I have not seen OnStar as a topic yet. I was curious about other's thoughts with this technology.

As a cellular phone, I think the hands free system is great. The minutes are expensive (when compared to generic celluar rates), but you do get nationwide calling service.

I've not used the other features yet, and have only pressed the OnStar button once to sign the system up. I question the usefulness of such features as 'direction' service when we're already looking at a navigation screen. The 911 red button is nice, but not advantageous over a regular cellular phone (that we all have). It seems like a lot of the OnStar's features are negated or made redundant by the navigation system. I'd probably have a different opinion if I were 108 years old and thought nothing about money - but then I probably wouldn't be driving my six speed CL-S...

Will I renew this next year? Maybe, but just for the cell phone service, and that is probably not financially sound. If they drop the rates, that'd be a different story.

By the way, the cellular phone number they gave me is a Philly cellular number from Verizon - you can here the Verizon message come on when you call the car and the car is turned off. I wonder how they justify the price of the OnStar celluar minutes when I carry a Verizon cellular phone on my hip that gives me a gazillion nationwide minutes per month for about a dollar a day - plus I get voice mail to boot.

 

i'm still waiting for my 03 with navi and onstar but i think i'm going to abuse it for the first free year just to test it out .what are some of the other features of having onstar?

 

Only good use I can see to it, is the ability to call them up in case you forgot to lock your doors and you are away from the car or you locked your keys into your car and they'll unlock it for you. Other than that I've got Navi and I've got a cell phone already.

Will I renew? Newp, that money will be put to the navi upgrade disk (if it's deemed major enough of an upgrade).

 

Its more expensive because its analog. Other than the door unlocking, I just don't see the point when you have a cell phone and navi unless you're too technophobic to use either.

 

That makes no sense whatsoever. Analog technology (at least at the consumer end) is not more expensive than digital. Most carriers provide service for both (like the multi-mode phone I carry on my hip that goes to analog when there is no digital signal).

You may be comparing PCS technology to cellular. PCS is slightly cheaper (for the consumer) but I would agree with OnStar's choice of cellular - better penetration throughout the country and in urban environments than PCS. Cellular uses a longer wavelength carrier signal than PCS.

As long as your car is powering the sucker, who cares if it is digital or analog?

 

If you call on your cell in an emergency, you can not be tracked. You probably won't have enough time to find out where u are using the nav. And if you did, it would take up time. Now with Onstar 911, they already know where u are and will quickly dispatch somebody. If you move, they will follow. Much more efficient.

Also, if you follow your tech/cell phone news you will hear about Mobile 911. A very important system that keeps being delayed.

 

I think the Navi really reduces the benefit of OnStar. I'd rather trust the Navi's directions than those given to me by someone making minimum wage reading a Mapquest screen in a GM call center. The air bag deployment sensor, SOS button, auto door unlock service, and vehicle tracking all have value though and IMHO are worth the extra $125 added to the Navi only price. At some point in the not too distant future, OnStar and it's competitors are going to have to go digital. Who knows what that will mean to current users.

 

Haven't you seen the movies? You can so be tracked on your cell phone. Stupid Hollywood...

(to an extent you can be tracked, but not to the accuracy as the movies let you believe)

 

They may not charge you extra for using your digital handset in analog mode, but it does cost them extra. Look at cellular rates before digital cam along. $20/mo for 20 minutes and $.079-$0.99/min? Digital technology packs more calls in a given bandwidth, lowering the cost per call for the carrier. Since On-Star's carrier knows its an analog system and will suck up more bandwidth, they charge appropiately.

 

I wouldn't say the advent of digital cell phone technology directly played into the rates dropping. It was more of the competition involved when the PCS carriers came into battle with the standard A & B carriers.

Back before PCS players were around, the standard carriers were raking in the big bucks. Of that $1/min, I'd say only 10c of that went to maintenance and equipment costs.

 

I think you're forgetting the stolen vehicle tracking, and the insurance discounts that come along with that.
Also the airbag notification, and the remote diagnostics.

Those are some of the larger points I took into consideration when I got my 2003 instead of getting a cheap 2002 with navi without onstar (among more important things of course)

 

I got no added discount on my insurance with OnStar or LoJack (my insurance is already discounted though for a variety of other reasons).

With respect to a handheld mobile phone: the cellular/PCS providers can easily identify what 'cell' you a located in which narrows your location down to a rather narrow area.

I do agree that the OnStar 911 would probably narrow you down more effectivly if it really does read out your GPS location from the Navigation unit.

I would guess that the real usefulness of the OnStar system (not the cellular phone, but the OnStar network) would only occur when our car breaks down or you lock yourself out in the middle of nowhere - but then who are you going to call? OnStar or Acura TLC - I'm calling Acura while my car is under warrenty so they can foot the bill.

 

Yeap, I only get $8 off my 6 month premium for having the OnStar. Plus my ins co. said they don't verify if I keep the service. So as long as I signed up with it orginally...

Yeah you can also triangulate (that part is true in the movies & the phone doesn't have to be in use, just powered on, but that makes it harder) but it takes monitoring of the system real time, and its not an exact science. The cell's coverage area isn't a perfect circle (or pie shaped for a cell's sector) because of the terrain and reflections off tall objects.

