[jcrick]

Originally Posted by Tripdub1

The only thing that is being shut down is the free email account sprint gives you (suchandsuch@sprintpcs.com). Not sure what the big fuss is about since they have such tight restrictions on that e-mail anyway (You can't send e-mails larger than 2mb from a sprintpcs email account). Sprint Mobile Email will continue to work as before.

For you it might not be a big deal if communication is not an important ingredient to your business. The suggested solution from Sprint is to use gmail. Using gmail, yahoo, and the likes reminds me of the American Express commercial where the business man lays his super hero credit card on the table to pay for the business lunch meeting, and the prospective clients all laugh at it. Likewise gmail looks like a toy for an occasional work at home mom & pop selling on ebay or perhaps a fly by night start up business, but not the person with a longstanding stable business. Impressions count, and you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. Furthermore, keeping in touch with people doesn't usually require 2MB responses, usually only a kilobyte or two at most. But getting those messages and responding in a timely manner can very much be a big deal. Not being able to respond to a clients urgent needs can be translated by the client that their issues aren't that important to you. The result is they can choose to take their business to someone who will treat them with importance.

I have been on the phone with several different techs over the past 3 days discussing this issue with my wife’s new phone, the Instinct. Nice phone for her needs, but I need something a little beefier. I was told yesterday that the HTC Diamond would work with Sprint/Roadrunner, so I went to the Sprint store today to kick the tires and take a test drive, but after 30 minutes we couldn't get it to work.

I called Sprint again this evening, and worked with an L2 tech and a supervisor for well over an hour and they even tried several different phones including several Win Mobile versions, none worked.

I'm not sure this is really a Roadrunner problem or even a Sprint network problem either. I say that because with my Palm OS based Treo 650, the connection to RR works with the existing network configuration (and is documented in a previous append). But since Sprint has to support the phones they sell, they are the best ones to exert pressure on the phone manufacturers and OS developers to address this problem.

From what I can tell, the problem is how authentication is implemented by the phone manufacturers of both proprietary OS and Microsoft Win Mobile based phones, at least as far as RR is concerned. The two things that cannot be specifically configured are the 'Username' and 'Password' for the authentication. I think the configuration dialogs make some incorrect assumptions for the values to use for these two required parameters for authentication to work correctly. It might be OK to prefill a field with an expected value, but the user should be allowed to change that value if needed. To prove this, I can configure these separately in my Palm but not in any of the phones that we tested tonight. And the Palm works, period.

I did learn tonight during my conversation that there is a group working directly with Time Warner on this issue, although i didn't get .to talk directly with them. They cannot tell me if there is ever going to be a fix or not. I suggested that there certainly will be a fix following the settlement of a class action suit; there usually is. If there is a group working on this, then Sprint has to be aware of the potential impact in the bigger picture. Once again it was suggested that I set up a free email account. I explained that that is only a toy solution, and even the Sprint rep agreed.

I suppose there is possibility that RR is implementing something incorrectly, but so far that is not obvious to me they are. I will take another look at some requirement specs on how authentication is normally set up.