Cell Phone Service

Stick Together, I guess that's loose marketing talk for some sort of unified communications. Anyway, certainly mobility is a big part of unified communications, and attempts at single number access to anyone. A great idea, actually single number connectivity has been around decades, it seems, (I remember a big paper from Nortel on this at least 10 years ago). So I've ordered a Google phone from T-Mobile. Try out this smartphone stuff (I'd rather have an iPhone, but I prefer T-Mobile cell service).

Yes, cell phone service, does anyone have good service? First, call quality and connections, cell phones, all of 'em, pretty much suck, don't they? Are any vendors really any better at this? But then, I'm spoiled, used ISDN for years, the absolute Nirvana of voice communications. So cell phones are sort of like MP3s, a degradation of quality. Yet, a necessity (and, yes, I have an iPod... but prefer a lossless algorythm for music storage).

OK, we put up with cell phone calls. What about customer service? Another issue where vendors compete. If we all get dropped calls from all vendors, maybe customer service will differentiate between the competing cell phone companies. Recently, a noted columnist in a noted industry mag slammed T-Mobile for it's customer service. I had to write him immediately, because customer service is why I stick with T-Mobile. Here's some of what I sent him, three incidents that keep me a customer:

Initial Sign Up:

My son was moving to LA in a couple months, so when we wanted to get cell service here in Utah, we requested an LA phone number. Several companies I talked to said it was not possible to get an LA phone number, or acted like they had no idea what to do. Made me quite cynical about the level of competence of the representatives. We walk into T-Moble, me carrying a
chip on my shoulder from the previous experiences. The T-Mobile rep says "no problem" and about 30 seconds later we have a 213 Area Code number while still in Utah. And all other cynical questions were completely answered. Unbelievable! Somebody knew what they were doing. Besides, she was incredibly cute... cute and competent, a combo that really drives me wild (but I digress...).

Phone Replacement:

A couple years after the intial contract, we sign up again. My son gets a new Razr. After about 6 months, the keyboard craps out. I note we have a 1 year warranty, but my cynical side girds for a war with T-Mobile. We walk in, the rep says no prob. The only kink, we are led over to a computer hooked up for a video conference with customer service back at the main T-Moble ranch. Way cool! I'm into video. Another cool babe comes up on the screen, asks us a few questions, looks at the phone via an auxillary camera, and we are in biz. New phone on the way, just make sure to send back the old one. And she winked at me (my son says she winked at him!), but I digress again...

Billing Resolution:

This summer, we got a bill with lots of expensive extra minutes. I noticed that a large block of minutes was actually from the previous month. A phone call to T-Mobile got me a very responsive and helpful agent who spent quite some time examining the bill, and, while having a excuse for the previous month's minutes, did give us full credit, removed the excess minutes charge, and gave me some helpful suggestions to reduce the overall bill in the future. I'm sure she was cute and winking, although I guess I once again digress.

I guess YMMV, but I'm happy. So on to the Gphone...

one-X

Got a demo of Avaya's UC strategy. Some good things, some not so good. Lots of open source, some consolidation of servers, single client for H.323, SIP, and video, integration with SameTime and Microsoft. Yet no unified management (third party was suggested), and no client for Mac OSX and Linux (other than a web portal application... more servers and more management interfaces and, just a web function... cheap excuse for development). At least SameTime has a Mac client, so they have seen the Zen light if not just the UC light.

Yes, Zen hovers over UC like some sort of spiritual presence (super presence?) waiting for all this telecom to enter heaven. Agnostics in heaven. Such a concept! Now I'm blogging about telecom philosophy... Back to Avaya...

Did really like the one-X mobile app. Works on most cell phones including iPhone. Has a GPS feature that will direct your preference based on location. Located in the office? Office phone rings. Located elsewhere? Cell phone rings. If this works, it's a tremendous feature, overcomes manual preference changes (forwarding) for those of us who never remember. Besides, way cool!

Voicecon SF 08

Just back from Voicecon in San Francisco. The weather was incredible, hard to stay inside for sessions. But good stuff. Mostly, food for thought more than direct information. The biggest deal for me was "generations", and this whole idea of the new workforce and what they expect in the workplace.

I'm old, over the hill, but I hope I still have a toe dipped in the new telecom culture pool. No problem with a monochrome display on my Avaya 96xx set, I hate Bluetooth dongles hanging off my ear (and the erie look of others who wear them), and 100 Meg Ethernet more than handles my data transmission needs.

But Alan Sulkin (another old telecom fart, with an AOL email account of all things!), provided the head's up, the shift in thinking... color, GigE, and Bluetooth, and of course, social networking. The new workforce won't even think of working for a company that doesn't provide these technologies. They may be techno jaded, but they are also way ahead of we traditional workers.

This generational transition was reinforced by a walk through SOMA on Thursday afternoon to meet the son of an old friend for lunch. He works for a 2.0 company, and the whole south of Market area of SF is populated by young workers attached to Facebook, Linked In, and other 2.0 companies. Amazing to wander amongst them, and try to accept the fact I'm soon out to pasture as they take over.

There was a morning session, with reps from the big companies, Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, etc. All in suits or nice slacks/sport shirts. Then there was the pres of Digium, in a hoody and t-shirt. Held his own in the session. I then had a vision of all the "suits" headed north into the financial district to beat each other up to land a large corporate account. But Mark of Digium was probably headed south to the 2.0 companies, and cleaning up providing their communications needs. Open source, cheap, extensible, write your own features... the new telecom.