Category Archives: Technology

AF Cyber Command “Delayed”

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According to the front page of the Air Force Cyber Command’s Website:

8/14/2008 - Barksdale AFB, La.  – The Air Force remains committed to providing full-spectrum cyber capabilities to include global command and control, electronic warfare and network defense. The Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force have considered delaying currently planned actions on Air Force Cyber Command to allow ample time for a comprehensive assessment of all AFCYBER requirements and to synchronize the AFCYBER mission with other key Air Force initiatives. The new Air Force leaders continue to make a fresh assessment of all our efforts to provide our Nation and the joint force the full spectrum of air, space, and cyberspace capabilities.

Which makes sooooo much sense considering that the military doesn’t have a cohesive all-around cyber defense policy.  Seriously, cyber security measures can change literally from base to base.  What drives those measures?  You would think it would be a standard set of security practices applied to all and you’d be somewhat correct.  However, what you also have to take into account is that almost every base has a different contract company taking care of their network  security measures.  Those measures may be based on what the contractor is willing and able to do for the price that the military is willing to pay.  On some bases, you may have three to five different companies taking care of the various networks depending on the security level of the network.  Not only is the security level dependent on the classification of the material on the network, but it’s also dependent, again, on the capability of the contractors.

I remember getting a call when I was in NORAD/USSPACE from a flag officer and he needed me to come over and help him with one of his computers.  Since that part of the network wasn’t “owned” by NORAD/USSPACE, I literally was not allowed to help him.  I simply didn’t have permissions for that side of the network.  I  had to file a help desk ticket for him which, according to contract, allowed up to 3 business days before it was addressed.  Since he WAS a flag officer, the contractor did put a rush on it, but still.

I’ve been against the privatizing of the military’s networks since they started.  Okay, so you don’t have to pay contractors retirement benefits and all the other baggage that comes along with a military person’s life, but if you don’t write the contracts correctly, the military can wind up needing a task completed by the contractor that’s not in the contract and you can’t force them to complete that task without amending the contract which would also mean, MORE money.  That’s right, when a new task is added for any reason to a contract network admin or techie’s tasks, they may not HAVE to do it until the contract is reviewed to see if it falls under the contractor’s “scope of support.”  And because only contractors can touch the network on some bases, folks in uniform can’t complete the task either.  And since we’ve slashed the living shit out of the military’s network specialists in favor of contractors, we don’t have them to utilize anyway.

Which, if I’m being cynical, leads me to believe that someone has finally realized that having a cohesive policy across all the networks that the Air Force “controls” means that every single one of those contracts is going to have to be rewritten and I’m betting that some Senior NCO and their team has done the legwork and given General Lord and his bosses the cost analysis for those new contracts and someone with power of the purse-strings has crapped their drawers when the reality of what a workable, cohesive, policy is going to cost.

That’s if I was being cynical.  It could just mean that what we’ve got is working just fine and there’s no need for a cyber command in the first place…and I swear to you I typed that with a straight face…after three tries.

Thanks to He Who Needs No Linkage for the tip.

You want to know the funniesnt thing for me about all this?  I’ve got interviews with two contractors in the next week for jobs supporting the military’s network.  I hope the question, “What’s your opinion about privatization?” doesn’t come up and I hope to hell I’ve got the good sense to lie about it if it does.  I need a job.

The Lost DaVinci

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Or is it just hidden?

There’s some interesting stuff going on over in Italy, related to discovering artworks that have been painted over. Technology continues to amaze me (I’m easily amazed, but even so…).

Seems that once upon a time, DaVinci began a mural – a battle scene. For centuries, common wisdom was that he’d been unsatisified with his efforts, and destroyed the mural, and it was painted over by another artist, Giorgio Vasari. But in 1977, a young art apprentice was inspecting Vasari’s frescoes, and found two words painted near the top of the wall: “Cerca Trova.” The words were practically invisible from ground level. They translate to “Seek: You will find.”

Skeptical colleagues discounted the discovery. Yet they were the only words on the six enormous frescoes that cover the walls today. To Dr. Seracini, it could mean only one thing: The da Vinci mural must still be there, concealed behind Vasari’s paintings. “We are talking about the masterpiece of the masterpieces of the Renaissance,” says Dr. Seracini, “way more important than The Last Supper or the Mona Lisa.”

