Cellular Phone Carriers
A Broken Industry in Need of Fixing

Preface:
To those about to read this post in full, I want to give you all fair warning. For many years I’ve simply dealt with the way that the wireless industry has carried on with its business model; a passive observer if you will. Unfortunately, I’ve been burnt one too many times and I’m simply sick of the crap. That has prompted me to write this post – almost more of a rant – as a lash out against an industry that I can’t help but see as completely broken. Much of this is opinion and/or my own views. However, I’ve attempted to back it up with as many facts as possible.

Also, be warned that it may seem like I’m picking on AT&T, but I’m not. The model for their data services has recently changed and it’s a change that is going to become industry wide. As such, I’ve simply chosen to use them for the sake of consistency. Rest assured that many of the calculations I used for AT&T are consistent for the entire industry.

Lastly, I would like to make it clear in advance that I’m in no way affiliated with or employed by any wireless carrier, the FCC, the CTIA, or any other group either for or against this industry. I’m simply a pist consumer looking to inform others and get this all out of my system. As far as I can tell, there is exactly 0% consumer fairness or protection for anyone getting service from these companies. As far as competition goes, the only competition happening is in the most anti-competitive sense I can come up with. By your own experiences, some of you will already know what I’m talking about and probably feel the same way. However, many of you have probably carried on over the years completely invisible to any issues and have been 100% satisfied with your service; you may want to stop reading now if you’re in that group. So, here it goes…

Introduction:
Let me start by saying that never in history have we come across an industry so vital to the way that we communicate with each other. Sure, wired telecommunications and ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have been around just as long or in some cases longer than wireless phone service. For that matter, until recently, those same services have been our primary means of staying connected with others around the world and, for many, will probably continue to be that way for the foreseeable future.

However, a dramatic shift is happening in the way we stay connected. Increasingly, users around the world are discontinuing their land based telephony services in favor of cellular service. Additionally, the advent of advanced smart handsets such as Apple’s iPhone and handsets running on Google’s Android system are making a case for these to become user’s primary mode of access to the internet; it’s fast, mobile, convenient, and unfortunately also puts wireless carrier services in the spotlight as primary ISPs.

With all of the fast advances in wireless data and telephony services, the carriers are starting to show their true colors. For the majority, it doesn’t look too bad, but more and more users are starting to see these colors as less of a rainbow and more of the shades of grey that they truly are. For the last decade the wireless industry has carried on with roughly the same business model. Sure, the technology has changed, but the business model is much the same as it was in the early 00’s. If the advances weren’t coming so quickly, this model could successfully continue. However, I fear that this current model won’t hold out for long before users rise up with a huge backlash against the industries draconian ways. This brings me to a few issues that are hurting the current system and my views on how they need to change. In this post, I will highlight on Coverage, Voices Services, Data Services, Messaging Services, Contracts, Phone Exclusivity, and Billing.

Coverage:
Let’s start with the simplest of subjects. Coverage is the one subject here that’s going to affect everyone at some point in some manner. The point here is simple and plain; coverage just isn’t good enough.

With people dropping their land lines in favor of wireless services, it’s becoming increasingly important that everyone be able to get coverage regardless of where they’re at and even more so at their place of residence. When land lines were the accepted primary mode of voice service, it wasn’t such a big deal. However, I have seen ever increasing arguments online about who is providing the best coverage to America’s user-base. The truth? Nobody is providing the best coverage to America. Each carrier has its strong and weak areas and it all depends upon which area of the nation you live in. If you don’t believe me, have a look at each carrier’s coverage maps.

All carriers clearly excel in providing coverage to some areas and fall behind in areas that other carriers excel at. This, in some cases, has created small monopolies in certain areas of the country where only one service is available. For example, the area I’m currently living in only has reliable coverage from Verizon. AT&T is also available in this area, but it isn’t their native coverage area and comes with extreme restrictions on voice and data services. This effectively means that I will have to buy services and phones from Verizon if I’m to have reliable wireless service where I live -- regardless of the price and restrictions.

