysadmining your phone)