Re: Verizon wants to give me a free phone, or maybe not [telecom]

If all my wife wants to do is use it to make phone calls, why would I care?

My wife hasn't thrown her device away. Although I didn't buy it myself

- it was a gift from one of my relaties - I think that if it says "4G LTE" on it, it should continue to work until the "4G LTE" network is turned off.

Verizon says that only "non-Volte" 4G phones will work. I assume that my wife's phone doesn't meet that requirement, and can't be adapted for it. I'd be delighted to find out I'm wrong.

Verizon won't care that I'm out the ~$270 the network extender cost me, either.

There used to be Gamewell fire alarm boxes on most street corners in the U.S. They were reliable, easy to use, and didn't require much maintenance. They were replaced so that everyone had to have a telephone and be able to call the 911 centers where a new group of civil servants sat at consoles that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, an expenditure which the politicians said would save lives and make everybody safer and increase efficiency, since callers could say what was wrong and therefore could be sent "only the resource that is needed." The fire departments were able to lay off their alarm operators and Morse Code operators (Each Gamewell box has a Morse Code key and sounder in it), and therefore justify spending millions of dollars on new and improved and more sexy radio systems that increased the profits of the companies which made massive campaign contributions to the politicians in the first place.

The actuaries at the companies which underwrite home insurance were less impressed with the change: they raised the insurance rates of the areas that removed the Gamewell boxes, since the 911 system couldn't deal with immigrants whom did not have enough proficiency in English to describe the precise needs of a victim who was being robbed of air by a heart attack, as opposed to one whom had been robbed of money by a thief. The 911 dispatchers were told they would be taught Spanish to "cure" the problem, but not Kurdish or Urdu or Hebrew, so volunteer ambulance companies sprang up to address the needs of various ethnic groups - but they were not, for the most part, allowed to have 911 calls routed to their sites instead of to the 911 Public Safety Access Points where the "professional" operators had to guess at the languages they were hearing and try to add a linguist to the call to figure out precisely which resource was needed.

The last time it broke, I was able to get a used replacement on Ebay for about $35. Of course that's not good for the profits of the companies which sell the new and improved and more sexy sooper-dooper Wiz-Bang 10006se9x replacement models, but I was happy to have a basic phone that could be used without paying a thousand dollars extra.

I think our public servants too often confuse the word "newer" with the word "better." I'll leave it to the readers to think about the reasons why.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Horne
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Am Sat, 20 Aug 2022 15:14:29 +0000 schrieb Bill Horne snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com:

It must also support VoLTE

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be able to do calls in the 4G LTE network.

if it does not support that, it is useless after the shutdown of 2G/3G. This is sad because a huge amount of devices is useless and will be wasted, but the amount of users relying on that technology is very low.

Reply to
Marco Moock

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