On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Bob Fronk <[email protected]> wrote: > Verizon just came and gave me their pitch. I currently have no real reason > to move, but Verizon may make the recurring cost savings worth the effort.
In my experience at a small company (around 30 mobile devices): * VZW has the best overall wireless coverage in North America. * Their coverage outside the US is spotty. It's also painful to use. You have to buy a dual-radio (CDMA+GSM) phone, of which they offer few, and pay an extra monthly fee just for the privilege of paying $2/minute for overseas roaming. [So it largely comes down to your habits. If you do a lot of international travel, go with a GSM carrier. If you're mostly NA-based, VZW is good.] * VZW is the most expensive wireless carrier. Almost three times the cost vs. Nextel, which we had before. Nextel sucks, sure, but VZW isn't *three times* better. * VZW's web interface to account management has a number of useful and powerful tools. You can group phones/accounts into folders and tag with cost centers. On the downside, we've never been able to get it to give an externally consistent report of our minutes-used vs minutes-available status. * VZW's front-line customer support for easy stuff (broken phone, stupid user questions, etc.) is very good. You have to fight through a touchtone menu, but the rep's generally know what they need to know and can communicate well in English. * VZW corporate is nothing short of evil. You don't really buy phones from VZW; you recent them. VZW considers their customers to be their property. Capabilities other carriers do for free, VZW charges for, and only for their (often inferior) implementation. ** For example: The BlackBerry 8830 has a GPS chip in it. VZW disables this for everything but their VZ Navigator service, which you have to pay $10/month for. The VZW turn-by-turn is okay, but location-based add-on services stink. You can't even use such services if you pay for VZ Nav. This was especially egregious on the 8830 because it was eight months after phone availability before VZW got VZ Nav *working* on the 8830. Meanwhile, Sprint had their 8830's GPS working for everything from day one. Since Sprint has roaming agreements with VZW, this actually meant that Sprint's phones worked better on VZW's towers than VZW's phones did! * Sales staff either don't care about us or don't stick around. I suspect this is due to VZW corporate being so evil; it's tough to work for the customer when corporate won't let you. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
