Wyszdom

tl;dr: T-Mobile’s $30/month plan beats a $70/month plan by AT&T (depending on where you need service), but T-Mobile still operates like a big phone company.

I’m pretty disloyal when it comes to phone companies; I recently was a customer of all four major US carriers in three years. It’s pretty easy to move around with an unlocked phone and Google Voice, since I’m not tied to a contract or even a phone number. I honestly have never memorized my current phone number provided by AT&T, and I’ve had it for six months.

Last month, this post by Danny Sullivan caught my eye. It mentioned a T-Mobile plan that would get me 5GB of data, unlimited texts, and 100 minutes for $30/month. I hardly ever use my phone for voice calls, so this sounded great to me. I could take or leave the texts since I use Google Voice, but it makes sense for T-Mobile to include them since it costs them virtually nothing to transmit. Even though I know that T-Mobile’s coverage can be pretty lousy in some places that I travel to, I thought it could be worth giving them another chance after a few years of network upgrades, and it wouldn’t be hard to move back to AT&T if I needed to. I got distracted, though, and forgot about it.

Today, Danny had an article on CNET describing the plan. This time, I decided to go for it.

Store: Go online.

I didn’t want to wait for a SIM card to arrive in the mail, so I walked into a T-Mobile store and announced my intentions. The clerk knew exactly the plan I was talking about, and then politely informed me that this plan was not available in stores. I had to go to the website to sign up. That’s totally understandable. Physical stores have limited inventory, so it doesn’t make sense to send all of the billing plans to all locations. Yep, it makes perfect sense. Completely unrelated to that last thought, I wish there were a better way to convey sarcasm in text.

Website: Try chatting.

I found the place to order a microSIM and entered my billing information. I got this error with multiple credit cards: Sorry – we’re having some trouble with the debit/credit card you provided. Please check to make sure you’ve correctly filled in all the required fields. I searched for that error and apparently I’m not the only one to get it.

Chat support: Try calling

On the site, a popup appeared offering chat assistance. I took them up on their offer and explained the situation. The representative simply had me re-check all of my information again. I did, and when it failed again, she asked me to call 611 or the 1-800 customer service number, apparently not understanding that I was not already a T-Mobile customer.

Phone sales: Go to the store

I called the sales number. The representative informed me that I called at an excellent time, because they’re offering microSIM cards for only 99¢. Great. I provided my billing information, and she has trouble processing the order. Like the chat representative, her first reaction is to re-verify all of the information, which she has entered correctly. She then put me on hold to check with the order processing department. When she got back, her tone was much different than it was before, when she was polite and making small talk about my name. She informed me that the order would need to be processed in a store for additional “verification.” I told her that I had already gone to a store, and that I was told I needed to go online. She said, and note that this is in quotes, that “they’re full of it” and there was no reason the store couldn’t help me. I politely explained that perhaps the clerk in the store had meant that I couldn’t purchase the plan in-store, but maybe they’d give me a SIM card. At the end of the 18-minute call, before I hung up I could hear her breathe a disappointed growl into the phone.

Store: Go to Walmart

I ventured out again and went to a different T-Mobile store. I asked for a microSIM and explained that I’d then get the $30 plan online. Two staff members told me that I couldn’t do that; if I got a SIM card in the store it would cost me $20 (remember, it was 99¢ over the phone), and they would need to activate it in-store, so I wouldn’t be able to get the plan I wanted anyway. I briefly recounted everything that had happened before this. They seemed frustrated (not with me, but with T-Mobile), and said that they’re not given any support with these online-only plans. One of them told me that he had recently helped a friend buy the plan through Walmart’s site, and said that he’s heard it’s easier to use than T-Mobile’s anyway.

Walmart: How may we confuse you?

I first tried going to walmart.com on my phone. When I searched for [t-mobile] on their mobile site, I was told, “We’re sorry, but we’re having system issues. Please try again.” I went to their desktop site on my laptop and found the $30 plan, but it was listed as an “e-delivery” item, so I wasn’t sure if I was going to get a SIM card. Since there was still a pretty good chance that something would go wrong in the billing process eventually, I aborted my mission.

If they can’t even take my money, how can I expect good service?

T-Mobile has been trying to brand themselves as the hip and rebellious “UnCarrier,” trying to set themselves apart as a sensible alternative to the traditional contract-laden US mobile providers that we all love to hate. But when they have ridiculous policies like only offering some plans on their website, it’s hard to see them as being any different.

