VZW and Cingular finally getting along?!?!

[roamer1]

Last week I was in the basement of my office building (where SPCS works fine and Cingular works OK, but pretty much nothing else works more than intermittently) and landed up trying to make a call on my VZW phone anyway -- it went through, with the phone finally showing it was on analog AND was roaming. It turns out (and I confirmed it by checking the SID the phone was on while placing another call) the call went through on Cingular! I tried calling my VZW phone from my SPCS phone while it was on Cingular and my VZW phone rang...

Today I was in some rural parts of Alabama where VZW has no coverage (i.e., Talladega and Cleburne counties well away from I-20, where RCC Unicel is A-side and Cingular is B-side and there's nothing else except very weak Nextel) and once again landed up on Cingular when I hit holes in RCC's coverage, and was able to place and receive calls, calls received had caller ID, etc.

What's going on -- are VZW and Cingular finally getting along? (VZW ATL has always roamed on Cingular in SE KY, where VZW has no choice other than Ramcell, which most carriers shun as a "roamer gouger" -- but VZW ATL customers have never been able to roam on Cingular Atlanta or Cingular B'ham...) I thought at first after the experience at the office that it was just a fluke, but now I'm not so sure...especially since I've been able to roam in multiple Cingular systems and RECEIVING calls works.

Hopefully the reverse holds true (i.e., "Cingular roams on VZW now") so that I can once and for all shut up about Cingular's roaming problems in east TN! (I checked with a couple of people who use Cingular who say their IRDBs haven't been updated lately -- so it looks like Cingular's still blocking VZW systems at the phone level. The IRDBs not being updated doesn't mean Cingular hasn't set up roaming with VZW, though...) I doubt Cingular and VZW will ever get along well enough such that Cingular coverage is part of VZW AC plans and VZW coverage is part of Cingular NP plans, but roaming charges are often preferable to credit card roaming or no coverage at all...and some of us are on local or "true" national plans that would include at least some systems as free... [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif[/img]

-SC

[bobolito]

Hopefully it is just work in progress and not all IRDBs have been updated yet. It is also possible that roaming on VZ is possible for some Cingular customers and not for others because they may have different IRDBs.

[astint1]

I have a Ericsson T60d in Houston, Texas. and when my phone was roaming on 800Mhz i dialed 611 and Verizon's automated thing came on. On my Sprint phone when I roam on the 800Mhz band, Verizon is taking my calls.