Tom:

i asked you how you know if your phone is tapped and thank you for your reply for the past 8 months there is 2 to 3 clicks when i pick up my phone before i get a dial tone before i changed my number [both unlisted] during certain times of the day and evening i would be having a conversation and then someone would pick up my line then i would hear clicking during the conversation if the conversation wasn't interesting enough they would hang up if not after the conversation was done i would stay on the line and 15 to 30 seconds later the line would hang up sometimes giving me dead air, sometimes giving me a dial tone and at other times a busy signal i could also hang up the phone over and over until i got no dial tone and after 30 seconds to 2 min. the line would pick up hang up then pick up you could then hear a high pitch like a tape recorder running at times i would have no dial tone at all and would have to reset my line i have even started using only corded phones with the same results my phone has gone dead for 24 hours with no explanation from the phone company my voice mails have been erased and when i called into my voice mail i would get a busy signal at times when i change my number trying to fix this i was without a phone for 48 hours and as soon as the number got changed i still had the same problems except i canceled my voice mail one repair man said there was no problem at my phone box at my home or on my pole but a block down i was showing a draw from my line he said he was going to tell sbc there was a security problem this never happened my phone company still showed trouble on my line and ordered another repair the foreman from sbc canceled the order saying there was no problem on their line the supervisor at my company had me plug my corded phone into my box on my house and at first there was no dial tone then there was clicking before a dial tone he sent a repair man out that stated there was no problem at my box or at my pole but there was a conductive problem across the street a block down by some motels on my line he refused to check that pole he then went to the pole that show the draw the first time and moved my wires down to a different set of screws and said i would have no problems i still had problems then i got a phone call from a motel that evening stating it was the wrong number i called the phone company again and they showed problems still and sent another repair man instead i got a call from a cell phone saying they found some crossed wires that everything should be fine it is the same the phone company said i needed an electrician out to check my lines because the tests showed the problem was inside my house even though i ripped out all of my lines and replaced them and had all of my equipment disconnected i had the electrician out and the report was all of my lines were good to go i have lost at least ten to fifteen thousand dollars over my voice mails being erased and i don't know what to do there is a police report that has been filed and i am afraid that there is an sbc person involved with this because the people across the street had sbc over 12 to 24 times within 2 months before all of this started and also last winter my husband caught someone at the motel looking in our window with headphones on and a satellite disk in his hand pointed to our house i don't know what to do i hope you understand all of this.

Dear reader:

Hmm. For good or bad reasons you no longer trust your landline telephone. You need, therefore, to use a pre-paid wireless phone. Change it every two weeks or so. You will have no luck determining if someone is monitoring your landline. If there is a legal law enforcement tap there is no way to detect it. That's because the recording and listening originates through a telephone company switch, with no equipment outside your home to find and no clicks to hear. If it is a wildcat police tap, one without a court order, then perhaps a top-notch private investigator with very good equipment might be able to tell. But don't worry about this, give up the phone, go to anonymous wireless service. A last suggestion: a combination of medicine and talk therapy is often very helpful.

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Q. What Hollywood film first showed a mobile telephone?

A. From Geoff Fors (internal link)

Sabrina in 1954 is the earliest movie I am aware of which features a prop car telephone, but there could be another. Not really in the class of a movie, one of the early Superman serials with George Reeves shows a car telephone in the personal car of Perry White, newspaper editor, and that show pre-dated Sabrina by a couple of years, 1952 I think. The Superman phone was a real one which probably was pulled in from the studio parking lot. The Sabrina phone (two of them side by side, as I recall) were just prop department mock-ups. The Sabrina antenna was another prop department creation which would be more at home at a ham radio convention than on a car phone, but I guess it got the point across. There were a number of low budget early 1950's science fiction films which featured some sort of mobile radio equipment employing a conventional looking handset, but those were not, as far as I can tell, intended to portray a "car telephone."

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AT&T Wireless (external link) just introduced the Ogo, no, I don't know what that stands for, a dedicated text mobile. No voice. Still, connectivity, keeping in touch. Meant for kids, young adults, and people on a budget, the OGO provides e-mail, IM, and text messaging. It only works on AT&T's GPRS network, their medium speed data service that's now in most medium to large cities.

