Campgrounds With No Cell Reception

Do you try to disconnect yourself from the realities of the world by leaving home all devices including cell phones, laptops, iPhones and iPads when you go camping?  Camping in places with no cell reception are often the best places in the World to hide out if you are looking to get away for a few days.  These areas are often remote enough that you might just have the location all to yourself.  We think there might be a correlation between crowded campgrounds and those with good cell phone reception. I am a "camping purest" and prefer campgrounds with no cell phone coverage to avoid the temptation of staying connected.  

We are on a mission to find all of the remote campgrounds in the US that DO NOT have good coverage.  Remember the objective of identifying these locations is not to fix the coverage its to find a cell phone dead zone to cleanse yourself from reality for a few days. To do this we are asking all of our users to tell us what campgrounds don't have good cell phone reception or are complete dead zones.  I have a theory that if a campground actually has good cell phone reception its probably crowded, too close to a city and usually being inhabited by people that should be at home watching TV or staying in an RV.

We will try and share some of the locations with you as our users begin to add them to the map.  Click here to search and add a new campground on our map that is a good get-a-way and might have no cell phone coverage.   deadcellzones.com

AT&T & Apple Class Action Lawsuit

Crowdsourcing a class action lawsuit against Apple and AT&T!

Tech Crunch Disrupt Hack Day produced a new product.  It’s a class action lawsuit generator against AT&T that uses your actual call drop data to tabulate how many times your phone crashed and how many times you’ve been generally screwed by AT&T.   Worstphoneever.com searches for baseband crashes on your desktop, uploads them, and saves them to a database. The results are tabulated and added to the total, eventually leading to a detailed class-action lawsuit.

You can call AT&T and complain to them and they will give you a refund on that month of service. There's no specific number that AT&T will tell you is the breaking point, but let's just say that it's 10 for arguments sake. Let's also pretend that each AT&T customer pays $56 a month (which is the average price of AT&Ts plans). So here's our math: $56 * (number of months for each user where they had more than 10 dropped calls)

$1,000,000,000 / $56 a month = 17,857,142 months of service. We don't know exactly how many AT&T iPhones are out there, but they added 3.2 million new ones in Q4 2009, so I think it's safe to say at least 10 million.* 17,857,142 months / 10,000,000 subscribers is 1.78 months of bad service per subscriber to reach a billion dollars. Easy peasy. But what if you're like me, and every month is a bad month, and you've had an iPhone for 2 years?** 17,857,142 months / 24 months per subscriber = 744,047 subscribers.

Facebook Mobile Ads vs. Dumb Pipes

Mobile advertising CPM's make data / voice subscription models irrelevant?

Wireless operators have built huge businesses selling cellular voice service for a hefty monthly fee.  Fees are based on a fixed monthly charges regardless of whether you use the minutes / data or not.   But now that cellular voice calls are a commodity, consumers are spending much less money than they used to for voice services.  Add VoIP and cheap prepaid wireless service into the competition, and this will only continue to erode in the future as long as it remains based on fees and not adverting.  Facebook, Google & Skype all have disruptive platforms that are disinter-mediating the dumb pipes making them almost irrelevant.   The only question remains when will be the tipping point?

The dumb pipe industry is hoping that data revenue from text messages, Internet access, multiple mobile Internet devices per person, like the iPad and Kindle -- will make up for the difference. And so far, it's coming close. But monthly bills will likely continue to shrink and these operators don't have a clue how to monetize their services via adverting yet for fear of cannibalizing their cash cows.

Here are three charts below which are quietly forecasting the demise of predictable subscription based ARPU related business models (Voice & Data) and the rise of advertising.  Its all about leverage and clearly AT&T and Verizon are losing it and Facebook and Google are gaining.  I think we are closers than everyone thinks to free subsidized data and voice services from Facebook and Google.   I can't wait because I think as effective CPM's are on the rise publishers stand to actually make more money than the dumb pipes who are focused on fixed subscription models.

CHARTS OF THE DAY: Here's Why Wireless Carriers Are Hosed

Customer Churn: Coverage vs.Contracts

Contracts Reduce Customer Churn . . . Not Service

It has become fairly obvious that if AT&T's lost its' current iPhone or iPad exclusivity contract that they would suffer tremendous customer carnage.  Every person I speak with tells me that if AT&T didn't have them locked into a Blackberry or iPhone contract they would switch to another smaller carrier.  Unlike, Europe where you can purchase a phone 1st and pick a wireless carrier 2nd.  US customers are only offered subsidized phones that lock them into exclusive carrier contracts.  It's bogus in my opinion and should get more government regulation by the FCC who continues to be a pussy on this topic. 

Is Cell Reception Getting Worse?

There is much anecdotal evidence to point out that as data speeds increase exponentially and the number of users increase on the network that  mosts cell phone users will experience more problems.  Industry studies suggest that as the density of mobile phone users compete for access to cell phone towers the likelihood of dropped calls and data congestion gets worse. So you must ask yourself does it make sense to stick with AT&T and Verizon who are the largest carriers and would you be better off going with a smaller carrier who has less customers around you competing for access to the network?  If I only had access to a density of cell phone users map I could really create a beautiful and informative infograph.  I would call the chart "Where You Don't Want to Be on AT&T's Network".  Downtown San Francisco's very densely postulated iPhone user community is a great example of this phenomenon.

We see the number of related searches growing steadily about frustrating consumers looking for solutions: deadcellzones.com web site traffic (Quantcast).

Related topics:
Relieve 3G data congestion?
Forget 4G Cell Towers, Bring on Femtocells

AT&T Dropped Calls

In a poll that asked 4,040 smartphone users in March how many dropped calls they had experienced in the past three months, AT&T — the exclusive U.S. carrier of Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and iPad mobile devices — came in dead last among the country's four largest carriers.   

We can show you where AT&T drops calls according to our users by search our database at Deadcellzones.com/att

Verizon (VZ) customers reported losing only 1.5% of their calls over the past three months, the lowest in the smartphone industry and the lowest percentage for a carrier ever recorded by ChangeWave.  AT&T customers, by contrast, reported 4.5% of calls dropped in the last three months. That's one out of every 22 calls — three times as many as Verizon's and the worst percentage ChangeWave has ever seen.  In the same survey, Sprint (S) was the country's second most reliable carrier, with 2.4% of calls dropped, and T-Mobile (DT) the third, with 2.8% of calls dropped. See graph.

Rural Wireless Carriers Have Better Coverage

Rural Carrier Trade-offs:  Great Coverage or Great Devices?

Rural wireless operators continue to face a number of challenges in their daily quest to remain viable options for consumers increasingly bombarded with advertising and promotions from nationwide operators AT&T, Verizon, Sprint & T-Mobile.  These operators that spend billions of dollars on marketing each year and in the case of the nation’s two largest operators are increasingly dominating the market.

There are approximately 160+ rural carriers who are constantly trying differentiate their local coverage and better customer service against the larger carriers. However, these carriers are at a huge disadvantage not having access to the hotest devices like Apple's iPhone and iPad, which often results with customs not staying with the local carrier and get inferior coverage. Most customers choose a wireless service that provides good local service, but if a rural carrier doesn't have the latest hardware device offerings it’s hard to compete. Many people are willing to stay with local smaller companies even if they are not using brand name handsets.

Rural carriers have been battling handset exclusivity issues for many years and try to offer compelling alternative devices to remain competitive.  Some smaller carriers have had luck negotiating access with large hardware manufacturers, but there is more needed to be done.

90% of all new postpaid customer growth in 2009, or roughly 9 million customers, were signed up by either Verizon Wireless or AT&T Mobility. And that even the smallest of the nationwide operators, T-Mobile USA Inc., was more than five times larger than the largest rural provider – U.S. Cellular Corp.

Related Article:
Rural Wireless Customers Have Fewer Choices