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Last Words Archives: 1 / 2001, 2 / 2001, 1 / 2002, 2 / 2002, 3 / 2002, 4 / 2002, 5 / 2002, 6 / 2002,
1 / 2003, 2 / 2003, 3 / 2003, 4 / 2003, 5 / 2003, 6 / 2003 , 7 / 2003
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Last Words, 7/2003 Archive
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"Please press 1"
Jane Barbe, whose voice was familiar to millions of telephone users across the country who ever dialed a wrong number or had to "Please listen to the following options" in a voice-mail system, died July 18 in Roswell, Ga.
(29/07/03) [perm link]
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Customer Care Vodafone customer relations department had a bad day warning subscribers that unless they started using the service more frequently, they would be disconnected. Vodafone argued that the move would 'make room for new customers' and claimed that with 'extremely high demand for mobile phone numbers' there was 'only a limited number to go round'.
(29/07/03) [perm link]
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Spoofing SS7 New York Times writes about MCI WorldCom's federal fraud inquiry on fees for long-distance calls.
"The central element of MCI's scheme consisted of disguising long-distance calls as local calls to avoid paying special access tariffs to local carriers across the country. Those tariffs are the largest single source of MCI's costs for carrying calls and data transmissions."
"MCI was said to have routed domestic telephone traffic to Canada through a series of small companies with which MCI had contracts. The technicians said that the billing codes were altered and that the calls were transferred to AT&T lines into the United States so that AT&T would have to pay the tariffs."
In a lot of countries inter-carrier billing has been a source of many disputes, but this is absolutely amazing and still Worldcom still went bankrupt!
Slashdot discussion (27/07/03) [perm link]
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Mobile Sports Phones 4u has linked up with SonyEricsson to launch the inaugural Mobile Phone Olympics to be held at the cult street sport event Sprite Urban Games, on Clapham
Common, from July 25 to 27. This supreme test of mobile phone users' skills will be a four disciplined event designed by phones 4u examining all the major handset disciplines: Text Championships, MMS Messaging, Mobile Gaming and Mobile Phone Hurling.
(25/07/03) [perm link]
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NEC e606 review Mobile Burn has a great review of the NEC e606 3G phone using Three network in Australia.
I have to disagree on one thing with the writer. When you buy a 3G phone, you don't only buy services, you buy the network. Network has its services, quality, coverage, customer support, developer support etc. Service are no good if you can't use those where you are. (14/07/03) [perm link]
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Mobile operators' revenge US wireless companies will charge users to keep the phone numbers and they are charging a lot! Here are the numbers:
AT&T Wireless Services claims that will cost them $50 million a year to support number portability.
AT&T Wireless Services has about mobile 22 million subscribers.
AT&T Wireless Services will charge $1.75 per month for number portability, emergency 911 services and number pooling.
Now lets do the maths: It looks like AT&T Wireless Services will make about $462 million in extra fees, their costs is about $50 million so they will make $412 million extra on the number portability. And just couple of weeks ago most of the carries were opposing the number portability!
On the other side of the spectrum is Verizon Wireless, which will not initially charge fees to customers and will review in November how to recoup costs, which it estimates at about 10 cents to 15 cents per customer per month. That sound like a fair deal to me.
Via TechDirt Wireless follow the earlier trail (08/07/03) [perm link]
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Roaming charges: IHT has a nice story about How to hold down cell phone charges abroad. I have always wondered why people don't complaining louder about high roaming charges! There is no good reason why these charges are so high:
When roaming, mobiles first try to find a "friendly network" in a roaming country which makes it quite cheap for both operators. This network is usually a sister company of the home network or another cooperating network, so even the "extra" international call leg is cheap. The calling party already pays for the airtime charge anyway, ex the US
There has been discussion over 10 years about the "optimal routing" network feature, where call is routed straight from a calling country to a called country without routing the call voice path through B-party's home country. This would be very nice when the calling party is not in the called party's country, like when you are traveling with your friend and calling him/her. This feature would be easy to implement as technology, call routes and roaming agreements are already in place. Network operators do not like this, because they would loose revenues, network vendors will not build this feature as nobody would buy it and the looser is, of course, the consumer.
In Europe country borders are coming down fast, all mobile networks are interconnected with backbones and application servers, and the single currency makes cross border billing/accounting easy, but roaming prices do not reflect these development
So, contact your mobile operator and local MP, and make your opinion heard. And next time your wireless carriers or manufacturers interest group tells you they have consumers' best interest in mind, ask them about the "optimal routing" feature for roaming subscribers and you'll see how serious they are. (01/07/03) [perm link]
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