Less expensive than the Blackberry or Sidekick, representative competitors, I think the Ogo should do well. It's now $99 after a $30 mail-in rebate. Unlimited message plans start at $17.99 per month. The Ogo sends and receives domestic text messages to and from standard wireless phones. They charge extra for texting from outside the country.

I don't have a unit to play with or test, no company has ever sent me any hardware in nine years of running this site, but the Ogo looks like fun. It does have a USB port so perhaps some ingenious hacker can find a way to hook up a microphone and do VOIP over the Ogo. Then you'd have text and voice. I suspect many kids will keep their voice mobiles and have an Ogo at the same time.

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Good Musings from Ken Schmidt (internal link) and Mark van der Hoek (internal link)

Ken: There's been some terrible language lately going into certain wireless ground lease contracts. The carriers are actually trying to get through clauses like these:

1. One carrier's lease now states they may increase the size of the compound and the landowner must consent, such consent not contingent upon monetary gain. By the terms of the lease they could expand to the whole parcel and the landowner could not object.

2. A certain tower company now includes in its lease that it does not pay ground rent until the second carrier comes on the tower. Outrageous. This is a blanket clause for them, not an exception for expensive sites.

3. In the same lease the same carrier now allows the landowner to request a tower and compound move once during the lease at the carrier's expense after the first term has expired. Still trying to figure that one out.

Lastly, about practices. I cannot stand the lease purchase entities (internal link, more on buying cell ground leases) like Wireless Capital Partners and others. The salesmen are getting downright misleading. Satellites will cut your lease short or consolidation means your tower is coming down, and so on. Yet we will be happy to buy your lease and take those same risks.

Mark:

Those land grab clauses are indeed outrageous, I hope you help your clients negotiate out of them. One thing I know well is that upcoming technology and consolidation won't reduce the number of base stations needed, in fact, we'll need thousands more every year.

Satellites replacing terrestrial cellular radio? Liars! One acronym proves it: RTD. Round Trip Delay. Satellite communications stink because of it. Until some laws of physics are repealed it will stay that way. A radio wave has a finite speed, close to the speed of light, and without some earth shaking breakthrough in quantum physics, that finite speed will limit the user friendliness of satellite phones. Yes, they are usable, but no, they aren't as good. The delay is annoying. You can work with it, but it's still annoying. Then there's the capacity problem, the ability to handle many calls with a limited amount of spectrum.

The whole reason cellular became practical is the concept of frequency reuse. We took single, large antennas off of mountain tops and put smaller ones on rooftops and towers. Now we can use frequencies several times across a metropolitan area, instead of only once. Since satellites have such a huge footprint, they don't have that advantage. For this reason, ground based systems will always offer superior capacity. Any new coding or compression developments that allow more capacity on satellite systems will also be available to ground systems, so satellites can't get ahead of the game.

Then there's the matter of battery life. I'm sorry -- it's just always going to take more power to talk to a satellite than it does to talk to a cell site a quarter mile away. Basic physics again. Oh, did I mention you have to almost always be outside to use them? Barring some nationwide political development, I can't see satellite services EVER replacing terrestrial based services. Augmenting, yes, replacing, no.

Consolidating, yes, another reason used to get people to sell their cell site lease. We lose a tower here and there, but not many. And if it's a multi-carrier tower, the probability drops dramatically. You'd have to get all of the carriers to reach the conclusion that they don't need and will never need that site. I think you're more likely to get a cell site shut down by some lawsuit revolving around a zoning issue or nuisance claim. And we know that's not likely once the site is on the air. It can happen, but it's a rare event.

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Q. Should I negotiate a cell site lease with the carrier on my own? I'd save several hundred dollars if I didn't pay a consultant.

A. You shouldn't handle the lease without competent help, you have no idea what the contract should include or how to deal with them. The carrier's agents handle cell site leases every day, they would love it if you, someone who has never negotiated a wireless lease, had no assistance. So go ahead. But you're not going to save any money, most likely you'll lose.

