Personal: April 2006 Archives

I did an amazingly stupid thing this weekend. I managed to get myself lost in the woods.

My friend Lewis and I went down towards Santa Cruz on Saturday afternoon. The plan was to do some wine tasting, visit our friend Ashton and then go to a party in Santa Cruz. Things did not go quite as we had planned. We did go wine tasting. We got down there late, so we only managed to go to one winery, Bonny Doon. After that we met up with Ashton and decided to go for a quick hike up to the Lime Kilns in Fall Creek State Park. Now, this in and of itself was not the worst idea. It's a pretty short hike and Lewis had done it before. The problem was, it was 6pm when we left, and we took basically none of the things you should take when you go on a hike. These include: a flashlight, water, food, warm clothes, basic first aid supplies, a pocket knife, a map, etc. We also didn't tell anyone where we were going and when we planned to get back (we'll call this really stupid mistake number one). Brilliant I tell you, brilliant.

So, the hike up to the kilns went uneventfully enough. We got there around 6:30, and then we made our first really stupid decision. We decided to go back a different way than we had come up (really stupid mistake number two). We thought the trail we were on was a loop. Turns out this wasn't the case. We ended up hiking for several miles in the wrong direction as the light faded. It was getting dark out and we compounded our problem by, first, not turning around and going back the way we came (really stupid mistake number three), then going down a bunch of dead end trails. Finally around 9pm we gave up and called 911 for help. They put us in touch with the local park rangers. Here we made really stupid mistake number four (there were lots of smaller stupid mistakes before this, but this was the fourth really stupid one). We tried to follow the directions of the ranger to walk our way out of the park using only our cell phones as flashlights. We ended up making a wrong turn and going down a trail onto private land off the park, so now the rangers had no idea where we were. This turned what would have been an hour long rescue into something that lasted much longer. We walked down the wrong trail for quite awhile before realizing that we were not on the path we thought we were on. The rangers told us to stay put, so we did. It started raining. We huddled together for warmth. I had a raincoat, but the other two had to huddle under an umbrella. Six and a half hours after we called for help, they finally found us. It was after 4am before we finally walked out of the forest.

There's a couple things I want to note. One, we're all really greatful for the help that the Santa Cruz Sheriffs, the Park Rangers, the EMTs and others gave us. Second, if you're lost in the woods and at a landmark, don't move. Third Verizon's good cell phone coverage was a lifesaver. T-Mobile worked out there, but there were a lot of places where the only working phone was the Verizon one. Fourth, despite good coverage, the GPS functionality of the Verizon phone doesn't work at all if you aren't in range of at least three cell towers.

Well I'm really happy we all made it out safe and sound. Lots of lessons learned from this one. Lewis thought we should be forced to put big red "L"s on our forheads and walk around Santa Cruz. A large part of the learning on this one is just not getting complacient. I realized that just being close to an urban area doesn't make any safer when going hiking in the woods and doesn't make it any less important to pack everything that I'd need if I was somewhere more remote. I fell pretty damn dumb. Doh!

So for some reason I get drawn into a conversation about Wireless Carriers several times a day. Could be that I'm looking for them.

Either way, I thought I'd draw up a quick chart describing all the carriers in the bay area and what I see as their strengths/weaknesses.

First, the handy-dandy table:

Explanation of grades:
A - Exceptional
B - Above Average
C - Average
D - Poor
F - Lame
F-- (special category for exceptionally lame)

The whole thing reminds me of the "fast, friendly, cheap, pick any two," joke. None of the carriers are really head and shoulders above the rest. They each have their strong points, and each one as at least one negative. Unfortunately it's not about picking the best wireless carrier, it's about picking the one that sucks the least. I'll go into my opinions of each below.

T-Mobile

T-Mobile is my current and favorite carrier. T-Mobile has exceptional customer service which is open 24/7. The agents there have almost always been polite, helpful and quick to solve any issues I've had. They only make you wait 30 days after buying a phone before they will unlock it for you, and they don't give you the run around when you call and ask for it. T-Mobile tends to have relatively generous plans. More minutes per price level than any other carrier and they don't try to nickel and dime you to death like Sprint or Verizon. I do wish they had rollover minutes though, and they can't do anything if you run out of minutes in the middle of the month, which was a problem for me last January. The big downside for me with T-Mobile is the fact that they stopped carrying Sony Ericsson phones a few years back. This is a bummer for me because generally Sony has had the best phones out there lately. I can't wait for the new K790a to come out. 3.2 Megapixels of Sony CyberShot goodness. Almost all Sony phones have Bluetooth and they're GSM/GPRS/EDGE. Some of my friends complain of network weirdness from T-Mobile. I haven't had any problems lately, but I do know of a few things that have bothered me with T-Mobile's network in the past. For a long time Cincinnati was in the wrong time zone. This meant that our "evening" hours didn't start until 10pm (they'd fix our bill if we called them about it). This was lame, but then again, Cincinnati is lame, and I don't live there anymore. I really don't care if they've fixed this or not, although I think they have. The other problem I've occasionally had with T-Mobile is weird behavior when roaming. Things like calls going to voice mail without the phone ringing, or trouble getting a signal. I don't think this is as bad as it used to be, but a few years ago I had problems when I was visiting my family in Aspen. In the bay area I rarely find that I don't have a signal.

