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.
Factories in Europe were of much higher quality for a long time after World War II for similar reasons. A lot of those factories were bombed out or otherwise damaged, so they were replaced with the latest, most efficient technology, while the US had slow aging out of factories that worked perfectly well but weren’t as efficient.
The moral? Don’t assume somebody has the best tech because they’re richer or more saavy. Sometimes it’s because the other guy was an early adopter of older tech and that tech is still working pretty well.
(Sayeth the commenter on the six-year-old Mac.)
Comment by B. Durbin — 20080229 @ 1723
Another thing to consider is that, in land area, the USA is the third largest country on the planet. (Russia and Canada are one and two. China is four.) We are also the third largest country in the world in population with 300 million people. (China and India are one and two, while Indonesia is number four.)It takes a *lot* of cell towers to cover that large an area while servicing that many customers.
Compare that to, for example, Germany, a country of about 60 million crammed into a land space about the size of Illinois.
Comment by R. Greenwell — 20080229 @ 2253
One also has to remember NIMBY - Not In My Back Yard. When I was working the E911 project a few years back, the engineers all had their stories of the hoops the companies had to navigate just to get a cell in place. After all, who wants an ugly cell site in their neighborhood?
There are cell sites on top of High Voltage towers, monopoles that look like light posts with no light, church steeples hidden under fiber glass panels, fake pine trees, and on and on. All the ’special’ things done to hide a cell site just increases cost.
What’s that suburb southwest of Denver where QWEST built houses (shell houses) just to hide the cell infrastructure? The locals didn’t want the towers (NIMBY), they only wanted the service/coverage.
Mr. Greenwell also points out the geography factor. Another factor is the usage density. A cell sector can only handle a certain number of simultaneous users. To increase the capacity, another cell is added to the sector (more $$$). Then, like a highway, at what point does the provider decide to add capacity (more lanes) or let the traffic suffer?
A couple of years back I heard Sprint was adding 100 cell towers per month nationwide. (That averages 2 per state per month for the mathematically challenged.) I don’t know what any provider’s current rate of installation is, but using Sprint’s numbers, at a cool million a pop for a new site, that’s over a billion a year just for new towers.
So geographically, someplace like Rhode Island is probably saturated with cell coverage, but someplace like Wyoming will probably never have 100% coverage. And if a provider was only putting in two towers a month is a state like Texas, maybe sometime 500 years from now they’ll have the state covered. Not.
So, it has become an interesting business problem. On the one hand, the providers have been wildly successful to the point of choking on their own success. Even though the demand for NEW phones is leveling off, the demand for COVERAGE just keeps going up.
And the demand for high speed service to deliver the web, tv/video, movies on demand, music on demand, file download on demand, and other data-on-demand means the companies not only have to increase capacity for new towers, they have to increase the capacity of the backbone data links to each tower. That is why one provider is running OC3 (155Mbs) or greater to EACH AND EVERY TOWER THEY HAVE. And that still won’t be enough in some locations.
It looks like the faster the providers run, the behinder they get. So what is their answer? Lay off people. Increase price. Decrease customer service. And the provider hopes they end up with a net gain against the P.O.’d customers who flee to some other provider searching for all the former provider gave short shrift.
Sigh………….
Comment by JoeC — 20080305 @ 1419