* Posts by Tim Beeber

4 publicly visible posts • joined 14 May 2008

Vonage drops off the net

Tim Beeber
FAIL

Appears to be a UK problem, mostly.

I called my US vonage #, and the VM picked up - that's about as far as I can test it remotely.

From their website:

"Some customers are presently experiencing an intermittent issue affecting their ability to make or receive calls to their UK phone numbers. Inbound calls to some virtual numbers to Italy, Spain, France, and Ireland are also affected. Our engineers are aware of this issue and are working to resolve it as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience in this matter."

Gmail in massive web outage

Tim Beeber
FAIL

Blackberry App, too...

The GMail app on my BlackBerry also appears to be effected.

SMS costs more than using Hubble Space Telescope

Tim Beeber
Unhappy

@Alternative solution to SMS pricing

Agreed, that's the way to cut the price, however, but I do find the feature occasionally useful. My wife has also taken to communicating with a friend who cannot always manage a voice call, but can get an SMS out.

What's bothering me is that what had never run me more than a buck or two a month is now running $5-15 a month, and I just don't see any real justification for it, other than lining the pockets of Verizon.

Ans so far, spam hasn't been a real problem for me on my mobile... <crossing fingers>

Tim Beeber
Unhappy

SMS now the equivalent of HP printer ink...

SMS costs are starting to piss me off, that's for sure.

I actually started wondering what the data transmission costs were the other day when perusing my bill. Made me think of the comparisons of HP printer ink and Dom Perignon that I remeber seeing a while back. Of course not a valid comparison, but it does make you think about how badly you are getting shafted.

When I first started with SMS support, it cost $.02 to recieve a message - and I didn't mind getting dinged a few pennies. Verizon has been raising that, and just bumped it to $.20. Ouch. I don't see any justification for an increase in costs.

It's been a bad time for my wife to suddenly discover this feature of her phone...

I suspect this is to try to force people into service upgrades, so even the occasional user is having to pay $10-15 a month per phone more to get on a plan that includes TXT, or get dinged per message at the exorbanant rate. They also just took away the $5/month SMS add-on that would have been good for the occasional user - so the minimum upgrade is $10/month/phone, some options run more.

And to upgrade both phones on my plan level to include unlimited TXT will take the monthly base nut from $70 to $100, a 43% increase for the ability to send a bunch of short illegible messages to other phones. Not a great deal, but I may be forced into it.

I even went as far as starting to shop around for other carriers, but they all had pretty much the same deal. No collaboration in a competitive market, right?