A five year lease of $1,000 a month is a $60,000 deal. But what if your expert gets $1100 a month? That extra $100 a month with a 3% escalator clause means an additional $1,236 for you in the first year and at the end of five years $6,562. The negotiator's fees pay for themselves many times over. By the way, do you have a spreadsheet program? Click here for a file that explains monthly increases (internal link) in more detail. There's something else.

Asking too much from a carrier can poison the whole deal. They may walk, rather than dealing with you and your overinflated deal. You can't let this happen. And the only way to know what to ask for is to talk with someone who knows. Like Ken Schmidt of SteelinTheAir.com (internal link).

Fair disclosure here: I get a $25 referral fee from Ken for each client he gets from privateline.com. I think I've made about $175 since recommending him. And the reason I recommend him is because he is honest, he's provided much valuable information to this site, and he answers his e-mails. I trust him. I can't promise that his service will pay for itself but even if it doesn't you'll know you have a contract that covers everything it needs to, that you're protected, and that you'll have asked for as much money as you could without killing the deal. Those two points are worth something by themselves.

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I can see Nokia's new products doing what the X-10 appliances do, but wirelessly and with an ability to easily network with our computers and other electronic devices. Ever heard of X-10? (external link) It's been around at least a decade and much of it works well. Nokia's new line could incorporate many X-10 features for the home, and then go beyond it. With Nokia's technology I can easily imagine your refrigerator taking a picture of its contents, then sending the picture to you at the grocery store. Or having your Bluetooth enabled car noticing it needs an oil change, then scheduling an appointment with the mechanic.

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Q. Where's it best to file a patent?

A. (From Professor Richard Levine (internal link))

Simply put, in the countries you think you'll get the most money from your invention. The United States, certainly, but other country filings are more difficult to decide on.

Due to a treaty on patents in the European Union, an inventor can file a patent application at the EU patent office in Munich, Germany, in the English language, and specify which EU countries the patent should cover. Each country costs more, a lot more, but it is convenient and somewhat more economical to file just one European application instead of many different ones, if you are sure that the invention requires multi-national patent coverage.

Very few inventions are economically feasible to patent for all of Europe. Many inventors are forced, due to the filing and patent attorney costs, to chose just a few large European countries such as Britain, France and Germany, and merely swallow the disappointment of not being able to have patent coverage and royalties in Italy or the Czech Republic, for example. You need to estimate how much royalty income you could reasonably expect from each country in comparison to the costs of patent coverage there.

Regards,

Richard Levine

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What do you think about privateline.com having a subscription side? Old content would still be free, new content would have a charge. Is there anything I could produce that you would be willing to pay for? More on new technologies? Self serving corporate press releases honestly analyzed? Or are there already too many telecom news' sites? Should things stay the way they are? Be honest. Let me know your thoughts by clicking here (internal link). Thanks in advance.

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Nokia's 6670 smart phone's accessories (external link) should foster brand loyalty and creativity. Do I sound like a press release? Let me make a comparison. A camera's practicality and professionalism relies on a system, not just the camera itself. Nikon, Cannon, and Leica's lenses, film backs, flash accessories, autowinders, and so on make their basic cameras do an amazing host of jobs. You start collecting these accessories and pretty soon you have a bag of brand specific gear that works together well. You have a system.

Unretouched Nokia photo taken with a 6670. Resolution is 1152x864 pixels. Good enough for web work.

Nokia and others are now moving toward this camera model, coincidentally, and happily enough, with mobile phones that take pictures. Nokia's 6670's accessories include a wireless keyboard to compose documents on, a GPS unit, a flash unit, a wireless headset, no more stupid cords, and best of all, a remote monitoring camera.

The remote needs a power supply but connects wirelessly over the same GSM network your 6670 uses. Dial the remote with your mobile and see what it sees. Or have it send you an image on schedule or taken when activity trips its built in motion sensor. Has an infrared source to take low light or night time images, as well as a microphone to send you audio. Very cool. Read more by clicking here (external link).