The fact that I was unable to give them my money after several attempts is another bad sign for their ability to provide good service. I’m not terribly upset about initially being declined. While I still don’t know exactly what happened, I’m guessing that somewhere along the way I triggered a fraud flag. Sure, it’s a false positive, as I always pay my bills in full whenever they’re due, but it happens. What really frustrated me is that none of the people I spoke to were empowered to figure out what was going on and fix it.

If anyone has a recommendation for a good AT&T MVNO with a sensible data plan, let me know in the comments.

Update on June 6, 2013
I decided to give it another try today. I’m paying nearly $70/month for AT&T for only 3GB of data, and text messages cost extra. I went into a physical Walmart store and picked up a T-Mobile “starter kit” that came with a microSIM and $30 of service. I paid with cash, so I think I now have what qualifies as a burner phone. Take that, NSA. 😉

Before I activated my T-Mobile number, I called AT&T to see if they would try to retain me as a customer. When I mentioned that I was canceling to take advantage of the T-Mobile plan, the representative made no effort to retain me as a customer. Just as Verizon tried when I canceled my account with them, the AT&T agent told me that I would be charged an early termination fee because I had upgraded my phone recently. After I explained that no, I was not under contract and that I always bring my own phone, we found out that something got messed up (as it did with Verizon) when a discount code was applied to my account. She waived the fee and canceled the account.

I activated the T-Mobile line by dialing *611 after inserting the SIM, and it was a relatively easy process. I got kicked out of the automated system when I was unable to find a phone number in my city of choice. I don’t know why they don’t have an option for “I don’t care what city my phone number is in. It’s 2013. Just assign me any US number.” At one point the friendly agent asked for the number that would add credit to my account, saying that I would have scratched a card to reveal it. I could find no such card, and was worried that I had wasted my money. Fortunately he skipped over that step, and we later found out that the activation code came with the credit. My phone was then activated, and had a working Internet connection within a few minutes.

They really didn’t want me as a customer last weekend. I now feel like I snuck into a store with a mask on, paid for my items, and left without a problem.

Parking at SFO’s long-term lot costs $18 per day. For a weeklong trip, that’s $126. And from where I live, round-trip cab fare can be even higher. A common technique is to park at the nearby BART station for only $2 per day, but then you’re subject to the train schedule, which adds a bit of complexity and you need to carry your luggage through a train station in addition to an airport. I recently tried another option.

FlightCar is a way to get free airport parking. You simply let FlightCar know when you’ll be traveling, drop off your car with them, and pick it up from them with no fee when you return. In exchange for you not having to pay for parking, FlightCar may rent out your car while you’re gone. Whether your car is rented or not, you don’t have to pay for parking. And yes, they take care of insurance, cleaning your car, etc.

Here’s how my experience was:
I listed my car ahead of time. It was a very easy signup process and only required some basic information about my car. As per their instructions, on the day of departure I called them when I was about 15 minutes away from the airport. I had an early flight, so this happened to be at 4:12 AM. I was told to drive to the Millbrae BART station, which an earlier email had indicated would be the likely meeting point. The person on the phone was very helpful, giving me exact directions to the station and letting me know how to identify who I was supposed to meet. At the station, I met one of their valets, who walked around the car with me, noting any existing scratches, and having me sign the paperwork. This only took a couple of minutes. We both got back in the car, and I drove him to the terminal, where I got out and handed over the key. And that was it until I returned.

A week later, after retrieving my bag, I called FlightCar to let them know that I was back. I told them that I was on the arrivals level and which door number I was standing outside of. They also asked me what color jacket I was wearing, and then told me to wait for a black Town Car. Less than 10 minutes later, a black car picked me up and took me to a parking lot in Millbrae. Until this point, everything had gone smoothly and as promised. When we arrived at the parking lot, it was dark and raining, and just a bit eery sitting in a black car facing my own car waiting at the other end of the lot. The lot wasn’t lit, and there was no signage identifying it as a business. An attendant with a flashlight approached the car, and took me over to mine with a flashlight. He mentioned something about a generator being off, which is why it was so dark. He had me sign another piece of paper, said that he didn’t think the car had been rented out, and turned on the car to check the mileage. At this point the radio turned on at a high volume, with the station set to hip hop, and the mileage was higher than I had remembered. The gas level was about the same. To his credit, the attendant reacted quickly, turning off the radio, and noting that the odometer was reading about 500 miles higher than it was when I had dropped off the car. He then called his boss to find out what had happened. He quickly learned that my car had in fact been rented out, and let me know that I would be receiving a check in the mail for $70. I entered my address on his phone and was on my way. One additional issue that I noticed later was that my insurance card was missing from the glove compartment. I think they remove it and replace it with a FlightCar card during the rental, but they must have forgotten to put it back. This wasn’t a huge deal though as I was able to print a new one.

