Pondering Cellphone Reception on Vacation

During vacation, I still gravitate to my old habit of thinking about work. So I came back to the cool circular newspaper reading room of the Edgartown Public Library to indulge. Here they had the WIFI connection, the electric plug and even a comfy place for a mouse and pad, and I thought about what Thomas Friedman wrote about in the NY Times yesterday. He said he wished our cellphone service were as good at Ghana’s. And that if he ran for office, a promise to make it as good as even, gasp, Japan’s wonderfully advanced system, would win him the race easily.

The same question, why do we have such crappy cellphone service, can be answered simply: It’s the Capitalist way. Instead of agreeing by government decree, that GSM is going to be used for all phones, we let CDMA (Verizon) and GSM (T-mobile, Sprint, Nextel) fight it out, and the problem is that Verizon is too damn big to be pushed around, though the other guys have the platform that the rest of most of the world has adopted. Remember betamax? VHS won, even though Beta was better.

As we drove up island and the service cut out, I compared this to Hungary where no matter how far out on top of a mountain in the boonies you are, nobody ever loses service…But then again, no one minds that there are cell towers on every church and barn roof. NIMBY doesn’t work as well without all of our lawyers to plead their case.