These products may seem like vaporware now, Nokia won't introduce them for some months and then not in the America's just yet, I do think the company will gather a following. I don't expect my phone to do everything, I mainly want it for voice. But this a la carte approach, one accessory here and there, is very compelling. It lets us make the phone be what we want. Good things will have to follow.

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"'Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head"!' George Orwell, 1984

While al Qaida and their supporters are Islamic fascists I think divining Islam will not completely explain their motives, any more than understanding Christianity helped us know David Koresh or Jim Jones. We can only judge al Qaida by their actions. Their behavior, no matter how based, no matter how rooted, is totally unacceptable in a modern society. They are a death cult and they need to be destroyed.

In 1995 Aum Shnrikyo terrorists released sarin nerve gas into the Tokyo subway system. It's natural for us to ask why al Qaida and Aum Shnrikyo want to kill people but this is probably pointless; cults are notoriously difficult or impossible to understand. The 39 men and women of the Heaven's Gate Cult in 1997 killed themselves to ride the Hal Bop comet. Can we understand that? Do we need to?

A cultist cannot give us rational reasons any more than a mentally ill person can. Can you communicate in a rational way with a drunk? What will that profit you? Could Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, or Hess supply you with a coherent rationale for conducting World War II and killing six million Jews? No, of course not. These people were insane. We followed Hitler and his people to their last bunker and destroyed them, just as we need to do with al Qaida.

We may think we're being more understanding, more caring, more enlightened, if we do more analysis. When that's just being ineffective and ultimately stupid. Less intellectual. Leave the analysis to the historians after this war is won or reduced to a low level fire fight. I don't care how a rabid dog that is biting people got rabies, I only care that it dies. Not because I love its death, but because I love the lives of the people it is hurting. Is that hard to understand? al Qaida is a death cult. Kill the bastards.

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Confused about the new GSM oriented technologies?: GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, and HSDPA? So am I. But Peter Rysavy of Rysavy Research (external link) does an excellent job in this paper of explaining them (external link). Well worth a read. An industry paper, it promotes GSM services too much, overstates data transfer rates, and promises developments sooner than they'll occur. Still, that's expected, every industry group, in this case 3G Americas (external link), tries to push their solutions. In fairness, Rysavy does mention the CDMA 2000 variants, as well as WiFi and WIMAX. Contact me if the link to the paper dies, I have archived a copy.

Table from Data Capabilities: GPRS to HSDPA, by Peter Rysavy of Rysavy Research

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Wireless coverage will extend and improve once Voice over Wi-Fi, or VoWi-Fi, gets put into cellular phones. WiFi, a protocol for short range, wireless local networks, now in homes, many businesses, and your local Starbucks, can deliver voice once a call is packetized (internal link). That's an easy job for a cell phone, even if the chipset needed is expensive and at first difficult to design. If cell phone service is bad or non-existent in, say, a hunting lodge outside Laramie, Wyoming, you might use a WiFi hotspot to telephone out using the internet. WiFi hot spots are far cheaper to build than cell sites, consequently, we should be getting many more of them in rural areas than cellular connections. Limited mobility of course but at least a connection.

This marrying up of different networks, of which we should include Bluetooth (internal link), points to a problem the industry has now given up on, universality. Years ago we thought a single wireless operating system might be possible, today, for many practical reasons, that hope is gone. We may as well hope for a single, universal language. (Although I would argue that we do have a universal language now: broken English.) So, today the emphasis on getting along falls to the instrument itself, the cell phone, which will have to be so smart that it can operate on many frequency bands and understand many different wireless operating systems.

Two last things. The factor limiting cell phone size has been the keypad. We could make mobiles smaller but people still need enough room to press keys. Still, the units have become very small and light and battery life has increased greatly because of this. Now come camera phones and video streaming. This will mean bigger phones, heavier ones, and much, shorter battery life. Because video is limited by screen size, the bigger, the more clear, the more colorful, the better. Phones now will bulk up. Hmm.

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Dear Tom:

I just read through your "Cell Phone Basics" article and wanted to say thank you for the information. I work for a national carrier, nothing special, just lower management in a call center. I want to work in the cellular industry and am currently working my way through school as well as building contacts in the industry. I just wanted to take the time to say thank you for the great resource. I learned more about cellular technology in the last 3 hours than I have since I became interested in the field. Thank you for your time and efforts, best of luck.

