From: Strata Rose Chalup (strata@virtual.net)
Date: Mon Aug 21 2000 - 13:17:21 PDT
Short answer-- yes, it doesn't get any better than this. Sprint bites
the wax tadpole here in the Bay Area unless you live in certain specific
areas, so I went with GTE/Verizon. In the scant 5 weeks I've had the
phone, they've already pulled the "mygtew.com" site out from under me
and replaced it with "myvzw.com". But don't worry, at last count it
didn't actually *work* in realtime to update your phone, unless you
count 24 - 48 hours as "real". And it was so hard to use that I hadn't
provisioned it with any data yet anyway! BTW, my phone had to spend
many minutes downloading a new key, since they didn't seem to have
ported the keys to the new site either.
This is but a drop in the bucket from having GTE/VZW/LAME take 5
business days/8 calendar days to "provision" my phone for Seattle, after
being assured when I bought the phone that it was a "nationwide network"
and after specifically telling the phone tech at time of purchase that I
would be in Seattle the day after buying the phone. No incoming, no
outgoing, no nothing.
And "of course" things like SMS messaging, the voicemail notification,
etc don't work in Seattle because Airtouch != GTE even though they both
allegedly == Verizon. They are "still integrating" their systems. Did
I mention that the phone number one calls to check voicemail in
California sometimes works but mostly doesn't? And that I have had the
phone switch from digital mode to analog for large chunks of the day
while remaining in the same 10 square foot area that roll my chair
around behind my desk?
If I move to Seattle fulltime, I will probably fight the good fight to
get provisioned into the Airtouch system so that the voicemail access
will work. Of course, that will mean changing the phone number.
Argh^2.
The degree of routine lossage is absolutely mind-boggling. If Lauri
Anderson turned it into a book, it would be thick enough to stun SEVERAL
oxen, not just one. Who *are* these wankers, and how did they place out
of "grownups 101" long enough to be trusted with Actual Phone Stuff
anyway? Hello? Does anyone build sustainable systems anymore?
If anyone out there is building a large-scale system for communication
in any form, and does not FROM SQUARE ZERO build in facilities for
a) inter-server communication
b) translated gateway communication
c) weird little hooks/stubs to be called out of band as a library
they need to be taken out and shown the clue stick.
I will let
d) modularize, modularize, and then do modularize some more
pass by the wayside if it is not and never will be MY responsibility to
see that a system scales, otherwise add it to the golden list.
Sigh.
If a system is worth a cracked transformer, then it's worth designing
for scalability and interoperability. If you don't think anyone will be
using it, don't even bother building it. If you DO think people will
use it, fer cryinoutloud build it so that it can be used in extensible
ways.
Try to imagine that every system will become part of another, larger
system and be a value-add waypoint of a larger transaction-- I don't
mean this in a commerce sense, just in a processing sense. The huge
perfect factoring program becomes a waypoint in an end-to-end encrypted
message system. The encrypted message system becomes a waypoint in any
number of transaction-based systems, from delivering student grades to
buying an emu online. Any of those systems become parts of the larger
workflow space of their organizations, etc.
Most of the WankPatrol out there building closed systems for cellphone
stuff has not been thinking about the future, about mergers, about
portals, about partnerships. They think their stuff only has to work
for THEM, and seem to have pretty much ignored interoperability between
systems. This seems completely bizarre to me, given that widespread
roaming and billing arrangements seem to presuppose the cellphone
industry equivalent of RADIUS support amongst ISP's. So why don't they
have a global notification protocol so the stupid phone alerts work when
you roam?!? !@#!#!&#%$^*&#%^*# not rocket science!!!!
Yeargh. Now back to work.
Cdale, thanks for lancing that particular boil, I've been saving a rant
on that since early July.
_SRC
cdale@silly.techmonkeys.net wrote:
>
> Greetings.
[...all too familiar tale of pain & suffering omitted...]
-- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Strata Rose Chalup [strata@knownow.com] | strata@virtual.net, KF6NBZ Director of Network Operations | VirtualNet Consulting KnowNow, Inc [http://www.knownow.com] | http://www.virtual.net/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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