Da Vinci and those who commissioned the work left no direct account as to why the master gave up on the mural. Whatever its technical flaws, the painting’s inventiveness and savage passion dazzled artists throughout Europe for a half century before it disappeared from view. “One writer at the time says it is the most beautiful thing in existence, twice as beautiful as the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel,” says Syracuse University art historian Rab Hatfield, a member of the Italian commission overseeing the project.

Dr. Seracini, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, wasn’t the first art scholar to be seduced by the mystery of Leonardo’s missing mural. No one, however, has pursued it with such technical acumen.

Not long ago, art conservationists had only a trained eye to guide their work. Today, sophisticated scientific techniques are becoming part of every art expert’s tool kit. This spring in Vienna, for instance, restorers relied on X-ray fluorescence to analyze the solid gold of a priceless 16th Century sculpture. In France, University of Michigan physicists probed the walls of a 12th Century chapel with nondestructive terahertz beams. In Pittsburgh, NASA scientists used molecules of atomic oxygen to wipe a Warhol painting clean of the lipstick smear left by a vandal’s kiss.

Since that discovery in 1977, Seracini has made use of every technological advance to pursue his search for the DaVinci mural. That search will culminate next year, using a portable neutron-beam scanner that is still in development. Seracini is hopeful the hidden DaVinci will be found.

I hope so, too.

source

Tomorrow is FireFox 3.0 Download Day

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If you’re already a Firefox user, why not download it right away and help Firefox get that world record? If you’ve never used Firefox before, the worst that will happen is that you’ll kick yourself for never using it before.

Disclaimer: I get absolutely nothing out of this but the satisfaction that comes from passing on a better browser. Seriously.

Download Day
Apparently “Jun 17″ was just an estimate. I searched the Firefox site and can find the May Beta version, but still can find where to download the full version of Firefox 3.0. I’ll let you know when I do.

Big Brother IS Watching You

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I would have you know that google-maps and mapquest and all those other lately-developed methods of scoping out and locating a specific address is a god-send, especially for someone making a living marketing books, or in some kind out outdoor sales, or even just scratching a living doing temp-jobs here and there. How easy is it now to drive across country and locate the next gas, or rest-stop, with the aid of an add-on or built-in navigation system? How easy is it now to find the place where you have an interview or a sales call the next day, or to locate every independent bookstore in every town in Idaho or Iowa.

It was great when google-maps even added an aerial view version of their maps; you can zoom in and sort out where features are in relation to each other – and when they went even farther and generated a street-level view? Oh, fantastic! As someone with a propensity to get lost going to a place that I had never seen before – well, that would take care of that, wouldn’t it? I am a visual person, I operate by landmarks I would already know what a place looked like, before I even set out! I would recognize it when I got there! Is this technology stuff great, or what? It did occur to me that this would enable a new and higher degree of on-line snooping. How many of you could resist the temptation to check out the ex-boyfriends’ or that former spouses’ address? (“He lives there ?! OMG, Quelle dump! How could I ever have fallen for someone who lives in a tacky place like that?”) We certainly didn’t resist temptation at one of the places that I worked: we whiled away a small portion of the workday showing each other our own houses, discovered that we all lived in small, agreeably well-kept neighborhoods, in tidy bungalows of no particular distinction. None of us, on this showing, would ever have our domiciles featured in House Beautiful or Southern Living.

But I should have gone a couple of houses farther down the street, upon discovering this feature. Because, most jarringly, whoever did the street level photography in my neighborhood inadvertently captured more than just my house, my neighbors houses, and all of our cars.

They captured my daughter and I, with our dogs on leashes, standing in the driveway of mu neighbor Judy’s house; all three of us, perfectly recognizable to ourselves and our closest intimates, if fortunately just blurred enough to make us unrecognizable to a stranger. There we are, the three of us, with the smallest of the dogs clearly visible at my feet, my daughter in her gym things with the other dog half-hidden behind her. I have a sweat-jacket on, my daughter a pair of red sweatpants and a navy blue pullover – and there we stand, talking to our neighbor Judy. We were all mildly freaked to discover this; it was obviously shot months ago, for the lawns are late summer crispy-brown and there are no flowers in bloom, although most of the visible trees are in leaf. The skies are overcast, grayish with light clouds. My daughters’ new car, which she bought last year is parked in our driveway. We have coats on, so it is obviously cool – and most likely a Saturday or a Sunday morning, since those were the only days that we both went out with the dogs.