In other areas of the country, it’s impossible to get service at all. For example, after reviewing the coverage maps for the 4 major wireless carriers in the US, I was able to determine that it’s impossible to get wireless service in certain areas of central Idaho. Are there any cities or towns in these areas? There may or may not be. However, the point is that if some major catastrophe were to happen to you while visiting this area of Idaho, you’d better hope and pray that someone else comes along and sees you because you won’t be making any phone calls from this area of the country. It’s not just this one area either. Take a look at the coverage maps for Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile to compare the coverage. I guarantee you’ll find white blips all over the place that none of them cover.

Voice Services:
What can I say? A lot of this subject goes with coverage. If you have no coverage, you have no voice services. However, other problems with voice services do exist. Dropped calls in good coverage areas, poor voice quality, and other similar issues. These issues are simply not acceptable. Any of these issues during an emergency call to 911 could be the difference between life and death.

These are also some of the hardest issues to pin down. Is it the handset, the towers, problems with the backbone in the area? It all depends on the time, situation and location. The one certainty is that, 99% of the time, the carriers don’t care to take any of the responsibility for these issues. When confronted about these issues and threatened with the user changing companies, many will simply recite that the coverage in the user’s home area is good according to their maps and remind said users that they will be responsible for paying the ETF (Early Termination Fee) if they change services before their contract ends.

Data Services:
For the most part, this is one of the areas I’m currently the least concerned about. The prices for what you get in return seem quite reasonable – with one glaring exception. For the sake of the fact that this subject will relate to Messaging Services, I’m going to do some quick number crunching.

Here’s the numbers breakdown. For the sake of being conservative, I’m going to do these calculations based on AT&T’s new $25 for 2GB of data. It seems that the industry is heading to this model and is reasonably fair. 2GB is equal to 2147483648 Bytes. I arrived at that number using the following method. 1GB of data is 1024MB, 1MB is 1024KB, and 1KB is 1024 Bytes. So, to arrive at the number listed above you would do 1*1024*1024*2048. When you break $25 down to pennies by 2147483648 is comes out to roughly 858993 Bytes per penny which is equivalent to roughly 839KB of data transfers per penny; pay special attention to this number because I’m going to use it again later in the post. For those who aren’t quite sure what I’m talking about, that amounts to 1 high quality 1600x1200 picture from a 2.0 megapixel camera or a 30 second audio clip from a high quality MP3. For the amount per penny, that’s not too bad for the majority of users. There will always be the high usage users that pass the 2GB cap, but they will be few and far between for the time being.

In fact, my only real gripes with data services right now are coverage, bandwidth, and tethering. I can’t really complain too much about coverage and bandwidth. Until the iPhone hit the market in 2006, data services went hardly noticed. I blame that on lousy web browsers on smart phones, but that’s neither here nor there. Regardless, both of these issues are forcibly being addressed by the various carriers to ensure quality data services in all of the same areas as voice services, but it’ll take them a while to catch up.

Tethering on the other hand is a completely different story. I’m pretty sure this is just another way that this industry has decided to line its pockets with revenue. If you want to attach your smart phone to your laptop or other mobile device and use it as a wireless modem, you have to pay your carrier $20-30 depending on who it’s with. No, that’s not the smart phone data plan you’re already paying $30 for. It’s an ADDITIONAL $20-30 on top of that data plan. Does the wireless industry take us all for idiots?!?!?! I’m already paying you for a data plan. Where the deuce is this extra cost coming from? The access medium is exactly the same. The only thing that has changed is the delivery method. Think about it this way… You visit the CNN website on your smart phone. It looks exactly as it would if you visit it on a laptop – only a lot smaller. If you want to visit that same website from your laptop via tethering, your carrier is going to charge you twice as much. How is that even fair!?!?!? FCC, can I get a little help on this one?

Messaging Services:
There’s no gentle way to put this. So, the flat out truth of the matter on this one is that people are just plain getting screwed. It’s simple and fast to prove. In order to do this let’s take a quick jump backwards to data services.

I mentioned the calculation that, conservatively, users are getting roughly 839KB of data transfers for every penny they spend on their data plan. Now, I’m going to break this down into two calculations; one for the cost of SMS (texting) without a plan and one calculation under AT&Ts Messaging 1500 plan. Though, I will continue to use AT&T for the sake of consistency, the following calculations are consistent across the carriers.

