On 2007-02-07, Jud Hardcastle <I5i5changethistodash5rbo@xemaps.com> wrote:
> dcferguson@pacbell.net says...
>> Note that to make money from this service they need to have more than
>> a little bit of use. Just having those towers costs money. There's a
>> power bill to pay, they need to pay for tower rental or taxes on the land
>> it is constructed on, and they need to spend a bit on maintaining
>> both the physical infrastructure (so the tower doesn't fall on someone
>>
> That's assuming there are towers with nothing but AMPS. If there is any
> digital on the tower at all then all those costs must exist anyway. Are
> there any such towers--most likely both digital and analog are there but
> the analog is either further up the tower or is cranked up powerwise or
> both to support a few callers at greater range than digital reaches. To
> reach the same area as analog with digital would take more towers.

No, I don't think the last bit is correct. AMPS had greater reach when
everyone had 1 or 2 or 3 Watt RF output phones, and had an antenna mounted
on the roof or the trunk when they used a phone in the car. Now we all have
200 mW or 300 mW RF output handsets, and expect to be able to shove the handset
to our ears inside cars and have it work. You can't buy high power phones
any more. There's little you can do at the tower to make up for the fact
that the phones we have now transmit 10db less power than the phones we had
when the tower spacing was engineered (not to mention the crappier antennas),
and are hence harder for the tower to hear. The digital stuff, if you trust
basic physics, should give you better distance than AMPS when run at the
same power level, which is the situation we have now with our
power-constrained handsets. AMPS has no advantage.

As for the other issue, any tower that has digital service now is one
which sees enough use that the carrier could justify investing in its
upgrade. You are correct they won't turn these towers off, but there's
a pretty solid chance they'll be getting rid of the AMPS and replacing
it with more digital, since the digital stuff should both work better
and support higher revenue services (like data). I think AMPS is gone
anywhere there is digital service already; the spectrum it occupies can
be more profitably used for digital service. The only issue is what
happens to those towers which only support AMPS, which apparently
provide so little revenue that they could never justify upgrading them.

>> While I believe that AMPS is a goner regardless, my suspicion is that
>> they're playing chicken with the FCC over rural coverage because they'd
>> like to coax yet another handout from the government (to add to your
>> bill), like the landline carriers get, to keep coverage turned on in
>> places with small populations or where the terrain is rugged. We'll
>> see how that goes.
>>
> Could be. Whatcha want to bet if nothing has been done when the AMPS
> sunset is reached, they'll turn off AMPS--BUT LEAVE THE EQUIPMENT IN
> PLACE--waiting for enough public to scream and the politicans to jump on
> the FCC and congress to subsidize the carriers maintainance of AMPS in
> those areas. The trouble with that is if there are no AMPS phones being
> made then eventually the problem is going to have to be addressed with
> expanding the digital signal to where it should be in the first place.

I guess I should have made it clearer. I don't believe they are hoping
for subsidies for the AMPS service, I'm sure every one of the big carriers
wants that to go away. What I suspect they might want the subsidies for
is to pay for the conversion of all that rural infrastructure to digital,
along with its future maintenance. We'll see what they get.

Dennis Ferguson