We find the creepiest part of this to be that our neighborhood is fairly small, although the street we live on does get a fair amount of traffic – and we thought surely we would have noticed someone driving along, filming through the windows. Surely we would have noticed Big Brother watching our street, especially on a Saturday.

(Cross-posted at Blogger News Network)

Wanna Help Set a World Record?

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On June 17th, Tuesday, go to the Firefox Site and download Firefox 3.0. Go there now and pledge to download on Download Day. They’re looking to break the record for most downloads in a single day. It’s simply a better browser than Internet Explorer. I like Safari for the Mac, but Firefox just does what I want it to the way I want to do it.

Download Day

Adventures in Old Lamps

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I can’t remember exactly when I discovered that it was not actually very hard, to re-wire table lamps, and do things like replace plugs and swap out one-way sockets for three-way, so that an ordinary lamp could be transformed into a reading lamp. At a guess, I had watched Dad take stuff apart and put things back together… and well, really, it didn’t seem to be anything very complicated. Stripping half an inch of insulation off the ends of the wires, threading them through the lamp-base and securing the bare wires around the little screws in the socket base – this is not rocket science. It’s about as challenging as replacing a light-bulb.

At some point – about the time that we returned from Europe – I discovered that all the little bits that hold a lamp together and attach a shade are pretty much a standard thread. We’ve bought lamps at the thrift-shop or at yard-sales because they have a pretty base – and it’s very pleasing, how much better they will look, immediately upon installing new hardware and a nicer shade. And never mind the wiring – last month, Blondie bought a pair of inexpensive 1930’s era decorative lamps that you wouldn’t dare plug in. The wiring was that crumbly – I swear it looked like one of those pictures of a dangerous example of faulty wiring in a brochure handed out by the fire department. New hardware, new wiring, new sockets, all the way around; amazing how much nicer they looked, almost at once.

I have a whole basket full of those essential lamp pieces, most of them scrounged from various broken lamps. Never know when you will need an essential bit, you see. Some of my favorite lamps have bit the dust, since I took up the carpets and painted the concrete floors in the house. Two weeks ago, the dogs got rowdy and knocked over a pretty little bedside lamp, a blue and white vase-type that I bought in Greece, and in the same week, Blondie sat back suddenly in the rocking chair, and there went a lamp that I had bought in Korea, a blue and white bowl that I saw in a shop in Itaewon and had converted. Not to fear, though – for we salvaged all the parts, the wooden base and top, and the metal rod that ran up through the middle, the shade and the socket.

Last weekend, Blondie, the Queen of All Yard Sales, spied three lamps for sale in a neighbor’s garage – all blue and white painted china bases, all vaguely Oriental in design, in good shape and all three for a mere pittance. One of them most particularly resembled the Korean bowl, and as it was approximately the same dimensions, I thought I would be able to remove the brass base and top to it, and replace them with the wooden base and fittings from the Korean lamp – and I would have something that came very close in looks to it.

Only the hex-nut that held the whole thing together at the bottom was apparently tightened on at the factory by Godzilla himself. Not even with a crescent-wrench could we get it to budge – and Blondie and I tried separately and together, and with a spritz of liquid wrench, that is supposed to make it easy to unscrew anything.

There was only one thing to do. And that was to take it to Pep Boys. Really, any garage would have done, but Pep-Boys was open on Sunday. Where else do you find the strength and the technology to separate metal bolts from the threads they are apparently frozen onto, than at an auto mechanics?

But the manager did look at me and ask, warily, “This is at your own risk of course. It’s not a priceless Ming vase, is it?”

“Five-dollar yard-sale special,” I said, “Have at it.” It took one of the mechanics about two minutes and all the other mechanics came to look, shaking their heads.

The manager did say afterwards that it was the weirdest request that anyone has ever come to Pep-Boys with. That is my home craft advice for the week – bet you never heard this from Martha Stewart. Also, you can, in some places, take cast-iron pots to a body shop to have the rust sand-blasted off them – and I wish I could remember how I came by these two little bits of wisdom.