Let’s start with the “no plan” calculation as this is the most blatantly ridiculous number. One SMS message consists of no more than 160 characters; it has to be that way because of the technology employed to make it work. For each character you type, that equals 7/8ths of a Byte. A full Byte is 8 bits and a standard ASCI character is only 7 bits; my apologies for any confusion this causes. This means that a completely full text message is 140 Bytes. With no plan, AT&T will charge you $0.20 for a simple text of no more than 160 characters or 140 Bytes. That doesn’t sound too bad until you actually break down the numbers and compare. For that same penny, you’re getting 7 Bytes of data transfers or one very long word – 140/20. Remember that there are 1024 Bytes in 1KB and that you’re getting 839KB of data transfer per penny on your data plan. To put it in perspective you would have to send 6136 text messages consisting of 140 Bytes to equal 839KB of data transfers – (839*1024)/140 for those who are wondering. This means at $0.20 per message you would pay just north of $1227 for the same 839KB of data transfers that you get for $0.01 on your data plan. Feeling ill yet???

Okay, now let’s see if having a plan puts us closer to the ballpark range. AT&T’s 1500 Messaging plan will cost you $15.00 and obviously gets you a 1500 message limit. When you divide 15 by 1500 that equals $0.01 per message – assuming you use all 1500. So, that is now getting you 140 Bytes per penny. Better, but still not even close to being in the ballpark. Using the same 6136 messages to equal 839K at 1 penny per message, you’re still going to pay 61.36 to get into the same data transmission range that you’re paying $0.01 for on your data plan. Granted, it’s not $1227, but it’s still raking consumers over the coals. In any case, I present for your disapproval the most expensive data per Byte to transmit on the planet. If this doesn’t make you ill then read “The True Price of SMS Messages” by Sam at http://gthing.net/the-true-price-of-sms-messages. I nearly gagged the first time I read some of his comparative calculations.

The solution to this is quite simple, really. Either the carriers need to include SMS in your smart phone data plan or, even better, do away with charging for it at all and make it a standard part of your cell service. I want to make it clear that I have no issue with charging and having plans for picture messaging or MMS. That does take bandwidth to transmit and is fair to charge for – though it should be a lesser amount. However, it is costing the carriers NOTHING to provide you with SMS service. The short period between the time you hit send to make a phone call and the time the call actually starts is a handshake period between the phone and tower. They use this same handshake period to send that 160 character text message. This technology is over a decade old and has been paid for many times over by consumers. Why we’re still being charged for this is well beyond my comprehension level. The best I can figure is that nobody is saying anything and carriers will continue to line their pockets with this revenue until somebody speaks up.

Contracts, Phone Exclusivity, and ETF:
These three subjects are actually all interlinked. As such, I’m just going to cover them all at once. Phone exclusivity is what ties these all together; so, I’m just going to start there.

As it stands right now, every carrier has phones that are 100% exclusive to them. Verizon has its Droid phones – yes you can get Android on different carriers, but not on the same phones – AT&T has iPhone and, until recently, Sprint had the Palm Pre. These are merely examples, but ones that will stand out in everyone’s minds as the easiest to identify. Here’s the issue with these exclusivity deals. If a carrier hits gold with one handset, then the number of users with said carrier will skyrocket – iPhone anyone? While that may be good business for the carrier, it is 100% unacceptable business for the consumer for several reasons.

The first is QoS (Quality of Service) being affected by a disproportionate number of users on one carrier. I once again cite iPhone as the example here. AT&T has had an inordinate number of quality/reliability issues with voice and data services on its network in certain areas because of the number of iPhone users. If you don’t believe me, just hunt around the internet or ask any AT&T user in New York.

The second issue is plan rates. Because these phones are exclusive to one carrier, said carrier has the potential to set the plan rates for these phones to whatever they want. It’s a “if you want the phone, you’re going pay what we tell you to” sort of deal. It’s not so much that they’re performing this practice at the current time, but the potential is there. I just hope and pray that they don’t start doing this.

The last issue is completely about fairness to the consumer. At the present model, there is no consumer fairness. If you want a specific phone then you either get the carrier it goes with or you don’t get the phone at all. For some, it’s simply a matter of not wanting to deal with said carrier, but for others it’s about not being able to get service with that carrier. Going back to the coverage issue, remember that not all carriers provide service everywhere. Though the majority of users in this nation will have access to whichever carrier they want, there will always be some that only have access to one carrier. This means that phone exclusivity will always alienate a portion of any given handsets potential user base. This also means that users are now getting service from carriers based on the phones they carry and not based on the service they provide in a given area – which seems completely backwards to me. This leads me into Contracts and ETFs which are mutually exclusive to each other.

