Phone calls have made a comeback in the pandemic. While the nation's biggest telecommunications providers prepared for a huge shift toward more internet use from home, what they didn't expect was an even greater surge in plain old voice calls, a medium that had been going out of fashion for years. From a report: Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother's Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year. Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times. In contrast, internet traffic is up around 20 percent to 25 percent from typical daily patterns, AT&T and Verizon said.

The rise is stunning given how voice calls have long been on the decline. Some 90 million households in the United States have ceased using landline phones since 2000, according to USTelecom. Wireless calls replaced much of that calling activity, but the volume of minutes spent on phone calls hasn't changed much over the past decade as people turned to texting and to apps like FaceTime and WhatsApp, according to wireless carriers and analysts.

Google's video game streaming platform, Stadia, is now free to anyone with a Gmail address, the company announced on Wednesday. To sweeten the deal, Google is also giving new users two months of Stadia Pro -- including access to nine games -- for free. From a report: Existing Stadia Pro subscribers won't be charged for the next two months of the service, Google said. Previously, access to Stadia required purchasing the $129 Google Stadia Premiere Edition, a bundle that includes a Chromecast Ultra, a wireless Stadia Controller, and three months of Stadia Pro, the service that offered free games and video streams up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second with HDR lighting.

According to The Verge, Verizon is canceling scheduled appointments for internet installation and repairs, "[leaving] Fios subscribers without wired internet at a time when they're likely relying on it for work and to see friends and family during the COVID-19 pandemic." From the report: "We are minimizing our in-home installation work to critical needs to keep our employees and customers safe and to reduce the spread of COVID-19," Verizon says in a support document. "To reduce the spread of COVID-19 and keep our employees and customers safe, we are making every attempt to perform work without going into homes or small businesses and are limiting in-home installs to medical emergencies and critical installations," Verizon tells The Verge in a statement. Self-install options are also available for "qualified service orders," the company added.

However, Verizon actually changed the language in the support document sometime on Tuesday morning, according to Business Insider. Previously, the site said that "our technicians will not be able to enter your home or business to install new services or to do repair work." Here is the previous language, from a version of the page archived on Monday: "As a result of COVID-19, we are taking precautions to keep our employees and customers safe. At this time, our technicians will not be able to enter your home or business to install new services or to do repair work. Qualified orders will be provided self-install options, or you may proceed with placing an order for a technician-required installation and it will be held for future appointment priority. You will receive notification to select an installation date when we resume operations."

Sony has revealed the DualSense, PlayStation 5's new controller that will "bring a sense of touch to PS5 gameplay." IGN reports: Announced on PlayStation.Blog, the DualSense will keep "much of what gamers love about DualShock 4 intact, while also adding new functionality and refining the design." Touch was a big inspiration when designing the DualSense, and haptic feedback is one of the ways this new controller will help bring PS5 games to life. Sony mentions that this feedback will add " a variety of powerful sensations you'll feel when you play, such as the slow grittiness of driving a car through mud." Adaptive triggers have also been incorporated to the L2 and R2 buttons, which will help players "feel the tension of your actions, like when drawing a bow to shoot an arrow."

The angle of the hand triggers were changed and some subtle updates were made to the grip. One thing that will be missing from the DualSense is the "Share" button that was featured on the DualShock 4. Sharing from the controller is not gone, but that previous button was replaced by the new "Create" button. Sony promises more details will be revealed on this change as we get closer to PlayStation 5's launch. DualSense will also have a built-in microphone array that will allow players to easily chat with friends, even for those who don't own a headset.

