Start moving telecom companies from `shop/mobile_phone` to `shop/telecommunication`

Currently ~85-90 of the 111 brands in shop/mobile_phone are telecom companies. IMHO it would be good to move them to shop/telecommunication in order to not have two entries for the same object (which is the case for some of them) and to have a clear separation between the two tags.

[bhousel]

@bhousel is pull request #3130 really the one you intended to reference? Sounds kind of unrelated to me, or am I missing something?

sorry, I meant #3120

I am not going to read this entire thread. I’m getting seriously pissed off at how things are trending on this project, and OSM more generally. Maybe in 2015 or 2017 this was fun, but it’s 2022 now and I don’t have the patience anymore for long philosophical tagging discussions and it isn’t fun anymore.

If you’re here to build a useful open map of the world, then welcome.

If you’re here to argue about what words mean, please leave. Take it to a mailing list, wikipedia talk page, diary post, hold a vote, whatever. Let me know what you decide and I’ll support it if it makes sense and works technically.

I’ll be making changes soon to the NSI project if things continue this way.

[m-hue]

@Adamant36 I’d invite you to obtain a financial statement from one of the telcos. They actually report the revenue from selling devices (Tmobile calls this “Equipment revenues”, Verizon calls it “Wireless equipment revenues”) as well as the cost of the devices they sell ( “Cost of equipment sales” and “cost of wireless equipment” respectively). You’ll be shocked, more often than not equipment sales result in a negative gross profit (=they sell it at a loss). The GP obviously doesn’t even take into account the operating expenses (wages, rent, …) yet. You’d deduct these from the GP to get to net income. If you account for that, the losses would be even steeper. The ~3% profit you typically see in the grocery industry is net profit (=after operating expenses). Most grocers’ GP is significantly higher (e.g. Walmart, Kroger and Publix all reported GP margins between 20% and 25% for Q3/2022, which is not untypical at all). The numbers you’re referencing (8-15% profit on phones, the conclusion that that’s a “pretty high margin compared to other business sectors”, mixing gross and net (?) etc.) make me wonder whether you’re basing these statements on personal assumptions rather than verifiable facts.

Oh, and

I never said unlocked phones don’t exist in the US. “[…]They aren’t really sold in the United States except on Ebay[…]”

kind of came across like you were trying to imply exactly that.

Anyway - you appear to have made up your mind. That’s fine, agree to disagree.

The main point I was trying to make is that this is a great place to document tagging best practices, but not so much to redefine tagging. I think consensus on how things should be tagged needs to be reached elsewhere; especially in situations like these, where the documentation (wiki) is not at all consistent with how things are actually being tagged. I believe we’re on the same page as far as that’s concerned.