Under the current model, when you go to buy a phone and carrier service, you pay a subsidized price for said phone and sign a X-Year Service Agreement with that carrier. With that contract comes an Early Termination Fee or penalty for canceling your service before your contract is up. I understand the point of this contract, but this is the most broken sales model I’ve ever seen and causes the most trouble for users.

Let’s hop back to AT&T and look at iPhone again for a moment. A user new to AT&T could walk into an AT&T store right now and buy a 16GB iPhone from the carrier for the subsidized price of $199 w/2-Year Service Contract and $325 ETF. This is wrong on so many levels it makes my head spin.

The first wrong is “subsidized price”; as far as I’m concerned, such a thing shouldn’t exist. If you can’t afford the full price of the phone – which in this case happens to be $600 – then you should probably reconsider your priorities. Additionally to that, the unsubsidized price for phones needs to come way down. You can’t possibly convince me that the decade old base model phone you’re trying to sell me costs $100. It might be worth $30 if you’re lucky. More proof by example of the iPhone – thanks to those that do the teardown and price to build on these things. When the 3GS iPhone came out, it cost Apple right in the ballpark figure of $200 to build a 16GB model. At $600 unsubsidized price for the same phone, that’s a 200% mark up in price. I’m not against handset manufacturers making a profit, but let’s be reasonable here.

The next wrongs tie together with the first – contracts and ETFs. If phones were sold unsubsidized – mind you that some carriers won’t let you buy their phones that way – then contracts and ETFs wouldn’t exist at all. The point of the contract and ETF is this… When you pay the carrier the subsidized price for the phone, they’re making you vouch for the remainder of the phone cost by locking you into a service agreement. They build the remainder of the phone’s price into the cost of your voice and data services to recoup their money – please correct me if I’m wrong about this. When you cancel your service before your contract is up, they charge you an ETF. The point of the ETF is to recoup the rest of the monies that you didn’t pay for the phone.

In the end, you end up paying the full phone price anyway. So, you might as well pay the unsubsidized price up front. The only downside to that is that you still pay the same amount for your services as the guy next to you that paid the subsidized price for the same phone. This leads me to the opinion that, if they’re going to insist on subsidizing phone prices, you should be able to buy the phone unsubsidized – no questions asked – and be able to get lower rates on your voice and data services. That doesn’t sound too enticing to the carriers, but it is fair to the consumer and I almost guarantee it would draw in more customers. It almost has to happen this way for the simple fact that users are viewing the current model as getting screwed. An example to back up this claim…

John Doe walks into a Verizon store and buys a Motorola Droid for the subsidized price of $200 w/2-Year Service Agreement and $350 ETF. John Doe is reasonably pleased with his phone and service until a cell tower near his residence starts to malfunction. He starts consistently dropping calls and getting otherwise poor service where he lives. Verizon at this stage refuses to acknowledge that a problem exists in his area. After weeks of argument with the carrier, John Doe drops his Verizon service, opens an account and buys a new phone with T-Mobile. Because he terminated his service before his contract is up, Verizon charges him a $350 ETF minus $10 for every month he stayed with Verizon before cancelling. Verizon is simply recouping the rest of the phone sale. However, John Doe views this as being penalized for having to find a new carrier that provides better service because Verizon wasn’t providing him with the service he needed; in that assumption, I can’t disagree with John Doe. If he wasn’t being provided with good service, he shouldn’t be penalized. By the same fact though, Verizon has a right to recoup the cost of the phone. The solution??? STOP SELLING SUBSIDIZED PHONES!!!

Lastly, I’d like to bring your attention to a problem with the way some carriers employ their contracts. Carriers will use their contracts to insert hidden restrictions and limits that users are blissfully unaware of until they’ve violated said restriction or limit. Granted this happens with contracts in any industry, but it’s disgusting none the less. Let me feed you a couple of quotes out of AT&T’s latest posted contract online. Keep in mind that I have in no way edited these excerpts. They are quoted verbatim straight out of the contract:

Offnet Usage: If your voice or messaging service usage (including unlimited services) during any two consecutive months or data service usage (including unlimited services) during any month on other carrier networks ("offnet usage") exceeds your offnet usage allowance, AT&T may, at its option, terminate your service, deny your continued use of other carriers' coverage, or change your plan to one imposing usage charges for offnet usage. Your offnet usage allowance is equal to the lesser of 750 minutes or 40% of the Anytime Minutes, the lesser of 24 MB or 20% of the MB included with your plan, or the lesser of 3000 messages or 50% of the messages included with your plan. AT&T will provide notice that it intends to take any of the above actions, and you may terminate the agreement.