As for the controller's color, it is a bit of a non-traditional design as far as PlayStation is concerned. Usually, PlayStation controllers have a single color, but the DualSense has a two-toned design to make it stand apart. Additionally, the position of the light bar, which will be returning, was moved to "give it an extra pop." Now, the light bar sits on either side of the touch pad, as opposed to the top of the controller. Here's a picture of the front of the controller:

TracFone Wireless is facing a potential $6 million fine for allegedly defrauding a government program that provides discount telecom service to poor people. Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission proposed the fine against TracFone yesterday, saying the prepaid wireless provider obtained FCC Lifeline funding by "enroll[ing] fictitious subscriber accounts." TracFone improperly sought and received more than $1 million from Lifeline, the FCC said. The FCC press release said:

"TracFone's sales agents -- who were apparently compensated via commissions for new enrollments -- apparently manipulated the eligibility information of existing subscribers to create and enroll fictitious subscriber accounts. For example, TracFone claimed support for seven customers in Florida at different addresses using the same name, all seven of whom had birth dates in July 1978 and shared the same last four Social Security Number digits. The Enforcement Bureau's investigation also found that, in 2018, TracFone apparently sought reimbursement for thousands of ineligible subscribers in Texas. Today's proposed fine is based on the 5,738 apparently improper claims for funding that TracFone made in June 2018 and includes an upward adjustment in light of the company's egregious conduct in Florida." TracFone said it would respond "at the appropriate time" in an effort to reduce or eliminate the proposed fine. The company also said "we take seriously our stewardship of public dollars and will continue to focus on connecting millions of low-income customers to school, jobs, healthcare, and essential social services," according to Reuters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Telecoms engineers are facing verbal and physical threats during the lockdown, as baseless conspiracy theories linking coronavirus to the roll-out of 5G technology spread by celebrities such as Amanda Holden prompt members of the public to abuse those maintaining vital mobile phone and broadband networks. Facebook has removed one anti-5G group in which users were being encouraged to supply footage of them destroying mobile phone equipment, with some contributors seemingly under the pretense that it may stop the spread of coronavirus and some running leaderboards of where equipment had been targeted.

Video footage of a 70ft (20 meter) telephone mast on fire in Birmingham this week has also circulated widely alongside claims it was targeted by anti-5G protesters. Network operator EE told the Guardian that its engineers were still on site assessing the cause of the fire but it "looks likely at this time" that it was an arson attack. The company said it would be working with the police to find the culprits. The problem has become so bad that engineers working for BT Openreach, which provides home broadband services, have also taken to posting public pleas on anti-5G Facebook groups asking to be spared the on-street abuse as they are not involved in maintaining mobile networks. Industry lobby group Mobile UK said the incidents were affecting efforts to maintain networks that are supporting home working and providing critical connectivity to the emergency services, vulnerable consumers and hospitals. Telecoms engineers are considered key workers under the government's guidelines.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Devices with Wi-Fi 6 started rolling out at the end of 2019, but now, a new vote proposed by the FCC could open up the 6Ghz band to unlicensed wifi and add a massive speed boost to wireless gadgets. Backed by Chairman Pai, the FCC vote is scheduled to take place on April 23rd, and if passed would add 1200MHz of available bandwidth to the usable wifi spectrum which the FCC says would "effectively increase the amount of spectrum available for Wi-Fi almost by a factor of five."

Not only would this improve things like latency and download and uploads speeds, because the 6Ghz band was previously mostly used to support things like wireless backhaul, microwave services, and a limited number of public safety services, new 6GHz wifi devices wouldn't really have to compete with other gadgets for spectrum, unlike the existing 2.4Ghz wifi band which often suffers from interference caused by household appliances. The move is also seeing widespread industry support from a number of groups including the Wi-Fi Alliance, which earlier this year announced the creation of the Wi-Fi 6E which incorporates the 6Ghz band into current wireless standards. A number of tech companies also approve of the proposal, including Qualcomm, Intel, Facebook, Cisco and Apple.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Google will offer 100,000 free Wi-Fi hotspots and will donate 4,000 Chromebooks to students across the state of California, governor Gavin Newsom said during a news conference Wednesday. The internet access points are supposed to help improve broadband internet in rural households across the state where internet access is either limited or very slow. Students will get access to the free Wi-Fi for a minimum of three months.There are still many parts of the state that do not have access to high-speed internet, however. "This was a substantial enhancement that came just at the right time," Newsom said. "We need more Googles," he added. The latest move comes as Newsom announced that California schools will remain closed for the remainder of the school year with many classes switching to online learning.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Huawei is still using components made by U.S. companies in its newest flagship smartphone, a Financial Times teardown has found, despite the U.S. all but blacklisting the Chinese telecoms equipment manufacturer. The teardown was done by XYZone, a Shenzhen-based company that disassembles smartphones and identifies the suppliers of their components. The biggest surprise was that some parts from U.S. companies were still ending up in the newest Huawei smartphone, despite the U.S. all but banning its companies from selling to the Chinese tech company.