Thanks, a reader

Thanks to you! Mark van der Hoek has checked many of my wireless articles, without his invaluable help I could not accurately describe cellular radio. I used to archive my happy e-mail here (internal link), perhaps I should add more.

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The always fascinating Arthur C. Clarke, from 1976, writing on the 100th anniversary of the telephone:

"For man is the communicating animal; he demands news, information, entertainment, almost as much as food. In fact, as a functioning human being, he can survive much longer without food -- even without water! -- than without information, as experiments in sensory deprivation have shown. This is a truly astonishing fact; one could construct a whole philosophy around it. (Don't worry -- I won't try.)"

"So any major advances in communications capability comes into widespread use just as soon as it is practicable Often sooner; the public can't wait for 'state of the art' to settle down. . ."

"In the early 1940's the late John W. Cambell . . . refused to believe that anything as complex as a TV receiver could ever be made cheap and reliable enough for domestic use."

"Public demand certainly disposed of that prophecy. Home TV became available . . . before the solid state revolution [L]et us take it as axiomatic that complexity is no bar to universality. Think of your pocket computers again and march fearlessly into the future . . . trying to imagine the ideal, ultimate communications system -- the one that would fufill all possible fantasies."

"[W]hat about telepathy? Well, I don't believe in telepathy -- but I don't disbelieve it either. Certainly some sort of electronically assisted mental linkage seems plausible; in fact, this has already been achieved in crude form, between men and computers, through monitoring of brain waves. However, I find that my mental processes are so incoherent that I should be very sorry for anyone at the receiving end. Our superhuman successors, if any, might be able to cope; indeed, the development of the right technology might force such an evolutionary advance."

"Perhaps the best that we could manage would be sharing of emotional states, not the higher intellectual processes."

Clarke's point in this last paragraph is that we may be able to communicate anger, joy, or difficulty, without being able to specify what experience or thought we are having to produce those states. In other words, I might communicate the idea of happiness without being able to say what I am happy about. More on this later.

Arthur C. Clarke, writing in the article "Communications in the Next Century of the Telephone." It is in this book, The Telephone's First Century -- and Beyond: Essays on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of Telephone Communications by Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Dertouzos, Morris Halle, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Jerome B. Wiesner T.Y. Crowe, ed. Crowell, with AT&T New York (1977) p.100 ISBN #: 0690014856

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U.K. based cellular provider Orange has been involved in a number of art projects, including art that advertises. I like this approach. If you are going to try to sell me something, give me something neat to look at.

Click here to enlarge

This nice in-site sculpture was done by The GCGroup AG of Zurich. The press release says:

"The 'Orange Lightscape' consists of 475 glass rods stretching from floor to ceiling and equipped with energy-saving chains of LED lights. These generate the impression of a right angle hovering in space. Large-scale pictures from the world of Orange brands will be used in addition, supported by a moving news panel made up of light diodes."

Orange also produced an interactive exhibition, which you should take a look at. Entitled "watching them, watching you" Orange used thousands of wireless photo messages to create an animated display wall. There's a link below this photo to the exhibit site.

http://www.orange.co.uk/expressionist/exhibition.php (external link)

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What inventions or improvements do you know that could have been invented years or decades before they were? The phonograph seems obvious: its components existed at the time moving type was invented. A funnel, a hard wax cylinder, a stylus, and a hand crank, were all the things needed. Instead of 1877 people could have been listening to records in 1677. The telephone itself could have been invented around 1845, at the time of the first practical telegraph. T-stakes instead of wooden fence posts, concrete railway ties instead of wooden ones. How about the little wheels today on our luggage? That could have been done fifty years ago. And Energizer now says they offer a flashlight that accepts three kinds of batteries. It's often not the technology or resources that limits us but the idea.

