by Daniel B

Created on: February 04, 2007   Last Updated: November 05, 2011

Merely using the phrases "mobile phone provider" and "best customer service" in the same sentence is cause for derisive laughter.

I first got a mobile phone (paid for by the company I was working for at the time) from a little company called Honolulu Cellular. As its name implies, it offered service in the city of Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, in Hawaii. I'm sure there were some roaming arrangements with someone or other, since I think my phone worked in other states as well.

Back then, "customer service" meant that when the company I worked for called up "HonCell" and told them they wanted to buy mobile phones for about ten employees who were going to be "on-call," there was a HonCell representative at the office the next day with samples of all the phones they offered and all the forms necessary to sign us (and our spouses, if we so chose) up for phones. They even told us which colors we could get the phones in. In person. And they came to us!

I don't think it took even a year for HonCell to be bought out by AT&T Wireless. When I changed jobs, AT&T sold me a shiny new $400 GSM "World Phone" - which only worked in town, and didn't work anywhere out in the country, because even though they had towers everywhere, their transceivers worked on a different frequency than the phone! So whenever I went for a long bike ride, my wife couldn't reach me. She'd call the hospitals and the morgue to see if anyone had brought in my body. After a couple years, AT&T still hadn't added the right frequency for the phone to work, and I ultimately had to complain to the Better Business Bureau to get them to give me a service credit.

I wound up with a new phone that was a "US Tri-Band" model, so it worked all over my island, and all over the US, and Taiwan, and India, and England, and Austria, and Italy, and... oh, wait, no, it didn't work at all in Kenya. That's because Kenya settled on one GSM frequency, and it was the one out of four that US Tri-Band phones don't support! So I wound up buying an unlocked Quad-Band phone in Nairobi, Kenya.

Meanwhile, AT&T had gotten bought out by Cingular, which promptly got rid of the least expensive service plans AT&T had offered. Having had a taste of how affordable national SIM cards and pre-paid minutes could be for someone like me (I don't talk a lot,) I waited for my Cingular contract to expire, then had my mobile number ported over to a T-Mobile prepaid account. I now carry 4 SIM cards - a T-Mobile US card, a T-Mobile UK card (which also works in at least part of continental Europe), a Safaricom Kenya card, and a Celtel Uganda card. When I land, I just pop in the right card, buy some minutes, and I'm good to go!

I haven't needed much customer service from T-Mobile yet, but so far, I've been happier with them than I was with Cingular or AT&T. I do, however, miss the good old days of Honolulu Cellular and their more personal service.

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