Roaming: Roaming charges for wireless data or voice service may be charged with some plans when outside AT&T's wireless network. Display on your device will not indicate whether you will incur roaming charges. Services originated or received while outside your plan's included coverage area are subject to roaming charges. Use of Services when roaming is dependent upon roaming carrier's support of applicable network technology and functionality. Check with roaming carriers individually for support and coverage details. Billing for domestic and international roaming usage may be delayed up to three billing cycles due to reporting between carriers. If your usage of the Services on other carriers' wireless networks ("offnet usage") during any month exceeds your offnet usage allowance, AT&T may at its option terminate your wireless service or access to data Services, deny your continued use of other carriers' coverage, or change your plan to one imposing usage charges for offnet usage. Your offnet usage allowance is equal to the lesser of 24 megabytes or 20% of the kilobytes included with your plan and for messaging plans the lesser of 3000 messages or 50% of the messages included with your plan. AT&T will provide notice that it intends to take any of the above actions and you may terminate your agreement. You may be required to (1) use a device programmed with AT&T's preferred roaming database; and (2) have a mailing address and live in the United States, Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Pay special attention to the highlighted portion under roaming; it’s intentionally vague. What this is really telling you is that AT&T is masking its native coverage area from its users. If you go into an “offnet” mode – meaning you’re now on a partner’s network instead of AT&T – your phone will continue to indicate that you have AT&T service. I myself have experienced this issue first hand. This wouldn’t be an issue if AT&T posed no restrictions on partner usage, but you can clearly see that they impose some pretty stringent ones if you read the portion about “Offnet Usage”.

The long and the short of it is basically this… AT&T says that it doesn’t have to tell you when you’ve entered a partner coverage area, but also has the right to cut off your service if you pass your partner usage caps. I question the legality of this all together. How can you reasonably expect users to stay within stringent usage caps if said users have no idea that they're using partner coverage? I posed that question to both the FCC and AT&T in late 2009 and really got nowhere – though I did manage to evade paying my ETF with this little bit of information. AT&T shouldn’t be able to have it both ways and I, in fact, call this false advertisement. If any AT&T execs are reading this, YOU’RE LYING TO YOUR USERS. If someone went after them with a lawsuit over this, I wouldn’t be shocked. I digress though.

Billing:
I won’t take too long on this subject. It’s something that affects everybody at some point in their contract and is relatively easy to fix. As it stands, billing is not a simple matter, but it is getting better. I have seen articles recently relating to users that are experiencing “Bill Shock” which is what happens when either you exceed your usage limits or they make a mistake on your bill.

In any case, the easy remedy to this is a simple text message or telephone reminder to the user when they’re about to pass their limits. Some carriers do this, but others haven’t reached that point yet. This should, however, be something done across the industry. It just seems like a good and fair practice. As far as billing errors, I have zero ideas. They’re called errors for a reason. My best suggestion is to confront your carrier and make them fix the error. If these errors keep reoccurring, make some noise. You’re paying them for a service and they aren’t doing a very good job of providing it to you.

The Overall Solution to These Problems:
I’m sure you are now all in awe – sarcasm intended – about how broken this industry is after reading this post. For the blissfully ignorant, I apologize for opening your eyes to the industries misguided ways. In many cases, I wish I didn’t know most of this myself. However, there is a solution and it’s to turn the industry upside down. It calls for a complete overhaul and restructuring of the entire system, but I believe the government could reasonably enforce this solution and America would be all the better for it. Here it is:

Turn this industry into what it actually is becoming; a utility – well, sort of. Think about it. You’re paying them to provide you with a service. As it stands right now, this isn’t happening. Granted, you are getting a phone and minutes to make calls with. However, you’re also getting orders dictated to you about what you can and cannot do with said service. The last time I looked, this wasn’t the same way with wired broadband; as long as I’m not performing illegal activities and I pay my bill, I’m provided with bandwidth and my broadband provider leaves me alone. Is it really too much to ask for this from my wireless provider? This industry needs to be split into three groups to ensure proper consumer rights and competitiveness across the board.

