I swapped my mobile phone number (MINE!! thank you number portability) to Cingular yesterday. It took nearly 14 hours for my new handset to start ringing instead of my old one when I call my number, but eventually it did happen. T-Mobile was just pissing me off too much. US carriers are not about customer satisfaction, they’re about how much you can tolerate. I was with T-Mobile because of the wifi that came with my Internet account for a while. But recently I had been seeing more and more issues with their SMTP to SMS gateways, dropped inter-carrier SMS messages, their generally poor coverage, had gotten multiple reports recently from people who say they can’t call my number at all (at all, they get a “number out of service message”, T-Mobile never managed to fix it for at least 3 people), and most recently the discovery that I can’t send messages to my own handset on T-Mobile.
So I’m up officially on Cingular, and already I can send myself messages using that Clickatell account I setup. A miracle!!! Of course, I expect Cingular to join ranks at some point as well and this will cease to function. One thing I was kinda surprised by is that there’s no real appreciable difference between my E61 with a T-Mobile SIM in it and the E61 with a Cingular SIM in terms of network speed. I’ve heard a lot of folks say that they can really tell the difference. But I’ve tried both decent size downloads and interactive sessions like SSH, and they seem to be just about the same. Would be nice to see some blind taste tests of different carriers with the same device. I’m sure most people are just projecting device differences out into differences in the underlying network.
