Steven's Myth of Verizon AMPS coverage in the San Francisco BayArea

Todd Allcock wrote:

> For those of us who enjoy a more traditional, and admittedly more plebian
> "cuppa Joe," there are a bunch of coffees I prefer to Starbucks
> (including McDonalds!) but the king of coffees remains Dunkin' Donuts, as
> any self-respecting "Nor'easter" will attest to!

Last time I tried Dunkin' Donuts coffee was in Korea. It was horrible.
This was a time I would have gone to Starbucks, but the one by my hotel
opened very late, about 9:00 a.m.. I needed to be on a train every day
at 8:00 a.m. to go to LG, and couldn't hang around waiting for Starbucks
to open. I gave up on morning coffee for that trip, on the next trip I
brought my own coffee and brewing apparatus, and a stainless steel
commuter mug.

During lunch, the waiters at LG's guest restaurant took orders for
coffee or tea, and when it came we couldn't tell which was which. The
coffee was very weak, and the tea was strong. The LG people were very
amused at the Abraham Lincoln coffee/tea joke, "Waiter, if this is
coffee, then bring me tea. But if this is tea, then bring me coffee."

From "What is American Culture"

"Burnt coffee at exorbitant prices. The most popular cafe chain, whose
name decent people do not pronounce, burns its coffee beans to produce
what Americans mistakenly believe is an authentic European taste. Proper
coffee, by which of course I mean Italian coffee, is bittersweet, not
burned. Americans evidently hate the wretched stuff because they drown
its flavor in a flood of milk, in the so-called "latte", something I
never have observed an Italian request during many years of travel in
that country. By contrast, Italians drink cappuccino, mixing a small
amount of milk into the coffee and leaving a cap of foam. If Americans
do not like it, why do they buy it at exorbitant prices? They do so
precisely because the high price makes it a luxury, but an affordable
one for secretaries and shopgirls."

I was very glad to be able to use a CDMA phone in Korea, on the train
ride to LG, though it was cheaper to rent a phone than to roam on
Verizon, so that's what I did. There is no GSM service in Korea, though
you can rent a CDMA phone that has a SIM card slot for your GSM SIM, so
you can roam, but it's expensive, and it may only work with European
carriers. They did this for the 2002 FIFA World Cup, and I presume that
they kept the system in place.



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› See More: Steven's Myth of Verizon AMPS coverage in the San Francisco BayArea

Don Udel (ETC) wrote:
> "John Navas" <[email protected]> wrote in message > On the
> contrary -- Consumer Reports suffers from a self-selected sample
>> of a non-representative universe. It also suffers from serious
>> screwups, like the recent car seat debacle. And it just rated McDonalds
>> coffee as better than Starbucks -- LOL!
>
> And once again CR is right.

Coffee is pretty subjective though, more than even some other food items
such as ice cream, where the poorer ice creams pump a lot of air in, and
use artificial flavors and thickeners, and may use corn syrup rather
than sugar.

That said, according to one article I read, McDonalds started using 100%
Arabica beans about a year ago. If that's the case, they may really be
better than Starbucks for regular coffee, since McDonald's sells a lot
of regular coffee and makes it fresh every few minutes, while at
Starbucks it can often sit around for an hour while customers buy
lattes, and frappacinos (sp?). There's nothing special about the beans
that Starbucks uses versus the coffee that McDonald's uses.

Where CR is most useful is in their surveys of various sorts, such as
vehicle reliability, and wireless coverage. They aren't asking people
what they like best, they're asking people for their own experiences, so
any bias is eliminated. They also use extremely large sample sizes which
gives their surveys a very small margin of error.

Some people complain that Consumer Reports subscribers aren't
representative of the population at large, but in reality this cancels
out when they do their surveys. I don't think that anyone claims that
with such a huge sample size that the results would be much different if
they surveyed non-subscribers, though as I pointed out, there might be a
small difference based on the socio-economic differences between CR
subscribers and the general population. For many of the metro areas in
the last survey, including the San Francisco Bay Area, the differences
between the carriers were quite large. In some areas they were not very
large.

Oh, and In 'N Out has good iced tea!

