Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Tue, 30 Apr 91 05:23:58 -0700 From: Steve Forrette Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Bay Area cellular Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 321, Message 3 of 4 Lines: 73 I have to take exception to John Higdon's comments about the cellular situation in the San Francisco Bay Area. I too have been a customer of both systems, and find Cellular One to be much superior. This opinion is based mostly on my personal experiences, rather than quantitative data such as the number of cell sites, etc. In October 1987, I purchased my cellphone, an in-car NovaTel 385. I'm really pleased with the way it's worked for me over the years. (I'm told that they are a lot like credit reports - "either 1's or 10's, mostly 1's", but I got a 10, I guess.) I don't have much experience with 600 mW handhelds. I initially signed up with Cellular One, and had it for a couple of years. I then lived in Seattle for 18 months, and when I came back, I decided to give GTE a try, largely based on John's reports. It lasted for less than two months before I was so fed up that I switched back to Cellular One. There were several smaller reasons for switching, such as the inability of customer (dis)service to deal with technical problems (they said "call the people at the switch directly, using this number", which was never answered). But my main problem was with roaming. As we know, the "B" carriers have this wonderful thing called Follow Me Roaming. I often have the occasion to travel into the Sacramento market, and sometimes to LA, so roaming is very important to me. After hitting *18 in Sac, it would take around 15 minutes before calls would "roam", and of course it would reset sometime in the evening and be unusable and unactivatable for a few hours. And when it was on, it sometimes just wouldn't forward. I had instructed someone to call me if there were changes in a meeting schedule, and hit the roof when I found out that I wasted an hour of my time going to meet him when he tried in vain to reach me. The "A" carriers in California and Nevada had a really slick system called Super Cellular. Your calls forward to you whereever you are. All you do is hit SEND when you enter a new market, and forwarding is activated *instantly*. Not in 15 minutes, not in 15 seconds, but right away, reliably, every time. Plus, you get all your custom calling features as well, something Follow Me Raoming didn't offer. I heard talk that the B systems in California were working on something like this, and maybe it's working now, but that's a couple of years later. As far as coverage, I found that Cellular One was superior. Perhaps GTE was better at the far edge "fringe" areas, but I was having problems in the middle of town! For one thing, Cellular One had coverage through the Caldecot Tunnel, since 1987 (GTE got it in 1990). When I first saw this advertised, I thought it was pretty much a gimmick, but I've been surprised just how many times it's come in handy. John's San Jose home is about an hour away from the tunnel, so his priorities are probably different. Just after getting my Cellular One account reactivated, I made my last "B" call to cancel my GTE account. When asked why I was switching to CellOne, I mentined the signal quality issue. Maybe someone was interfering for dramatic effect (:-)), but the static was incredible on the line. We could barely hear each other. And I was on I-880 in Oakland, hardly an out-of-the-way place. And the worst part was that my left arm would get this voilent twitch every time I wrote GTE right after "Pay to the Order of" on my checks. I'm sure John has similar stories with the carriers reversed. Maybe we're both right, and it's just that each carrier has concentrated on a different end of the bay. I'm looking forward to hearing of his CellOne horror stories! Steve Forrette, forrette@cory.berkeley.edu