Confessions of a Wireless Customer Service Rep, 080514

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One thing that makes cellular users crazy is the inability of their providers to turn off text messaging. While younger folks are texting at a rate that baffles most folks over 30, many older folks don’t want it, don’t need it and get upset to the point of stroke when they’re told that their service provider cannot and will not remove the ability to accept text messaging from their cellular service. To add insult to annoyance, the cellular companies charge you for these unwanted messages after they’ve told you that the can’t remove the feature.

Very simply, you’re mad at the wrong people. It’s not the cellular companies that make it impossible to remove the text messaging feature, it’s your federal government.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 to be exact.

Now…you may say, “But Timmer, that Act was never ratified.” and you’d be right.

However, the FCC in its infinite wisdom still took the part of The TCA of 1996 which said that telecommunications companies could not restrict telemessaging services and ran with it anyway. The idea being that if those messages were restricted, that would be an infringement on the senders’ First Amendment rights.

There isn’t a customer service rep working for a cellular company today who doesn’t WANT to turn off your text messaging. Believe me when I say that as much as it annoys our customers, it annoys us just as much. We don’t like being told what low-lifes we are or that we’re in cahoots with the texting spammers or what a scam it is. We don’t.

It is nice to be able to tell everyone that you’re mad at the wrong people though, and that word is getting out. Apparently the FCC is getting tired of cellular customers calling THEM to complain about it and there’s hope that by the end of the summer, we’ll be able to turn off those annoying messages for those folks who have no use for little messages on their phones.

UPDATE:  The more I read about this issue, the less the above explanation holds water.  I’m on my weekend, but I’m going to be speaking with the person who offered this explanation to me come Monday.  I’m not going to take it down though.  I’m going to leave this up as a reminder to do more research BEFORE I put up a post.  Thanks to those of you who chimed in and made me look closer at this.

Confessions of a Wireless Customer Service Rep, 080513

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Okay, so summer is right around the corner and if you’re shopping for new cell phones, now is the time to start looking for that new phone that you’ve had your eyes on for the past few months. Prices are coming down on a LOT of phones from all of the cell phone companies.

But…wait…if the prices are coming down on all of last year’s hot models, doesn’t that mean that new models are getting ready to be introduced?

Yes.

So, before you drop $19.95 on last year’s newest and best thing, keep in mind that this year’s newest and best phones are getting ready to be introduced. And no…after a certain amount of time, you won’t be able to return that cool phone from last year to get the newest and shiniest new toy that’s just come out.

Patience. Do some research. Check out the plethora of cell phone blogs and see what your carrier is getting ready to introduce before you jump on all of those inexpensive phones that the cellular companies are trying to unload before the new ones come out.

I know that iPhone has been burning a hole in your brain since it was introduced, but keep in mind that some of the companies that aren’t AT&Cingular are looking to introduce their Google Android Phones in the upcoming year. You all know that I’m an Mac-head. I wouldn’t give up my MacBook Pro for any other laptop out there. However, while I lust after an iPhone as much as any Mac Fanboy, I also know that the Androids are going to be the most customizable communications devices that we’ve ever seen. Third party applications will be the norm on these “phones.”

Remember, most companies give you discounted pricing on phones after you’ve had a phone for one year and then huge discounts at the two year mark. (Coincidently when your contract is about to expire.) If you’ve got a phone that you’ve had for two years and have that huge discount available, do you want to use it for a very cheap phone that’s going to be outdated by the end of the summer, or do you want to use it to bring down the price on a full blown communications device?

Me? I want my phone to be my phone, my iPod to be my iPod, and my laptop to be my laptop. I don’t think any of the comm devices out there or that are getting ready to come out take care of all of those tasks as well as the individual devices do…yet.

Of course, none of these new “all in one” devices are good without the features to support them. Check with your provider to see what the price is on the features that you want/need on your device. Some features are bundled. You can get internet/email/text messaging all for 19.95 with some devices, while others only have internet and email for 19.95 and you have to add an additional texting package. Some devices are less expensive (coughBLACKBERRYcough) but their features are going to cost you more. The sleek “grownup” device may be what fits your look, but the device targeted at the younger crowd, often have less expensive bundles that take care of all your needs.

