One of these Providers is Not Like The Others

T-Mobile. Cingular/AT&T. Sprint. Alltel. Verizon.

Ignore the Alltel dweeb "Chip" and the other nerks who are supposed to leverage the stereotype that nerdy fat boys are ineffective nitwits, for the time being.

Forget about the bespectacled stalker guy in the gray coveralls with the crowd of people and hovering helicopters that represent Verizon's network.

Never mind the fact that T-Mobile along with the ever-morphing CinguAT&T use GSM technology with SIM cards while the rest use CDMA technology which does not utilize the handy SIM cards.

Who has what coverage, how many bars, or the coolest selection of phones is also unimportant in this rant.

There is one striking difference between one of the above-named cellular providers and all the rest that has me steamed. I'm not talking about a phone capability, but, rather, a feature you might find in your account web page -- a very useful, handy feature that I was used to having, and had relied on from time to time. It is a feature that I really needed last week, but which I was shocked to learn was NOT provided by the cell company I am currently locked into using for the next 18 months.

Suppose you had a family. Suppose you got on a family cell plan, so you all shared some minutes. You'd get phones for your kids. One for your spouse. One for you. For your grandma. Your dog. Whoever. You'd be the main account holder.

And suppose you suspected one of your kids was doing something you had forbidden -- he or she was texting his buddies during school hours, perhaps. Or calling his smack dealer during church. And you'd given her one chance to clean up her act before you yanked her phone privileges away.

Instead, suppose your spouse lost his phone. You wanted to wait a bit before shutting it off, in case someone found it and called one of the numbers in the contact list to report they found it. You were curious, though, to see if it had been found and was being used.

In both of those situations, you'd probably find it very handy to be able to check the call activity real-time, right? Log on to your account, check the call records for the past few hours or days and you'd know if your spouse's missing phone was used to ring up bazillions of hours with mainland China. You'd know if little Timmy was calling Caitlin every two minutes in spite of Caitlin's parents' restraining order against Timmy. You'd know.

You'd know, that is, unless you're with Verizon. If you're with Verizon, you have to wait until three days AFTER the billing cycle has ended, and only then can you find out.

Tough luck if the billing cycle just started.

I can see that Verizon might be behind the times and that is nearly forgivable, but when I asked Verizon to provide this information to me after I had verified my identity (they have it in their databases; it should be trivial to pull it into a file and e-mail it), they refused. When I asked them to implement that feature, they refused.

"It is against Verizon policy for any one at any level within Verizon to provide pre-billing call detail records to anyone except for Law Enforcement or someone equipped with a court order."

Yeah. I'm gonna get the cops to swear out a warrant so I can see if my lost phone was used recently, or if the call I just made was "in network" or "roaming" or any other reason I might legitimately want to see what was going on with MY account.

Some peeps choose their cell providers because their friends and family are using the same one and they want the "free" airtime. Some choose them because one provider has better coverage in the areas they live and travel than other providers. Some choose them because one provider has an exclusive on THE cool phone they want. Some are lured by a spiffy new calling plan, like MyFaves or unused minutes roll-over. Some may think Chip is way hot and hope to win a date with him. And some, like me, find one company is much like the other and will hop over to the one that offers the best, most rewarding customer experience.

A T-mobile rep offered to buy out my contract if I'd bring my family over to them. I'm giving it very serious consideration.

Hmm, I don't know about the limitations of other providers, but with Sprint, there is no text messaging log whatsoever in the online account info; they only show how many you've used, but not who they were to or from or when they were sent/received.

As far as the detailed call log, there isn't one for the current month, only for the previous months which have already been invoiced. Even then, all the incoming calls show as "incoming" and don't show where they came from, so you can only find numbers for outgoing calls.

What they do have for the current month only shows the number of minutes used, text used, etc and there is a disclaimer near the bottom which says the information might not be completely accurate or up-to-date. I've never called them to request more info than what the site gives me, but once when I found a discrepancy in the number of minutes they claim we used, it was explained to me that sometimes roaming minutes aren't reported to them at all until the end of the month, so they might show up on a future bill instead of the current invoice.

I'm sorry you're having trouble with Verizon, but the grass is not always greener on the other side. Everyone I know who has Verizon in Florida LOVES them, but they have poor service in South Georgia so Alltel is king in those parts... T-Mobile and Cingular are both awesome in the big city where I live, but both of them are weak or nonexistent when you start travelling into rural areas, where most of the carriers (and therefore available roaming towers) are CDMA.

All I'm saying is, there are more important things to consider in your provider than real-time logs (seriously, I didn't know any carrier actually did that, but it's not enough to make me want to switch to tmo). Does Verizon offer a service you can use to GPS-track your kids? Sprint calls it "Family Locator" and they charge $9.99/month for it...

Also ask your provider if your kids' phones have FDN or if they offer phones with FDN (Fixed Dialing Numbers). This handy feature allows you to setup a list of "allowed numbers" and lock the phone with a PIN code so it can only be used to send and receive calls from certain numbers. Kids hate it, but paranoid parents LOVE it.