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Evan I. Schwartz in In "Sparking the Fire of Invention" (MIT Technology Review) contends individual inventors and small research labs are returning to prominence. When the U.S. Census in 1940 eliminated "Inventor" as an occupation, replacing it with "Researcher", it changed the status of inventors. No longer independent, iconic, rugged American symbols, these people were now thought of as kooks in the basement. More recently, kooks in the garage.

Schwartz writes, "The change marks a comeback for those iconoclastic souls who still call themselves inventors -- the people considered the driving force of the economy in the days of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright brothers. From the 1920s and '30s onward, with the rise of giant technology-based companies like GE, AT&T, and DuPont, invention became co-opted by corporate labs that had to answer to management hierarchies. Within corporate labs, inventors were reclassified as 'researchers.' In 1932, the year after Edison died, more U.S. patents were granted to corporations than to individuals for the first time, and in 1940, the U.S. Census Bureau eliminated "inventor" as a job category.

"The new climate for invention, say Myhrvold and others, is the result of four major trends. The first is the reemergence of invention outside big corporations. For nearly a century, the innovations of large corporate research centers such as Bell Labs or General Electric overshadowed those of inventors working alone or in small groups. But now a constellation of forces is bringing the individual inventor and small technology companies -- and sometimes small teams within large firms -- back to the fore."

I'd link directly to the article but The Review is for subscribers only. So do this: use the Google search box above to search for this article. The return you'll want is: Technology Review: Sparking the Fire of Invention. It will list an MIT site. Hit the "Cached" version. That will give you the article without you having to subscribe. Yes, we Americans are indeed an inventive lot.

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The Wall Street Journal reports Qwest's former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio could face civil charges for the accounting scandal at the telco. Good. J.R. Snyder Jr. (internal link) says it's really difficult to appreciate from a distance how much resentment customers now have against the Qwest, the renamed, former regional Bell System telephone company. What went on?

Corporate raiding came to telecom, tearing down what had been carefully built up over decades. It's what happened when the Roman Empire finally fell. People in formerly conquered territories did nothing to surpass Roman building, they did the opposite, pulling carefully laid stones out of well made Roman roads to use for their own houses and walls. Public infrastructure fell apart and would not be improved on until the 18th century.

Two years ago U.S. Representative Diana DeGette laid out the Qwest story before a House subcommittee:

"As most of my colleagues know, US West, the predecessor to Qwest, was created with the break-up of Ma Bell, as one of the Baby Bells serving the Rocky Mountain region. US West was a solid, profitable, and traditional company with strong ties to the community. The stock certainly wasn't the riskiest, but the company was a valuable part of the community and a good corporate citizen. Exactly what you'd want your grandmother to invest in."

"In June 2000, in the waning days of the go-go Internet boom, a group of cowboys by the name of Qwest rode into town and acquired US West. These cowboys promised big changes. Higher profits. New innovation. Instead of a traditional telephone company they would turn the new Qwest into a model of the so-called new economy. This led to a corporate transition bumpier than most. The top management changed almost completely. Service problems abounded. There were painful layoffs and an almost complete halt of corporate charitable giving. This led to a dramatic change in corporate culture that had a serious affect on morale."

"In the years since Qwest's new management took over, their bad business decisions have had a significant impact on our local economy, the local workforce and the community as a whole. And now it appears that the problems might be much worse than simply poor business decisions. That is why we are here today. Not to belittle anyone or condemn without proof of wrongdoing, but rather to determine whether we are dealing with another instance of corporate malfeasance."

An anonymous source tells me:

"An AP report says the story was broken by a Qwest union (Communications Workers of America) official. As you can see there is no mention of that in the WSJ article.:

"Officially Qwest is not acknowledging any of the Wells notices to former executives because they are no longer a part of the company. I'm sure there's legal reasons also. Additionally, and this is alluded to in the WSJ story ("Qwest continues to face shareholder lawsuits and an investigation by the Justice Department. Qwest recently set aside $300 million in addition to an existing $200 million reserve for litigation."), Qwest faces some of it's own legal problems which I'm now hearing from inside that are even deeper than I thought."

