T-Mobile voice outage?

I have a friend who’s activated several phones online with VZW. I’m no big fan, but you don’t have to go to the store to activate….or do you mean unlocked phones?

I used to wave the “I just put my SIM card in a different phone” thing around until I saw her activate online one day. Still, better selection with GSM.

Hey, I am glad you’re OK with T-mo. Maybe you’ve been luckier than I have. And I appreciate your tips, but DANG, I’m on the edge between Denver and Wheat Ridge and T-mo has given me nothing to work with in terms of patience or understanding.

I don’t go to malls, but I suppose Costco is the same in concept. I’ve been to three costco kiosks, made several phone calls and too many chats to count and it has been a nightmare.

I had vzw before t-mo and I wasn’t crazy about them, either. But they were better than this.

So, being on the fence about other providers, vzw seems to cost, for two of us on a data plan, about $30 more per month than sprint. Point taken.

But their rep for better network, better customer service and great deals on the droid phones, with Eclair, makes the costs seem somehow more palatable.

Bottom line for me is that, essentially, both of my parents are near death and, whatever it costs, I need a phone that works, and if I can support the community and harness android to help my work productivity between trips to Arizona to visit them, all the better.

I am on EDGE throughout most of where I travel, it doesn’t bother me, although I miss the 3G that I got with AT&T, it was practically everywhere where I live, work and travel (sans mountains), I expect in the next year or so, T-mobile will roll out more 3G towers in Colorado.

When I was with Verizon, I have a Blackberry 8830, with unlimited data, with the exception that the browser was lacking and that verizon wouldn’t allow me to use EVDO for larger files greater then 5MB without kicking me off EVDO and 1X and into SOS. I felt restricted so once I was out of the contract I moved to AT&T, where I was with them for more then a year with an iPhone 3G. This is where I started using heavy data, because I could load things like a steamed podcast without interruption, I can still do this on T-mobile along with my browsing habits.

To respond to a typo, If you break a CDMA phone, you either buy a refurbished phone or a new one, and have the provider activate it (You can do a CDMA flash, but rarely, and I mean RARELY can you get a sprint phone flashed to Verizon, you can to Cricket because they don’t monitor the ESNs) , I have been tricked by Verizon when I activated a Treo 650 back in the day, I was out of contract, by the corporate store guy screwed up and extended my contract, regardless that I was not purchasing a new phone. I’m just saying be careful.

Unlocked GSM phone are not tired to a carrier and can be used on any GSM carrier (the nation ones are AT&T and T-mobile) or for example, if you break your phone, you remove the SIM card, go to walmart and buy a Pre-paid phone for your carrier, insert your sim and continue on with life. There are a plethora of choices with GSM in this area.

Again, sorry you had issues, I honestly think you could have a bad antenna in your razr, but, a solution could have been paying $29.99 for a nokia for T-mobile pre-paid and the inserting your SIM, and then gone from there.

Thanks for the primo info. Wish I had thought to do that. Funny you should say that about the antenna. That was my first thought when we moved to this house. Then, my husband started having the same trouble. And a contractor came in with his t-mo and couldn’t hold a call, either. It’s like I moved to the Bermuda Triangle of triangulation. Well, maybe not triangulation technically, but you get my drift.

Unscientific perhaps, but since my neighbors have no trouble with vzw, I was hoping for the same.

Ten years ago, I wrote pretty extensively about AT&T’s acquisition of TCI’s HFC network jalopy and T’s brazen intention to flip a switch and transform it overnight into a 2-way cash cow (a blunder from which AT&T has never fully recovered, yet John Malone was able to ensure continued prosperity).

Since that period, I’ve lacked confidence in AT&T’s ability to be anything more than an ineffective corporate blob that even Dilbert would *run* from in terror.

So what would launch Dilbert into panic, apparently sends Steve Jobs into an exclusivity agreement: He may as well have been “Dancing with the Stars.”

Over the past decade, T has accomplished little more than display, for all the world to see, their consistent inability to realistically access their networks and adequately plan for future needs.

It’s an old story: Executives never listen to their engineers.

T-mo likely has a brighter future because when everything started going wireless, parent company Deutsche got a head start jumping even more significant hurdles with the Euro backbone. Meanwhile, execs at too many American telcos were distracted from the tasks at hand by day-trading and fleecing employees and stakeholders. (These days, Qwest’s Nachio, is enjoying pizza made by a convicted child molestor, or so I read recently.)

Sprint deserves credit for wrangling a means to piggy-back off of vzw…and vzw, if it doesn’t play its cards right, is likely to wind up in the same dismal position as T with the rapid deployment of all these smart phones on their once-pristine network map.

T would rather sue vzw than focus on their desperately needed network upgrades. How many talented, out-of- work engineers could T have hired with the corporate time and legal fees they’re paying to pursue such a ridiculous suit? (That lunchtime spa facial is actually egg on their faces and they seem to lack the discretion to even notice the difference.)

So with the proliferation of smart phones (Android alone is expected to see 5 percent growth in the next year), it seems pretty obvious that our Ronald Reagan Information Super Highway is likely to take a pretty serious pounding.

Implementing all of the network upgrades that are and will be needed will be costly and glitchy at a time when dollars are tight and customer service is already at issue.

I think we’ll continue to experience more outages like the ones we’ve seen recently and hopefully, the FCC will step in and do its job to ensure that carrier service concerns takes precedence over profits … or at least is a priority for carriers stumbling all over themselves in their attempts to compete with the iPhone.

Thanks for indulging me in this unscheduled digression. And for your help.

I take offense to you (JT) saying that a corporate store is more knowledgeable than a kiosk in a mall. I work for Sprint in a mall kiosk and we get just as much training as any corporate store. We go to trainings where there are corporate employees there as well. Third party dealer doesn’t mean less knowledge, just means we might not necessarily have technicians(which actually a lot of third party dealers DO have technicians.) When you look at Best Buy, Radioshack, Wal-Mart, Costco- then yes obviously they don’t know as much because they sell every carrier and don’t get individualized trainings as much as they should.