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SMS wrote:
> From "What is American Culture"
>
> "Burnt coffee at exorbitant prices. The most popular cafe chain, whose
> name decent people do not pronounce, burns its coffee beans to produce
> what Americans mistakenly believe is an authentic European taste. Proper
> coffee, by which of course I mean Italian coffee, is bittersweet, not
> burned.

There might be something to that. The great little coffee shop I mentioned
in a very recent article was Italian owned and operated.

--
"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day,
they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally.
I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine."
-- Bill Gates, in an interview with Newsweek's Steven Levy

clifto wrote:

> One of the nice things about working the Hispanofest in Melrose Park IL
> was that on break time there was a nice privately owned coffee shop
> just a couple of blocks off the beaten path. They pulled a mean espresso
> and made delicious coffee. And Starbucks tastes burnt to discriminating
> people who frequent places that make good coffee.

The problem is that non-coffee people often equate burnt with strong.
Apparently they have never had a cup of strong, medium roast coffee,
which is understandable since you can't get such a thing at Starbucks,
unless a store happens to do a medium roast as the "coffee of the day,"
and that's pretty rare, in my experience.

There are smaller, specialty coffee houses that do medium roast brewed
coffee, but you have to search them out. Or you can buy medium roast
coffee and do it yourself. The advantage is you can drink such coffee
black without drowning it with milk and sugar. It's like drinking good
whiskey straight, rather than mixing it with something sweet like soda
or orange juice to hide the taste. Plain coffee is much less profitable
than $3-4 espresso drinks, so understandably Starbucks doesn't want to
push plain coffee.

You often stumble across good coffee in places that you don't expect. If
it's a cafe or store owned by Pakistani's or Indian's, often the coffee
is good, Chinese, usually not so good, though judging from the number of
coffee houses in Taiwan, it should be better than it is.

See "http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EK18Aa01.html"

What is American Culture

"2. Burnt coffee at exorbitant prices. The most popular cafe chain,
whose name decent people do not pronounce, burns its coffee beans to
produce what Americans mistakenly believe is an authentic European
taste. Proper coffee, by which of course I mean Italian coffee, is
bittersweet, not burned. Americans evidently hate the wretched stuff
because they drown its flavor in a flood of milk, in the so-called
"latte", something I never have observed an Italian request during many
years of travel in that country. By contrast, Italians drink cappuccino,
mixing a small amount of milk into the coffee and leaving a cap of foam.
If Americans do not like it, why do they buy it at exorbitant prices?
They do so precisely because the high price makes it a luxury, but an
affordable one for secretaries and shopgirls."



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Notan wrote:
> John Navas wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> A panel of "trained testers" took their brew black -- no cream, milk
>> or sugar -- and visited two locations of each company.
>>
>> Two locations! Not just one? Wow!
>> For "trained testers" read CR staffers.
>> LOL!
>
> And, once again, you come across as snob, who think that people value
> his opinion(s) above all others.

Actually for Starbucks, where all the U.S. stores are company owned and
operated, two stores should be sufficient because there isn't a lot of
variability. For McDonald's, where there a lot of franchises, as well as
a lot of company owned stores, you'd expect more variability on some
menu items.

The burnt taste that they complained about is not some huge secret, it's
how Starbucks roasts and brews their regular coffee.




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Todd Allcock wrote:

> For example, if the survey was a question like "do you get your news from
> TV, radio, internet or magazines?" asking a group comprised entirely of
> magazine subscribers would obviously skew the results.

I guess that John is trying to convince people that if somehow you could
get a sample size of 50,000 respondents, and it was all random, that the
results would be different. Of course this is ridiculous, the sample of
CR subscribers that are Verizon subscribers, are not going to be biased
for or against Verizon, any more than the Sprint, Cingular or T-Mobile
subscribers are going to be biased against their own carriers. I think
what he doesn't understand, is that the survey isn't asking 50,000
people "which carrier is best in your city?," it's asking for an
evaluation of your own carrier.

Now if you surveyed only long distance truck drivers, and trucking
firms, of course Verizon is going to have a huge advantage, because they
have much wider coverage than Cingular in non-urban areas due to AMPS.
The commercial carriers still use AMPS in areas where there is no CDMA
coverage (see "http://www.etrucker.com/apps/news/article.asp?id=51944").