Cingular

Cingular has exceptionally lame customer service. Their customer service is actually the worst customer service I've ever had from any company in any industry. That's including credit card companies, car dealerships, and even the evil Best Buy. They've earned the special F-- for their atrocious customer service. If you really don't care about customer service, and I mean customer service that randomly turns off your account and can't give you a good reason why, Cingular has a few positives going for it. It has generally good coverage in the bay area, and it carries Sony Ericsson phones. If you really want a Sony phone, buy it from Cingular with a prepaid account, wait 90 days, ask them to unlock it and then use it with T-Mobile. Or even better, buy an already unlocked one with the OEM Firmware off eBay. T-Mobile will even tell you how to reset your internet settings to work with their network. I guess I should also mention that Cingular has roll over minutes, so if your usage varies a lot from month-to-month this might smooth things out for you. Cingular off-sets this a little by giving you less minutes per price point than T-Mobile.

Verizon

Verizon has the best network hands down. If you want coverage everywhere, this is the one to go with. A lot of this comes from the technology they use. Verizon uses a CDMA network that is much more advanced than GSM, they're bringing up their EV-DO network, and most of their phones still work with the old school AMPS analog network. There is a huge downside to this though - it means you have to wait for phones to be developed specifically for Verizon's non-standard technology. If it wasn't bad enough that their phones are 2-3 years behind the GSM phones from T-Mobile and Cingular (and those are at least a year behind the ones in europe) Verizon cripples their phones. Verizon locks out the OBEX protocol on their Bluetooth phones. This means that while you can use a Bluetooth headset, you can't sync your address book with your computer. It's about the lamest thing I've seen a company do. It's right up there with Best Buy's rebate policies. I guess they did market research and found that only geeks ever actually transfer files, contacts, photos, ringtones or whatever using bluetooth and everybody else just wants a wireless headset. The logic behind this is that it forces you to use their expensive network to get your photos off your phone, and you have to pay them for ringtones, you can't just copy them over to your phone. Verizon Wireless actually had to settle a class action lawsuit because of this. This is a total deal breaker for me, both because it's just lame and because I have a Mac. One of the coolest things that Macs can do is they can use a program called iSync to sync your address book on your computer to your phone. I never loose my contact list. I don't loose phone numbers and it really isn't a problem for me when I get a new phone. This is all due to the magic of iSync. All this adds up to earn Verizon a special F-- for phones. Their customer service can also be a total pain in the ass. It took a friend of mine months of calling them to get her phone account separated from her ex-boyfriend's after they broke up. Overall, unless you really, really need the network strength (like your parents live in Maine), I'd stay away from Verizon.

Sprint

Ooo spiffy! You can have push-to-talk. Actually, that's a feature of the now long gone Nextel. I basically got nothing against Sprint. They use a network technology that, like Verizon is only used by them. Ok, to be totally fair, Verizon, Sprint, MetroPCS and a few others all use the same technology -- but their phones won't interoperate on each other's networks. This means their phones, like Verizon's are outdated. They also like to retain control of their brand, so you don't buy a Samsung phone to use with Sprint, you buy a Sprint phone to use with Sprint (made by Samsung). Their plans are so-so. They require long contracts (I think they were the first company to go to two-year contracts), and almost everything else about them is unremarkable. I did really like Nextel when I used to have a company provided phone. The push-to-talk thing is kinda handy, but it's not that much more useful than just dialing someone. Nextel also was the first company to do a really neat user-interface thing with their phones (since copied by Sony Ericsson and others). If you store multiple numbers under a contact you can scroll up/down to select that contact in your address book and then use the left/right buttons to select which number you want to dial. It really is the best way to navigate an address book I've seen so far.

MetroPCS

I want to say I haven't heard anything negative about MetroPCS. If you never leave the bay area they do have decent phones and really cheap plans, but they charge roaming anytime you go anywhere - which just doesn't work for me.

Well, that's it. If you've got any comments (or Cingular horror stories) you can leave them below.

Actually, one more thing. Before I step off my soap box I have to say that the whole "network locking" thing is crap. If I buy a GSM phone I want it to work no matter who's SIM card I put in it. Maybe the mighty carriers have studied this and found it stops fraud, or keeps their customers, but quite frankly all I think it has done is create this cottage industry around unlocking phones. Anyone who wants to can download software, or go to chinatown and get their phone unlocked. To me it's just a stupid way to piss off customers. Okay, now you can leave comments