-GE> Here in the Pittsburgh region, we only get 250 peak and 60
-GE> off-peak
-GE> minutes on our demo lines.
That's aweful, I mean, plans better than that are available to the general 
public. Cellular One will sell you 600 peak and 120 offpeak for around 169 a 
month add another 13 bucks and they'll give you an extra 500 offpeak minutes.
I just called Cellular One today cause my bill just closed and I wanted to 
get the totals, 6700 minutes, total bill was 46 bucks. Cellular can save you 
a lot of money if you know how to use it.
I'm going to have some fun with the Sprint people when they come into this 
market, I'll ask them if they're competitive with regular cellular and when 
they say yes, I'll plop down a bill and ask them to tell me how much they're 
going to be able to save me.
-GE> BANM has gotten very aggressive in the Pittsburgh region as
-GE> well. It's
-GE> very rare that I can't show a subscriber to AT&T Wireless
-GE> (the Cellular
-GE> One franchisee here) a savings of at least 20% when they
-GE> switch
-GE> carriers. The problem I usually face is that even though
-GE> AT&T's
-GE> published prices aren't as good as BANM's, AT&T will
-GE> through in all
-GE> sorts of bonuses and incentives to keep customers. I showed
-GE> one
-GE> AT&T subscriber a savings of over $16,000 over two years to
-GE> switch, and
-GE> AT&T turned around and flat out GAVE them a $7,000 credit
-GE> to wait for
-GE> six months before the considered switching.
Figures. That's a big credit and they probably figured it would be easier to 
take the credit rather than switching.
-GE> The practice that really burns my butt is what usually
-GE> happens when I
-GE> show an AT&T customer the chance to save major amounts of
-GE> money thanks
-GE> to a limited time BANM promotion. The customer will go to
-GE> AT&T for a
-GE> counter offer, and they will drag their feet in getting
-GE> back to the
-GE> customer until the BANM promotion is over. Then the
-GE> customer ends up
-GE> stuck with AT&T. I offered a local radio station with 25
-GE> AT&T lines a
-GE> conversion package that would have saved them almost
-GE> $10,000 per year,
-GE> but the offer expired on the last day of the month when the
-GE> special
-GE> promotion ended. AT&T waited until 5:00 PM on Friday, the
-GE> 31st to make
-GE> their counter offer, and it wasn't as good as what I was
-GE> offering. But
-GE> it came too late for the radio station to make the
-GE> changeover until the
-GE> next Monday when I couldn't offer the incentives.
Bell Atlantic needs to be more flexible in that case, there is no good reason 
why a promo can't be extended by a few days or a week, especially in the case 
of a potentially good customer.
-GE> Down here, we just ended a promotion for unlimited
-GE> off-peak. But since
-GE> I concentrate on business accounts, that's not as big an
-GE> incentive as
-GE> the new aggregate billing plans. With them, the customer
-GE> gets X free
-GE> minutes per line, but the minutes are pooled among all the
-GE> phones. That
-GE> way the customer never pays for unused minutes on one line
-GE> while they
-GE> have unused minutes on another line. We can even offer an
-GE> aggregate
-GE> billing plan to individuals who want two cell phone lines.
The aggregate idea is a good one. I think they're doing it in this market too 
but am not sure.
I did notice that the BANM site near me just went sectorized. Or I should say 
that they mounted some sectorized antennas halfway up the tower, I really 
can't tell if they're 850 mHz or are antennas co-located with a 1900 mHz 
system.
There have been LOT of dropped calls in the area so I suspect they're 
switching over and are getting the bugs worked out.
The omni antennas are still up at the top of the tower.
-GE> Sorry, but while my level of expertise on cellular rates is
-GE> very high,
-GE> on technical stuff I defer to the our techies. They have
-GE> forgetten more
-GE> than I'll ever know.
That's ok, you know what you need to in order to make money, to me I like the 
tech stuff but keep up on rates mainly to make sure that I'm getting a good 
deal on my cellular one account.
Thanks for the reply.
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