“New legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives would require mobile carriers to detail their ‘guaranteed minimum’ data speeds and their network reliability statistics to potential customers,” Grant Gross reports for IDG News Service.
“The Next Generation Wireless Disclosure Act is designed to give mobile customers more information about new 4G services, said Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat and bill sponsor,” Gross reports. “There’s no standard definition of 4G mobile service, giving customers ‘vastly different’ speeds depending on the carrier and location, Eshoo said in a statement.”
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Gross reports, “The bill would require mobile carriers to offer potential and existing customers information on pricing, including caps on so-called unlimited data plans, and it would require carriers to disclose what technologies they use to deliver 4G service. Carriers have marketed several technologies including LTE (Long Term Evolution), WiMax, and HSPA+ (Evolved High-Speed Packet Access) as 4G, Eshoo said. The legislation would require the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to compare the prices and speeds of 4G data service at the 10 largest U.S. mobile carriers and provide consumers with a side-by-side comparison.”
“CTIA, a trade group representing large mobile carriers, said the bill adds a ‘new layer of regulation’ to mobile service. The legislation ignores ‘the fact that wireless is an inherently complex and dynamic environment in which network speeds can vary depending on a wide variety of factors,’ Jot Carpenter, CTIA’s vice president of government affairs, said in a statement,” Gross reports. “Carpenter called on Congress to focus on the ‘real issue’ — making sure carriers have enough wireless spectrum.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
