I’m reluctant to push my last post (on how difficult buying office telephone systems is today) down, since we have gotten so many good ideas for investments and discussions from that post. But it has been the last post for more than three months!

And I’m just ready as can be to rant about T-Mobile Hotspots. I had to wait because I’ve been on the board of directors of Boingo Wireless, as a representative of New Enterprise Associates (NEA). But Boingo has just acquired another company and that gave me the opportunity to leave the board without disturbing the company. And now I feel I can talk freely about WiFi Hotspots and Mobile Broadband (although I’m obviously biased and retain an indirect financial interest in Boingo through my NEA interests).

Last night, sitting at Dulles International Airport (DIA), I finally cancelled my T-Mobile HotSpots subscription, which I had had for 61 months. (That’s right, I first signed up for a T-Mobile HotSpots account in July 2001.) Oh, and I got such pleasure from doing so!

1) I really can’t stand dealing with wireless carriers, as a class of companies. They are so clearly organized to get as much money out of you as possible, without regard for your actual feelings as a customer or underlying desire to pay for their services. This is true of Cingular, Verizon and Sprint (with all of whom I have devices and accounts) as much as it is T-Mobile. But I really enjoyed cancelling my T-Mobile account for two big reasons: a) T-Mobile blocks Port 25 in their WiFi Hotspots. This means you can’t use your default configuration for collecting email, which is at least 80% of the reason for having WiFi HotSpots in airports and coffee stores, where 95% of T-Mobile’s access points are. No other ISP I deal with blocks Port 25 (Sprint, Verizon, Comcast, US West, Boingo, Wayport, etc.). I think of it as T-Mobile has the attitude that we should pay them and then custom configure our own software to get our email. What are we paying for? And b) T-Mobile treated Boingo Wireless very poorly in their business relationships. I won’t go into any detail for fear of doing something wrong, but suffice it to say that I have been embarrassed to continue to pay T-Mobile $30 a month while being on Boingo’s board. And it now gives me infinite pleasure to stop doing that!

(The pleasure is even more intense because Boingo bought a company called Concourse Communications and now provides WiFi access in a significant number of major airports, including Chicago and DFW, both of which I spent time in this past week. Boingo is now providing blanket coverage in some airports where T-Mobile is only providing service in frequent flier clubs. Heh heh. But not IAD, where my only choice was to go to the United Red Carpet Club and use T-Mobile, which is what lead to my pleasurable experience of cancelling T-Mobile HotSpots last night!)

2) I also got pleasure out of the experience because of what I had to to cancel the account. I know this business, subscriptions, and a key piece of success in selling subscriptions amounts to making it really hard for customers to cancel theirs. (See much of the press about how good AOL is at making it hard to cancel an account.) The experience of cancelling my T-Mobile account was indicative, but I was prepared. You can’t cancel online (I think it should be illegal to solicit business online without allowing customers to cancel it online too). So when I finally tracked down the toll-free support line and finally managed to work my way around the incredibly stupid voice-recognition software (couldn’t be TellMe Networks), I told the customer support representative I wanted to cancel. And when he asked me why I wanted to cancel, I told him that I would be happy to share that information with him — after he finished cancelling my account. Of course, he had to find my account, establish my identity, and then he had to put me on hold while he got a confirmation number for my cancellation. Why did he have to put me on hold? Probably to get authorization to cancel the account, which meant persuading his manager that the account couldn’t be recovered by referring me to an account recovery specialist (which is why I told him that I wanted to cancel before telling him my woe). Once he got the confirmation number, I told him that T-Mobile was blocking Port 25. He was actually pretty good: apologized for creating a problem, asked me if I had called technical support, and apologized again when I said that I didn’t want to have to reconfigure my software to use T-Mobile, that that was the point of cancelling. It was clear to me that he was trained how to be polite, but that he had no idea what I meant by “Port 25″.

I still have my Boingo account and look forward to being able to use it in more and more airports over the years to come.

Okay, now that I’ve vented and shared my personal feelings about Boingo, T-Mobile and wireless carriers with you, I get to the real point and the one that’s useful for actually posting this on our firm’s website (rather than my Small Thoughts blog, where I post thoughts that don’t really matter).

The point: There IS an alternative to WiFi Hotspots. It was the alternative that I used at the United Red Carpet Club at DIA last night when I realized that I couldn’t get my email through T-Mobile. In fact, it is an alternative that I am now using virtually everywhere, including places where there are no WiFi access points and places where there will never will be WiFi access points (such as the passenger seat of a car going 70 miles per hour through the Virginia countryside). The alternative is often called Mobile Broadband (although that might be the trade name that Sprint is using to brand its service, which is the one I’m using). The technical term for this is EV-DO, which is a high-speed wireless service being provided through Sprint and Verizon (but not through Cingular, T-Mobile or other GSM-based wireless operators). See Walt Mossberg’s review of the competing networks in yesterdays Wall Street Journal (subscription required) to get a coherent explanation of the difference.

And the point of this is that the (g**darned) wireless operators have actually deployed a technology that can transform the mobile use of notebook computers, really truly transform it — so you can use your computer anywhere anytime productively and with a high speed connection (slightly better than wired DSL in your house, but slowed than cable or most commercial wired networks). This means that we will have to continue dealing with these customer-insensitive companies if we want to continue advancing our productive use of computers. Gilman uses a tablet computer with an EV-DO card in it and it transforms a tablet from a toy or neat demo into a serious working device that be used like a pad of paper AND a real computer. I use mine with my Macintosh and, as I noted above, was able to deliver documents for our firm while we were driving down I-95 south of Washington, DC on our way to an appointment. I also have a computer with Verizon’s EV-DO service built in, a Lenovo Thinkpad. But I think that was a mistake, since the wireless operators maintain proprietary connections to the network and you don’t want to stake a whole computer on one of those companies.

Anyway, I do apologize for going on at such length. If I had an editor, they would have told me to break this into multiple posts. But I’ve got a lot stored up after such a long absence from posting on this blog….