AT&T Coverage Versus Verizon Wireless Coverage – What a Difference Wording Makes
AT&T and Verizon have been going back and forth in their advertising lately regarding AT&T cell phone coverage and Verizon’s claims about it. If you missed it, the whole thing started with some television commercials in which Verizon showed AT&T’s coverage map compared to Verizon’s coverage map. The commercials were apparently effective, because not only did AT&T fire up some counter-ads, it also sued.
At issue is the AT&T coverage map shown in Verizon’s ads. The commercials parody the Apple iPhone commercial’s line, "There’s an app for that" with the line, "There’s a map for that." The map in question shows AT&T wireless coverage for its 3G network, the one that is supposed to be handling the iPhone and it’s users because it is a faster data network. With 3G connections, accessing the Internet on an iPhone or any other mobile phone for that matter is much faster than on the old cell phone network technologies.
AT&T sued saying the ads were misleading and then started airing its own ads starring Luke Wilson in which Wilson says that AT&T has way more coverage than shown on that Verizon map. Then, he goes about flinging post cards around the map.
So, what happened? Who is lying, Verizon or AT&T?
The answer, as it often is in marketing, is that no one is technically lying. How can that be possible?
Well, as it turns out the map Verizon shows of AT&T 3G coverage is accurate. In fact, it is lifted from AT&T’s own maps of its 3G coverage area. So, what is AT&T complaining about?
AT&T said in its lawsuit that the ads implied that AT&T cell phone network has no coverage of any kind in the non-red areas on the map. It claims that casual T.V. viewers would be confused by the map and think that AT&T’s dismal 3G coverage was the same as its marginally better coverage with older slower technologies.
The Luke Wilson counter-commercials in which Wilson says, "Verizon has been making an issue about maps," uses a map of AT&T coverage that includes any kind of coverage whatsoever.
So, who is telling the truth?
Well, if you want to use a smartphone, iPhone, or any other mobile phone that accesses the Internet using the latest fast networking technology, then Verizon is telling the truth. You will only get that faster 3G coverage on the map with less red.
If you just want to make a phone call, then AT&T is telling the truth with the map that has a lot more red.
The question is, which is more deceptive? An ad portraying a network better suited to handling the kind of traffic used by "an app for that" showing how bad AT&T’s fast 3G network coverage is, or an ad depicting that ad as inaccurate by showing a map that displays where old network technology should allow any cell phone to at least make a call?
I’m going to give this one to Verizon as being more truthful. They are essentially saying that iPhones aren’t going to work very well in a lot of places because 3G coverage is not available in many locations. While AT&T is trying to show counter that they "cover" a much bigger area without mentioning what kind of coverage they are talking about.
As always, with marketing it comes down to parsing the exact wording in the advertisement.
Firefox Slow Loading Multiple Tabs
I’ve used Firefox for years now and always been very impressed with it. Sure, it was a memory hog, and still is to a certain extent, but in all fairness, when you routinely have over 20 tabs open as you go through your day, you can’t expect a tiny footprint.
However, after a recent ill-advised attempt at speeding up a certain process that uses runs in a browser but isn’t a website per se, by tweaking the Firefox about:config file, I had an issue with my tabs taking forever to load, especially when I tried to open several tabs at once by CTRL-click.
I would click to open multiple tabs and then notice that they just sat there spinning the little circle graphic and taking forever to load.
The culprit?
First, were the lame network.http settings recommended all over the Internet.
Second, was the Speed Dial plug-in.
Speed Dial Plug-In Slows Down Firefox
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Speed Dial plug-in, it is the greatest improvement to Firefox, or any web browser since tabs. Functionality similar to Speed Dial’s should be the default home page of every web browser instead of just a list of the 9 most used or most recently used web sites.
Instead of just a list of sites, like bookmarks, Speed Dial has thumbnails of each site to help both with navigation and to jog your memory about what each site is based on a quick look. It can even be used to tell if a website has been updated with a quick glance. For example, one of my sites in one of my Speed Dial pages is Woot. I can take a quick look and see if it is worth a click to go check out the deal of the day.
The functionality is taken from Opera’s Speed Dial which allows a user to set their own websites on a screen just like the home page for Google Chrome. There are 9 (configurable) spaces per page and multiple pages can be added. They appear along the top as tabs. This allows you to setup your own go-to list of sites according to task or function or time of day, or whatever you want.
I have several groupings ranging from my own sites, to sites with great online deals, to sites with Microsoft news, to sites with webmaster tools, and so on.
Speed Dial Firefox plug-in is very configurable and yet, works great without any configuration if you choose. You can set the name for each website, or have it dynamically generated. You can also configure how the thumbnails are generated.
This is where I got into to trouble. Having never really thought about it, I just set all of my thumbnails to refresh every 1 hour or something like that. For normal users, that might cause any issues, but as a power Internet user, who has come to love Speed Dial, I have 8 pages each with 9 websites on them. For certain tasks, I might open one or two sites from each page. I do this by pressing the control-click combination to open each site in a new tab so I can just get all of the sites launched at once.
So, here is what is happening in the background that I didn’t consider. As I open each page, it has most likely been more than 1 hour, so the thumbnail tries to refresh for all 9 sites on every page. Do the math, and I am trying to open maybe 81 websites if I happen to select one off of each page. That is in addition to whatever I am actually trying to do in the foreground. Depending upon how many “Persistent” connections you have setup and how many total connections, those slow loading webpages probably aren’t loading slow, they are waiting for time-outs to elapse before doing anything.
Setting my Speed Dial thumbnails, particularly those that don’t update in a way that is very readable in the thumbnail, or those that I don’t care what the current page looks like, to only refresh every 14 days or 21 days or whatever, fixes the issue. Now, when I click on the 2nd Speed Dial page maybe only one of the 9 websites is trying to refresh its thumbnail.
By, the way, I put back all of the network.http back to realistic numbers and my Firefox is indeed faster, but pumping them way up doesn’t help anything.
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