The first group would be infrastructure. This group would be a single, government controlled entity. Their job would be simple… The implementation, maintenance and generational upgrades of ONE wireless network across the whole nation. This would ensure that the entire continental US – plus Alaska and Hawaii – would be covered with cellular voice and data services. This also ensures that one type of cellular network technology standard makes it easy for handset manufacturers to design phones – no more arguments about CDMA vs. GSM and how will LTE be backwards compatible on both technologies. Lastly, this takes QoS problems away from the carriers and puts it squarely upon those managing the infrastructure or those manufacturing the handsets. No more going around in circles with your carrier to figure out where the problem is coming from. If something is going on with a tower, every carrier is going to hear from users about it and be able to relay this information to get the issue fixed.

The second group would be the carriers. This group would remain a private industry. These carriers would all run off the same cellular infrastructure and would simply provide the user with cellular service plans. Each carrier would be required to contribute monies toward the maintenance and generational upgrades of the infrastructure. This ensures competitiveness across the carriers as each will be providing the same coverage. Whoever can provide the best plans and prices gets the most users. They will simply exist to provide access to the infrastructure and basic support for any issues the user is having with billing or services.

The last group will be the handset manufacturers. No longer will they design phones to the carrier’s specs. They will, instead, build handsets as they design and see fit. Since the infrastructure and technologies related to it will be the same across the nation, you will be able to buy whatever phone you wish – unsubsidized – and use it with whichever carrier you see as best suiting your needs. This will also inspire direct competition between manufacturers with new handset technologies. If you want to sell phones, you better keep up with the curve or stay ahead of it. This also ensures that prices for handsets will come down since the manufacturers will be directly competing for consumers.

For the “small government’s best” readers, I hear your cries about further unneeded government takeover of another industry. To those with this concern, please give this some consideration anyway. I'm not a huge fan of government control over anything, but this industry has had its chance and has failed miserably. I mean, honestly, what would you rather have; a government take over that ends in consumer protection and good service – with the added bonus of free market competition – or continue with the current model and continue to get screwed by companies that are just out to make a buck? This is NOT simply a free market, for profit, business anymore. This is a utility that is vital to how other companies and people function; it needs to be treated as such.

If this model could be implemented then issues with coverage, voices services, data services, messaging services, contracts, phone exclusivity, and ETFs would all go away. Users would get the handsets they want, the service they want, and not get raked over the coals for it anymore. True competition between carriers and between handset manufacturers would ensue and the world would be at peace – stranger things have happened. Will this kind of change ever occur? I can’t answer that question. I’ll I can do is throw out the facts, make suggestions and wait to see what happens. One thing is certain though… If everyone would speak out, things would get better much more quickly.

Final Thoughts:
For everyone out there, I do have a few suggestions until a better way can be found. DO YOUR RESEARCH. Don’t just jump out there and get service based on the phone you think you want. Find out who provides the best coverage and services in your area. There are a plethora of user and professional reviews for the different carriers all over the internet. If you travel a lot, make sure you’ll be able to get service in your regularly visited areas.

Also make sure to plan ahead about which voice and/or data plan you’re going to get. If you have service now, monitor your usage before switching carriers so you can properly select a new plan. And never let any salesman talk you into buying a more expensive plan than you need; the same goes for phones. Remember that many of the stores are employing people on commission. They’re out to make a buck on your unpreparedness; so, don’t get caught.

Once you have selected your carrier and plan, do some research about their phones. Don’t just buy the latest and greatest phone out there. Read consumer reviews on any phone sold by your carrier in which you may be interested. If you have the money, then buy the phone unsubsidized – assuming they’ll let you. This keeps you from having to sign a contract and will save you headaches in the future if you start having troubles with service. If you can follow these guidelines, it’ll go a long way toward improving your satisfaction with cellular phone service.





Feel free to post your comments/opinions about this subject – even if they differ. Sharing any opinion about this subject means I have succeeded in engaging you on a subject I’m very passionate about and I welcome that.