The latest on my Real T-Mobile Customer Experience saga. Good news this time on calling customer support.
Firstly, SoftGnome to the rescue! SkypeOut is just unusable here in Lithuania it seems, and I didn't want to call T-Mobile's customer services from the landline at the in-laws (expensive international call for retired folk). I'm certainly not calling from my mobile phone itself at $2/minute roaming! So I set up the Gizmo softphone client on my PC to place the call from my home phone via the PhoneGnome box under my study desk at home in Scotland, with the Internet acting like a 2000km internal extension line. (For anyone confused by the above, it means I just placed a call from my PC here as if I'd picked up my normal cordless phone at home -- except I'm actually in a different country.) Call quality was excellent, even on a slow 256kbit DSL line at the in-laws' house.
Call was answered by a human, who transferred me to the business account support, where a very nice lady patiently went through all my problems. All the humans at T-Mobile have been very helpful -- it's the computer systems that seem to suck.
Yes, their web site is broken it seems, as is their data roaming. Their tech support people will get back to me.
At least my bill for all the roaming I've done seems less than I'd feared. Although I've just downloaded a couple of Java apps onto my handset that will let me send SMS messages via the Internet for under 1/10th the cost of their roaming charge...
Moral of this story: T-Mobile could have saved me the pain of sorting out a cheap means to call them by not trying to ding me full roaming charges (padded with maximum margin) for calling customer support from my handset. Or just put a web-initiated call-back on their support page and be done with it...
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