A nickel is not a lot of money, but 20 million nickels is...

Think bandwidth. Think expensive satellite bandwidth.

I XM is interrogating the receivers on a periodic basis, it makes sense to
determine which receivers are not being used, and stop interrogating them.

This cuts bandwidth usage, and cuts costs.

(motion of hand shifting gears in an automobile)

When cable television first became available to me, I signed up for it,
along with HBO, the only movie package available at the time.

Then for several month, I would stay up until 3:00 or 4:00 every morning
watching HBO. I figured that since I was paying for it, I was going to get
as much use out of it as possible.

(motion of hand shifting gears in an automobile)

It would seem to me that if you are paying $29.95 or $49.95 per month for
satellite weather, you would want to turn it on at least once or twice a
month just to look at what you're paying for.

And then again, if you aren't using your satellite weather more than once
every couple of months, should you really be flying in conditions where you
would need satellite weather?





"Jose" wrote in message
...
What if you're not near a phone when you discover that you need it and
it's not there? Or if "due to unusual call volume, there will be a
slight delay before our highly trained service representatives can get
to your call."?


Honestly, when is this ever going to be the case? The reasonable
assumption is that if you're going to go flying, you call and activate
it.

No, the reasonable assumption is that if you're paying for the service,
the service will be available. So you want to go flying today, you turn
on the XM weather. No dice. So you call to activate (assuming there's
a phone nearby, which isn't always the case). "Due to unusual call
volume we won't be able to help you until next March".

Imagine if the phone system were like that? "Your records indicate that
you haven't made any calls to Toledo this month, so your phone service
has been deactivated. Please call to reactivate."

Jose
--
Nothing takes longer than a shortcut.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.