A few days later, as promised I received a check signed by the CEO and cofounder. And then about a week later, I received a reply to an email I had sent to FlightCar containing my feedback. The CTO and cofounder explained what they had done to address it. They’ve made sure that they always have gas for the generator, so the lot should never be dark, and they’ve added signage to make it clear that it’s the FlightCar lot. He also gave some background on the confusion about my car being rented. They used to send the driver an email if their car was rented, but due to abuse of the system by car owners seeking free parking without renting out their cars, they’ve stopped sending those emails, at least for now. As for my missing insurance card, he was going to make sure the valet on duty understands the correct procedure. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the great things about trying a startup is that while there are often kinks, they tend to be very responsive to feedback as early customers help them with feedback.

Overall, I found the service to be convenient, and it’s pretty hard to beat the price of -$70. I’ll admit that I was pretty thrown by learning at the last minute that my car had been rented out, and for the first few minutes of driving back to my apartment, I thought that I wouldn’t use the service again—not because they had failed me in some way, but because I was a little weirded out by the fact that someone else had been using my car, and I had no idea how carefully they had driven it. I was also a little annoyed by the inconvenience of having to take all of the items out of my car before dropping it off and then replacing them later. As some time has passed, though, I’m more inclined to try it again. Someone renting a car is most likely not going to do anything crazy with it, as they’d risk getting a traffic ticket or damaging the car, and having to deal with all of the consequences of that. It’s not really a big deal for me to carry a few personal items in and out of my car. And, it is pretty silly to pay so much for parking.

When I mentioned this service to Dan, he handed me his copy of The Economist, which had a cover article on the sharing economy. The article points out an exciting trend that’s going on where people are able to make some money by sharing what they have, without all of the overhead of advertising, insurance, billing, and other administrative costs that would have made the process too expensive or complicated in the past, and renters are able to get access to products and services that they may not have been able to afford in the past. There are plenty of examples. RelayRides and Getaround let you rent out your car or rent someone else’s. I’m looking forward to finding an excuse to rent a Model S someday. For those who don’t want to rent out or rent a car, Lyft, SideCar, and Tickengo facilitate the sharing of rides. Now I understand what all of those pink mustaches were about that I saw in San Francisco on Tuesday. 🙂 LendingClub facilitates loans to and from its members, and I know someone who has made very good returns from the service. TaskRabbit is used by people who need help with small jobs, and those who are seeking to help. Wal-Mart is apparently considering paying in-store customers to provide same-day delivery service to online customers. (By the way, Google is testing same-day delivery in the San Francisco Bay Area, so sign up if you’d like to try it for free during testing.) Beyond sharing of relatively everyday items, there are even more premium services like BlackJet which allows those who are well-off, but not quite so well off that they can afford to purchase or charter a jet, to purchase an individual seat on a private jet flight. Or, as an example of something on the more affordable side, Fancy Hands provides personal assistant services to those who need some extra help, but don’t need to hire a full-time assistant.

I love innovation. These services are opening up opportunities to customers, property owners, and service providers that they may not have had otherwise, expanding the market. I understand that innovation can mean uncomfortable disruption, but incumbents should play to their strengths rather than protecting their business (and not consumers) via regulators. For example, I’m inclined to avoid taxis because of their unpredictability. While I’ve had plenty of perfectly fine experiences as a rider, I’ve also had drivers who drive aggressively, don’t know where they are going, talk loudly on the phone the entire time, refuse to take me to my destination, generally seem annoyed or even angry that I would get into their car, and of course insist on cash payment. I don’t have to worry about that with Uber, plus Uber provides the added benefit of a nicer vehicle. So why don’t taxi services learn from their competitors and play to their strengths? They have a large fleet of cars. Their drivers, in general, have a good knowledge of the areas they serve. To make me happy, all they’d need to do is get reliable mobile apps, provide a reputation/rating system for their drivers (and perhaps for passengers as well, if they’d like), have a GPS unit (or any smartphone) on standby, and accept credit card fees as part of the cost of doing business. It doesn’t have to be the 5% fee that one cab driver’s sign recently claimed.

