Just received a letter from AT&T Wireless re: their CDPD data service.

It appears they plan to stop accepting new customers in March, 2003 and 
turn off the service entirely in June 2004.

They apparently want to migrate customers over to their GPRS or whatever 
service, although from what I can see there are no unlimited plans (as 
Verizon does with their 1XRTT service) and there is no information as to 
whether or not it will offer fixed/static IP.

Although it's nice to see they are building out higher-speed networks, so 
far, neither 1XRTT nor GPRS seem to have the same degree of reliability, 
robustness, and resiliency which CDPD does, and I'd be reticent to move 
any of our CDPD accounts to either 1X or GPRS as they just don't do the 
job as well as CDPD (at this point.)

I have not heard anything from Bell Atlantic (Verizon) about their CDPD 
services, but I think they have a number of police forces on their CDPD 
service, especially in the northeast, which may be more of an incentive 
for them to keep the service up (in which case I can just move the AT&T 
accounts over to BAMS in the event that AT&T does actually end it's CDPD 
service while keeping the same hardware).

IMO, AT&T'S CDPD service, where available, is somewhat superior to BAMS's 
in terms of throughput, resiliency, and maintaining a connection in poor 
coverage areas, so I for one will be sad to see it go. 

I think they have a good product in their CDPD service, and after the 
investment in setting up all the CDPD systems nationwide in most (all?) 
of their properties (not to mention their "partners" like Dobson, etc, 
doing so in some of their markets and Vanguard spending to set up CDPD 
before being acquired by AT&T), it is a shame and a waste to get rid of 
it.  I understand they may need bandwidth, but as long as they are 
required to handle analog calls (as a roaming "common denominator" not to 
mention support for any legacy analog customers) there seems little 
reason not to maintain the relatively few channels required for CDPD service.

I would hope that they reconsider their decision and at the same time 
improve the GPRS service feature and reliability-wise, as well as 
promulgate GPRS price plans comparable to their current CDPD plans. If 
not, and if they do make the unfortunate decision to stop CDPD service as 
per their announcement, we won't be looking to AT&T for data service 
subsequent to that point.

(This post and SID list are also available at http://www.wirelessnotes.org)

Regards,

Doug

d2@interpage.net
Interpage(TM) Network Services Inc. / http://www.interpage.net