Comments on: Merger, shmerger, where's my ESPN phone?

As traditional phone operators jockey for dominance, new technology helps make up for lost competition.

[EENetminder]

You don't know the half of it

In early December, I registered a cell phone with AT&T that allegedly was good everywhere in the country, in preparation for a 3-week trip to Missouri, so I wouldn't get clobbered with roaming charges on my regular cell phone. I wasn't able to use the phone anywhere except in larger cities (Amarillo, Texas isn't one of them) because I wasn't in an AT&T area.

About halfway through the trip, I got an email from SBC, my landline provider, that showed that I had "added services". Not knowing what they were, when I got home, I called. After finding out that it was a standard response to a piece of mail they had sent and that I had returned, the nice lady asked if there was "anything else SBC could do", to which I replied, "Yes, if you can provide cell phone service."

She signed me up, on Jan 10, with Cingular, and migrated my existing account over from AT&T. She was supposed to send me two new phones, too.

On Jan 21, I still didn't have them, so I called, only to find out they'd shipped them to the wrong address (in a town two hours away, to an address that doesn't exist). On Jan 28, my existing phone stopped connecting; despite the fact that the phone says Welcome to AT&T, and then shows Cingular, and despite the fact that their computers show my account, their system apparently doesn't recognize my phone (which had worked fine the day before) as being part of their system.

And I still don't have the new phones.

The whole SBC/Cingular/AT&T mess is beginning to remind me why Ma Bell was broken up in the first place; it takes them a few hours or days for billions of dollars to change hands -- but the phones don't work, and nobody can tell you what's going on.

Eric Peterson

[OldFartPeter]

Cingular doesn't like Virtual Networks?

I signed up with T-Mobile in California about 2.5 years ago, and at that time T-Mobile was using the Cingular network in CA (and elsewhere, I believe) to fill holes in their own network. So much for not supporting MVNOs. In was concerned about the impact of the ATT-Wireless&Cingular merger, but my personal expert on the subject (who also has T-Mobile service in CA) assured me that the service would be transferred as necessary.

However, as of about Jan 28th, my service, which has mainly worked very well in Canada, the UK, Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, etc., and fairly well in much of the USA, developed a new "feature", where on making or answering a call, the communication was all one way (i.e. I could hear them, but they could not hear me), for long enough thay would hang up, though after about 60 secs the connection would become two way, and work as normally. Since all but one (now 2) of my 15-20 calls since had "worked" this way, I finally called the "Customer Service" number, from whence I learned that "about 18 towers in my area had a technical problem", though not the one where I live (where many of the calls had been based).
So maybe Cingular have just discovered their "no MVNO support" policy?

What happens when my wife's ex-Cellular-One then ATT-W now Cingular (TDMA) phone gets converted to the new (GSM) system?

[caiger]

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Try it out

Robert