bobf@garp.mit.edu (BFrankston) (08/17/89)
I'm gathering this comments in my first attempt to travel with my cellular phone. I have travelled with a car phone in the Northeast and that worked. Travelling wider than that is more difficult. In speaking to Geoff Goodfellow, I can understand his frustrations with the cellular system. I thank him for help in getting as far as I did. My base system is Cellular One (SW Bell) in Boston. They do not (yet) have follow-me roaming and do not have roaming agreements in the Bay area (San Francisco). 1. They list the roaming number as 415-770-ROAM. Turns out that it is really 860 for the A carrier (Cellular One, not related) and 722 for the B (GTE Mobile). 2. It is difficult to phone these companies since information only gives out the 800# which is useless outside of California. 3. Cellular companies only work during business hours. After all, nobody really uses this technology so why work weekends and evenings to support it. 4. Given #3, I can't register when I arrive on a weekend. You get off the plane and discover that you can't get service. But why would anyone use a telephone on a weekend? 5. Even in the Northeast, primar roaming territory for me, the cellular companies are too dumb to list their roaming numbers in the phone directories. See #3. 6. Charges. See #3. After all, telephones (and by extension cellular phones) are only play things for the idle rich. Real people don't travel. 7. An aside, for airplane phones, see #6 compounded by the worst quality imaginable. Why aren't planes simply local cells? Maybe there are technical problems with the current generation (can someone explain them to me) but one can take it into account for the digital network. There is a danger in being sarcastic in email. I should clarify by pointing out that I think that cellular should be the normal mode for communications with wired phones being oddities. TV, on the other hand, should be confined to cable because it wastes gobs of spectrum that can be used for more useful communications. Now that I've expressed my considerable annoyance, is there any hope for the FCC viewing cellular phones as normal communications and working to establish guidelines for roaming and, followme roaming? Followme implemented with proper protocols should cause double charging. In fact, #8 would be the idea of charging for all services including answering services at full rate air time when not air time is being used. Well, if you're a monopoly you can do anything. There are some additional practical problems with a portable phone. One is that callers are used to giving three or four rings while with a cellular twenty would be more reasonable to accommodate figuring out what that sound is and where it is coming from and how to dig the phone out from the bottom of a pile of junk (common scene in comedies). What I really want is a combination of phone with beeper so that it would retain a list of messages and callers. Yes, one can get cellular answering service but I detest voice mail and all I really want is a list of caller phone numbers. This list can be provided automatically with ANI or by allowing a user to key in a phone number instead of voice mail. Since information is being passed, a (modest) charge would be appropriate. Perhaps in an ISDN/X.400 world some of this might start to work. I should live that long. (Yiddish sarcasm, not a statement of probability). Full name: Bob Frankston