 

I can give you some insight on PCS phones and location based services. I'm not the expert in the system and towers area (Fotis can chime in there) but I can tell you about the "handset" part.

In today's telematics, when you buy a Lexus or BMW or Mercedes, first you get to choose which carrier you want. Not so on Acura? Oh well, the system is certainly digital on the calls but the 911 call is still analog. How do I know this? Because when I was working with the Motorola phones in the aforementioned vehicles, they had to be dual-band/dual-mode phones so that they could go into analog mode for an emergency call. But I do believe the calls were placed in digital mode. Since the Acura system has no phone attached, all the calls might be in analog only. Nobody has a Nationwide analog system except Verizon, so I think price is not going to be negotiable.

Is analog mode superior to digital mode in tracking, today? I don't know, I don't think so but right now the only feasible way in with the triangulation method in the cellular world. But all digital phones have this ability to track, too. If you get into the "debug" mode of your digital phone, you'll be able to read the GPS coordinates of the tower you are talking to. But that's no good since that tower can be over a mile away. Tracking an analog phone is no easy task either. How does OnStar do it? I don't know but when I hit the button in a Mercedes, they were able to tell me almost exactly where I was located.

In the future (and the future is already here for some Sprint phones), there's a GPS antenna right in the phone that will send the GPS coordinates to the emergency officials. But the system has to support this also, not just the handsets. There is a mandate from the Federal Gvt that requires all handsets and systems to abide by October 2002. We're almost there, no one else including Verizon is even close and in fact, they're not going to make it. So no GPS for digital this year (officially). I think Verizon is trying to accomplish another method for position location besides GPS that will get a pretty close approximation of your calling location. This is important (the accuracy) because when you call from your handheld in an apartment building, police have to know which apartment; which floor; even which room. Eventually the digital phone will the phone for choice for tracking and GPS and location based services and the new 3G network. What does this mean? You'll be able to have services pushed to your Navi instead of you requesting them. Drive by your local Acura dealership and get a maintenance reminder on the screen. Live traffic reports on the Navi. YOU progam the icons that appear on your Navi from your personal Navi homepage. Show me the Taco Bell and Texaco icons all over town, delete the Wendy's and Shell icons. All kinds of cool stuff.

Sorry back on topic. Do analog calls cost more than digital calls? We'll we all know from Business 101 that your cost structure is based on a number of factors. What you are charging the consumer is not necessarily what it's costing you (sometimes it's not even relative). But I'm thinking that a "major" factor in an analog vs. digital call is bandwidth and capacity; and digital wins when it comes to bandwidth and capacity. That's why Verizon will soon scrap the entire analog network and covert it to completely digital because it is costing them to keep it up and going (granted there's maintenance, billing, etc. on analog) but those callers are costing them. I can't honestly say that an analog calls "costs" more than a digital call, but everyone is charging more for them. So in the wireless industry, analog costs more than digital. When the analog network is gone, OnStar should already be fully digital by then. Will it be able to fall back to analog when there is no digital signal available (in places like BFE Kansas)? Probably not.

 

i used to hate onstar because i thought the antenna was ugly and the service was worthless however my friends escalade has onstar and its pretty cool they will order your movies for you keep a credirt card on file for you make your dinner reservations (locate your whip if its stolen) plus a lot of other cool shit like unlock your doors if you get locked out etc...and in the recent months since ive checkin for my next prospective ride ive grown to like the onstar antenna

 

my last company was devloping w/ nextel to integrate j2me (java) phones w/ onstar. w/ your nextel phone you would be able to tell if any of your family member's equipped w/ onstar has had any air bags deployed, start the car, unlock the car etc....

 

Granted I've been out of the cellular industry for a while (circa 98), but I would venture to say it's more of a cost thing with the older technology. For example, there's little to no demand for an AMPS transceiver nowadays, therefore a dwiddling supply. So when one goes bad in an analog base station, the price of a new one is a lot more than what it used to be. But back in the hayday of analog cellular in the early 90s they were cheap comparatively.

This same thing will happen with 2G networks if 3G ever gets rolling.

But yeah, definitely the capacity thing is an issue, that's the major reason carriers went to digital.

That's crazy to think they are converting their system to all digital. That's gonna cost them lots. Especially in BFE where they currently have one analog tower per 5-10 miles. Are they going to put in place the 5+ digital towers needed to replace that one? Or are the customers there SOL?

 

Dude, you hit the nail on the head. Verizon doesn't have a choice, they are going to have to replace that entire analog system and yes, it's going to cost them a little bit of change and it's going to be passed onto YOU, the Verizon customer. Unfortunately they don't have a choice. Australia has already started doing it:
article.

I'm already starting to see digital phones that don't have analog in them. The customers on the analog network are costing Verizon and the digital customers who roam for free on analog are costing the Company. Verizon is already starting to squeeze out the analog customers in favour of the digital customers, eventually there won't be anything left. How long will it take? Maybe 7-10 years but it's going to happen. In the next decade, analog will disappears completely. And that's in every single square centimeter of this country, including Alaska. There will be places that will go uncovered perhaps or maybe there's a satellite fallback.