Telephony data transmission & signalling costs phone companies big time!

I am a techie (been a software developer for over 20 years). At my previous job, I worked for 11 1/2 years as a software developer for a firm that provided advanced telecommunications services to small phone companies. That firm had a larger SS7 network than AT&T at the time (with the accompanying costs).

Data transmission has some very high costs! If you had any idea of the price of all of that equipment, plus the software to give it its smarts & run everything and keep it all glued together, etc., you wouldn’t be stating what you are stating.

By the way, after your message & data hits the cell phone tower, it goes into a land line – and any phone company sending messages over somebody else’s network gets charged for the privilege. We know how many bytes were sent, and where.

Verizon’s move to LTE is what will make them a truly global brand. LTE supports both FDD and TDD mode. GSM supports only Time Division even though HSPA is built on top of W-CDMA.

My hope is that in 5-6 years every carrier will be using some implementation of LTE and GSM (HSPA/HSPA+/HSPA Extended) and CDMA (EVDO/SVDO) will go by the wayside. GSM is an old, insecure technology that doesn’t travel well through structures or have proper noise canceling built in and CDMA is less energy efficient and has too small of a market share (around 18% worldwide) to compete on a global level.

So if Sprint and T-mobile were to merge, it would make more sense to agree on an LTE technology and point both road maps at that point. Until they are using the same technology it makes no sense for a merger and it makes even less sense to migrate one of the user bases to GSM or CDMA when LTE is right around the corner.

This is the key point. I don’t see what the advantage is for either company: Sprint is competitive with price but has (relatively) terrible coverage; T-Mobile is competitive on price, but has (relatively) terrible coverage. And they operate on different networks. So there wouldn’t be any increase in coverage.

I’ve always thought it would make a lot of sense for Verizon to acquire T-Mobile to gain access to an already established network of GSM towers. It would save them tremendous costs/growing pains that AT&T/T-Mobile already went through, and allow them to finally move off CDMA and become a truly global brand.

I have also heard (although I’ve never verified) that, because they’re a foreign owned company, T-Mobile isn’t allowed to increase their coverage any more than already exists in the U.S. That seems insane, but I’d be curious if anyone has ever heard anything similar?

It costs $0.0000001 to send a single text message and always has. But they charge $0.10 for that message’s transfer. Data plans are equally egregious. Consider a $100 data plan. That’s $20 a month. With $20 I can easily buy 1 to 2 GB of space. And these people have the nerve to charge $100 a month when the cost of doing business is probably closer to a dollar or two a month (if that).

You know, the cell phone industry never gets any flack on any of this. I’d say, that if you wanted to actually get some views here, you might want to actually start investigating the price of some of these things and see if you can stir something up.

It’d be better than reporting exactly what every other tech site is reporting. It’d be interesting to read. And you might actually have a shot of doing it better.