*WSJ. AT&T's One-Rate Plan Falls Short of Promise
July 8, 1999
By WALT MOSSBERG
THE PROBLEM with high-tech products and services is that, while
they're often remarkable, they usually can't live up to their marketing hype.
Overselling seems to be as common a product of the high-tech industries
as digital technology itself. This is certainly true of the computer and
Internet industries. But it's also true of other technology-driven businesses.
A prime example is AT&T's bold new Digital
One Rate cellular-phone service, which I've
been using daily, in multiple cities, since late last
year. It promises to make your cell phone as
simple and affordable to use as a land-line
phone, so that you'll use it even for casual calls
without a second thought.
Unfortunately, in my experience, the actual
service behind the marketing isn't good enough to really allow that. I've
been frustrated with it again and again.
If you have a question you want answered, or any other comment or suggestion
about Walter S. Mossberg's column, please send e-mail to mossberg@wsj.com.
The very popularity of the service has overloaded AT&T's network at
times, making it hard to place or receive calls. And, in my experience, the
system has a maddening number of dead spots in big cities, where calls get
suddenly cut off. The situation reminds me of the America Online crisis of a
few years back, when the company introduced flat rates, then couldn't
handle all the added customers and traffic the new pricing attracted.
Digital One Rate eliminates both roaming and long-distance charges, and
does away with the confusing concepts of peak and off-peak minutes.
Instead, Digital One Rate customers just pay a flat, attractive, monthly fee
for a bulk number of minutes of airtime and use those minutes with no
added charges anywhere, anytime. Not only that, but the high-tech phones
that accompany the service are capable of intelligently switching you to
another company's service, at no extra charge, if necessary.
AT&T PUSHES Digital One Rate as nothing short of a revolution that
will finally get people to treat wireless phones like land-line phones. "It's so
simple and affordable," says the company, "your wireless phone may
become your only phone." TV ads for the service show people calling
wirelessly from distant cities to order clothing from catalogs or to check on
the outcome of a child's soccer match.
People flocked to the service, and the sleek
$200 Nokia 6160 phones AT&T sold for
Digital One Rate became status symbols. I
signed up (and even touted the Nokia 6160 in
a column last winter). But I've been disappointed since. It's not that the
service is so much worse than other, traditional cell-phone services. It's
just that the service falls far short of the new, higher expectations raised by
AT&T.
In my hometown, Washington, D.C., the AT&T service simply dies in
several places along my commuting route of choice, the heavily traveled
George Washington Parkway along the Potomac River. I often lose calls in
the middle, sometimes more than once per call. But I figured this parkway
might be a special case. It runs through wooded public land, where it's
tough to erect cell-phone towers. And other cell-phone services I've used
also lose calls there, though not as often as AT&T.
So I switched my commuting route --
twice -- only to find that both alternate
routes also featured multiple dead
spots. One such spot, for example, is
at an intersection about a half-mile
from the busiest shopping mall in the
Maryland suburbs of Washington,
hardly a rural backwater. Worse, I
discovered that my One Rate phone's
much-touted network-switching
capability never cuts in as long as I'm
in an area served by AT&T, no matter
how bad AT&T's signal is in any
particular spot.
It's not the phone itself. AT&T lent me
another phone last week and asked
me to try it. But the new phone dropped calls in all the same places as my
old one.
And this experience isn't particular to the Washington area. In nearly every
metro area to which I've traveled with my AT&T phone in recent months
-- including San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles and Boston -- I've
encountered either annoying dead spots or jammed circuits. AT&T admits
it used to have a capacity problem in New York, but the company says its
service there is now normal. Still, my phone calls died three times in just
one day on a visit there last week.
IN SOME of these cities, my problems technically weren't with AT&T's
own network, but with the networks of other companies that are AT&T's
roaming partners. Still, AT&T has urged us to forget about roaming with
Digital One Rate, to just imagine the country as one seamless AT&T
network. So I still blame AT&T.
Dan Hesse, the CEO of AT&T Wireless Services, admits "we have had
certain markets and locales where we have had capacity problems," and
that "we did underestimate initially the success of Digital One Rate." But he
says "I disagree emphatically" that the service today isn't delivering what it
promises.
Mr. Hesse says AT&T's digital service is at least as good as competing
cell-phone services, that it "performs very well in Washington" and that the
company is pouring vast sums into covering more areas and increasing
capacity. He says that most customers' expectations are lower than mine,
despite AT&T's marketing. He blames some of the coverage issues, like
my parkway problems, on the reluctance of government agencies to permit
cellular- tower construction.
Still, AT&T needs to do better. It needs to emulate AOL, which
recovered from its huge mistake by rapidly improving capacity. If AT&T
wants to make my cell phone into my main phone, the service ought to
work all the time, anywhere. Period. [Are you paying attention AirTouch and Vodaphone?]
For answers to your computer questions, check out my Mossberg's
Mailbox column in today's Tech Center.
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