This piece kind of jumped out at me, because of this post the other day:
…my Comcast cable service crashed yesterday afternoon at 4 p.m. That not only means my Internet access is down on all five of our family computers, but my cable television is down as well. In fact, the only service still working in our house in the landline phone – and that’s only because, when Comcast offered that service as well, my wife replied, “I don’t trust you people not to screw that up as well. I need something in this house I can depend on to work right.”
And, in fact, she used that phone to call Comcast to report the outage. And I took off for Peet’s to file this column.
As someone noted in comments at the landline post, during Florida hurricanes, he lost everything, and his POTS phone line fell down on to the ground, but it never quit working. My experience during Frances and Jeanne five years ago was the same — no power, no cell, but I never lost phone, including DSL. I was blogging right after the storm, using a laptop and modem plugged into a power inverter running off the car battery.
I think that’s timely and explains fully the problems with a lot of the policies of both the current and previous administration. For Bush, a lot of people didn’t trust him to wage a war, to catch terrorists, to bail out bankers, or monitor domestic communication. I hate to say it, but that lack of trust was warranted. Similarly, Obama is asking us to trust him on a host of big issues that frankly, we shouldn’t trust him on. Where’s the assurance that a single payer system won’t come about (either purposely or by accident) once a universal health care system is in place? Who’ll compensate us, if universal health care is like medicare/medicaid rather than like the VA of the Clinton years? Who’ll pay my increased costs of the next few decades, if it turns out global warming isn’t as scary as hyped and a cap and trade turned out to be a bad idea? I will.
To be blunt, in order to increase trust, a person or entity needs to work. For example, provide collateral or insurance for a bank loan or when borrowing something. Another example is consistency. If a politician takes pains to have a consistent message even if that message might be unpopular to the people he happens to be speaking in front of today, that’s a trust builder in my view. And it’s one of the reasons I trusted McCain more than I did Obama.
A few of the pro-Obama posters have shown not only a remarkable lack of understanding of conflicts of interest, but a lack of understanding in trust. I don’t trust people because they have a certain affiliation or look good on TV. I trust them because they are willing to make serious sacrifices in order to gain my trust.
You have to remember that our POTS phone services are still coasting on infrastructure investments made under the old Bell System. It was a regulated monopoly, with a guaranteed rate of return. I worked there, before the First Divestiture (1/1/84). When deciding what to deploy, the priorities were (1) safety, (2) reliability, and (3) cost. And the resulting infrastructure was approximately as reliable as gravity.
Cable networks were built under a completely different economic mode. And different priorities led to different deployment decisions.
Ditto for the cellular carriers. (“Can you hear me now?”)
If we still had Ma Bell, I guarantee that nobody would have iPhones in 2009. But I also guarantee that, whatever primitive mobile devices we were carrying, they’d be approximately as reliable as gravity.
It’s a tradeoff. Personally, I like sexy new devices and services, and am willing to compromise a little on reliability to get them sooner. But we should realize that it is a tradeoff… and one made without the understanding nor the consent of the ratepayers from the early 1980s.
As a lot of the legacy POTS equipment reaches end-of-life, telcos are replacing it with VOIP systems comparable to Vonage or Skype. Cheaper, yes. But they’re not going to work when a hurricane drops the phone wires onto your lawn and Florida Power is out for a week.
I’ve had land lines go out during a hurricane. And when I lived in Orlando, during Charley, Frances, and Jeanne, when the phones did work the frickin’ mayor kept placing automating “reassurance” recorded calls. I HATE recorded calls with a burning hate.
I have just a cell phone now. I carry it everywhere. I can’t do that with a land line. Sure, they don’t work after hurricanes take out the cell phone towers, but in my experience those get put back up pretty fast.