I did mention to the customer agent that it all worked fine during my
trial period, and he explained that is why they have it.  He never could
understand that you don't then break what worked in the trial period!

The problem they have is as we discussed with text messages before in
this group.  For various features such as data and SMS there are people
who are "light" users and "heavy" users.  The attempts at segregating
those users and charging appropriately haven't been working too well.

IMHO they would do best by making a small amount of everything be
included in the plans (eg 10 text messages a month, 30 mins of data
usage).  The reason for that is that charging extra for even one message
or one byte of data results in customer service calls that will more
than wipe out any profit made.  It also gives people an incentive to try
them out.  Then have a tier around the $5 per month level for light
usage and finally a tier for heavy users at $20 or whatever it was, but
charge people based on their usage for the month.  That way if you used
lots of text messages/data you'll pay more but it will have been worth
it to you.  I believe some carriers already do this for voice minutes.
And the beauty of a scheme like this is that automatically segregates
the users and even does the right thing as usage changes month by month.
Instead the carriers are just driving people to wifi and voip.

Roger

We really don't know if this is a new policy or a local outage. Anybody
else find this change? Everything is still working the same in Honolulu.

Well, so far it still works here......... If anything changes, I'll post
back, even though, as I said, I don't use it all that much.

But I'll be more mindful of it in the next weeks/months, to see if anything
changes.

UPDATE: As a test, I put wap.voicestream.com into the "The Internet"
connection and now POP3 /SMTP email is working again. TMO is still mucking
with Google services though.

--
Sven