i'd asked:
> Anybody had notable (good or bad) billing and/or customer service
> experiences with Voicestream or any other GSM provider with native
> coverage in the San Francisco Bay Area?
many people said:
I think Voicestream and T-Mobile are the same company now. If you've
had problems with one, you'll likely have 'em again.
now, most of the problems i'm having are due to statistical anomolies
(in which BigTelCo is optimized for the average case, and i'm some kind
of an exception). in that light, my problems are completely portable.
however, AT&T is more statistically driven (that is, they've optimized
their value proposition) than even t-mobile was. i may end up going
back to t-mobile, since t-mobile appears to have lost the "race to the
bottom" at least for now. you never know how good you had it until after
you switch to AT&T, or something.
i won't be switching to CDMA or any other non-GSM. just because us-gov
deliberately allowed contractors to put closed, non-GSM systems into iraq
and afghanistan does not mean i'm ready to be locked into old (bad) ways
of doing my telco. until we have ubiquitous 802.11 so that i can roam with
a SIP phone, GSM is the closest thing to "right". this isn't a technology
problem -- GSM might be horrible under the covers, i don't know or care.
if another multi-vendor international standard is proposed, i'll look at it.
other observations (anonymized) that came in on this thread: