Bell Atlantic Connects
With Cell-Phone Plan
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
Every time you turn around these days, somebody is touting all the new
things you can do with your digital cellular phone. You can receive e-mail,
browse the Web (sort of) and read news headlines, stock quotes and sports
scores. Big deal. What I really want from my digital cell phone is a quick dial
tone and a clear call that stays connected -- every time, anywhere in the
country, at a reasonable price. And, judging from my e-mail, so do a lot of
you.
Last year, I thought I'd found the answer: AT&T's heavily touted Digital
One Rate plan. This was the first plan to offer travelers a single, flat monthly
rate for calls almost anywhere in the country, with no roaming fees or
long-distance charges. Every call is treated like a local call.
After using the AT&T service for a while, however, I reported last July that
it was a major disappointment to me. In my experience, the quality of the
service was uneven and unpredictable. In city after city, including my home
base of Washington, D.C., and its environs, I encountered dropped calls,
jammed circuits and numerous dead spots where the service didn't reach.
Hundreds of readers e-mailed me to confirm that they, too, were having the
same bad experiences.
So, about six weeks after publishing my AT&T review, I began testing a
lesser-known national flat-rate competitor, a plan called SingleRate USA
from Bell Atlantic Mobile, the huge East Coast wireless phone carrier. Just
as with AT&T's plan, subscribers to SingleRate USA pay a fixed monthly
fee for a fixed number of air-time minutes that can be used almost anywhere
in the country without incurring any roaming fees or long-distance charges.
Every call, from anywhere, is treated the same.
There's a big difference, however: The Bell
Atlantic service actually works well, and
delivers on its promises. I found it to be
everything the AT&T service should have
been, but wasn't, for me.
In my tests all over the country over the past
five months, the Bell Atlantic SingleRate
USA plan has delivered quick dial tones and
clear calls that stayed connected, with
virtually no dead zones that I noticed. I
estimate that I suffered no more than 15
dropped calls over that whole time period.
With AT&T's service, I could easily endure that many dropped calls every
few days.
The phone I used with Bell Atlantic was also a winner. It's the Qualcomm
Thin Phone, model QPC 860, which weighs just 4.2 ounces and is two-thirds
of an inch thick, yet has a full-size keypad. It easily fits in a pocket and
contains an unusual thin inner battery that, in my tests, lasted for about a day
of typical use. You can snap on a more powerful external battery to add
more juice, even while you're in the middle of a call, without interrupting the
connection. Other phones are also available with the SingleRate USA plan,
including the Motorola StarTac and a Nokia model.
I tested the Bell Atlantic plan not only in Washington and elsewhere on the
East Coast, where Bell Atlantic reigns, but also in metro areas far beyond
the company's territory -- some of them the same places where AT&T had
failed me. Among the cities where I successfully used the SingleRate USA
service were New York, San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, San Jose,
Cleveland, Las Vegas, Providence, Houston, Phoenix, Hartford, Austin,
Rochester and Albuquerque.
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
Bell Atlantic doesn't guarantee results as good as mine, but there are a
couple of possible reasons why it did better for me than AT&T did. First, the
company claims that the digital wireless phone technology it uses, called
CDMA, is more pervasive than AT&T's rival TDMA technology. Second,
the Bell Atlantic phone readily and automatically switches to an alternative
wireless network if the standard signal is too weak for good reception.
I didn't test the Bell Atlantic and AT&T services and phones side by side,
and it's likely that AT&T's service has improved somewhat since I last used
it regularly, five months ago. AT&T is making huge investments in its
network. But I doubt the AT&T service could have improved so much in
that period of time that it would be able to match my experience with Bell
Atlantic.
There are, however, two major downsides to the SingleRate USA plan. First,
you can get it today only if you live in Bell Atlantic's East Coast territory.
Second, it's offered only in one expensive configuration: $160 a month for
1,600 minutes, plus 20 cents a minute for calls over the limit. The Qualcomm
Thin Phone also costs a hefty $200. The reason the plan is so costly, and is
hardly advertised, is that Bell Atlantic loses money on it because it has to
swallow the roaming fees. It prefers to stress a profitable East Coast-only
plan, called SingleRate East, that mainly covers its own territory.
But that's about to change. Bell Atlantic Mobile is poised to go national later
this year, morphing into a huge new wireless carrier that will meld its East
Coast systems with those of Airtouch and GTE, which are strong in the
West, Midwest and South. And company officials say that, when that
happens, they plan to heavily push the SingleRate USA plan, or whatever it's
called by then, and to offer it in a variety of lower-priced packages.
I'm not making a blanket endorsement of Bell Atlantic here. The company's
record in some key areas, such as deploying high-speed Internet lines to
homes, has been mostly talk and very little action. But the SingleRate USA
plan is a winner, and I recommend it.
For answers to your computer questions, check out my Mossberg's
Mailbox column in today's Tech Center. |
