Telcos, can’t live with ‘em can’t live without ‘em
Yesterday I buckled down and got a new cell phone subscription. I have been a loyal customer of T-mobile for the past seven years. The only effect this loyalty has had was to give them an effective carte blanche to screw me over. Their philosophy probably is that if your customer is too lazy to switch, you’ve got to incentivize them.
I identified Orange as being a lesser evil and took the cheapest one year plan from them I could get. I’ll pay €7,50/month which will be effectively doubled and all my actions will be substracted from that €15.
The customer service at the orange shop was of course dismal. This wasn’t in their flagship store but in their tiny retail outlet in Delft city centre.
They had no clue what HSDPA is and couldn’t tell me if and when Orange is planning to roll it out (Orange hasn’t released anything about this yet). They also couldn’t inform me about the availability of the Nokia N95.
I never want to be tied to a mobile operator for longer than a year. Usually I forget to cancel on time because every operator imposes a three month cancellation period so that means I’m stuck longer. They do everything to tie you down and squeeze the most possible money from you.
This time I am going to cancel my plan immediately. It would be nice if they would have offered that service in the shop.
My 3310 —proclaimed by some to be the greatest phone ever made— is not really cutting it anymore in this age of GMail apps and Jaiku presence. This means I’m looking to get a new phone.
N95
The N95 though very expensive looks like the mobile phone to get (look at the review on YouTube). But reading the review at GigaOM shows that it is everything but that battery life isn’t.
Builtin WiFi is nice to escape data costs when you are at home and at work. But the things I would be going for mostly are the excellent photo/video capabilities and the media features.
I’m looking for a pocket camera and combining it with a cell phone would seem to be the best utilization of pocket space. For unobtrusive shooting and shooting e.g. while sporting or going out a 1kg DSLR is too obtrusive. The N95’s GPS would mean that pictures could be automatically geotagged. It does all this and more.
The N95 is simply too expensive and the next runnerup candidate is the N73.
Rabo Mobiel
The other thing I had been considering is to take a mobile plan from Dutch bank the Rabobank called Rabo Mobiel. Rabobank has recently been offering very affordable mobile plans to its customers with the promise of digital mobile payment options for the future.
Payment possibilities here in the Netherlands are in the dark ages compared to the far east or even with the Nordic countries. I’m guessing that uptake will take a while but Rabobank are trying to get people on board with very competitive pricing (appealing to the Dutch) and a very well done advertising campaign.
This offering is cost efficient, sympathethic and promises to bring you to the future of payment. Still I didn’t take it because seeing is believing and switching banks is nontrivial.
See the introductory ad:
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
April 9th, 2007What a coincidence - just 4 hours ago I activated my Rabo Mobiel SIM card. I have opted to ‘transfer’ my number - which means I have a temporary number for 3 months. This is more or less solvable by call forwarding, except that you don’t get any SMS messages, and it costs money. As is usual, I’m now also stuck paying off 2 mobile phone bills for 3 months.
The most efficient way to handle this sort of thing is to mark your calendar, 3 months before your ‘lock-in’ expires. Once the date swings around, send a signed paper with a copy of the same document you used to authenticate yourself when you bought the subscription, to an address that you already have an file.
Unfortunately, doing this risks your number transfer options, as sometimes they feign impossibility of their systems to cope with separate transfer and cancellation requests.
My roommate, Remco, has had rabo mobile for a while now, and the option to pay 10 euros a month for unlimited internet sounds great if I end up travelling a lot, and given that they are a bank, ostensibly this mobile thing is not where they are getting their money from. Last but not least, because I didn’t get a new phone with my subscription, I have a one-monthly cancellation term, with no lock-in. That’s unique! If it doesn’t work out or I manage to break my phone, I can switch inside of a month. Very convenient.
It also helps that I have a rabobank account. I also did the entire process of subscribing online, no customer service in between. Signing for stuff occurred the same way I ’sign’ for an online bank transaction. The only thing I have to snail-mail is a preprinted number transfer request. I assume this is required to convince Vodafone to transfer the number and cancel my service. This may be strange, but, anytime stuff works out without human intervention and a minimum of snail mail, I’m actually happier.
One disadvantage: The SIM card was preloaded with the following phone numbers:
Rabolijn (Rabo line)
Rabofoon (Rabo Phone)
Rabo mobiel (Rabo Mobile)
interhelp (I actually know what this is; it’s to cancel bank cards and the like in case your wallet gets stolen)
Int. Bankieren (International banking?)
