Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Rogers iPhone 3G S Activation Nightmare
« Ajax Push for OpenSocial | Main | Rogers iPhone 3G S Resolution »How long does it take to buy a new iPhone 3G S in Canada? It probably depends on how many people are ahead of you in line. For instance, if you arrive when the store opens (at 10:00 AM) and one person is ahead of you, it should take at least two and a half hours (I arrived at 10:00 AM and left at 12:30). The process that Rogers uses is very thorough: after the clerk signs in, authorizes the transaction, enters in the SIM ID, and asks you to choose a phone number, the system times out, discarding everything that has been entered in so far. I'm unclear on the purpose of the last step, but it must be very important, because it was performed at least three times.
But that's just the funny story; the sad story is that the one person ahead of me in line arrived at the store at 7:00 AM. Being from New York, they expected long lineups and fierce competition for all of the five iPhones available at the store. (That's right -- in three hours, a total of five transactions were processed.)
What's also "funny" is that the "hardware upgrade price" to upgrade my aging Motorola V220 from 2005 was $347 (not the $199 you see advertised) and required a three year contract. So, I switched to a new plan (also requiring a three year contract).
Surely, with all the cell phone fees we pay in Canada (like my $35 activation fee -- hey, that's only $14/hour) Rogers could purchase enough computing power to activate 5 phones per store.
But what can we learn from this experience (other than the need for cell phone carrier competition in Canada)? First, some part of the back-end system did not have sufficient capacity, perhaps a registration service. (I suspect this because the web application remained reasonably responsive, but still failed with a timeout; however, contradicting this is the fact that the entire session would be lost each time, indicating that the web tier actually was the problem.)
Could Ajax Push have helped? Possibly: if a back-end service is slow, the web interface can be designed so that time consuming operations are updated via push, allowing better user feedback (and the ability to manage multiple tasks from the same browser interface).
The new iPhone is great, by the way, Apple did their part. (Also, the clerk was very pleasant throughout the entire frustrating process; if anyone earned the activation fee, it was her.)
Posted by at 6:26 PM in Entries by Ted Goddard