An .public white paper by Alf Watt.
Existing voice and data networks cannot meet many of our day to day communications needs since their first priority is increasing shareholder value not reducing the cost of communications. Significant capital investment is required to establish service in any region using practiced techniques, this drives costs up, especially in the initial stages as the investors demand to see returns. This has the effect of restricting service to people and groups who are members of a small and wealthy market segment, or providing the majority segment poor service by targeting the lowest common denominator.
Carrier grade networks have a very high cost of construction. This capital investment must be secured, at least in part, before construction can begin, requiring a large organization to manage the project, assess and manage risk and provide assurances to creditors, future customers and other stake-holders that the project is being managed. This organization itself will necessarily become large, organize along conventional corporate lines and grow slowly to maturity as their network is deployed. More often cellular networks are built by existing companies which have the capitol, structure and vision to implement the plans of cellular equipment vendors who evolved alongside their operator partners.
The incentive for an existing operator to provide and maintain a high level of service it directly related to the performance of any competing systems, as the competition provides better service, lower rates or other incentives to attract customers the network operator adjusts it's business practice to maintain a competitive advantage.
There is also a natural effort to provide service first to those who have the most money to pay for it. This is a natural outcome in an open market but the incumbents have not been quick to roll out to less affluent or less populus areas. This results in fragmented coverage, and a widening digital divide which leaves the aspiring classes
Combining the high cost of construction with the incentive to serve those with more cash to spend leads to the development of large, in some cases defining, billing systems.
In urban centers the incremental cost of adding capacity to overloaded cells has a small marginal return on investment for the carrier, the excess capacity may only be utilized at peak times when service levels drop due to the volume of traffic on the network. This is a problem for customers because it means that the time at which they are most likely to use their service is the exact same time that the network is most heavily utilized, directly leading to low levels of service.
In non-urban areas the incremental cost of adding coverage to outlying cellular network has a small marginal return on investment for the carrier as well. This time the cause is purely a geographical, and can easily justified by the operator as the initial investment in hardware, installation and costs related to acquiring a site. If the total expected utilization and attendant profits are less than the cost of the install, they don't do one.
In planned cellular system someone, somewhere, set's the prices. While this is not typically thought of as price fixing the ability to dictate the cost of personal communication across a network of millions of subscribers has some rather frightening implications in the realm of personal freedoms and market policy. We can think of the existing cellular networks fixed wireless networks, as their coverage areas, pricing and customer service policies are periodically upgraded to levels required to retain customers.
AMPS? CDMA? GSM? TDMA? PCS? GPRS? G3? With so many great standards how can we pick just one? The short answer, you can't. And the resulting hardware, service, software, interconnect and other incompatibilities are slowly grinding consumer acceptance of cellular into the carpet of everyday life. We've come to expect that no matter how new and exciting our collection of electronic devices the chances of true interoperability are nearly null.