What do I think of the Sprint “everything for 99.99″ plan? I think that’s the last ditch effort of a telecom to increase it’s customer base before they sell to another company. Unlimited talk, unlimited text, unlimited internet and email all for 99.99 simply isn’t fiscally maintainable for very long.

Having said all that, don’t look for the cheap or free or cool phones, look at what you need and then check with the wireless telecoms to find out what the total cost of ownership over a year is going to be. A couple hours worth of research can save you hundreds of dollars in you personal comm budget. And just a warning, if you’re going to start texting anytime soon, or give your teenager the ability to text, make sure you give yourself and them enough messages to last the month. The thing about text messaging is that the more you do it, the more you do it.

Guest Post – Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Amazon.com

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(Although the following appears with my name on it, ths is actually a guest-post by another IAG member, who did a lot of numbers-crunching and came up with some recommendations: Michael S. Katz is an attorney, editor-in-chief of Strider Nolan Publishing, board member of the Independent Authors’ Guild, and author of the comedy novel Shalom On The Range Take it away, Mike!)

Amazon.com recently announced a new policy requiring all Print On Demand authors to use Amazon’s own printing company, Booksurge, in order to be sold through Amazon. Many POD authors and publishers are understandably upset by this, as this can only serve to cost the authors money, and cost the printing companies business. But in terms of Amazon’s market share, how much business are we actually talking about?

WHO’S ON FIRST?

Sales of books totaled $2 billion in 2000, at which time on-line sales made up between 7.5% and 10% of that total.1 Amazon and BN.com now account for more than 85% of online book sales.3 Recent data shows that Amazon’s book sales are approximately four times that of BN.com,4 and Amazon has a 70% share of the Internet book market, so this translates into a 15 to 17.5% market share for BN.com.5

Amazon’s total sales in 2006 were $4.63 billion, but this includes books, music, and various other items, including a lot of high-end electronics, jewelry, and the like. Barnes & Noble actually outsold them at $4.68 billion (and they were basically limited to books, music and movies), but their on-line presence had only $477 million in sales. Why are people flocking to Amazon over BN.com?

A LOT TO RECOMMEND IT

A lot of it has to do with programming. Amazon has a reputation for being the best at tracking customer habits, having collected information longer and used it more proactively. Over the years they have collected detailed information about what its customers buy, considered buying, browsed for but never bought, recommended to others, or even wished someone would buy them.10 Amazon uses this information to calculate recommendations that boost sales.

In the entertainment industry, recommendations are a remarkably efficient form of marketing, as they enable films, music and books to more easily find the right audience.9 For example, the book Touching the Void, a tale of a mountain-climbing tragedy, was released in 1988 to good reviews but modest success. In 1998, the book Into Thin Air, about another mountain-climbing tragedy, was released and became a bestseller. All of a sudden, people began buying the older book again. Touching the Void began to be displayed side by side with Into Thin Air, and actually wound up outselling the newer book. How did this happen? Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, attributes this to Amazon.com recommendations. Amazon’s programs note buying patterns and suggest similar books to readers. Some people follow the suggestion, enjoy the book, and post excellent reviews. These purchases and reviews lead to more sales, more recommendations, and the cycle continues.9

Readers’ reviews also stimulate sales, although moreso on Amazon than BN.com. One study (Chevalier and Mayzlin) examined how sales on both sites correlated with number of reviews and customers’ ratings.12 They determined that a good review will increase the number of books sold, although with much greater effect on Amazon than BN.com. A bad review has a greater effect than a good one, based on the assumption that many 5-star reviews are believed to be “planted,” whereas 1-star reviews are seen as more legitimate.12

GETTING FROM POINTS A(MAZON) TO B(ARNES & NOBLE)

How do prices compare between the big two? A study (Chevalier and Goolsbee) collected Amazon and BN.com data for 18,000 different books during three different weeks in 2001. They determined that there was significant price sensitivity for online book purchases at both sites. But the demand at BN.com was much more price sensitive—both to its own prices and to Amazon’s prices—than at Amazon.4

A one percent increase in a book’s price at Amazon reduced sales by about 0.5 percent at Amazon but raised sales at BN.com by 3.5 percent, implying that (based on the 4-to-1 ratio in sales) every customer lost by Amazon instead bought the book at BN.com. Conversely, raising prices by one percent at BN.com reduced sales about 4 percent but increased sales at Amazon by only about 0.2 percent.4 Therefore, a customer lost by Amazon would usually wind up buying the book at BN.com, whereas a customer lost by BN.com would not necessarily go to Amazon. If BN.com keeps its prices right, they can steal away a lot of Amazon traffic.
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Round Two of the Great Amazon Imbroglio

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Well, this is getting interesting – last weekend the writing world – or that portion of it that doesn’t have a name which frequents the New York Times best-sellers list – was all agog over Amazon.com’s fiat that all books sold through Amazon must be printed by it’s POD subsidiary, Booksurge. (Gruesome details here in my post of Sunday last).

