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