Switch Away From Sidekick...Still Having Problems

may 14, 2005

In the past, I was plagued with issues with my Sidekick II (like service outages and such). And a week and a day ago I switched away from my Sidekick, opting to return to using a normal phone (my new Motorola C650), but it seems like the Sidekick continues to haunt me with problems! Ever since I moved away from the Sidekick, I have not been able to use the t-zones (T-Mobile's WAP portal) on my new phone. After three calls to customer service (each about an hour long), it is still not working. First, I must say that the customer service at T-Mobile continues to be top-notch. Each call I have been escalated from tier 1 to tier 2 engineering and then to tier 3 engineering. They have treated me well, but still have not resolved the issue after two trouble tickets. Last night, tier 3 engineering thought that the problem was that they could not update my SIM card with the correct URL for getting to the t-zones portal (wap.voicestream.com) since whenever I push my t-zones button it goes to the wipcore.t-mobile..com address. They suggested that I go into a T-Mobile store or reseller to get my SIM card replaced. When I got off the phone, they apparently closed the ticket. This morning I went into the T-Mobile retail store at Oakridge Mall where Tim (the guy who sold me the Sidekick) helped me get a new SIM card. After three hours of not having service on my phone since the SIM card swap, I called Customer Care and found out that they had put the wrong SIM card number into the system and corrected the issue. I pushed the t-zones button and was greeted with the same "Page Cannot Be Displayed" error that had been plaguing me for the whole week. I called Customer Care again and walked through the three tiers of support. Dan at tier 2 engineering was especially helpful and helped get the issue to tier 3 with a note that it is some sort of misprovisioning of my service -- having something to do with the Sidekick service instead of the t-zones. Juan at tier 3 openned another ticket for me and is sending it to network engineering to have it worked on. He says that it will take 72 hours or so for this to get resolved. Tier 1 gave me 150 extra minutes (with 90 days expiration) for my troubles, but that doesn't help me since I don't use my phone for calls all that much outside of calling my wife who also has a T-Mobile phone (Family Plan = free mobile-to-mobile calling). Juan gave me 30 extra text messages (also with 90 days expiration) which may come in handy, though I hardly go over 300 text messages a month anyways. I will wait and see if they can get this t-zones issue solved soon. That damned Sidekick haunts me from Florida (where it sold to on Ebay)! At least I got some free minutes and text messages out of this ordeal -- and also a new SIM card to replace my two-year old one.


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