Interpolis Zorg (their healthcare insurance subsidiary)
Interpolis Schade (Damage and insurance)
Bel Uw Bank (Call your bank)
Yes, 8 numbers. What the hell? I’ll be writing a note of complaint about that, because this way I don’t know what to call when. Other than that, so far, so good.
Cristiano_Betta http://ibbydibby.com/cbetta/openid/
April 9th, 2007I am using Melinda’s laptop because mine is at the Apple store for another repair. But I have two comments:
1: Isn’t it amazing that people like us always seem to know more about stuff in a shop then the people who sell the stuff? I spend this afternoon explaining MediaCentral vs MediaPortal vs AppleTV to one of the Tech guys of DJ Jazzy Jeff in the Apple Store.
2: I think mobile service as we know now will one day die. Just like podcasting and products like the Apple TV are killing the normal TV broadcast, WIFI mobiles and open wireless networks will take the light out of existing mobile networks. I think this is good because this will mean that we are going to buy the phone for the phone and not because we get a new contract. Manufacturers will make sure that the mobile you will get is actually THOUGHT THROUGH! I can’t wait untill this happens.
alper http://alper.nl
April 9th, 2007@Reinier: What are the payment features they are offering and how close are you to ‘paying your croissant with your mobile’ like they advertise?
One month switching is indeed unique, the carriers I complained to told me that I shouldn’t complain about a three month cancellation period because everybody does it (the logic!). This makes me wonder why on earth I am stuck with Orange for one year for. I did not get a new mobile so I’m not paying off an expensive gadget.
I think it’s a good thing that the SIM is preloaded with helpful numbers but one or two should surely suffice.
@Cristiano: You’re right. SIP is already built into the N95 —it really does do everything— and in a couple more years will become completely commonplace with SIP-as-a-service being offered by anybody and their uncle and mobile connectivity moving from GSM to WiFi and Wimax. Broaderband eventually will solve all our problems.
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
April 10th, 2007So far you can access your banking stuff through your phone (by way of a website, pretty simple stuff and didn’t really require becoming a telco), which allows you to transfer money. That’s about it.
@Cris: I first have to see some sort of wireless service that ranges sufficiently. Right now if I stand right in front of my apartment but outside on the ground floor (I live on the 3rd floor, european counting), I can’t even see remnants of our wireless network station, let alone connect to it. 802.11n shows good promise, though. The WiMax stuff multiplexes across many bands below the interference boundary but logic would say that the range on such a device would be very low.
Then there’s the issue of latency. We can’t get rid of both the mobile and land telcos and just connect the world with one endless hop network of wireless stations; the time it would take to even get from here to amsterdam would be multiple seconds. In effect, a telco’s solution is virtually the pinnacle of effiency on paper, they just manage to bollocks it up: wide-beam on a square kilometer+ scale cell, then straight into high speed fiber to another beamer, which beams down to the target. That’s perfect; it scales, it has low latency, it should be capable of decent bandwidth. Of course, the telcos still don’t have a serious lookup system, and they keep screwing up 3G, which doesn’t help.
What would really impress the heck out of me is some sort of limited european-wide release of a certain low frequency (below 5 ghz). Total freedom (like the ‘microwave’ band of 22-26ghz) won’t help because abuse and scramblers would eliminate any serious use. Some sort of arrangement that transmitters of any kind are fine as long as they adhere to some pre-defined transmission protocol (well engineered.. and yet selected by a conglomerate of governments? Yeah, I’m dreaming). This protocol would only define ways to transmit raw packet data without delivery assurance (analogous to the lightweight nature of IP), and a way to attempt to negotiate collisions. That’s it.
As if.
Cristiano_Betta http://ibbydibby.com/cbetta/openid/
April 10th, 2007@Reinier: I didn’t say it is possible right now, but trust me when I say that one day everyone will call using wifi.
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
April 10th, 2007And why would that be? if WiMax-like technologies ‘win’ (and I don’t see why not, in the space where WiFi is used now, WiMax is much better), then the coverage in an overwhelming amount of even the very populated Netherlands will simply not be sufficient for WiFi. In busy cities, here and there.
The competition element will drive the prices on standard mobile calling down a lot, and at some point there will be an equilibrium.