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Originally Posted by Dubai Stu
(Post 7705707)
It is not Cingular it is the roaming carrier. They don't release the phone from the system when it is switched off. As a matter of fact, at this year's Gitex (the Middle East's largest tech show), they were actively demonstrating technology aimed at enhancing roaming revenue by increasing the time your phone remains registered on the roaming network and using a software trick that would slow your phone down on registering on a competing carrier.
Under this approach, if you landed at Frankfurt, powered your phone back up for one call to tell your wife that you made your connection, and then shut it down and boarded at plane to the US, you'd be paying these roaming rates until you powered your phone back up in the US. As annoying as it is, you need to either disable your voicemail or hardforward (e.g. not conditional) all calls to voicemail. If you let the system send it to voicemail if you don't answer, you will hugely increase your roaming bill. This is another reason why I use a roaming SIM when traveling. They have written a special algorithm to send calls to voicemail that is not dependent on a conditional call forward. I see. That makes sense. If the VLR keeps reporting you as active even though you aren't, you will indeed stay registered until you show up elsewhere and calls will come through. An unconditional divert seems as the best way to go considering you can set those while roaming at no charge. One just has to remember to do it! Something different but with the same goal (roaming revenue) happened to me quite some time ago. I've always wondered how it was possible. Back in ancient history, I was in Prague using an Omnipoint SIM in a Motorola L7089 (should give you an idea of how long ago this was!) For some reason, if the phone registered on Radiomobil, I no longer could see Eurotel in network scans! The reverse was not true. The same thing happened with a Nokia 6150 I was carrying as well. The only way to get Eurotel back was to carry the phone into the metro, set manual network select, and manually select Eurotel upon exiting. To this day, I have no idea how they did it nor have I ever seen anything like it anywhere else. I suppose it could've been a bug but I always believed it was a way to keep roamers locked in. What SIM do you use for roaming? I have a post-paid HKCSL SIM that I keep for visits to places where T-Mo charges $4.99/minute but would rather use something better. I've had it for forever so simply haven't gotten rid of it out of inertia. |
I'm now back on the board and I'll try to explain the "double minute" situation that people were questioning. This happened initially on my first trip overseas with Cingular. I phoned Cingular after receiving a huge bill upon my return. The CS person agreed that it was not spelled out, even in the fine print, but was evidently happening is that when someone in the US calls me while I'm in Europe, Cingular has no control as to which European networks the call is routed on. If it is routed on a network with which Cingular does not have a preferential agreement, Cingular has to pay a higher fee and hence charges me the other carrier's fee plus its own roaming fee. I think that in some cases the fees from the other carrier didn't appear with the Cingular roaming one. The bills were a mess (and still are). As I was a new customer, the CS gave me a credit for 1/2 the charges and gave me 300 bonus minutes per month (which I still have).
As for turning off my voice mail, I believe I've always called Cingular. I'm heading over in two weeks, and will be doing the same but in addition, I now have a SkypeOut account which I'll use on my ultraportable which has built in WiFi (and Bluetooth for my headset). The cost is 2.1 cents per minute, plus a 3.9 cent setup, for calling most industrialized countries -- from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Note that when calling European cell phones, there is a still charge of something like 20 cents a minute no matter what phone you are using to call. |
Just came across this article in Information Week.
title: Telecom Leads In Race To The Bottom Of Customer Service bottom line, all the telecom companies suck in customer service. take your pick. However, there were some occasional bright spots -- in wireless service, for instance. AT&T's Cingular operation, after finally digesting the former AT&T Wireless operation and making other improvements, was up 8% to 68 in the survey. |
My experience with my tmobile phone has been the pits for coverage anywhere but the most urban of locales. On the other hand, my Cingular phone has almost as good coverage as my Verizon phone did.
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