T-Mobile: The Incommunication Company

[rowyn]

Last Friday, my Internet service with T-Mobile stopped working. I knew this because of what koogrr refers to as the "two-dot dance", where the little icon that shows a G when you're connected shows a couple of cycling dots instead. This happens sometimes, when you're too far from a tower or you just got off the phone or you're in a thick-walled concrete basement or the stars are not aligned. It usually doesn't last for hours. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting a few times, and then rebooting, with no success. About midday, I went to the T-Mobile website to use their "Desktop Interface" to check my email. The DI is a web-based mirror of your Sidekick. When you're logged in to it, you can see everything your SK has -- notes, contacts, email, text messages, everything. It's got one of the crappiest UIs I've seen in the last 8 years, but it more or less works.

Well, used to work. I didn't get an error message when I clicked the link. The cursor turned to an hourglass for a moment, the browser pretended it was loading a new page, then told me it was done, while still on the same page.

Ooo-kay.

I went to the support section of T-Mobile's webpage. There was nothing there, or on their front page, or on my login page, about an outage.

I gave up for a few hours.

My smartphone was still working as a stupidphone, and Friday evening I texted koogrr's Sidekick. "Is your phone's 'net out?"

"Yep. I called Customer Service, there's some kind of widespread outage."

I gave up again.

Saturday: still out. Sunday: still out. Sunday night, I called customer service. There was no automated announcement of an outage. After waiting twelve minutes for a person to answer, I gave up on talking to anyone and hung up. I checked the web again. Still nothing on the main page, still nothing on my login, Desktop Interface still cryptically not working, still nothing on the support page. I tried the forums.

Aha! The Sidekick forum had an announcement that there's a problem! O rly? It said that browser service has been restored, and they were working on the rest.

I checked, and yes, my SK's browser does work despite my SK thinking it can't connect. I texted John with the news.

Monday, still no service, not that it mattered since my SK hadn't charged properly overnight and died after twenty minutes of use. When I got home, I plugged it in. An hour later, John texted: "Did you get a text from T-Mobile with your username and password?"

"No," I texted back.

An hour after that, I got a text from T-Mobile apologizing for the disruption to service, and telling me my username and password. (T-Mobile does not believe in hashing. Or encryption.) "Buh? Why are you telling me this?"

Twenty minutes later, a box popped up asking me to login. To what? I don't know. Dutifully, I attempted to login. Dutilessly, the device failed to login. After ten minutes, I cancelled out so that I could at least web browse again.

Tuesday morning, my smartphone was still impersonating a stupidphone. I went to T-Mobile's website, which was still displaying the same lack-of-information it had since Friday. I checked the forums. The announcement of the outage was gone. I clicked one of three 'The Gargantuan Outage Thread' threads, which had approximately a bazillion replies. It opened with someone saying that we needed to login when the SMS login box popped up, and couldn't until then. I opened my phone, looked for an SMS login menu option, found one, and tried to login. A few minutes later, it stopped trying to login and returned to the main screen and the two-dot dance. Had it logged in?

I waited a few more minutes. Nothing but the browser showed any signs of life.

I called Customer Service, and halfway through talking to a very apologetic and utterly clueless CSR, I finally lost it.

"Jennifer," I told her, "I know this isn't your fault. You don't need to apologize. But I just want to tell you this, and I want you to pass it on to your boss and whoever else for me. What really bothers me, what's really driving me crazy, isn't that my phone doesn't work right now. It's that I can't get any information on what's wrong. I go to the webpage and there's nothing. I log in and there's nothing. I try to get to the Desktop Interface and it doesn't work with exactly the same failure message I'd get if I wasn't connected to a network at all. I call in and get over 10 minutes of hold time but no automated attendant telling me "oh yeah, there's an outage, we're working on it." I get a text message with my user name and password, but no explanation why. I had to go to the forum and get another user to tell me what to do. Because your users are providing me with better tech support than you are. With more communication."

She apologized anyway, and gave me a month's free SK service, which is less than 20% of what I pay T-Mobile each month.

Ten minutes after I got off the phone, my sidekick finally stopped the two-dot-dance and connected to the net.

Sort of. IM worked. Email did not.

When I checked on Thursday, the Desktop Interface still didn't work, but the link for it had been replaced with "An Important Message for Sidekick Users". That linked to the forum and an apology from the COO. Maybe Jennifer had passed my message along and maybe someone had actually listened. The COO threw Danger and Microsoft under the bus, saying Danger/MS were working to fix it and implying that the mess was therefore All Their Fault in the First Place. He reiterated that the phone and text services 'provided by T-Mobile' still worked and had worked all along. Which was true.

It's Friday now, and email still does not work properly. It sends and receives sporadically. I check gmail to see if I have any. Gmail has also worked all along, and I don't pay them anything.

I'm glad I didn't get a new contract with T-Mobile in August. I still love the Sidekick's design and utility, but I do not love T-Mobile any more. It's not the outage, or not just the outage. It's the way they handled it.

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I really hate customer service. x.x On the other hand, I don't think it's possible to have a good customer service experience, unless the problem is very simple and can be solved in one sentence or less, preferably by a recording. q:3

[rowyn]

I've had good CS experiences. This has not been one of them. The opportunity to talk to a knowledgable machine has been sorely missed.

