You can get a cellular signal even in the remotest places you go on holiday. However, progress is a patchy thing, and some of my experiences getting mobile data to work were so spectacularly, splendidly and unrelentingly dismal, I thought I’d share them with you. It’s quite long, so maybe get yourself a coffee first. If you’re an investor in telcos, I’d make that an Irish coffee. A stiff one.
My objective was simple: be able to access my e-mail while I’m away without my laptop, so I know there are no fires in my little consulting business needing my urgent attention.
Firstly, you need some connectivity.
The only mobile phone we have — I got one for my wife as she’s out and about more than me — is a Motorola V525 with a Vodafone pre-paid SIM. (Why Vodafiend? Purely professional interest, not value for money.) It was bought from box-shifter Phones4u in the local shopping mall. Nothing remarkable. Later, it was sent into a friend’s secret back-room for unlocking from satanic mind-control forces, but otherwise appears normal.
First wrinkle. Vodafone’s flagship data offering didn’t work out of the box. Press the Vodafone Live! soft button, get an error. The SIM card didn’t seem to be provisioned for GRPS — a call to Vodafone customer services to fix. Oh, and each call to fix their screw-ups costs me 25p. The GPRS settings also didn’t match those on the Vodafone web site — and those on the Vodafone web site differed depending on how you searched for them. Another call. 45 minutes on hold. Abandon to bath baby. Another call. (“Does this gateway give me full Internet access so I can use my phone as a modem with my laptop using Bluetooth, or is this gateway just going to give me access to Vodafone Live! and/or web sites?” I might was well ask if Vogons like ice cream.) The Motorola website is also supposed to help you provision your phone, but didn’t have any option for my phone, plan and network combination.
GPRS is a notoriously awful system to provision. It just doesn’t seem to be able to bootstrap itself into discovery of the right gateways. Why couldn’t everyone have agreed to have the same default gateway for Internet access, and have whacko settings for anything else? Just so you know, I got the phone unlocked after having the GPRS problems, so it’s not my fault!
Eventually it all springs into life, and I can access their portal.
Next stop, get the email client set up. Whoopee — there’s one built-in, and it even does IMAP. It has a separate set of GPRS settings, just to make things easy. Tap, tap, tap. I run my own email server to have total control, so I can see it connecting fine through the firewall. It works! Err. Once. And never again. I subsequently discover this is because it can’t cope with more than about a dozen messages in your inbox. Of course, why would anyone want such a crazy thing? But I’ve got better things to do than debug Moto phone software, so time to try something else.
Do a Google search on “J2ME IMAP” and follow some links.
Download the Sirius email client. Errr? Ummm? Where is it? Not in the applications folder. Eventually find that all J2ME downloads end up under the “Games” sub-folder of “My Items”. Naturally. Install, configure, more triple-tapping. Run. Bzzzt. Crashes on sync. No error message, just dies.
Next candidate, please.
EmailViewer from Reqwireless steps up to the plate. More download, configure, tap tap tap. Try it and SUCCESS! It works, I can read my mail.
So off we go on holiday, and it works like a dream. I go for a few days using the trial version. I hit the daily usage limit and am impressed enough that I’d like to buy it. Click the registration link. Follow the pages of e-commerce crap, eight thousand taps later we get to a drop-down box for your platform type that simply doesn’t work. Does nothing. But you can’t submit the form without it. Give up.
Ooh! My accountant wants to know if I want to run a payroll. Absolutely! I send a reply. “We must verify your email address before accepting replies.” OK. I do it. The outbound message is lost in the process, but I have no way of knowing until I get home and no payroll was run. Thanks.
Get to the end of the trial period — last day. Cripes! Let’s have another go at registering. For some reason this time it refuses to deep-link into the Handango m-commerce site. I’m forced to start from the home page. OK, whatever it takes to get an activation code. I’m getting good at this triple-tap stuff.
I only started taking notes about half way through this harrowing odyssey, so my apologies if some things aren’t 100% right or are out of order — the gist is all true. Here’s the lowlights:
This glorious experience took 45 minutes of my time. I make a note of the before-and-after balances of my pre-pay account, and just the failed purchase cost me £2.17, or about $3.82.
Vodafone already have all my personal and payment details registered. They could have offered a payment platform, or a set of web services to access this data. They haven’t, because they think it’s far more urgent to sell TV to mobile users. Standard cellco wannabe media company envy complex. The people are cooler, the parties are better. Who wouldn’t? Making money by enabling easy transactions is just too dull.
While I’m having a go at Vodafone, here’s a few more ways their portal is broken:
Overall it’s OK, but nothing to get excited about.
Anyway, back to the main story. A few days later, one last go at registering my email client. Now we’re past the trial period. Fire up the app, click register, and it refuses to take you anywhere. Says you have to go to the wired website to buy. Tough shit, otherwise. That’s right, the trial period has expired so we’re not going to allow you access to buy this product. Business genius — I should write an article for HBR on it.
Luckily, I had suspected that disaster would strike, so I gave myself a back-up plan. I’ve been in this IT thing long enough to know that cocked-up is the natural state of affairs, and a Plan C is never a bad idea. I opened a Vodadone Mail email account. (Oh, just another two calls to customer support because their web self-provisioning doesn’t work, and password reset doesn’t exist.) Eventually we get there. I forward copies of all my inbox messages to Vodafone, and I can browse them via the wireless web. Not great, but better than zilch.
You won’t be too amazed to learn that the address book in the web-based mail app in no way syncs or integrates with that in the phone. Modal, moi? Such seamlessness must involve futuristic technology we can barely dream of. And the actual sending of an email results in a gobbledegook 9502 error (or whatever - I didn’t write it down for posterity). And forget Gmail or Yahoo-style gigabytes of storage. Expect “out of room” errors after you’ve got 50 weeny messages in your inbox. But hey, what do you expect from the world’s leading personal communications company? It’s so good they have Vodafone Live! banners on the buses running around town here telling me it’s completely fab. It must be true!
So Vodafone have made about 10 quid off me in data revenues, but probably spent twice that in customer support. I’m a guaranteed churn when my credit runs out. Reqwireless have made nothing, despite my intensive efforts to give them my money. Handango are at zero too. Motorola have my money, and Phones4u are getting a sweet commission.
Overall, it’s not a pretty sight.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 07:08 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/508.
Shorter Geddes: Network operators suck cock. Big, ugly, throbbing cock.
I agree completely. My own Nokia 6230/T-Mobile UK setup does most of these things and more; e-mail client that doesn't work, ever, MNO website with inaccurate and contradictory instructions, deliberately infuriating portal, and why the fucking hell do I have to make eleven clicks before I can enter a URL? Except to keep the rubes in the games'n'ringtones crapware ghetto?
The POP3 settings given by T-Mobile conflict with the ones for my email, and don't work. There's a "security settings" menu that I suspect contains the key to the mystery, but helpful T-Mobile have greyed it out to keep my grubby fingers from things I have no business to know about and should leave to the Adults at, well, T-Mobile.
Personally, I can't wait for T to stop fucking around and give all their users the no-portal, no cuffware Web'n'Walk offer they have just announced for "high end" users in Germany. Homepage is Google. €10 for 20MB download monthly. Simple. I'd use that.
I suggest we abolish the word "portal". A portal is a doorway - but these ones don't lead anywhere. How about "ghetto"?
Posted by: at July 5, 2005 11:41 AMI need to use a different network profile to send MMS'es and get on the net, and my provider wants me to believe we'll all soon be watching TV on our mobiles. Riiight.
Posted by: at July 7, 2005 08:04 PM