The P40's radio-frequency front-end modules were, according to XYZone's teardown analysis, produced by Qualcomm, Skyworks, and Qorvo, three U.S. chip companies. RF front-end modules are critical parts of the phone that are attached to the antennas and required to make calls and connect to the Internet. The Qualcomm component is covered by a license from the U.S. Commerce Department, according to a person familiar with the company. [...] The "Entity List" designation means that U.S. companies have to apply for a license to export any U.S.-origin technologies to Huawei. The U.S. government has granted a "temporary general license" to its companies, allowing them to sell to Huawei to service existing products -- helping clients such as telecoms carriers that may need to replace parts of their wireless equipment. But the general license does not cover sales for the purpose of making new products, such as the P40 smartphone. For that, companies must seek individual licenses, and the Department of Commerce has not said which ones it has granted them to. A spokesperson for Huawei said the company has "always complied with any export control regulations of various countries, including the United States" and that "all the product materials are obtained legally from our global partners, and we insist on working with our partners to provide consumers with high quality products and services."

Also missing from the P40 are parts from U.S. chipmaker Micron. "Micron made the storage devices called NAND flash memory chips for some batches of last year's P30 smartphone, and South Korea's Samsung made the same chips for other batches," reports Ars. "The FT's copy of this year's P40 Pro appears to have only Samsung NAND flash memory chips."

Long-time technology pundit Robert Cringely writes: IT — Information Technology — grew out of something we called MIS — Management Information Systems — but both meant a kid in a white shirt who brought you a new keyboard when yours broke. Well, the kid is now gone, sent home with everyone else, and that kid isn't coming back... ever. IT is near death, fading by the day. But don't blame COVID-19 because the death of IT was inevitable. This novel coronavirus just made it happen a little quicker...

Amazon has been replacing all of our keyboards for some time now, along with our mice and our failed cables, and even entire PCs. IT has been changing steadily from kids taking elevators up from the sub-basement to Amazon Prime trucks rolling-up to your mailbox. At the same time, our network providers have been working to limit their truck rolls entirely. Stop by the Comcast storefront to get your cable modem, because nobody is going to come to install it if you aren't the first person living there to have cable...

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) extends both the network and a security model end-to-end over any network including 4G or 5G wireless. Some folks will run their applications in their end device, whether it is a PC, phone, tablet, whatever, and some will run their applications in the same cloud as SASE, in which case everything will be that much faster and more secure. That's end end-game if there is one — everything in the cloud with your device strictly for input and output, painting screens compressed with HTML5. It's the end of IT because your device will no longer contain anything so it can be simply replaced via Amazon if it is damaged or lost, with the IT kid in the white shirt becoming an Uber driver.

Since COVID-19 is trapping us in our homes it is forcing this transition to happen faster than it might have. But it was always going to happen.

sixoh1 shared this story from the Wall Street Journal: Home internet and wireless connectivity in the U.S. have largely withstood unprecedented demands as more Americans work and learn remotely. Broadband and wireless service providers say traffic has jumped in residential areas at times of the day when families would typically head to offices and schools. Still, that surge in usage hasn't yet resulted in widespread outages or unusually long service disruptions, industry executives and analysts say. That is because the biggest increases in usage are happening during normally fallow periods.

Some service providers have joked that internet usage during the pandemic doesn't compare to the Super Bowl or season finale of the popular HBO show "Game of Thrones" in terms of strain on their networks, Evan Swarztrauber, senior policy adviser to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said this week on a call hosted by consulting company Recon Analytics Inc.Broadband consumption during the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m . has risen by more than 50% since January, according to broadband data company OpenVault, which measured connections in more than one million homes. Usage during the peak early-evening hours increased 20% as of March 25. OpenVault estimates that average data consumption per household in March will reach nearly 400 gigabytes, a nearly 11% increase over the previous monthly record in January....

