Even by today’s relaxed standards for voice quality and mobile phone service, T-Mobile has a lot of explaining to do if it doesn’t expect more customers to depart it for the more reliable networks of Sprint (News - Alert) and Verizon.  

 

The outage reportedly affected nearly two million customers for a period of up to five hours – a long time if your primary phone or only phone is a T-Mobile (News - Alert) phone. Can the U.S. subsidiary of Deutsche Telecom really call itself a carrier if five percent of its customer base suddenly experience service interruptions?  

 

T-Mobile’s service flameout of this week comes on top of its “We lost your data/No, we found your data, but it will take ages to restore” fiasco around automatic backups for its Sidekick users (Yes, it was really Microsoft (News - Alert) and its Danger subsidiary fault, but since the customer sees T-Mobile is the first “throat to choke” in line, there’s more fallout here.).

 

Equally disturbing, service disruptions were distributed across its network, ranging from higher-density population areas such as Long Island and San Francisco to lesser ones such as eastern Tennessee and Honolulu, and across service types, including voice, text messaging, and data. If the problems had been confined to one city/region, it could have been written down to some sort of fluke equipment failure. Instead, the problem smacks of a software glitch/bug – most likely an upgrade – gone really really bad. 

 

T-Mobile’s next challenge is one likely happening now: Customers are going to leave, especially Sidekick owners who might consider this outage the final sign/straw. Will T-Mobile let them leave in peace or inflict a pro-rated early terminate fee?  

 

Maybe what bothers me the most is that a number of T-Mobile customers have taken a “So what, it’s technology, it will fail once in a while” attitude and plan to give the carrier a pass on the service interruption. For nearly all businesses and most families, having reliable voice service is not in the same category as Facebook (News - Alert) or Twitter taking a header for a couple of hours – you pay for service, you expect dial tone and/or data service, and unless there’s an extreme event to disrupt service, it should just work. 

 

If you are a business paying for T-Mobile services, you have the right to ask for a more detailed description of the problem and what efforts have been made to make sure it doesn’t happen again. If you are uncomfortable with the answers or don’t receive them in a timely matter, you should start migrating your business over to another wireless carrier as fast as practically as possible because you’ve got better things to do than wonder about if your cell phone is going to work.