After about 6 months of nearly seamless Caller ID delivery on my Bell Atlantic Digital Choice phone, Caller ID outside my local area all of a sudden stopped working. Additionally, Alpha Messaging delivery STILL does not work in most areas of New York City with BAMS/CT accounts although tests with other BAMS accounts indicate that the service is indeed available and working! I have an BAMS/CT A-side digital account in the 860-604 exchange, which, either as a result of my inquiries with BAMS and/or their own work on their system, started displaying Caller ID when outside the CT/00119 system in mid-September 1997. This included nearly EVERY BAMS market; I can't think of an area which did not ultimately receive caller ID, although some took longer than others (most notably the South Jersey 0008 system which showed "Unavailable" months after the rest of the 00008/Philly system had it working.) On or about April 3rd, at about the same time that BAMS proudly announced in their New England market newsletter that Caller ID delivery is available outside the CT system, it stopped working (great timing!). It currently does not work anywhere outside of the 00119/CT market, and doesn't even work in the Pittsfield, MA section of the 00119 market in the Berkshires. Whenever a call from a phone which was _known_ to show the ID (ie, calling number) in the past is placed to my 860-604 number, all I get is "Unavailable". However, as a comparison, A BAMS-Philly 00008 215-287 exchange mobile that the company has ID's _perfectly_ in each of the markets, including the non-BAMS SNET/00088 B-side market in CT and Western Mass. Specifically, the markets where I tested the CT/A and Philly/B mobiles and found that the CT got "Unavailable" while the Philly always got the calling number are: 00008: Philly 00018: Baltimore/DC (ID for CT DOES work via the DC roam port, however) 00022: New York Metro (ID works via roam port too) 00028: Boston 00078: Albany 00088: SNET - CT/A won't work at all there of course, but Philly gets CID! 00119: In CT/Springfield section, CID showed on both the CT 860 account and the Philly account; but in Pittsfield system the CT 860 doesn't get the ID and I have not properly tested the Philly act.) 00250: Atlantic City (incidentally, our Philly account was mis-billed as non-home for calls made here; it is part of the expanded home area) 00300: Vermont 00404: Orange County, NY 00486: Poughkeepsie, NY 02058: NY-17 between 404/486 and Binghampton systems, up to Albany. Again, it _used_ to ID fine in all of these markets, and the Philly account currently does, so I can't see why they can't get it working after over 5 weeks of outage and after publicly announcing it in their newsletter! Also, another long standing issue: CT/A accounts with Text Messaging still can not get alpha messages in Queens, Kings (Brooklyn), or Richmond (Staten Island) counties of New York/Boroughs of New York City. If an alpha message is sent to you while you are in any of these counties, it will not be received on the phone. However, the minute you cross into Manhattan or the Bronx via any bridge or tunnel (BAMS covers all tunnels in NYC now; AT&T still doesn't cover the East River tunnels), all your messages come in in a flood which essentially locks up the phone until you clear them out and/or they stop coming in. BAMS maintained that this was due to the software in the switch covering these counties, and that alpha messaging would not be available until the switch was upgraded. However, after testing messaging out with the Philly account, it surprisingly worked fine in all three counties! I therefore suspect that it is NOT the switch which requires upgrading, but some routing problem between the CT/A and NY/B markets, although this is only speculation. The point, however, is that if it can work for a Philly account, I fail to see why it will not work for a CT account as well. I spoke to BAMS-CT customer service and roaming departments a number of times over the past few weeks in efforts to resolve these issues, and they forwarded forwarded my inquiries on to (supposedly) the appropriate people), but still no progress. Indeed, the person who is looking into it for me from the BAMS CT roaming dept. (Michelle) called today to ask me if anything was working yet; I unfortunately had to answer "no" (I'm not blaming her; she is just passing the issue on...) It seems as if I am going to have to escalate the issue on my own now, something which I don't have as much time to do as I used to. Towards this end, I have compiled a list of systems (mainly BAMS at this point, but the list will grow to include any and all other systems that I know about or which people write in about) which I will post as soon as I have updated it, probably in the next few days. In the meantime, a preliminary version, as well as other cellular notes and observations, is available at: http://www.wirelessnotes.org This is a site where I hope to maintain a list of all known problems, features, services, notes, etc. which I (and others who have written/may write to me) have observed. If anyone is having similar problems, I urge you to check this list, compare your observations to mine and those who have written in, and provide any feedback which you may consider appropriate. Hopefully, such a list will facilitate more rapid resolutions to some of these ongoing issues. Finally, on a positive note, the Catskill 01516 system which BAMS partly owns has _finally_ been fully integrated into the BAMS system in that automatic call delivery and custom-calling features work, etc. After many calls and the exceptional help from Mark at the BAMS/CT roaming dept., BAMS finally got this market fully connected so BAMS customers may now receive calls, use features (3-way calling is oddly implemented there, though...see the notes at wirelessnotes.org for details), and place calls without using the roaming operator. I'm glad they were responsive and interested in resolving this issue -- it had been going on for a long time and it is finally fixed. I'll post an updated "Cellular Notes" list in the next few days, and update the WWW site in terms of CT Caller ID and Alpha Messaging in the New York counties noted above. Please feel free to visit "www.wirelessnotes.org" and submit comments, updates, new issues, observations, or anything else you think appropriate... Thanks! Doug