"I am relieved, of only slightly to read: "To live up to high expectations, Qwest senior executives and staff participated in a culture in which fraud and hype were pervasive, according to people with knowledge of the SEC's final draft complaint against the company. The report also says Qwest hyped communications about its performance with investors." I was corporate staff and I was becoming so stressed out from the conflicts with my values that it was making me ill. I didn't participate in supporting any of those things, to the detriment of my employment, which I'm way beyond dwelling over."

"In any case, the CWA Union VP, John Thompson, who made the announcement in a formal press conference, naturally infuriated current Qwest execs. CWA is laying the groundwork, in their own inimitable way, for labor negotiations, a la the major airline carriers, because Qwest is about to start asking for concessions from the union."

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Let's pause to remember, this day. Okay? This is a very good read about September 11th. (internal link)

Q. What's the employment outlook for telecom? I have a military background with radar. (This answer compiled from several sources.)

A.Telecom has been pretty down for a while, but it's starting to recover. You might look into going into the cellular biz as a cell tech. Maintenance work of cellular transmittting equipment. The pay seems to be decent, and benefits are good. The downside is that there is nightwork from time to time, and if you really like getting into trouble shooting circuits, forget it. It's board swapping. They seem to like ex-military radar guys. Many telecoms (wireline and wireless) use a lot of microwave, so your radar background would stand you in good stead.

There are various jobs posted by Verizon Wireless right now:

https://careers.verizonwireless.com/erphrprd/home/
careerhome1.html(external link)

Select the "Network" box and an area if you want to be picky, and see what they have.

There are also positions in the NOC, or Network Operations Center. These are folks that watch screens for alarms on various pieces of the network. The pay won't be as good as a cell tech, but it is more of an entry level job. It could be a foot in the door kind of thing, if they think you aren't qualified for cell tech. But I suspect you are.

Cingular just bought AT&T Wireless, so I don't know what will happen with AT&T from one market to the next. In a few places there may be some layoffs, but I expect that will happen mostly in management and sales/marketing. Until the paperwork is complete, they're probably not hiring anyway.

Sprint PCS is a lousy company - they can never make up their minds and have had frequent layoffs.

Nextel is a possibility, though their future is a bit uncertain.

SureWest Wireless out of Roseville, California is excellent. On the wireline side Roseville Telephone are the same good people.

Alltel is a regional company scattered around the south. HQ in Little Rock. I hear they are good to work for.

Stay away from small companies - you won't get training. And speaking of which, don't ever quit learning. Grab as much training as you can. I've seen what happens to people who rest on their laurels. Dead end jobs. Technology moves fast, especially in telecom. Stay up to date or get left behind. WHATEVER YOU DO, LEARN ABOUT NETWORKING. TCP/IP IS THE FUTURE (internal link) OF ALL COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS. At least for the next 5-10 years, anyway.

I wish you well - I know what unemployment is like!

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A cell phone with a dial!? "The sleek and sexy Nokia 7280 offers a completely new mobile phone design, foregoing the traditional keypad for a discreet keyless dial." Whatever. Nokia hasn't released a closeup photograph of this new/old interface but they sure have marketing nonsense to share. This is very funny:

"When twilight falls, prowl the night with the mysterious Nokia 7280 phone. Shrouded in the mystery is a passion that will only reveal itself as you slide it open. Its sublime form is exquisitely crafted, leaving you with a slim, sleek object of beauty, unmatched by any other. You and the Nokia 7280 phone, a combination that's as compelling as the night."

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Question for Mark van der Hoek

Mark: I understand mergers between carriers might cause a cell site to shut down. Any other factors?

Two rare instances, one policy, the other technical. Qwest Wireless decided to shut down their network and become a reseller on Sprint's network. Some of their sites were sold to Sprint, some to Verizon, and some were decommissioned. That's a unique event in wireless. Sometimes a carrier will have a 'boomer' site -- a site that was put up early in the network, at a high elevation. Now it covers too far, and a half dozen sites are built to replace it and the boomer is eradicated. That's a 'time to time' kind of thing.

