What comms? Part 1: Which network?

OK, sit up! Two things. One, the entire telephone industry is, collectively, a moron. Two, I gave away your privacy just to show you this mediocre cartoon. Both nasty.

Cell Phone Overkill

My mobile’s falling apart. The replacement simply must deliver the windswept beaches of a 3G Wonderland. Nothing less is acceptable. But Christ it’s hard!

It’s not about the phone, and whether I can get the right combination of features in one device — though that’s tricky enough. It’s the communications companies’ blinkered refusal to — well, how can I put it? — communicate!

Nothing connects up. Everything’s more complicated than it needs to be. And the telcos are so goddam obsessed with gadgets and hustling the customers and baffling us with a shell-game of contracts and pricing sleight-of-hand that somewhere along the line they forget to provide a coherent communications infratructure.

“Sorry, a what?”

My requirements are simple.

I want to make video calls to my boyfriend, who’s with 3. I need a halfway decent still camera, so I don’t have to carry around another device. I don’t need 3D stereo sound, thank you Nokia, though yes I agree the styling looks nice. Well done. But I do need to connect to the actual Internet, not just some ringtone-ridden kiddie arcade, so I can access my business’ web applications and choose my own sources of information, thank you. And I’d be nice if any supporting software ran on my PowerBook.

Oh, and I need to make telephone calls.

But 3 is out, because you can’t leave the walled garden of Planet 3. Who needs to download episodes of _Jackass_ anyway?

Optus is out because they restrict you Optus Zoo.

And Telstra is out, because for some bizarre reason they don’t deliver inbound messages from Kayako SupportSuite’s SMS gateway.

So that leaves Vodaphone. But on this rainy Saturday morning their website is unreachable — that builds confidence! I couldn’t find their website because I know how to spell.

Ah well. The foraging begins. Wish me luck.

Oh, and the cartoon?

Well the deal there is that I can use the cartoon from bLaugh provided I serve you the image file from their server at blaugh.com rather than my own using this code:

Cell Phone Overkill

That means when you look at this page, they get to track you too. And I passed on this information without asking you.

Considerate of me, eh?

7 Replies to “What comms? Part 1: Which network?”

  1. Richard, your comments are starting to build up a disturbing image. _Jackass_, Jackie Chan movies, _Mythbusters_ — dare I use the words “low” and “brow” together here?

  2. I’m only pretending to be ‘lowbrow’ so you can demonstrate your own refinement. In reality I am an urbane wit, a classical scholar and a chess Grand Master.

Comments are closed.