An American Lion

Despite my best efforts to find a reason to spend money and use a mobile data device with Verizon, I couldn’t bring myself to do so. The basic service I have now is for a handful of phones that Peej and I use. It’s not like me to spend money just because I can. I want value and I want good service. I want quality and I want something that doesn’t annoy me and drive me batty when I use it. Few bloggers actually pay to have their blogs hosted on a platform like Squarespace, but I pay it, and I pay it gladly, because of how much better it is than everything else out there. I tried some services, and walked away from them, even though they were free. Spending money isn’t the problem—finding something worth spending it on is the struggle.

I know I’m old fashioned. I preferred having a SkyTel pager.I used to love my pager. I kept it as long as I could before I broke down and got a cellular phone. It worked well, it always did what I wanted it to, and I never hesitated when paying the bill. Contrast that with how unhappy I am whenever I try to use a cellular phone nowadays, well, it just doesn’t add up. If I can’t get reliable service on my existing Verizon product, how am I supposed to believe them when they tell me their BlackBerry service is such great shakes? I hear nothing from Miranda but complaints about her iPhone. She’s gone through three of them. It was nice at first—then the thing slowed down considerably when she was in Florida and didn’t work at all most of the time when we were outside of Miami and Tampa-St. Petersburg. Around here, forget it. She usually just uses my phone.

When they talk about technology and networks, bear in mind—the companies selling these products to us put the cart before the horse. They sold innumerable devices with extremely high demands for data, and forgot to build the networks to handle all of that data:

“The average consumer doesn’t care about peak data rates or network acronyms,” said Dan Warren, the GSM Association’s director of technology. “They just care about the experience. They want to be able to watch YouTube or get live traffic updates on their smartphones. And they don’t care whether it’s a new network or a current network that is being upgraded.”

Mobile operators around the world are seeing a huge growth in the amount of mobile data traffic across their networks.

This trend is expected to continue as more consumers buy smartphone and jump onto the mobile Web. By 2014, mobile devices are expected to send and receive more data in one month than in all of 2008.

Three-quarters of this traffic will be attributed to Internet access, while nearly all the rest will be due to music and video streaming, the GSM Association recently said. The new usage patterns will put strains on carrier networks, and operators are planning now to keep up with demand. Already, AT&T, which is the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the U.S., is struggling to keep up with the heavy data usage.

While 4G networks will certainly increase network speeds and capacity, these networks and the devices that can be used on these networks will not be built overnight. This is why many carriers who are looking to meet demands today are turning toward advanced 3G upgrades.

If 3G doesn’t even work, why even talk about 4G?

And, yes. Yes, I do care about data rates. That informs me as to what my experience with a product is going to be like. My needs are very basic, by the way. I don’t care about video or music—I need E-mail, financial data, access to the news, and that’s about it. Everything else is static to me. And yet, with my very basic needs, no one has a product I’m willing to bite on. Do I wait for 4G? I’m basically a 2G customer, and no one can make money off of me. They’re chasing the kid who wants to look at the same skateboard crash fifty times—the kid who eats bandwidth and rings up a big charge for all of that streaming data. They’re not pursuing my business anymore. It makes me wonder if I can still fire up my SkyTel pager…