DREUBEN@eagle.wesleyan.edu) (DOUGLAS SCOTT REUBEN) (08/08/90)
Hi, Had a question about "Follow Me" Roaming (*18/*19) on the "B" cellular carriers: I have service through GTE Mobilnet in San Francisco. When I go back East, and try to activate Follow Me Roaming, it works until about 12AM, Eastern. If I activate Follow Me before 12AM, everything is fine, and Follow Me Roaming will continue to work until 3 hours later, ie, 12AM Pacific time. However, let's say I get into my car at 1AM, Eastern, and try to activate Follow Me Roaming - that usually won't work, or if it does, it takes about 1/2 an hour to register with GTE in San Francisco. If I try after 3AM Eastern, that usually works fine. Why does there seem to be this "dead time" between 12 and 3 AM Eastern? I have lots of ideas as to why this may happen, but don't really know enough about Follow Me Roaming to test them out. Anyone have any suggestions? Also, why doesn't New York City, probably one of the largest Cellular markets in the nation, have Follow Me Roaming?? What are you supposed to do if you live in Connecticut and work in NYC?? I guess this gives a LOT of business to the "A" carrier, which is DMXed from Rhode Island, Connecticut, NYC, and Northern New Jersey! (Err...that is, WHEN the DMX is working...! :-( ) Thanks in advance, Doug dreuben@eagle.wesleyan.edu dreuben@wesleyan.bitnet [Moderator's Note: "Follow Me", a/k/a/ "Fast Track" by Ameritech and others, has four ways by which it is cancelled, once it has been turned on via *18: (1) Within the same service area where it was turned on, *19 will cancel it. (2) When you move to another service area, *18 will turn it off in the area you vacated and install it in the new area. (3) If you return to your home area having forgotten to turn it off when exiting the area where you were roaming, then *73 will cancel it also. (4) Finally, at midnight each night *in the place where you are registered for home service* there is a general cancellation of all "Follow Me" setups from the day ending. If your home area is in the Pacific time zone, then the general cancellation will occur at 3 AM Eastern time. It is the home area that cancels all outstanding "Follow Me" requests, not the area you are roaming in. This general cancellation is intended to protect the roamer against unwanted guest charges of more than one day. You need to re-establish "Follow Me" on a day-to-day basis. In reverse, someone homing from New York City traveling on the west coast would be cancelled out at 9 PM Pacific. PT]
gutierre@nsipo.nasa.gov (08/12/90)
DREUBEN@eagle.wesleyan.edu) (DOUGLAS SCOTT REUBEN) writes: |> Had a question about "Follow Me" Roaming (*18/*19) on the "B" cellular |> carriers: |> I have service through GTE Mobilnet in San Francisco. When I go back |> East, and try to activate Follow Me Roaming, it works until about |> 12AM, Eastern. If I activate Follow Me before 12AM, everything is |> fine, and Follow Me Roaming will continue to work until 3 hours later, |> ie, 12AM Pacific time. I recently experienced the joys of "Follow-Me-Ripoff"... err ... "Roaming" while I was in San Diego, California about 2 weeks ago. One of the problems I came across was that San Diego (Pac-Tel Celluar) seemed not to have been able to handshake with my cell phone too well. Calls through the local dial-in worked fine, but calls forwarded from GTE Mobilnet/San Francisco seemed to die at San Diego. I would hear my phone being polled, but it gave up and then I got Pac-Tel's unavailable recording. I tried this about 3 times. I then tried *18 to (re)activate it, and it did work this time, but I sometimes wonder if it really worked after that. Another thing was that my phone was being polled about every 1/2 hour while I was in San Diego. I thought this very strange, as why would Pac-Tel Celluar care if I was still around or not, and what if I was in and area where it wasn't working (like inside the Performing Arts Center, where I was attending a convention). This is annoying because (a) I would assume it's putting a drain on my batteries and (b) it has a Rat Shack 3db antenna on it, and it screwed up our VCR's while I was making some copies, even though it was ten feet away! Hmmm. Robert Michael Gutierrez Office of Space Science and Applications, NASA Science Internet - Network Operations Center. Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.