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The Telecom Digest for Mon, 29 Nov 2021
Volume 40 : Issue 306 : "text" format

table of contents
Senators' Statement on FCC Approval of Verizon's Acquisition of Tracfone
Report: Verizon PrePaid service is off to a rocky start

Message-ID: <20211125144000.EF8D6766@telecom2018.csail.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2021 14:40:00 +0000 (UTC) From: Moderator <telecomdigestsubmissions@remove-this.telecom-digest.org> Subject: Senators' Statement on FCC Approval of Verizon's Acquisition of Tracfone Washington - Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) issued the following statement after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced its approval of Verizon's acquisition of TracFone. https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?id=653B221D-64CE-42B6-8F08-06E5F206B2E3
Message-ID: <1f1676e0-79c5-a893-6534-5505ba3e1b56@gmail.com> Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2021 23:37:06 -0500 From: Bill Horne <telecomdigestsubmissions@remove-this.telecom-digest.org> Subject: Report: Verizon PrePaid service is off to a rocky start When Verizon announced that they were buying TracFone, I happened to be in need of a phone. My wife had lost hers, and she drives for "Meals on wheels" once a week, so I gave her the one that my Sister-in-law had given to me: a 4G smartphone that was already set up on a Verizon post pay plan. I was in Walmart a couple of days later, and although they didn't have any TracFone packages on the shelves, they were featuring a "Verizon" prepaid offering, including a "flip" phone, for $35/month, with $5 off each bill if I paid with an automatic debit from my bank card. It sounded good to me: my cellular needs have always been modest, even before I retired, and I thought that $30 per month would serve me very well, especially since the "smart" phone was costing me over $70 on each bill, with it's postpaid plan. The phone came with the box: an off-brand unit made in China. I set up the account, agreed to the monthly debit, and turned it on, and ... Nothing, Nada, zip. It didn't work. No talk, no text. My old phone was still working fine, and I used it to ring up Verizon. After several waypoints, I arrived at a tech-support person that knew the phone I was trying to put in service. She told me to throw it in the trash and wait for a new one she'd send me. I did. She did too. The mail lady brought me another display box, complete with plastic hanger, and it had another off-brand phone made in China: the box was labelled "Orbic Journey." It sort-of worked for a few weeks. Then, problems appeared, and nobody at Verizon knows how to fix them: 1. The keypad isn't usable with Verizon's voice-mail or other Touch-Tone response systems. Pushing a key for the first time generates a short - in face, very short - tone burst, which (for example) the voice-mail system ignores. If I want to delete a message, I have to push "7" twice, with the first key-press serving to get past the short beep, and the second serving to actually get through to the Touch-Tone decoder. That's bad enough by itself, but it gets worse: the behavior is erratic, and sometimes I delete a message with one key-press, and the second push of the button deletes the NEXT message. The voicemail system usually accepts my password without any double taps, but the rest of the time, it's a (very irritating) guessing game to find out what each key-press will do. It's not just Verizon's Voicemail: the defect shows up whenever I try to send Touch-Tone codes to any auto-attendant system. 2. The phone speaker port is on the bottom of the flat-bottomed case, so it's very hard to hear the ringing, even though the ringer volume is turned up to seven, which is as high as it will go. If the screen is visible, the only way to hear the ringing is by putting a pencil under it when you put it down. 3. The menus are cryptic and VERY hard to back out of. There is no "home" button or other "Go back" choice. The only reason I can think of for Verizon to put such a phone out under their name is to use it as a bait-and-switch invitation, and here are the possibilities as I see them: Verizon will cut off all the "Lifeline" accounts on TracFone, and... 1. Offer Orbic phones and their own prepaid service as a substitute. and then entice seniors into some more profitable version of "Lifeline" service, or, 2. Offer "family" Lifeline plans with the hope of shaming the relatives of current Lifeline users into paying a lot more to keep in touch with Grandma, or. 3. Verizon will lobby to have Lifeline relegated to an "As available" tier of 5G VoIP service, with 911 calls forced to wait for more profitable corporate traffic. Well, my Crystal Ball is as cloudy as anyone else's, so I'll just leave you with this anecdote - when I graduated from Programmer Basic Training, I was selected to attend the Initial Corporate Development Program a.k.a. "ICDP." It was a prep school for those whom had showed unusual promise, and I worked very hard to show that I deserved the honor. My ICDP group invited the owner of a COCOT (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephone) company to come and talk to us about the industry and the future. After we had talked for almost an hour, I asked our visitor to tell us what he thought was our company's most important skill: what we, as a company, did better than anyone else. He picked up his coat, opened the door, and then turned around and said "You're very good at hiding what you really want." Bill Horne

End of telecom Digest Mon, 29 Nov 2021

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