Some carriers that use cells on wheels and aerial network-support drones after hurricanes or tornadoes are now deploying those resources to neighborhoods with heavy wireless-service usage and places where health-care facilities need additional connectivity. Several wireless carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile US Inc. and AT&T Inc. have been given temporary access to fresh spectrum over the past week to bolster network capacity.
While Netflix is lowering its video quality in Canada, the Journal reports Netflix isn't as worried about the EU: Netflix Vice President Dave Temkin, speaking on a videoconference hosted by the network analytics company Kentik, said his engineers took some upgrades originally planned for the holiday season near the end of 2020 and simply made them sooner. A European regulator earlier this month asked Netflix to shift all its videos to standard-definition to avoid taxing domestic networks. Mr. Temkin said Netflix managed to shave its bandwidth usage using less drastic measures. "None of it is actually melting down," he said.
And the article also has stats from America's ISPs and cellphone providers:

• AT&T said cellular-data traffic was almost flat, with more customers using their home wi-fi networks instead -- but voice phone calls increased as much as 44%.
• Charter saw increases in daytime network activity, but in most markets "levels remain well below capacity and typical peak evening usage."
• Comcast says its peak traffic increased 20%, but they're still running at 40% capacity.

Data shows that people all over the U.S. are doing the same thing. Verizon says it has seen an average of 800 million wireless calls daily on recent weekdays, nearly twice the volume of Mother's Day. From a report: And we're not just calling people more often, we're talking on the phone for longer: AT&T says that wireless voice minutes on Monday were up 39% from the average Monday, and Wi-Fi calling minutes were 78% higher. Thanks to coronavirus, we're no longer in transit, unable to answer a call. We're not physically in the office so, sure, why not jump on the phone to catch up with a friend or colleague between work tasks? There's no stepping out for lunch, no "Let's just cover this in person next time we see one another," because we don't actually know when that will be.

Pretty much the only reason you can't reach someone these days is because they're on another call. We're also feeling more isolated and increasingly concerned about the people we love. We want to check in with them more regularly. Texts can be cold and quick; a call is really one of the few ways others can hear the concern in your voice -- and you can hear the concern in theirs. And if you haven't yet changed out of your pajamas or washed your hair in a few days, phone calls beat video chats hands down.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NFC is usually only used to for quick text transfers, like a tap-and-pay transaction at a register or a quick data transfer from an NFC sticker. A company called "Waveshare" is really pushing the limits of NFC, though, with a 7.5-inch e-ink display that gets its data, and its power, from an NFC transfer. The $70 display doesn't have a battery and doesn't need a wired power connection. E-paper (or e-ink) displays have the unique property of not needing power to maintain an image. Once a charge blasts across the display and correctly aligns pixels full of black and white balls, everything will stay where it is when the power turns off, so the image will stick around. You might not have thought about it before, but in addition to data, NFC comes with a tiny wireless power transfer. This display is designed so that NFC provides just enough power to refresh the display during a data transfer, and the e-ink display will hold onto the image afterward.

NFC data transfers max out at a whopping 424 kbit/s. While that's enough for an instant transfer of credit card data or a URL, the 800x400 image the display needs will take several seconds. Waveshare says the display takes five seconds just to refresh, and that doesn't count the data transfer, which will vary depending on how complex your image is. The video shows a start-to-finish refresh that takes 10 seconds. If you want to use a phone, an Android app will convert your image into several different black-and-white styles and beam it to the display. Sadly, there's no iOS app yet. iOS apps didn't have the ability to write to NFC devices for the longest time. Writing to NFC was added with the launch of iOS 13, which only happened a few months ago.

President Trump on Thursday signed into law a bill banning the use of federal funds to purchase equipment from telecom companies deemed a national security threat, such as Chinese telecom group Huawei. From a report: The Secure and Trusted Communications Act, which the Senate passed in February and the House approved last year, will also require the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to establish a $1 billion fund to help small telecom groups remove existing equipment that is deemed to be a threat. "Securing our networks from malicious foreign interference is critical to America's wireless future, especially as some communications providers rely on equipment from companies like Huawei that pose an immense threat to America's national and economic security," the bill's House sponsors, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), ranking member Greg Walden (R-Ore.), and Reps. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.) and Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), said in a statement.

