11/10/2000:

(Seems to have been resolved on 11/19/2000, ie, it is working as it used to.)

Over the weekend, Bell Atlantic Mobile (Verizon)'s New York Metro / 00022 
market got a software upgrade to a number of switches, mainly in the NYC 
Metropolitan area.

Although facially a seamless upgrade, the new software revision affects 
the way the *71/No Answer Transfer feature works, causing calls to go to 
voicemail when the phone is off or can not be located instead of to the 
desired No Answer Transfer (NAT) destination number.

The NAT feature (under the ATT/Autoplex/Lucent/whatever the 
name-of-the-week is for the AT&T cellular switch with BAMS uses) acts as 
an override to voicemail and the "Mobile Subscriber is Not Available" 
recording if voicemail is not enabled. 

If you hit *71+Area code+7-digit number, which activates the NAT feature, 
each time someone calls your phone and your phone is off, you are not in 
a coverage area, or you just don't want to answer the call, the NAT 
feature is supposed to direct the call your specified destination phone 
number which you set with the *71 command (BTW, you can use *73 to 
deactivate all forwarding or in some markets *713 to deact only NAT, 
leaving any other previous forwards/treatments in place, supposedly :) ).

This is especially useful to many customers since they can have the NAT 
set during the day to their office so a receptionist can answer a call if 
the cellular subscriber can't be reached at the BAMS cellphone, and then 
at night the subscriber can issue another *71 command to send the calls 
to their answering service, or hit *713 (or just *73) to allow the calls 
to go back to voicemail. Essentially, the *71 command allows you to 
override voicemail (if you have it) or the "Unavailable" recording and 
redirect unanswered calls to someone who can take the call for you and 
respond to the caller immediately rather than having it go to voicemail, 
which in many cases -- and certainly here at Interpage --  is deemed 
unprofessional during business hours.

With the recent software upgrade, the NAT feature no longer works this way.

As on this Monday, 11/6/2000, when someone calls your BAMS NY Metro phone 
and it is either *off* or the *switch can't find the phone*, REGARDLESS 
of your NAT settings the caller will go to voicemail. (If the phone is on 
and you just don't answer it  will go to the proper NAT number.)

This dramatically vitiates the  purpose of the NAT feature -- if a 
customer sets the NAT feature to go to his/her receptionist and is 
expecting the receptionist to field the call and try to find someone to 
immediately assist the caller, and the Bell Atlantic Mobile customer goes 
into an elevator, turns the phone off, travels to an area with poor 
coverage or an overloaded system,  or for some other reason drops out of 
coverage, then instead of the call going to the receptionist, it will 
instead go to voicemail. The caller will thus not be answered 
immediately, and if the phone is out of coverage for a while, the 
voicemail indicator may not working, resulting in what may have been an 
urgent call being unanswered for an extended period of time EVEN THOUGH 
THE BAMS CUSTOMER TOOK THE STEPS TO SET UNANSWERED CALLS TO BE FIELDED BY 
A PERSON RATHER THAN VOICEMAIL.

After testing this out on two of our BAMS/NY Digital Accounts and 
verifying the problem (and at the same time seeing no evidence of this on 
New England, CT, Philly, or DC market accounts -- let's hope this is 
indeed the case!), I called customer service to get a tech to look into this.

I first spoke to the Carolina "overflow" center, and I could immediately 
tell by the accent (nothing wrong with it but it's a good way to tell 
where you are reaching) that I was getting the overflow center. 

After 5 minutes of my trying to explain the problem with no success, I 
asked what I always ask "Are you the overflow center in the Carolinas?" 
and the rep said "Yes", so I responded "Can you get me Orangeburg (NY) so 
I can talk to a tech rep there?" and she seemed glad to transfer me. 
(This is common -- the overflow center can't really do too much other 
than very simple stuff -- I hope that unlike AT&T and SWBel that BAMS 
still retains its regional service centers (Woburn, Wallingford, 
Orangeburg, and Philly/DC since it's only when you talk to them can you 
get anything done. Indeed, if they would only hire a few more front-end 
people in the local markets who can field the "simple" calls they could 
dispense with the Carolina call center since it seems that even for 
relatively simple calls they are ill-equipped to address such issues.)

After getting Orangeburg, I talked to a helpful technician there named 
Derrek. After explaining the situation to him, he said he received and 
e-mail about it a day ago from the Operations office, and that a number 
of other people had complained about the exact same problem. 
(And I'm very glad to see BAMS has put in place a seemingly effective 
mechanism for disseminating information like this to it's field people; 
many other carriers like AT&T wireless would have some idiot up in Nova 
Scotia who has no idea what No Answer Transfer is try to answer the 
question based on some training manual!)

Derrek indicated that they were aware of the problem and are trying to 
work something out, yet there is no projected time when this will be 
fixed again. He suggested using *72 (Unconditional call forwarding; ie, 
your phone rings only once -- just like a 1A/5ESS switch on the landline 
side -- and is immediately sent to the destination party) but that 
obviously doesn't do much good since you can't answer your phone. I told 
him we'd wait till Monday to see what's going on with the fix and call 
back then.

Unlike other carriers we have dealt with at least BAMS seems to be 
somewhat more "on the ball" and is actively aware of problems AND has 
that information filter down so that customers can get accurate and 
timely answers. I still have a number of issues with BAMS regarding 
feature use in the New England markets and charges for voicemail 
deposition which they have been utterly incompetent at addressing; see 
http://www.wirelessnotes.org for details, however, as compared to their 
competition, they are at least a good deal ahead in terms of addressing 
this and a number of other technical and somewhat esoteric (yet vital to 
some customers) issues.

(This post and updated SID list are also available at www.wirelessnotes.org)

Regards,

Doug