QOS = “Quality Of Service”.

1. I am going to pick on Sprint PCS here, but it is worth noting that most cable companies and other wireless operators follow exactly the same brain-dead pattern.
   

I live a few hundred feet from a cell tower that serves (among others) Sprint PCS. This tower goes out of service about 4-5 times a year, and when it does it takes Sprint an average of a day or two to get it working again.

In the meantime, we have no wireless service. Like right now. For over 24 hours to this point.

A large part of the delay arises from Sprint’s unwillingness to accept the notion that the tower is actually inoperative — they insist on multiple customer reports before they will even mark the tower as suspect in their database and commence the lumbering repair process. Each reporting customer is dragged through an aggravating and time-consuming inquiry process that assumes that the customer is the root of all problems and that the tower can’t possibly actually be inoperative.

And note that they are waiting on customer reports to determine whether the tower is operating.

Pardon me?

Sprint can query the tower for all kinds of information, they can determine who is connected to it, what the call volume is, etc... but to determine whether it is actually working, they wait for their customers to be sufficiently aggravated that they will brave the SprintPCS customer service call queue. With this kind of mindset, is it any wonder that customer churn is one of the biggest problems in the wireless industry?

Never mind that there are companies with turnkey solutions to this problem, I can see why the cut-throat wireless industry isn’t keen on adding to their per-tower costs.

Most wireless companies don’t own their own towers any more -- they farm out tower building and maintenance to dedicated tower operators. This complicates the use of on-site solutions, but does not impede remote software based monitoring at all.

It is patently obvious that Sprint, et al could use the information that they already have to automatically detect towers that are not operating. All they have to do is periodically look at the number of phones associated with a given tower site -- when that number drops to zero for more than some interval, it is probably time to take a closer look at that tower, at least remotely.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s just common sense.

If Sprint wanted to do something to improve their customer service, they would:

1. •Add items to their customer service phone menu for reporting problems with the system.
   

2. •Train CS operators to not treat the customer like an idiot when the customer is trying to do Sprint’s job because Sprint isn’t.
   

3. •Have a dedicated on-line system using mapping to let users report no service in locations where they normally get service.
   

4. •Implement the remote, software-based monitoring described above, so that towers can be brought back online much more quickly.
   

Sprint could also pick a customer within range of troublesome towers (like ours) and give them a freebie (perhaps custom) femtocell widget that could “phone home” to Sprint the moment the local tower went south.