Despite the enforcement "lip service" you hearing from FCC Chairman Genachowski and Commissioners in the media about net neutrality or the big merger, the FCC is not working for you the consumer and are simply puppets of the carriers. Here are two very important reasons why it's a failed organizational structure. #1) The FCC refuses to publicly acknowledge or regulate the difference between actual vs theoretical cellular/broadband coverage and therefore cannot accurately enforce competition. #2) 99% of their $500M of annual funding for 1,900 employees does not come from the taxpayers and comes directly from fees paid by the carriers themselves.
One of the biggest arguments in the
AT&T and T-Mobile merger is that there is sufficient
wireless competition and
rural coverage and therefore the merger of two large carriers should be allowed. We would argue this is totally false and we can provide thousands of consumer-reported examples of where consumers can only get one carrier and sometimes 0 in certain cases. Competition isn't fair on a regional basis and must be carefully audited by the FCC before allowing the merger to go through. However, the FCC can't do this because they lack the resources to do it and continue to ignore the dead zone data we generate. This is a huge failure on the part of the Government and will come back and bite all consumers if this continues.
DeadCellZones.com has reached out to the FCC for help numerous times over the last decade and asked them to take our consumer-reported dead zone data for free. However, the FCC would rather "try" and generate their own data to mask the problems so they don't piss off their carrier constituencies. So what did the FCC do? They responded by launching their own
FCC "Dead Zones" reporting website a 10 years later which has failed miserably. However, their dead zone reporting tool was "designed to fail" because the FCC doesn't really want to know the truth or regulate the wireless carriers' false coverage claims.
Folks it gets even weirder with some questions that were asked of us by FCC executives. They asked us "why we have created dead zone the maps"? My answer is always because its the right thing to do by showing the deficiencies of a Government agency that doesn't really work on the consumer's behalf to regulate. It was the aha moment for me to show there is way too much corruption between the FCC and the companies they regulate. We won't stop what we are doing until the Government and the carriers themselves acknowledge why and what we are doing is good for consumers. A little like "David vs Goliath".
The FCC is a "Government-regulated entity" that is funded by the companies they are supposed to be regulating and not the taxpayers. Its a huge corrupt game the public does not understand and the financial media ignores. The FCC has 1,900 employees and is supposed to act as an "independent agency" of the US government with an approximate budget of $466 million which is funded by measly $1 million in taxpayer appropriations and the rest in regulatory fees paid by the largest US telecom companies: AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon (NYSE: VZ), T-Mobile (NYSE: DTEGY), Sprint (NYSE: S), Cox, Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA), TimeWarner (NYSE: TWX), Cablevision (NYSE: CVC), etc. The mission of every employee at the FCC is to write policy but does that really regulate if no one does anything or takes action? Does this sound like an independent agency or a puppet agency with 99% of its' revenue coming from the companies it regulates?
AT&T is claiming this based on theoretical coverage maps not actual coverage that real customers try and receive. The reason
Deadcellzones.com was started almost 12 years ago was that carriers were being dishonest about where they were providing coverage. In this decade coverage and speeds have expanded a lot but the same problem still exists. No entity is auditing the coverage maps and the actual coverage that the carriers claim to provide. This lack of oversight only hurts the smaller consumer who lives out in the middle of Iowa or Kansas in rural America.
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