Some Good News

[Norwest]

Effective today August 22, 2007, GoPhone Pick Your Plan customers will no longer receive the USSD post call balance notification messages when there is no corresponding usage amount to decrease the balance on the account.

Apparently somebody was listening. I bet it took all of 10 minutes for a programmer to do
that once he or she got into the code... X below being the total of the usage dollar amount about to be broadcast to the user's phone by a particular code block...

'Comment: check for the neceessity of a usage broadcast
If str(X) = "0.00" Then Exit Sub 'If 0 do nothing

'Or skip over the broadcast code with a goto if there
'is other stuff after the broadcast block that needs
'to be executed.

If X = 0# then goto SkipTextMsg
'-----------------------------------------------
Code block that actually sends the usage text message
'------------------------------------------------
SkipTextMsg: ' continue on...


Or similar depending on the language.

A large company like ATT probably took 2 months of approval steps once the decision was made somehwere that it needed to get done.

I wonder if Apple pushed them on it.

[dcdmInc]

This was a big deal actually! It sucked. I spent a lot of time on the phone with management and others and arguing about this issue. I finally presented it as a safety concern because you could not dial 911 until you cleared all the messages. "Sorry you died little johnny, I couldn't dial 911 because it took 20 minutes to clear 80 empty text notifications!" Once I started with that angle they started listening to me and added me to the open Case on the issue. They called me yesterday personally (Thanks Lisa to say this was coming Wed Aug22nd. I think that was actually really cool of them and the best customer service I've gotten so far out of a phone company, lol. This is by far actually one of the biggest updates for the iPhone I have been waiting for..

Now I'm glad once again that I used 9's for my social and have no contract

Good day indeed!
-D

[tharmsen]

Ok, I'm not sure what this means. Can someone enlighten me?

[Tinman]

Originally Posted by tharmsen

Ok, I'm not sure what this means. Can someone enlighten me?

It only applies to pre-pay accounts. Apparently they were getting inundated with text messages letting them no whenever they used any data at all. Presumably this was setup to let people know how much the data they just used cost--totally unneeded with all-you-can eat iPhone data plans.

Might have happened with calls too, not really sure.

Anyway, apparently at&t has cut down on the text messages dramatically.



--
Mike