Kinky Talk

For about the last 10 years, I have suffered the vagaries of American phone mobile systems. To put it extremely mildly, the American mobile phone system is a turd in a fur coat. Let's examine my experiences so far...

Virgin (running on Sprint) - at Christmas right next to the transmitter, no signal. Go a little out into the countryside and... no signal. They had a great package $25 for 300 minutes and unlimited data. The data was dog slow and I was lucky to find a service.

Family Mobile (Walmart - T-Mobile) - generally good except where my girlfriend lives, where service will be pretty much nil.

Straight Talk (Walmart - AT&T) - runs reasonably well except it keeps turning my phone's wifi on automatically after I have turned it off. No wonder data is vanishing on networks I have passwords for!

Then we have this really kooky thing where AT&T & T-Mobile operate GSM networks but not on GSM 900 and GSM 1800 like the rest of the world. Oh no, America has to be different. GSM 850 and GSM 1900. Not only that but Sprint and Verizon are even kookier - they don't use SIM cards. That's way too user friendly. Instead they issue handsets that are locked to their networks that have no sim cards.

The US phone system is as close to broken as can be. The only thing that currently works for me is my MiFi pad. I don't know what network it's on. It's Straight (aka Kinky) Talk so it could be Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile or AT&T. This is how I connect to the internet to upload photos etc.

As far as the phone system, a connection is a miracle. Sprint won't connect anywhere I go so I dropped Virgin (which piggybacks on Sprint). T-Mobile won't connect at my girlfriend's house. AT&T won't connect at my house. Tonight for example, each message has to be sent 4 times before it actually goes. The connection is up an down like a whore's drawers.

It truly amazes me that America with its complete intolerance of anything remotely crap manages to stumble along with their mobile phone system being such a shameful shambles.

As I have said before, I switched from T-Mobile to AT&T because T-Mobile had negligible reception at my girlfriends house. AT&T seems to make my choices over how my phone operates ineffective by over-riding my choices and my free will!

Jesus Christ, America. Wake up and see the crap you have as a phone system!