Wireless is broken. And we're fixing it
how-to.t-mobile.com
how-to.t-mobile.com
Instead of cPanel or Plesk they had some home made solution, basically 80% of the links were dead, and the whole application only consisted of approx. 10 pages. Bravo!
I called the tech support, I've talked with 10-12 people, 9-10 of them were supposed experts at the technical department. Only one of them said he knew what an A record is, but he had to redirect me to yet another "expert", but he informed me it will take a "lot of time to access this man". A lot of compared to what? I was on the phone for like 1.5 hours already! I suspect this guy was eating his lunch at home but he was a resrouceful chap so they had to phone him with "tough" questions. I feel sorry for that guy working with idiots! And if he is unlucky enough he doesn't even get paid more.
The tech support story is not necessarily related to this article but I had to shout it out. I will probably write a blog post too. On the other hand, the fact they undertook developing a software which has perfect open source alternatives, and they let the end product become an epic fail, seeing these "we are so cool and competent" ads makes me puke.
Please, PAY YOUR TECHNICAL EMPLOYEES TOO, not just the marketing guys and DON'T BE DUMB, if you want to develop software give me a call because I can cut your costs by 90%, your managers are dumb.
Ohh, thank God I feel so much better now.
I suspect you're talking about T-Mobile Hungary which, like T-Mobile in other European countries, is the largest carrier in the country and really couldn't care less about its customers. (I'm a subscriber with T-Mobile in The Netherlands, where the company isn't dominant. The situation is better here.)
Verizon and Vodafone are separate publicly traded companies. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture between Verizon and Vodafone. Vodafone owns 45% of Verizon Wireless. However, Verizon has a 23% stake in Vodafone Italy.
Complicated, but not the same company.
What happens in this sort of case? Can we expect to see T-Mobile US try to rebrand or rename itself?
It’s not so much about the T-Mobile brand, but about the companies it acquired. In the US, T-Mobile doesn’t have a large network, which makes it uninteresting to customers who travel, but at least it’s relatively cheap. In Europe, the problem is that the T-Mobile networks are the incumbents. As we know from AT&T before the Baby Bell division, dominant parties tend to get lazy and lose interest in their customers’ wishes.
Like the cable companies in the US, T-Mobile doesn’t have a lot of customers because it’s such a great company, it has lots of customers because of mergers & acquisitions, false advertising, and lack of choice.
In France, free.fr wreaked the whole market by offering illimited phone calls + SMS + data (bandwidth capped beyond 3GB/month) for €16 to €20, depending on whether you already get ADSL from them. No device (rather, unlocked devices can be bought with a 12 or 24 months credit, in a contract independent from the network subscription), network subscriptions can be cancelled in 1 month. Simple, cheap, readable. All other operators had to follow suit.
The pricing is higher, but other than that, it's basically the same shebang and T-Mobile doesn't have a profit-margin wetdream of a landline network to subsidize their pricing.
edit: got it to go through after about 5 tries
http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/articles/walmart-and-t-mobile-i...
From what I understand you CANNOT switch over an existing gsm sim and balance to the special walmart plan, it has to be started with them.
> The plan will be sold exclusively in-store at more than 2,200 Walmart stores and online at www.walmart.com and www.T-Mobile.com and is expected to launch Oct. 16.
They're going in the right direction, but kicking and screaming a bit.
Which is a massive lie right there (from t-mobile). SMS is effectively piggybacking on the signals your phone sends out to find which towers are available, so were t-mobile being totally honest, they'd just cut out the SMS charge period. It's such a low cost (borderline free) to process and send SMS's that there is really no honest way to charge for it.
But we live in America, where tech literacy is abysmal for 75% of the inhabitants, and Telco's capitalize on this. Either that or we don't have a single honest Telco CEO.
What exactly is the difference between "cut[ting] out the SMS charge" and including unlimited texting in every plan?
EDIT: let's see if I can wrap some more words around my point.
Your parent post is complaining that t-mobile doesn't want to offer a plan which is differentiated from some current plan of theirs by (a) offering lower texting allowances, and (b) being cheaper.
You think that, since the cost of transmitting texts is nil, t-mobile shouldn't charge for transmitting them.
And by looking at the plans t-mobile wants to offer, we can see that they agree with you; they don't think it makes sense to charge more for a plan with higher texting allowances vs one with lower allowances. No matter how much texting you do, they're going to charge you exactly the same. (Your argument is phrased in moral terms, while I suspect t-mobile's position is driven more by the fact that an unlimited data plan is a perfect substitute for texting.)
But, instead of slamming your parent post for wanting something that makes no sense (plans that charge extra for more texting), you're slamming t-mobile for "dishonest pricing" that reflects exactly what you believe should be happening. I don't get it.
I'm not slamming the parent, just T-mobile rephrasing a still predatory model.
T-Mobile is rather unattractive at $70/month on a BYOP plan.
edit: Tmo's plan has a data cap on the $50/mo setup. Straight Talk does not.
Don't downvote until you know what you're speaking on.
This argument bugs me. The phone-to-tower is only a portion of the infrastructure: You have to get those messages somewhere after that. But the rest of that infrastructure isn't any more interesting than email.
So I'm not disagreeing with the point that SMS is overpriced (especially without a plan). I doubt you could convince anybody to spend $10/month on "unlimited email".
Since SMS was originally designed to use management channels it was already built into the general infrastructure, they just needed to up the server count to 3.
SMS was (and maybe still is?) almost pure profit for at least BT and I imagine other carriers.
It's still data and they still need to provision timeslots for it and transfer it. There is no free lunch. SMS goes over the signalling timeslot, in ISDN terms this is called the D-channel. D-channels cannot carry voice traffic. So provisioning more timeslots for D-channels, and consequently SMS, means that at a given tower and frequency you will have fewer timeslots for voice. So SMS has a cost.
This analysis is not taking into account the cost of transferring SMS over the wired infrastructure as well.
As you said, it's still data. If one has a plan that includes unlimited internet data, where is the justification to charge even more for SMS?
But none of that really matters, because it's not the cost of the product that determines pricing. It's the delivered value that determines pricing.
Also, that's a horrible address, with the combo of dashes and dot.
(seriously, on my computer it is a 600px by 250px wall of small grey legalese)
Is that all iPhones? Bummer if so
[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2013/03/t-...