On The Verge

I've had my share of troubles with the cellular carriers over the years. I've dealt with all of the major North American carriers except Nextel, and all have completely failed in the customer-service experience. (I recall one incident where I bought my wife a new Cingular phone for her birthday, but couldn't get it activated because her birthday was on a Sunday and Cingular had decided to close its call centers on Sundays to save money.)

So it shouldn't have surprised me when my recent attempt to seek info on new GSM phones from Cingular and AT&T Wireless left me completely frustrated. The companies are obviously mired in combining businesses, but it's going to cost them customers if they can't get out the straight scoop on important things such as 3G UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) service—the follow-on to 2.5G EDGE (Enhanced Data for Global Evolution).

I was shopping for two phones to replace the two Sony Ericsson GSM phones that my wife and son use on a shared Cingular account. And yes, despite my negative experience of a few years ago we still use Cingular because of the shared rollover minutes and because the company's GSM service makes European usage possible (See, "Simple elegance: SIM cards traverse the globe.") The contract for those phones ends in less than three months, so my wife and son are eligible for the customer-retention rebates that come with new equipment and contracts. I could have just let them choose one of the latest, relatively full-featured phones that come next to free, but I viewed this as an opportunity to test new gear and services. I had my sights set on a Windows Smartphone for my son and a UMTS-compatible handset for my wife.

I stopped by the nearest Cingular store a week or so ago to inquire about UMTS and the Windows Smartphones. No one in the store had ever heard of UMTS, and they knew that they could get the Motorola MPx220 phone, based on Windows Mobile 2003, only via special order. The Web sites are no help either. The companies are busy combining the two sites. The former section on the AT&T Wireless site that discussed the UMTS offering leads to nowhere, and the Cingular site doesn't even mention UMTS and its promise of 384-kbps data rates that can deliver compelling video, at least according to MobiTV (see, "Mobile video: Participants follow multiple paths.").

I had seen one of the Motorola phones at Best Buy back in November when that retailer was the exclusive outlet for the phone's launch. But to take advantage of the Cingular rebate, I need to buy replacement phones from Cingular. Moreover, the Motorola MPx220 got horrible early reviews and only mediocre reviews more recently. I wanted to see the Audiovox SMT5600 Windows Smartphone that's been a hot topic in the blogosphere. That phone first appeared as an AT&T Wireless offering back in October.

This past weekend, I ventured a little further from home to a former AT&T Wireless store that's now operating under the Cingular banner. There I found a store manager that was extremely knowledgeable and passionate about the business, but who was clearly frustrated by the merger. The store had Cingular-branded phones on one wall and AT&T-branded phones on the opposite wall. New customers, he explained, can choose from either wall. Existing customers that want to take advantage of the equipment rebate have to choose from the wall of their current service provider—even though the two are presumably one company now. Well, the Motorola MPx220 is a Cingular phone and the Audiovox SMT5600 is an AT&T Wireless phone.

Note that these are GSM phones based on SIM cards. You can buy any GSM phone, find a competent shop that for $15 can "unlock" the phone from the "branded" service provider, and then use the phone with any other service providers' SIM cards. Yet I couldn't buy the AT&T-Wireless branded Audiovox phone and get the equipment rebate for our Cingular account. My other option was to pay full price for the Audiovox phone (essentially $150 more), pay to unlock it, and then swap the SIM card from our existing phone to use the Audiovox with our Cingular number.

The store manager also knew quite a lot about UMTS. He told me that before the merger, the San Diego area where I live was slated to become the fourth UMTS-enabled market. But he's not sure what Cingular plans now. The UMTS-enabled handsets that AT&T Wireless was offering seem to have disappeared from the Web site. Perhaps the handsets are still sold in markets where UMTS is already operating, such as San Francisco. I'll be up in San Francisco next week and will try to drop by a few Cingular stores.

Meanwhile, Cingular just lost a chance to lock my wife and son down with a new two-year contract. Despite the fact that they both want new phones, and one of the existing phones has some annoying but nonfatal problems, I'm going to wait for a couple more months, when we'll be able to shop as free agents. I'd really hate to move my family away from the GSM world, but I like the looks of the Verizon CDMA-based 3G service. We can always keep the Sony Ericsson world phones to use on trips with prepaid SIM cards.