Many of us ink-stained scribbling wretches are being advised to A-remain calm, it is not the end of the world as we know it and B- that Amazon doesn’t own the bloody world yet, anyway so change over all of your links to Barnes and Noble and sit tight.

Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly has the latest development here; yes, a couple of POD firms have caved, given yesterdays deadline to stand and deliver, or else their authors ‘ buy buttons’ be disabled on Amazon’s website. Angela has some shrewd guesses about why and how this is all going down the way that it is, as well as a link to further developments – and the cheery news that no buttons have actually been turned off or harmed in the making of this power-grab/controversy.

The Independent Authors’ Guild forum has been all of a twitter though: what would Ingram/Lightning Source do about this? (Break out the terrible swift sword and start trampling those grapes of wrath, some of us hoped!) How would the various POD firms react ? (Stand tall and tell ‘em “Nuts!”, some of us hoped!) And how would the general public react? A volcanic outburst of rage would be nice, but perhaps a little much for us mere scribbling mortals to hope for. Some of us still have day jobs, you see, Although book-blogger PODdy Mouth has a nice takedown here, including a number that can be called…

OMG Amazon has a actual telephone number for people to talk to a real live human?

Well, OK, probably some poor barely-minimum-wage call center drone, so keep it civil and dignified, people. It isn’t their fault; the guys whose f**king brilliant idea this was are well beyond being reached by a phone call. Maybe not beyond subpoena… eh, call me a dreamer. It goes with the territory, I write historical novels and would like to make a living from it, for f**ks sake! Given that there are so many lawyer-bloggers, perhaps some searching analysis of whatever basis there might be for anti-trust action. All well and good; and this sort of controversy is bread, butter and circuses to the blogosphere.

But I have long predicted that the towers of the literary industrial complex would totter, crumble and fall when a certain technological point was reached – when there was a desktop gadget that would print and bind a nice little paperback or hardbound book. Even if it was so expensive to buy that only places like Kinkos would have them, even if it could only crank them out one or two at a time, even at a cost per unit substantially above that of one of those industrial print shops that could churn out a thousand in a minute – it would mean the end of the literary-industrial complex. Anyone could take their book content and cover file, with ISBN and everything, down to the corner copy place, pay them to print and bind a couple or three or half-dozen copies of your book… and you could mail them to whoever had bought them. Or who you wanted to send them! That’s the future, and according to this release, may be here already, in the form of the Espresso Book Machine. Think of this as Ingram/Lightning Source looking across the poker table with a steely gaze and saying, “raise.”

“It’s always been the holy grail of the book business to walk into a store and get any book,” said Kirby Best, president and CEO of Lightning Source. With the signing of today’s strategic agreement with On Demand Books, proprietor of the Espresso Book Machine, Best sees that goal coming a little bit closer.”

And savor the discription and call me a prophetess: “We’re building a new machine that’s much smaller that can be mass produced, version 2.0,” said cofounder and chairman Jason Epstein. Neller adds that a beta machine, which will be the size of a copier at Kinko’s (3’ X 2-1/2’ for the finishing unit with another 2’ for a duplex printer), will be ready in the fall. If all goes well, a less expensive model will begin leasing in 2009. “The point of this machine is to represent the ultimate in POD,” said Epstein, who sees it as the best way to preserve backlist. If the machines catch on and proliferate like so many Starbucks outlets, the marketplace would become radically decentralized and book distribution would require simply an Internet connection.”

Oh, yeah… definitely we’re into round two. Pass the popcorn.

(Crossposted at the IAG Blog)

(And yeah, my blogosphere cover is now comprehensively blown – I blog under the name “Sgt Mom” and write books under the name “Celia Hayes”. It turns out that someone is already using my real name and has somewhat of a reputation under it. I understand that Elizabeth Taylor had something of the same problem.)

