On 10-Mar-12 04:43, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 18:04:27 on Fri, 9 Mar 2012,
Stephen Sprunk remarked:
The existing "good reason" is that the mobile data terminals haven't
been designed yet,

They existed over a decade ago.

Not that included the ticket-issuing printer, fares table etc.

Receipt printers, yes. Fare tables? I'm not sure, but that's a
relatively simple customization for what would presumably be a large order.

let alone deployed. And the previous generation has at least 10 years
life left in them.

They were obsolete the day they were purchased; how long they're capable
of meeting obsolete needs before turning into paperweights is not
terribly relevant.

It is, when there's no money to replace them,

.... which is why savvy customers look at the ROI: you pay for capital
assets with the cost savings from employing those assets.

nor much of a need to either.

Perhaps, perhaps not.

The "slowness" of 2G/2.5G is mostly the connection delay while a
separate data channel is set up, which takes several seconds, after
which the data flows reasonably quickly.

I use data on the move a lot. And was very disappointed on a recent trip
to London when several times I could get a 2.5G signal, and "connect",
but data was extremely slow (order of a few bytes per second).

Even ancient 2G systems could do 9.6kbit/s, and 2.5G could do
56-115kbit/s (GPRS) or 237kbit/s (EDGE).

For any of those to drop to "a few bytes per second" would require
signal conditions so bad that the connection would fail.

Speaking as an employee of a tech products vendor, customers are now
demanding full ROI in 12-18 months, which gives them immediate cost
savings even on a 36-month depreciation schedule.

It's an interesting aspiration, but what happens if such a return is
*impossible*, given the development, manufacturing and operating costs
of the equipment.

If there is no ROI, then customers won't buy it.

And the customers (the train operators) aren't... as I've explained.

Then either the vendor is doing a poor job of selling their product or
that niche really doesn't need to be filled. Given how incompetent some
vendors are, I wouldn't assume it's always the latter.

There's no *extra* revenue stream here - just reducing
Credit Card fraud a little, and the "acceptable ROI" solution here was
C&P, not "being online all the time".

The return would logically come from (a) not accepting invalid credit
and charge cards and (b) accepting valid debit cards.

There doesn't appear to be a problem with them being accepted today. Of
course, it helps that for train tickets (and car park payment - another
common non-online, and thus non-authorised, transaction) the "cost of
sales" is virtually zero.

The marginal cost of service (not cost of sales, which refers only to
selling the ticket itself) may be close to zero, but unless you have
spare capacity, there is an opportunity cost: the non-paying "customer"
prevented a paying customer from using your service--and giving you
money for it. There is also opportunity cost in not accepting money
from potential paying customers who only have a debit card.

Obviously, one would need some analysis to figure out if these costs
were more or less than the cost of better terminals. If more, you buy;
if not, you don't. Also, since this is a gaping security hole just
waiting to be exploited by the masses, you would have to redo this
analysis frequently--and the cost of doing that would need to be added
to the costs above.

It might end up being worth the upgrade just to not have to do the
analysis--or to avoid the risk of making the papers when a few million
teens figure out they can easily beat your system and ride all over the
country for free without getting caught. All it takes these days is one
Facebook post that goes viral.

International roaming is another matter, but most US phones (TDMA, CDMA,
iDEN or 1900MHz GSM) don't work in most other countries anyway.
Tri-band GSM phones are the main exception, and int'l roaming for them
is ridiculously expensive--but at least it works. (CDMA and 1900MHz GSM
are also available in Canada, and that roaming is ridiculously expensive
as well.)

Across Europe (which in some sense is rather like a Californian roaming
in Texas)

In a distance sense, perhaps, but we have (roughly) the same carriers in
both places, unlike Europe. However, despite the constant trashing of
each other in advertisements, they understand that it's better to
cooperate on the back end and allow free (domestic) roaming than have
customers complaining that their phone doesn't work when their friend's
phone from another carrier does.

Their accountants also constantly analyze _where_ they're paying other
carriers for roaming and what it would cost to put up their own towers
(or put their own antennae on that carrier's tower) in such places.
This also tends to push down roaming charges: if a tower operator
charges too much, other carriers will put up their own towers in the
same place and the original tower owner will end up with nothing.

the regulators have been steadily reducing the cost of roaming.

Our regulators don't care since _customers_ don't pay for roaming;
that's a problem for the carriers to hash out between themselves.

Some carriers don't have any towers at all; they rely exclusively on
roaming to another carrier's towers. Others, like T-Mobile, focus their
coverage--and advertising--on high-density areas and rely on roaming for
coverage elsewhere.

Another factor is that FCC sells spectrum per "market" rather than
nationwide, as I understand is commonly done in other countries; this
has a significant affect on the economics of putting up towers.

My own choice of voice carrier (Virgin) was made because their
International Roaming was about half the price of others.

That's just not a consideration here for several reasons, some good and
some bad.

OTOH, I do remember the days of paying roaming charges on my 1G phone
even a few miles from home. Almost from the beginning, though, 2G
carriers offered "national" plans at a lower price than 1G "local"
plans, which was a huge incentive for most customers to change even
though the coverage (especially in rural areas) wasn't nearly as good.
AT&T's national 1G service rapidly became unprofitable, and they
invested a lot of money in rural 2G coverage so they could dismantle
their 1G network.

S

--
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking