Taxi Driver Online

You need to get on BT sim cards. We've had them over 12 months and never let us down. As for orange that we got with Mercury(spit spit), always losing connection but we're told we can't cancel them.
I'd love to cancel Mercury FULL STOP

Mmmm Mercury are getting a bit of a fan club.

It turns out he didn't pay his bills so Orange turned him off.

Don't get me started on Mercury but I can back up your post about moving plots.
In Feb I drove 90 miles to Excel to do a remap. A few months ago I drew the same plots for Datamaster. If I use 2 pdas to log on both systems, Datamaster has not moved but Mercury has.
Must be a glitch in Mercury
No point ringing them as nothing is ever sorted.
Just wish our lot would change over to the Datamaster system

Next time your up this way send me a PM, I live 2 minutes away from Exel's office A cup of tea will be ready for ya.

Read a few replies on here - And here's some defending of us Mobile providers:

The sim roaming will be available on Orange/T-Mobile from 5th October.

In most cases the connection issue on PDAs is down to incorrect set-up and a poor choice of APN. I would recommend that anyone running PDAs and having issues would be best to put your mobile and software providers in touch to discuss set-up.

In most cases changing to a M2M APN and locking the devices down to 2G will see dramatic improvements.

Sadly a lot of people are still purchasing their PDAs, Sims , software seperately with no thought for different dta set-up aspects and then they wonder why they have poor performance.

A few software companies out there I deal with (Especially Datamaster) are great to work with and we'll normally test a customers potential PDA choice and test APNs to get the best settings before we roll out a solution. A lot to be said from going directly to the network to get these services rather than 3rd parties who will provide you sims/PDAs with consumer APNs.


Cheers

Andy

_________________
Network Provider

So what happens when the mobile network is busy and you can't dispatch the work??

Nige

The mobile network never gets that busy they can’t dispatch work provided its all set up correctly. We’ve all heard how PDA’s stop working at New Year because they’re too busy but that’s a load of old nonsense and rather like saying don’t buy a car because all road roads can get grid locked. The reality is that just like the roads, provided you steer clear of the busy routes you’ll have no problems.

As Andy says, there’s quite a lot more to it and it’s certainly not all plug and play. Picking up a second-hand PDA and sticking a pay as you go sim in may well work but you’re never going to achieve the same level of performance as a properly set up device from the main network providers.

Bill

PS Andy, you’ll have to let me know who you are?

Hi Bill, ours goes down every New Years Eve at 00.00 when the network is busy infact it goes down every Saturday night at 23.00 for some strange reason.

It's not nonsense Bill there's plenty of people on here who are using the PDA system who's systems go down when it's busy, look at them in Wales who are on Cordic, there's a user in Hampshire who has problems when it's busy, we have probelms when it's busy.

That really helps the people who are using orange now doesn't it?

You can't run a taxi firm on that basis. We've binned orange for either Voda or O2 because of the unreliability of orange

_________________
Life? Don't talk to me about life!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjm2eslm6hI

We are swapping onto Voda and O2 in the coming weeks.

Nige get on to Mercury they have the sims in their office all they have to do is activate them.

We got ours on Friday and fitted most of them today. No probs so far..... Watch this space lol

_________________
Life? Don't talk to me about life!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjm2eslm6hI

Well if you loose your data in the way your describe Nige then whoever administers your GPRS service wants shooting with a big bargepole!

Although we've been around longer than Noah, we're relatively new in the PDA arena but we've seen two new year periods now without any issues whatsoever. Over 50 % of our customers are now using PDA's on a variety of networks and given we don't accept brown paper envelopes from any of them I can tell you they’re all pretty much the same.

As for Orange, there was a major outage the other week which took our customers down for just over half an hour but I guess from what you're saying you might have been down for a bit longer. The thing is, you have to look at the bigger picture and weigh the odd outage like this against all the benefits a PDA offers over conventional data terminals. Bear in mind also that we get to see all the outages on all the networks and it's certainly not all Orange!

Funny that I've had a Voda and an 02 customer today say they want to try Orange


Anyway good luck with the new networks, it may solve some of your problems. I'm sure you'll let us all know if it doesn’t

Bill

Send all the PDA's to me and I'll gladly get rid of them for free. Give me a data head anyday of the week.

Echo Wrote:



I'd be genuinely interested to know if you went to Orange directly and engaged between your software supplier and the network or went to a 3rd party, got some Orange sims and crossed your fingers!!

I'm not going to to claim outages dont occur etc but this is true of any network but what I will catagorically say is that from experience around 90% of errors are due to incorrect set-up and roll out of a solution. The key element being a lack of communication between the 3 parties involved (software/network/taxi).

I dont use this site to pitch sales/list prices etc but what I would advise is any prospective customer should be getting a live trial of any PDA complete with Sim , Software before committing to a contract so you can ensure the parties involved get the best performance settings before rolling them out! I cant think of two deals I've done that have been identical in set-up as this will vary from deal to deal dependant on software requirements/usage requirements/PDA type - so a lot of the pre-testing is trial and error to find the best set-up.

Sadly not enough of us are doing the above!

_________________
Network Provider