In a conference yesterday, Elon Musk said SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband will have latency below 20 milliseconds -- low enough to support competitive online gaming. "Despite that, the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Latency of less than 20ms would make Starlink comparable to wired broadband service. When SpaceX first began talking about its satellite plans in late 2016, it said latency would be 25ms to 35ms. But Musk has been predicting sub-20ms latency since at least May 2019, with the potential for sub-10ms latency sometime in the future. The amount of bandwidth available will be enough to support typical Internet usage, at least in rural areas, Musk said. "The bandwidth is a very complex question. But let's just say somebody will be able to watch high-def movies, play video games, and do all the things they want to do without noticing speed," he said.

So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink. "The challenge for anything that is space-based is that the size of the cell is gigantic... it's not good for high-density situations," Musk said. "We'll have some small number of customers in LA. But we can't do a lot of customers in LA because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough." [...] On the ground, Starlink's future customers will rely on user terminals that "look like a UFO on a stick," Musk said. The devices will have actuators that let them point themselves in the right direction as long as they're pointed at the sky. "It's very important that you don't need a specialist to install it," Musk said. "The goal is that... there's just two instructions and they can be done in either order: point at sky, plug in." As for the cost, the company previously pointed out that many U.S. residents pay $80 per month for "crappy service," perhaps indicating that Starlink will cost less than that.

Musk also addressed concerns from astronomers who say Starlink's satellites will interfere with astronomical observations. "I am confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries. Zero. That's my prediction. We'll take corrective action if it's above zero," Musk said, adding that SpaceX has worked with astronomers "to minimize the potential for reflection of the satellites."

The Federal Communications Commission announced Friday that it has proposed fining the nation's four largest wireless carriers $200 million for selling access to their customers' location information without taking reasonable measures to protect customers' real-time location information. From a report: The agency is proposing T-Mobile face a fine of more than $91 million. AT&T will be fined more than $57 million. It's fining Verizon more than $48 million. And Sprint's fine will be more than $12 million. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the proposed fines have put wireless carriers on notice that they need to do a better job protecting consumers' privacy. "This FCC will not tolerate phone companies putting Americans' privacy at risk," he said in a statement. Still, the amount of the fines is a drop in the bucket for the nation's carriers. For instance, Verizon reported fourth quarter revenue of $34.78 billion; AT&T reported revenue of $46.82 billion; and T-Mobile reported revenue of $11.88 billion.

An anonymous reader shares a article: Anna Wiener, author of memoir "Uncanny Valley", writes especially well -- with both fluency and astonishment -- about the verbal habits of her peers: "People used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn't fail, they died." She describes a man who wheels around her office on a scooter barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking, proactive technology, parallelization, and the first-mover advantage. "It was garbage language," Wiener writes, "but customers loved him." I know that man, except he didn't ride a scooter and was actually a woman named Megan at yet another of my former jobs. What did Megan do? Mostly she set meetings, or "syncs," as she called them. They were the worst kind of meeting -- the kind where attendees circle the concept of work without wading into the substance of it.

Megan's syncs were filled with discussions of cadences and connectivity and upleveling as well as the necessity to refine and iterate moving forward. The primary unit of meaning was the abstract metaphor. I don't think anyone knew what anyone was saying, but I also think we were all convinced that we were the only ones who didn't know while everyone else was on the same page. In Megan's syncs, I found myself becoming almost psychedelically disembodied, floating above the conference room and gazing at the dozen or so people within as we slumped, bit and chewed extremities, furtively manipulated phones, cracked knuckles, examined split ends, scratched elbows, jiggled feet, palpated stomach rolls, disemboweled pens, and gnawed on shirt collars. The sheer volume of apathy formed an energy of its own, like a mudslide. At the half-hour mark of each hour-long meeting, our bodies began to list perceptibly toward the door. It was like the whole room had to pee. When I tried to translate Megan's monologues in real time, I could feel my brain aching in a physical manner, the way it does when I attempt to understand blockchain technology or do my taxes.

