Law Office Computing

December 1998

Winton Woods

 

 

A Tale of Two Cell Phones-Ma Bell slams US Worst

 I got my first cell phone seven or eight years ago. It was the size of a small brick and had a battery that lasted about 30 minutes. I bought a multipound auxiliary battery that I could carry over my shoulder that would last for several hours. My buddy Jimmy bought a huge thing called a "Transportable" that weighed about 10 pounds and was the size of small TV set. My mother loved my cell phone, too, and that made all the difference. In those days, the cell phone was a tremendous technological achievement and I reveled in the freedom that it gave me. Within months, I had installed another phone in my car and suddenly I had a new kind of emancipation that I had never experienced before. I became an absolutely committed, my family might say addicted, cell phone user. The only serious problem that I had with my cell phone was that my provider, US West Cellular, was so badly mismanaged that it had broadly achieved the moniker "US Worst." Their customer service was unbelievably bad and almost every bill had some kind of serious and not insubstantial error in it. Every month, I spent endless hours on the phone trying to correct the problems and often gave up in frustration. When new carriers came on the scene and US West lost its monopoly, I quickly switched to another provider. During the next few years cell phones got smaller, more powerful, and the quality improved dramatically. At the same time, prices dropped, and cell phones became ubiquitous. It was about this time that my cell phone got cloned and sold to some drug dealers in New York. My cell phone provider (since bought out by Worldcom) was terrific about it and the charges created by the drug dealer never became a problem. The problem was that my cell phone was known to the underworld and within months it had been cloned again. My old provider gone, I had to deal with Worldcom. I discovered that they have even worse customer service than the old US West. Indeed, at this writing I am still getting bills from their computer for a service that I cancelled last summer! You can't reach sensible people at Worldcom and I just gave up.

All of that nitpicking hassle led me into the world of digital telephony where cloning was allegedly unknown. I experimented with all of the systems that were then available, ultimately choosing the AT&T service primarily because of its reasonable cost and its very broad roaming capability. I won't say that my AT&T service has been without fault but I can say that they have been wonderfully responsive to every problem I have had. I have traveled all over the United States with my AT&T phone and have never had a problem connecting with the local provider of roaming services in the city in which I found myself. I was recently in Mexico and was able to make first-class connections back to the US at considerably lower cost than a typical phone call through one of the three Mexican telephone companies. In short, I have found the AT&T service to be fairly priced, broadly usable in every city in which I have needed to use it, and with tremendous high quality, responsive customer support. Their new telephones are quite small and have a fantastic battery life. In short, you can't go wrong with Ma Bell's phones and the AT&T digital service.

 

Unfortunately, my Mama always told me that I've never been one to let well enough alone and when US West started up their new service that allowed the use of their digital PCS phone in connection with the land line into your office, I succumbed against my better judgment. A few months ago I had gotten the US West DSL service on my main home office phone line and I became aware of the tremendous restructuring that had gone on at US West. I had many problems with the startup of my DSL service and I found that the US West DSL support people were very helpful and responsive. As a result, I was induced to disregard the bitter taste in my mouth from my original US West Cellular service and try once again. I found I was in a different part of the company and there I have had nothing but trouble. The first problem I had with my US West PCS phone was with the wonderful "remote extension" feature. The number assigned to the PCS phone (which is different from the land line that rolls over to the phone) had been assigned to somebody else. For the first several weeks I kept getting telephone calls from my unwanted phonemate who was trying to access his voice mail at all hours of the day and night. I even got a call from HIS mother early one morning around 2AM. I spent many hours on the phone with the US West PCS support people before the problem was fixed. Then, I took a trip and instead of taking my trusty AT&T phone I took my new US West PCS phone. While in San Francisco I tried to call home and was met by a recording from Sprint (who has contracted with US West to provide roaming services in the Bay area), telling me that my PCS phone would not work there. I called US West customer service immediately and was told by the first person I talked to that my PCS phone would not roam in San Francisco and that basically I was out of luck. I had been told by the person who sold me the phone precisely the opposite and so I called her to find out the truth. Felice told me that, indeed, my phone was supposed to work in San Francisco and she could not understand why it did not. She promised to put me in contact with US West customer support to get the problem solved. It didn't get solved during that trip to San Francisco, so when I got home I called US West only to be told that the problem was with Sprint. I called Sprint and was told that the problem was with US West. I spent several hours on the telephone dealing with unpleasant people who were basically dedicated to placing the blame on somebody else but who assured me that my little problem would be fixed in "a few days." A month after the first debacle, I went to San Francisco again. And, you guessed it, my phone still didn't work. When I got home I called Felice and she basically said she had done all she could do and I would just have to live with it. Finally, after many months I found a young man at US West PCS who told me the truth. He read the computer trouble tickets and found that US West PCS has known for months that my particular PCS phone number in not in the roaming database and won't be for some unknown period of time. Basically, I have been given a royal run around. At this writing, the inability to use my phone in any place outside of Arizona seems to be uncorrectable and beyond the capability of US West to fix. When I suggested to Felice that US West had contracted to supply service in "1400" cities including San Francisco, she smugly informed me that I had no contract with US West. The bottom line is that simple: I cannot rely upon my US West phone for any travel that requires roaming capability, notwithstanding their promise to provide roaming capability in 1400 cities. I don't want to argue with Felice, I just want to call home.

If you need the special features that the US West PCS system provides and you don't need to utilize those features outside of your home area, the phone system itself works very well. I would recommend the phone for people with those simple needs except for one thing. That one thing is the absolutely inexplicable billing errors that seem as uncorrectable as the lack of roaming capability. Every month for the last few months I have had to spend a considerable amount of time on the phone arguing with US West service representatives about several hundred dollars of errors on my phone bill. I would cancel the US West service in an Internet Minute were it not for the fact that I have become addicted to the remote extension service and the DSL line for Internet access. I can only hope that somehow, some way, the impossible will happen and US West will get their customer service act together and decide that they want to compete with the other carriers. At the moment, I have no reason to believe that such a change is likely to occur. But there is hope on the horizon. National companies such as ATT are beginning to provide local service. Cable providers are on the verge of providing phone service over the Internet. I think we will soon see fierce competition in the digital phone industry and I expect that other local providers of digital phone service will soon provide the kind of remote extension capability that we now can get only through US West. Competition will ultimately save the day and relegate the Baby Bell monopolists, like US West, to their appropriate role as minor players in a telecommunication industry that has been restructured by competition. I can hardly wait for the day. Of course, US West is fighting tooth and nail about allowing competition. They claim that competition will prevent them from investing in infrastructure because they can't recover their costs. But that is just the age-old plea of a monopolist who seeks to exclude competition. In the meantime, US West remains what it has been called for years, US Worst. I am one of those lucky folks who gets to go to San Francisco a lot and I will remember the applicable rule: when you come to San Francisco, bring your ATT phone because in San Francisco they don't take US West PCS.