Then complain to the FCC. Your complaint is worth approximately 25,000 “votes.” Apparently, somebody in the government keeps track of these complaints.

bq.. But customer complaints continue to dog T-Mobile. In the fourth quarter of 2004, T-Mobile logged a rate of 4.3 complaints with the Federal Communications Commission per 100,000 customers; only Cingular had more at a 4.6 rate, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

p. This from an “article”:1 in last month’s WSJ. “Here’s”:2 a page I found on the FCC’s “site”:3 about filing complaints.

[3(FCC site)]http://www.fcc.gov/

[2(FCC complaint page)]http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/complaints.html

[1(WSJ 2005-04-27: T-Mobile Offers More Details On Coverage to Ease Concerns)]http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111445269927616146,00.html?mod=home_us_inside_today

There’s a pretty cool “demo video”:1 of Microsoft’s new “Office Communicator”:2 IM product over on “Channel 9″:4. Office Communicator is an enterprise IM solution that allows interconnection with both AOL’s AIM product and Yahoo!’s Messenger product. Some of the highlights of the video are:

* AOL AIM and Yahoo! Messenger integration
* Enterprise directory lookup
** Search by IM name or email address
** Lists phone numbers from directory
* PBX phone control via Office Messenger (cool!)
* Call forwarding and transferring control from Office Messenger
* VoIP calling from Office Messenger
* Live meeting data-sharing integration
* Conference calling integration (MCI service in this case)
* Discussion of security and encryption

I think the integration with “PBXs”:3 is particularly cool. PBX systems seem to be designed to be as non-intuitive as possible — a big part of this is due to the limits of a phone’s interface (i.e., a simple keypad with no display or a very small display). Obviously, you can build a much richer interface on a PC. I imagine that it would take some effort by a company’s IT department to get all of this working, but the productivity benefits could make it worth while.

I know a lot of people at work use IM to check to see if someone is at their desk before placing a call. Now you can check and call with a simple click of the mouse.

[4(Microsoft Channel 9 site)]http://channel9.msdn.com/

[3(Wikipedia PBX entry)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBX

[2(Office Communicator home page)]http://www.microsoft.com/office/rtc/client.mspx

[1(Microsoft Channel 9 video demo)]http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=69437