> But asking "cable TV subscribers," "Ford automobile owners," or
> "bricklayers" objective questions about cellular service should tend to
> get the same results if the sample sizes are large enough. (Unless, for
> example, cell companies discriminate against bricklayers...)

Yes, that's the whole point.

Of course Navas is just extremely upset that for yet another year,
Cingular fared extremely poorly in the Consumer Reports survey AND the
J.D. Power surveys. That's why he feels compelled to make up ridiculous
stories to try and defend them, part of which is trying to attack the
companies doing the surveys.

> Perhaps, but that old "standard deviation" equation tends to insure work
> things out. ;-)

The margin of error is still extremely small, even when broken down by
region and then by carrier. Additionally, in some regions, such as the
San Francisco Bay Area, there is such a large difference, that even with
the maximum amount of error applied, Cingular still does extremely
poorly, and Verizon does extremely well.


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Todd Allcock wrote:

> A bias that would most likely be even distributed among all carriers- for
> example, if self-selection is, say, 20% more likely to generate replies
> from people unhappy with their service, then all carriers will be skewed
> negatively by presumably the same amount.

That's really the key point. It's not as if the CR subscribers are
somehow biased towards one carrier or another. It's not like surveying a
group of long-distance truck drivers that would necessarily have
coverage requirements that are different from the average person.

> Given the lack of a completely "blind" random survey, the CR one holds up
> pretty well. In the real world, the ideal sample population is difficult
> to find, so you do the best you can with as unbiased a sampling as you can.

It's funny to see people latch onto the lack of a double-blind random
survey every time a survey presents results that they disagree with,
while at the same time not being able to present and reasons why the
survey is not credible. Yet in most cases it's not possible to conduct
such a survey. The CR survey was very well designed, since any bias
cancels out since it would be equal among all carriers. Combine that
with the huge sample size, even larger than the J.D. Power surveys, and
you have results that everyone agrees are the best you can hope for.

> Put another way, other than Cingular's "secret" least-dropped-calls
> study, has any consumer group or independent research firm (i.e. J.D.
> Powers) ever rated Cingular with the best network?

Not only that, but Cingular has steadfastly refused to release the
specifics of that study, which is highly suspect. Sprint is still suing
them, AFAIK, and Cingular countersued claiming that Sprint doesn't have
"the most powerful network" whatever that means.

> My experience over the last few years tends to support the CR study-
> whenever, in my travels, I find myself in an area where some people can't
> get service and some can, the ones who can have more often than not been
> Verizon users. (Because I always ask, out of curiosity.)

Yeah, in my area (SF Bay Area) it's almost always the Verizon users that
have coverage when no one else does. My daughter is constantly letting
her friends and teammates use her phone when their Sprint, T-Mobile, and
Cingular phones don't work. I do have to say that Cingular is improving
quite a bit out here, and I notice a difference over the past year in
terms of improved coverage.

> Certainly that's not scientific, and certainly is not a "representative
> sample" but it is generally the case in my experience.
>
> Having said that, I still wouldn't use Verizon's service- between the
> crippled phones, and high prices, I'm just not interested, but that
> doesn't mean they haven't got the network right.

The crippled phones are an annoyance, though they are often hackable.
Their prices are no higher than Sprint or Cingular, and often are less
due to corporate discounts.




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At 13 Feb 2007 01:26:47 +0000 John Navas wrote:

> when the sampling isn't random, as in the case of CR, where is the
> population isn't representative, and the sample is self-selected, two
> serious flaws.

Non-random and non-representative are not the same thing, necessarily.
If I wanted to determine the average diameter of M&M candies, I could
open a bag, and average the diameters of all of the blue ones. While the
sample was non-random, and perhaps flawed statistically, the sample was
certainly representative and I'll guarantee you my "real world" answer
would be
correct within the margin of error!

Same with the CR study- as non-random as the sample might have been,
there seems to be no good reason to believe why it would not be
representative.

[email protected] wrote:
> At Starbucks the house coffee sits only for 40 mins. Then It is dumped
> out and re-brewed. If you notice on each pot they have electronic egg
> times set to go off. Once it does, It's time for a fresh batch.