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Smarty Jones, Ace Emergency Dispatcher, sounds off on the problem of 911 and VOIP:

"In spite of all the FCC orders and proclamations of bureaucrats, politicians, business people and so on, wireless ALI or automatic line identification, is nowhere near meeting the deadline for the vast majority. Implementing it is fraught with problems. Realistically it's not going to happen for a long time. The problems are way too complex to go into here. But check the article below. VoIP? Hah! 911 people are totally against it because it inconveniences them even more than wireless. . . " (internal link, continues here with an article from Slate.com.)

Alcatel Telecommunications Review

Their latest issue is excellent. Instead of their typical thematic approach, Alcatel this quarter publishes a variety of topics about communication systems all over the world:

http://www.alcatel.com/atr/ (external link)

One fascinating article is entitled "High speed Internet in sparsely populated areas." It's a must read, I think this satellite based solution will be coming to America soon, providing web access and VOIP to many areas too small to afford broadband or to those off the grid completely. Perhaps a franchise opportunity?

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Pictured on this page (internal link) are some AT&T men from the 1920s. They are associates of Paul Seyler, who helped build the first fixed wireless radio-telephone service for individual customers in 1946 near Cheyenne Wells, Colorado. (internal link to .pdf file describing the project.)

Dr. Richard Ling (internal link) submitted these photos and names. Seyler is his grandfather. I hope that one day a family member or a researcher of one of these men may find now find a face to go along with a name.

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The June 3, 2004 Bonhams' communication auction (internal link, discussion) was a financial disaster for the auction house but a victory for collectors. Put together to create demand for communication antiquities, the auction if successful could have risen prices for these items throughout the world.

Geoff Fors reports by way of Antique Radio Classified's (external link) latest issue that "[T]he total sale amount of the technology items was just $ 93,883 and that even included a 19 percent buyer's premium ! Less than 51 percent of the items sold. The promoters had estimated the auction would bring in a total of at least $ 1,140,000 and had placed high reserves on nearly everything."

"I don't know if there is a list on-line of closed sales. The printed Antique Radio Classified does has a list, and most things sold in the $ 300-1500 range. The highest priced item was a Breguet ABC telegraph transmitter and receiver, French ca. 1850's, which brought $ 9,536."

"I guess I'll have to leave everything in my attic awhile longer." Geoff

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Q. Is there a product that spoofs Caller ID? A business, stalker, or con man might use it to disguise their real number.

A. It's more a service. You sign up, your calls are routed through their equipment, and the people you dial see a fake number. It's a bad thing and let's hope the FCC kills it.

Emergency dispatcher Smarty Jones comments, "We get calls from people who get outbound call center calls with 'pseudo' phone numbers and area codes not in use. Even MBNA, the second largest credit card company in the world, uses a fake area code. We get complaints for 'harassment' from people and it's MBNA and the same fake area code and number. Ninety-nine percent of the time the person is into them for tens of thousands and even hundreds of thosands of dollars and in arrears. So MBNA and others use this tactic to get to the debtor, right, wrong or indifferent. But after the 23rd time the called person figures it out and then calls law enforcement for 'harassment.' If we do a little bit of homework we find that the reportee actually is close to being a fraudster or actually is one. Amazing how criminals will call the police for help.

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Okay, where we were we? CDMA? Groan. Let's talk instead about communication history today. Don Kimberlin (internal link) is back in the States after months in England. This is on Station X and the first programmable computer. Neat stuff. He reports:

"I'm back now, have a jillion things to catch up on, and will resume correspondence shortly. Just to tease you, among The Things I Learned on Summer Vacation were that Eniac, the widely claimed 'first electronic computer,' wasn't. Two years earlier, the British code breakers at Bletchley Park, had a machine named Colossus up and running, for the purpose of breaking German crypto codes. Bletchley Park is most famous for being the place that broke the daily-changing codes of the German 'Enigma' machine, but a later code run by a Lorenz teleprinter was even more complex. Since Bletchley Park was run by Britain's secretive MI-6, ALL documents and machines there were destroyed when it was shut down in the late 1940's. Now, years later, it's being rebuilt from memories and copies of documents now being released from American secret files that are being opened. You can see more at:

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/page.cfm?pageid=159 (external link)

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