Ian just got himself a new cellphone. He bought a t616 from AT&T wireless in Purdue (where he is heading soon) and brought it back to Syracuse. I was surprised to see that when AT&T doesn’t have coverage his phone happily switches to Tmobile.
Sweet I thought, I must be able to do the same especially since AT&T has good coverage in the Westcott street area while tmobile has none … but I’d never seen it happen.
A little research reveals that yes AT&T does have a GSM1900 network in Syracuse and so does tmobile. So I call tmobile to see what the story is … and they tell me that I should be able to roam onto at&T at no charge, but that I have to put the phone in manual mode (not automatic, first sign of oddness!)
Anyway I hop in the car and drive to westcott, sure enough tmobile drops out but this time the phone shows 5 green bars of reception and says “Select Network?”. But when I do the menu only says tmobile and when I select it it says “Forbidden.”
I hop back on the phone to tmobile and eventually find my way through to tech support and someone who has some idea. Yes he says, we don’t actually have an agreement to roam onto AT&T in the syracuse area … He played a little surprised that the AT&T customer could roam onto tmobile, went away and came back and said that yes, there was a one-way roaming agreement.
So AT&T customers can use the tmobile network at no extra cost but tmobile customers can’t do the same. What the fuck? We’re renegotiating blah blah. Yes they know that the loose customers because of this … looks like I’ll be switching to AT&T once the contract with tmobile is up. Idiots.
Dave, I reckon AT&T will work fine at your place. Try Ian’s.
Posted by james at June 26, 2004 06:27 PM | TrackBackI just feel like commenting of James’ blog.
When I started shopping around for a GSM service that didn’t suck I got a lot of conflicting reports from AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile. They all claimed free roaming, but this didn’t always seem to be the case though, as James points out.
A year later when I finally signed on to AT&T I got more of the story. Cingular and T-Mobile had some roaming agreements, but it wasn’t nationwide, just some areas. Of course they don’t tell you this when you ask about their service. They are also reluctant to put anything in writing. From what I understand Cingular and T-Mobile are fighting, and their agreement might get canned. Apparently most Cingular customers in California are on a T-Mobile network, which may be why Cingular is acquiring AT&T Wireless.
When signing with AT&T I was told I would have nationwide roaming on Cingular and T-Mobile w/o being charged. I haven’t been able to confirm any of this though, because it’s hard to find anything in writing. The ways the laws are written I don’t think the cell companies need to disclose very much info. (Any Sprint customer can testify to the downside of this.)
>So AT&T customers can use the tmobile network at no extra cost but tmobile customers can’t do the same.
Well you have to love the arrogance it takes to call them idiots when you don’t know what kind of a deal they negotiated, and what AT&T might be paying T-Mobile for this.
Last time I checked their national plans, $39.99 gets you either 600 or 1000 minutes with T-Mobile, while you get only 450 min with AT&T. Additional minutes cost 45 cents/min on AT&T vs 40 cents/min on T-Mobile. If this qualifies as “no extra cost” to you, then I know who the idiot is in my book :)
Hello, abc (if that is your real name ;)
1. The deal would have to be pretty sweet to make up for lost customers—-particularly in a market that they are advertising a lot. In any case the person on the phone indicated that it was an old contract that they had negotiated when they were a young company and that they were trying to get out of it.
2. By “no extra cost” I was referring to the marginal price of using the t-mobile network, not a comparison of total network charges. In any case t-mobile could offer infinite minutes but if their customers can’t connect to a network then the value is not there …
Feel free to continue the conversation, although your motives for hiding your identity are unclear in this situation.