One interesting point that’s made in the article (watch the video for more context) is that while I may have felt a little weird about the FlightCar experience on my first try, my trust for this kind of service may increase over time, just as people don’t even blink before giving their credit card number to an online store today. We’re partially through this initial trust issue with cloud computing, where users are starting to understand that professionals who run data centers are probably better at protection and reliability than a local solution. Or, as one of my favorite analogies goes, I feel safer keeping my money in a bank than under my mattress.

For a look into the future of how an economy of part-time labor could work, check out this TEDTalk by Wingham Rowan.

One of my goals this year was to shoot more time lapses. I started the year off right by shooting one using the built-in timelapse feature on my Android phone:

On a recent trip, I upgraded to using my DSLR for a few shoots. Here are two of them:

They’re in 4K (which YouTube supports – woo-hoo!), so if your system is up for it, enjoy the videos in greater than HD resolution.

The workflow that I used was:

1. Shoot in interval timer mode (I used an interval of 10 seconds so the memory cards could keep up, but next time I’ll take it down to 8) with a D800E, recording in “overflow” mode so that the camera fills up the primary memory card first, and then moves on to the secondary slot. Save images as RAW.
2. Import photos into Lightroom, and make adjustments to color temperature, etc.
3. Export photos as TIFF if you’re like me and don’t like to compress stuff until the end.
4. Import TIFF files into Final Cut Pro, and drag into the timeline.
5. Set the project to 4K/3840×2160/30p.
6. In the Inspector, choose Fill under Spatial Conform to crop the stills so they fill the 16:9 video frame.
7. With all of the clips selected, right-click on one and select “duration” (or type ^D) and then type the number “1” and then hit the “Enter” key for a duration of one frame per clip.
8. Export a master file. I’m weird and encode using ProRes since I like to provide YouTube or wherever with the highest-quality file I can, but MPEG-4 is probably fine and uploads faster. If you want to go really crazy, YouTube will even take uncompressed video, but be prepared for a really long upload time.

I want to make some changes to that workflow, though. I originally tried shooting while tethered to my Mac. There are a few reasons why:

• Recording to memory cards means I’m limited by their memory capacity.
• To maximize memory, I shoot in overflow mode instead of backup mode. As luck would have it, during one shoot my CompactFlash card got corrupted and I had to recover it using Disk Drill.
• The interval timer feature on the D800 is limited to 999 shots. At 30 frames per second, that’s only 33 seconds of footage.

Unfortunately, the D800’s interval timer feature is not compatible with the tethered capture mode in Lightroom, and Lightroom doesn’t offer any interval timer feature on its own. I tried a free piece of software called Sofortbild, which seemed to have exactly the features that I wanted. However, in my tests it would shoot for about five minutes, and then stop transferring the image from the camera to the computer. I did buy a Trigger Happy remote on Kickstarter, but I didn’t bring it with me on the trip, so I’m not sure if that works while the camera is tethered. I would have tested that functionality before publishing this, but while attempting to test it I found that my 10-pin remote socket is now misaligned and I cannot connect any accessories until it’s repaired by Nikon. I hope they don’t charge me anything since it’s under warranty and apparently a somewhat common issue.

I have also while writing this discovered that Final Cut Pro can actually handle RAW files (wow!), so I might skip Lightroom completely in the future, assuming I don’t need its editing functions. This is really cool to know and will save me some space if I don’t have to do a TIFF export.

Something I’d like to do next is to stretch time in each frame. I can use long exposures to help smooth out the motion by blurring anything that moves, as if the motion is happening in real time. For example, in the second video, longer exposures would have made the person on the deck less jumpy, and the same goes for the trees in the foreground of the third video. I have some “black glass” which allows for daytime long exposures, so I hope to shoot a timelapse using that.

In addition to these technical changes, I want to improve the content of my timelapses. In this case, I simply pointed the camera at some good-looking mountains, but didn’t really take a ton of time to compose the shots. I’m also aware that shooting a timelapse of clouds is like shooting a macro of dew drops on a flower. It’s been done. Maybe that’s okay, but I’ll try to find other things to shoot.

I love giving startups a try. They’re often rough around the edges, but the customer service is almost always better than an average more established company. Not to say that big companies can’t have great customer service.

Tonight’s example: I sent an email to Pathjoy customer support. I received a reply with a resolution from the CEO in 16 minutes on a Saturday night. It’s hard to beat that.