Confessions of a Wireless Customer Service Rep, 080228

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B Dubya asked a good question in a comment on an earlier post:

Timmer!
Serious question to an industry insider…
Why is it that cell coverage in the US is so spotty, when Europe and even Arabia are totally covered? What would it take to get the US system on a par with even the third world in this area?

And Occam’s Razor gets applied. While the U.S.A. was busy replacing our old, mostly copper cable, communication’s infrastructure with new, expensive, fiber optic cable in the 1990s, when cell phones were still kinda bulky and sort of a fad, the rest of the world basically said, “Hell, we can’t afford that fiber optic stuff stuff and we’ve got these new cell phone thingies, let’s just put up a whole bunch of cell phone towers instead.” That’s why countries that basically had crap land line service even 10 years ago, now have cellular communications infrastructure that beats ours to hell and back. There are some places in Europe that STILL haven’t switched to fiber and if you use a landline, you’re not going to believe how crappy the sound is. They’re basically still using cable that was laid just before or after WWII.

Add to that the fact that most countries have ONE cell phone provider, often run by the government, that provides one kind of service that everyone has, while we in the U.S.A. have about four big companies and multiple little ones, all competing for coverage and bandwidth, and you have the situation you’re bemoaning. Not all the cell phone companies play nice with one another either. If you’ve got a Brand X phone and are closest to a Brand Y tower, you may get signal off that Brand Y tower, but the Brand Y customers are going to take priority over you and your Brand X phone.

In short B Dubya, the U.S.A. could afford upgrading to fiber optic while many places in the rest of the world couldn’t, so they started building cell phone towers en masse instead of laying fiber. Most of the U.S.A.’s cell phone companies are working hard to play catchup and are learning to play nice with one another because they’re learning that customers don’t care it’s because Brand Y’s tower is down, I’M not getting service where I want it. We should have almost full coverage on all major highways with very few “dead” areas by the end of the decade, but because our companies all are competing for a market that’s rapidly becoming saturated, they’ve been concentrating on covering more densely populated areas first and slowly expanding to suburbia and rural areas. Cell phone towers are cheaper than fiber, but that doesn’t make them cheap. You’ve got to have enough customers paying a bill in an area to justify adding and maintaining a tower somewhere. You also have to have landowners that will agree to let you put a tower on their property.

Rachel Lucas Was Wrong…But It’s Not Her Fault

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First, go read this post.  I’ll wait. I need a fresh lemonade anyway.

Done? Cool.

First of all let me say that for someone who doesn’t work in the telecom industry that it’s very easy to think badly of T-Mobile after reading that story. Hell, if I didn’t know what was really behind what happened there, I’d be just as peeved. But the whole story isn’t there and I think it needs some clarification.

Okay, so the events that took place happened in January of 2008. Let me double check, yep, by the information that’s provided, that seems correct.

What most people don’t know is that back in December of 2007 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed stricter Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) regulations that all U.S. Telecoms have to abide by. Before those new regulations it was pretty easy for anyone to call in, give their name, confirm the name on the account, confirm some personal information, and they’d get full access to that other person’s account. Since the new CPNI standards went into effect, that’s no longer the case. The FCC decided that only the account owner (the person who’s name is on the acount), or the people that the account owner had designated as Authorized Users on the account, may have access to the account information…which would include access to buying a phone in that person’s name. Apparently in the past, unauthorized folks just called up, ordered a phone, charged it to someone else’s account, mom’s, dad’s, daughter’s, and off they went with a new phone and no one was the wiser until the bill showed up.

If any of those T-Mobile employees had allowed that girl’s dad to buy a phone for her on her dead husband’s account when the dad wasn’t an authorized user they would have been guilty of a federal crime.

I don’t know about the T-Mobile employees, but I wouldn’t be willing to go to jail for anyone, no matter how bad their situation.

I realize that it’s easy to hate cell phone companies, trust me, I work for one and I think it’s absolutely scandalous that they just don’t give away cell phones and forgive every bit of overage that customers accrue through ignorance or apathy. It’s like they’re in business to make a profit or something. (sarcasm…in case you missed it) In this case though, they did exactly what your government told them to do.