Meanwhile, in the USA, the Baby Bells and other upstarts were duking it out for customer $ in the landline business even as mobile service providers were angling for a bigger piece of the pie. Calling card companies were probably leasing/renting some excess capacity from established operators to offer calling services at competitive rates. What about the voice quality of mobile phones and calling cards? Initially not very good and it was like robbing Peter (landline service providers) to pay Paul (remember “Can you hear me now?”. Imagine a caller asking that to the person being called 😀 ) as the technology was still developing and mobile service providers were expanding their network to improve coverage. I also remember carrying pager for on-call support at times. I have almost forgotten how those things worked. It was like a love-hate relationship with those pesky little things. You always want to be alerted when something breaks and needs immediate attention (those batch jobs running at night always find a way to break, don’t they? 🙂 ) but also pray that thingy never rings. The pagers were like nagging spouse who expects to do all the talking and expects one to hear silently 😉 For a short while Palm Pilots were the in thing and many sales guys liked to show off their electronic rolodex by flashing out those devices and using the stylus to record or retrieve contact information. That gave way to Blackberry as accessing corporate Email securely by phone was getting necessary and convenient and texting with a full keyboard was increasing in popularity. By the mid-2000s mobile telephony reached everywhere and we were just getting started for the next wave: the advent of the iPhone!
Part 4: App-solutely yours!…To be continued
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