11/09/2000: We recently signed up for the $5 Nextel Wireless Web add-on to one of our National Business plan Nextel accounts (the only reason we have one being the unlimited incoming airtime; Nextel coverage and handoffs are so poor that the only reason we are still with them is because of the unlimited incoming airtime; as soon as Nextel gets rids of the unlimited incoming airtime we get rid of them!). After about a week of semi-acceptable service (the display is certainly better than the tiny one offered on AT&T Pocketnet Ericsson phones, although the navigation is cumbersome and you frequently can't back up to the previous web page or level -- you need to go to the main Nextel menu to escape at times), the Nextel wireless web service appears to be down, and seems to have been so for over two days! We noticed this as we started writing WAP and HDML interfaces to our site and were testing out the overall reliability of our coding -- little did we expect that the actual network which carried the commands to us was not working! Initially, we tested and tested on our side figuring we had done something incorrectly, and it wasn't for a day or so till we figured that the error or outage was in the actual Wireless Web service which Nextel "provides". Each time we try to access it by going to the "Net Nextel" menu, we get "Waiting..." and it eventually just times out, or it immediately says "Network Not Responding". We have tried it so far from the Boston, NY Metro, Upstate NY (Albany and the Thruway corridor), Philadelphia, and Baltimore/DC markets, and the results are the same -- the network is simply unavailable. Calling Nextel was surprising-- they seem to very matter-of-factly acknowledge the problem and leave it at that: "Oh yes, the Nextel Web service is currently down and has been for a few days -- we aren't sure when it will be working again, but we apologize for your inconvenience". It seems that they don't consider this to be a priority... So I'm not sure how robust or reliable their network is; I know that if BAMS, GTE's, AT&T's or any other CDPD carrier went down for so long throughout their entire nationwide network (or even local CDPD networks like SNET in CT and RI), CDPD customers and public service/emergency services would be screaming; here, in the case of Nextel, it seems no one really cares to much and that they seem to find an almost 3-day service outage to be acceptable and almost (from the attitude of the service reps I've spoken with) to be not all that unusual. With the limited offerings that these phone-based microbrowser wireless web services offer, the fact that Nextel specifically allows its network(s) to go down for such an extended period further convinces me that these wireless web microbrowser services offer more hype than value and that the carriers need to do a lot more (or retarget the market to wireless data/wireless fixed IP similar to CDPD) to attract a significant enough customer base to even recover their costs for implementing these services, let alone profit from them and/or use them as customer retention tools. (This post and updated SID list are also available at www.wirelessnotes.org) Regards, Doug