I came across this in my RSS aggregator, and I have to say that I was very surprised. According to the Washington Post, Cingular switched off the entire legacy AT&T Wireless TDMA infrastructure this past July.
The transition from TDMA to GSM has been underway in earents at AT&T Wireless and Cingular (first separately and now merged almost one year now) for at least three years. According to the Post article, Cingular did not inform the AT&T Wireless customers using TDMA of the turn down of the infrastructure. I have no idea whether or not this was really the case or whether or not those customers are still able to use Cingulars legacy TDMA network, but these customers would likely find their phones either unusable or unable to get decent signals.
Man, if Cingular didnt let these customers know this was going to happen, thats just bad, bad customer service management. According to the article 90 percent of the former AT&T Wireless customers had migrated to the GSM platform, leaving 10 percent on TDMA. That 10 percent is not seeing their coverage extremely limited, and thats assuming that theyre able to use the Cingular TDMA network. Im not sure how technically feasible that is because there were some issues with simply offering AT&T Wireless GSM customers access to the Cingular network without getting a Cingular SIM. I have to think TDMA network sharing would be at least as difficult.
The way to handle this would have been to offer those customers new, free (low end) GSM phones and try to get them to sign contracts for new service plans. Cingular should not be surprised to see a good number of those customers leaving Cingular altogether, and I hope they get their act together before they turn down the Cingular TDMA network.
One hopes the folks at Sprint are paying attention to this as they consider a strategy to migrate Nextel customers away from the iDEN platform.
They did shut down large portions of the AT&T Wireless TDMA network. There were several places where AT&T Wireless had TDMA and Cingular did not. My guess is they left the non-overlapping sections of the AT&T Wireless TDMA network still operational. Of course, that doesn’t mean they still didn’t try the GSM upsell after doing all this. That I believe.
If you live in Indiana or Kentucky, and you had AT&T’s TDMA, this is what happens: your phone will now randomly drift from digital to analog roaming. On phones such as mine, there is no way to tell the phone you wish to receive only digital signals. Oddly enough, mine goes to analog roaming every time I hang it up. My guess is that’s because I have an old Suncom plan with unlimited incoming. This keeps me from calling someone and asking them to call me back. When in analog mode, my calls go to voice mail and never reach my phone. Surely this is a violation of my contract. I wonder if that means they have to pay me an early termination fee.