Billions of devices -- many of them already patched -- are affected by a Wi-Fi vulnerability that allows nearby attackers to decrypt sensitive data sent over the air, researchers said on Wednesday at the RSA security conference. From a report: The vulnerability exists in Wi-Fi chips made by Cypress Semiconductor and Broadcom, the latter a chipmaker Cypress acquired in 2016. The affected devices include iPhones, iPads, Macs, Amazon Echos and Kindles, Android devices, Raspberry Pi 3's, and Wi-Fi routers from Asus and Huawei. Eset, the security company that discovered the vulnerability, said the flaw primarily affects Cyperess' and Broadcom's FullMAC WLAN chips, which are used in billions of devices. Eset has named the vulnerability Kr00k, and it is tracked as CVE-2019-15126.

Manufacturers have made patches available for most or all of the affected devices, but it's not clear how many devices have installed the patches. Of greatest concern are vulnerable wireless routers, which often go unpatched indefinitely. "This results in scenarios where client devices that are unaffected (either patched or using different Wi-Fi chips not vulnerable to Kr00k) can be connected to an access point (often times beyond an individual's control) that is vulnerable," Eset researchers wrote in a research paper published on Wednesday. "The attack surface is greatly increased, since an adversary can decrypt data that was transmitted by a vulnerable access point to a specific client (which may or may not be vulnerable itself)."

The app-driven, cloud-connected "smart" pet feeder from Petnet recently suffered an outage that knocked units offline for a week, leaving pets hungry and customers angry. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from Ars Technica: Petnet began posting messages on Twitter on February 14 advising customers that some of its SmartFeeders "will appear offline," although they still would nominally work to dispense food. Of course, when something doesn't work, most people will try to turn it off and back on again, as that's the first-line repair for basically everything with a power switch. That, alas, was not the solution here, and Petnet explicitly advised against turning feeders off or on, adding, "We will continue to provide updates on this matter." The next update to the company's Twitter feed came four days later, on February 18, when it said it was working with a third-party service provider and would "release more information as we learn more." Finally on February 21, a full week after users began to notice something was amiss, Petnet said it had resolved the problem and would be pushing a reset and an update to affected customers.

Users were distinctly unhappy, not only with the outage but also with the company's lack of response and a clear lack of avenues for contacting them. "Does that same third party pick up your phones, answer your emails, pay your lease (property address is available for rent) and support your customers?" one customer tweeted on February 18. Another, on February 21, said, "Why were your emails not delivering? Why isnt anyone answering the phone or returning calls? Your website still claims support Mon-Sat by phone email and twitter. You've been silent for a week." Customers aren't the only ones unable to reach the company. Ars' request for comment sent to the press contact Petnet lists on its company website bounced back with an error indicating the email address does not exist.

Over the weekend, tech reporter Kari Paul from The Guardian got stuck in the California boonies by the Internet of Things. Ars Technica's Jonathan M. Gitlin reports: Paul had rented a car through a local car-sharing service called GIG Car Share, which offers a fleet of hybrid Toyota Priuses and electric Chevrolet Bolt EVs in the Bay Area and Sacramento, with plans to spend the weekend in a more rural part of the state about three hours north of Oakland. But on Sunday, she was left stranded on an unpaved road when the car's telematics system lost its cell signal. Without being able to call home, the rented Prius refused to move.

Adding insult to injury, Paul's cellphone was not similarly troubled by the remote location, allowing her to express her frustration, but also to talk to GIG's customer service to try to get the car back in motion. At first, the company's plan was to send a tow truck to tow the Prius a few miles closer to civilization, but that would be too easy. It appears GIG's customer service unhelpfully suggested Paul and her companion spend the night sleeping in the car and trying to start the car again the next morning. Instead, after a six-hour wait and not one but two tow trucks -- the second of which Paul called herself -- plus 20 (!) calls to GIG, the problem was finally solved in the early hours of Monday morning.