850MHz or 900MHz? AT&T or TMobile?

[Knight Walker]

On Sun, 2008-03-23 at 00:50 -0700, Lowell Higley wrote:
> I bought a tri-band phone while I lived in Europe.  It is
> 900Mhz/1900Mhz.  I had no problems with it on T-Mobile's USA network
> while I was their customer.  I tend to buy my phones is Asia or Europe
> because they are unlocked and usually not crippled.  T-Mobile in
> particular likes to artificially limit their phones.  For example,
> they will limit SMS messages to say 30 characters when that is not the
> technological limit.  My theory is they do this to increase the number
> text messages sent so they can get you to buy a more expensive SMS
> plan or charge you the 10 cents per message overage charge.

Sounds like you got a raw deal. I'd have quit too if my T-mobile
experience was like that. I've been a T-mobile customer since they were
VoiceStream and I've had no problems. I stopped buying phones from T-Mo
directly many years ago (Back when consumer phones were switching from
B/W to color) and instead I have bought my last couple of phones from
eBay, unlocked. I've had no problems using them with my SIM card. T-Mo's
website "doesn't recognize" my phone when I login, but I know a
compatible model (Same OS, same QWERTY keyboard) so I override it and
everything mostly works for me (Some of their T-Zones website features
don't seem to want to work, but I stopped caring about those when I
found free equivalents online). I'm anxious to try GPRS on a FreeRunner.
I hope the "2.5G" will be faster and more capable than the radio that's
in my current phone.

I've never seen T-mo artificially limit phones; not like I've seen
Verizon do it. All my texts have been sent as 160-chars-per and my phone
automatically reassembles the ones that get split, so any 30-char limit
isn't a "feature" of the network.

I haven't actually had to call T-mo customer service in several years. I
get signal pretty much everywhere I want it and where I don't, there's
generally a localized reason that everyone else is subject to.

-KW