Here's a plug for Qualcomm and CDMA in today's WSJ by Walter Mossberg, the computer columnist (who is usually very critical of everything).....
interactive.wsj.com
January 13, 2000
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.
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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
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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.
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