At the EDGE of registration
When RingFree’s Eric Chamberlain sent the rest of the team his OmniGraffle flow charts describing an on-iPhone registration process for RF that was simple and required a minimum of user keyboard input, we were mostly hooked. Some of us, though, were skeptical: Could the iPhone handle it?
The answer so far has been mostly “Yes”.
Most of you have been able to register with RingFree and able to make phone calls in less than minute. And you’ve told us you really like the process for its simplicity (you also told us we need to shorten some of the explanatory text because you’re not in in the fifth grade — and we will).
But some of you ran into problems. Somewhere in the middle of the process — usually right after phone activation — the registration abruptly ended, and you were left in RingFree limbo: partially registered with no where to go.
When we did come across a solution, we slapped our foreheads because it took so long to figure out the obvious: Those registering with us over WiFi had few problems. But those of you trying to sign-up over AT&T’s EDGE network ran into time-outs and blue-box warnings that killed the process.
The issue is that the iPhone is not able to maintain both a data connection over EDGE and a call connection over GSM concurrently (WiFi and GSM concurrently are OK). So, when you went into the activation phone call to enter your 4-digit key, you lost data connection with our server and the process would time out. The result: Your iPhone would be activated but you were never registered.
We thought — fingers crossed — we got a handle on the problem. And we deployed javascript modifications that accommodate the momentary loss of data connectivity using EDGE. Still, some of you, as of early this morning, can’t fully register.
We finally realized that enough of you have been accessing our servers using EDGE that AT&T is caching our data. And until those caches clear and AT&T has our latest javascript in its memory banks, there’s not much we can do except to ask you who are still facing registration problems to either wait a bit, or to head on down to your local espresso parlor with WiFi and sing up with us there. You’ll be up an running in no time.
P.S.: Using EDGE to make calls through RingFree does not face the same kinds of issues.
Tags: EDGE