(I remember a scene from a movie, or maybe a webcomic, not sure which one, where the protagonist works with a CSR for a minute or two and finally, in exasperation, says 'Look, is there a machine there I could talk to?' She puts him through to one and he left a message.)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Odd. My Android phone runs on T-Mobile, didn't have any problems this past week. Sidekick-problem only?

[rowyn]

Yes, it's pretty clearly an SK-only problem, given the ties with the Desktop Interface. So if I had gotten an Android phone, I would've missed this adventure in poor customer service. I'm still just as glad I didn't. I dunno, maybe in a few months I won't care again. It's also obvious T-Mobile is not supporting the Sidekick overall; the newest model is barely an improvement over my two-year old one. Any of the newer generation smartphones has a browser several times more capable, and the new SK isn't even cheaper than the G1 or the myTouch or other new smartphones.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Hm, that does sound unfortunate. *hugs poor Rowyn*

[caffeinewabbit.livejournal.com]

You've pretty much echoed my feelings on the matter over the past week. It's left me majorly annoyed - especially the fact that email is still down, which is what I mostly use my Sidekick for nowadays (I text and use the browsers pretty sparingly, but I have four different email accounts I usually use the phone for.)

Even though it doesn't excuse the craptacular customer service, T-Mobile is probably right to throw Microsoft under the bus - as this story claims, they haven't exactly been treating the Danger team with much respect.

My contract was up in August as well, and I was planning on upgrading to a myTouch, but now I'm seriously considering switching to an iPhone or one of Verizon's Android phones instead.

[rowyn]

A few months ago, I switched my primary email account to Gmail. Gmail auto-forwards to my Tmail account, and everything I send out from Tmail is copied back to Gmail and has Gmail has the reply-to account. So I can still use my Sidekick to check all my incoming mail, because I can use the webbrowser to look up Gmail.

Were I still using tmail as my primary account (which I was for a few years), I'd be considerably more pissed. I am really glad that I decided to make it an auxilary account, although at the time I did it, it was because I wanted a permanent archive for my email. Not because I thought T-Mobile was unreliable. Which it obviously is.

I find the article depressingly plausible. The Sidekick was a good, solid phone three years ago. It really feels like it got kicked to the curb in the last year, that someone decided it wasn't going anywhere and stopped supporting it as a platform. It's pretty easy to believe that someone wasn't someone who'd been involved with the project for very long.

Also, *hugs* to you. I didn't know you were a fellow Sidekick sufferer!

[caffeinewabbit.livejournal.com]

I've actually been using Gmail as my primary account for a few years now - I think only one person actually even knows my Tmail address. I just used the Sidekick's POP abilities to check it and my other email accounts, and so I'd be able to get mail without having to manually check. I just hadn't realized how heavily I relied on it until the outage.

And yup, got my Sidekick back in 2007. It really bites that Microsoft bought Danger just to marginalize them, I'd been following the company with interest since they started years ago.

[elusivetiger.livejournal.com]

They sent you your username and password? Cleartext?!

Wow - no T-Mobile for me, ever, just on that mark. Going to suggest haikujaguar ditch hers after contract is up, too. If they can't get that right I shudder to think of what else is going on under the hood.

[rowyn]

Yup. Text message, not email, but still. Pathetic. I'm not sure if it's the case for all T-Mobile services or just the Sidekick, though. The Sidekick obviously has its own 'net service that's not use for any of T-Mobile's other devices.

[telnar.livejournal.com]

Before you get too convinced that the grass is greener on the other side, here's an article on customer service which rates T-Mobile highest:

http://www.precentral.net/customer-service-showdown-sprint-and-verizon-tie-second-t-mobile-1-att-last

That article gathered its data during a more normal period for the network and is written from the perspective of a smartphone user who might need technical questions answered, so YMMV.

[rowyn]

My personal experience is that T-Mobile's in-person customer service (when visiting stores) is excellent; they have great sales people who know their equipment well. When talking to an actual person on the phone, also good. When using their website, completely abysmal. They do not even have a way to send an email/fill out a form/leave a message for a CSR. You can wait on hold until you talk to a live person, or you can not get help. Those are your only options. That "live chat support" Laptop Magazine references? Tried doing that a few months ago. The after filling out the chat form with my problem, I got a message that said 'no one is available at this time and even though the form said that the soemone would get back to you, we've determined that people aren't happy with the response times when we do that, so we're just not going to save it at all." It then cleared the form.

So maybe Laptop Magazine got lucky with the chat, or maybe I got unlucky. It wasn't the kind of experience I wanted to repeat.

The thought that everyone else's web page manages to be EVEN WORSE is pretty dismal, though.

Also, it's hard to believe that any other major carrier could decide for SIX DAYS that they didn't need to post a notice of outage during a service outage. Not even an automated message when for callers. Seriously, I am finding it hard to believe T-Mobile did it, and I saw it myself!

[makovette.livejournal.com]

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/10/t-mobile-sidekick-disaster-microsofts-servers-crashed-and-they-dont-have-a-backup/

Yeps, time to go to another carrier.....

CYa!
Mako