Not good enough. 20 minutes is the limit to receive the all the
antioxidant benefit.

Coffee has to be ground, brewed and drunk within 20 minutes, otherwise
it became a pro-oxidant.

"Maximum antioxidant activity was observed for the medium-roasted
coffee; the dark coffee had a lower antioxidant activity despite the
increase in color."

From Effect of roasting on the antioxidant activity of coffee brews.
del Castillo MD, Ames JM, Gordon MH. J Agric Food Chem. 2002 Jun
19;50(13):3698-703. School of Food Biosciences, The University of
Reading, Whiteknights, Reading, UK

One more reason to go to a coffee house that uses a medium roast, rather
than going to Starbucks.

Todd Allcock wrote:

> Same with the CR study- as non-random as the sample might have been,
> there seems to be no good reason to believe why it would not be
> representative.

You could probably find a group of people that was non-representative of
the population as a whole, i.e., heavy urban users such as real estate
agents, highly mobile users with a lot of non-urban use such as
truckers, highly mobile users with mainly urban use such as airline
pilots and flight attendants, etc. It might actually be a useful metric
to know which carriers these groups favor and why.

However nothing suggests that CR subscribers are not representative of
the population as a whole. They are generally higher income, and of
higher education level, which means that they travel more, but this
makes the CR survey even more valuable, for those that are interested in
the best coverage.

I think that we all understand that it's all a sour grapes issue by
Navas. On the plus side, the digression into coffee was very interesting.

DTC wrote:
> John Navas wrote:

>>> Any citations of its deployment by U.S. carriers?
>>
>> Nope. Just my own experience.
>>
>> Any citations to the contrary?
>
> Sometimes you really amaze me with your logic.

Yeah, "amaze" is a good word.

Reminds me of my responses when a restaurant owner asks me how I enjoyed
the meal, and the meal was terrible:

"It was unbelievable"
"I've never tasted food like this before"
"I'm going to tell all my friends about this place"
"It's just like my mother used to make"




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At 13 Feb 2007 02:20:31 -0800 SMS wrote:

> Not good enough. 20 minutes is the limit to receive the all the
> antioxidant benefit.

To be fair, I think that as few of us coffee drinkers are doing it for
the antioxidants as red wine drinkers are! ;-)

Show me a study that says the effects of caffeine burn off in 20 minutes
and I'll stick a digital alarm on my coffeemaker right now! ;-)

Todd Allcock wrote:
> At 13 Feb 2007 02:20:31 -0800 SMS wrote:
>
>> Not good enough. 20 minutes is the limit to receive the all the
>> antioxidant benefit.
>
> To be fair, I think that as few of us coffee drinkers are doing it for
> the antioxidants as red wine drinkers are! ;-)

The proven health benefits of coffee go way beyond the anti-oxidants.

It's beneficial in the prevention of Alzheimer's, Asthma, Apnea, Colon
and Rectal Cancer, Type 2 Diabetes, Gallstones, Impotence, Headache,
Kidney Stones, Obesity, Parkinson's, Radiation Poisoning, Skin Cancer,
and Suicide.

I just don't like to see some ill-informed health food nuts getting
their panties in a bunch over the fact that coffee has caffeine. An
article that was at PlanetRX.com (now defunct) stated: "Most people
don't think of coffee as a medicinal herb, but it is. The beans are
actually seeds of the coffee shrub, therefore an herbal product. And the
caffeine coffee contains is clearly a drug."

Notan wrote:

> Coffee has saved my life, more than once.

My daughter was premature, so I dealt with all the Newborn ICU stuff for
two months. One of the drugs they use to prevent apnea, a common problem
in preemies, is caffeine. We also drank a lot of coffee during that
period. Fortunately there were many coffee houses near the hospital.

At 13 Feb 2007 11:29:14 -0700 Notan wrote:

> Coffee has saved my life, more than once.


Mine too- drinking nearly a gallon on an overnight run from Denver to
Kansas City. Must've been the anti-oxidants! ;-)

Seriously, I'm not discounting the health benefits present in coffee or
red wine, for that matter. I'm just suggesting that they might not be
the primary reason many of us partake in their delights!