Wind Responds: Data Ports Fixed

Earlier today, Wind Mobile acknowledged via a twitter update and corresponding blog post response that they were aware of customer complaints that the “unlimited data” option for Wind phones was unlimited in the amount of data transferred, but not in the type of data transferred. Certain data ports were blocked, drastically limiting the applications which could be run via tethering through a Wind network phone.

Well, it took less than a day for Wind to fix this issue.

Before we get to the fix itself, look at those timestamps. 10 hours ago Wind acknowledged the problem, 23 minutes ago, they announce a fix. 9.5 hours of response time to get their network reconfigured. Ladies and gentlemen this is a new level of customer service in the wireless industry in Canada. It seemed inevitable that Wind would have a few hiccups when launching their network, and the data port blocking issue was one of them. What remained to be seen was whether or not Wind would back up their customer service promises and it sure looks like they have. Complaints about the blocked ports have only been on the Wind site for a few days before the problem was acknowledged to the best of my knowledge, and this is an amazing turn around time.

As to what exactly was done, well, check out the link above for the whole story but here’s a few excerpts:

We’ve added real time video streaming (although the Technical guys told me I couldn’t ask how they did it!), SIP, VOIP, SSH, and VPN… in fact, most letters of the alphabet now are supported. However, we haven’t been able to get video streaming to work on the BlackBerry Bold 9700. We’re still working on that one, and we’ll let you know when it happens.

…

Here’s the full list (get even more detail in our FAQs):

• • Email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, …)
  • Streaming (new)
  • Consumer applications like Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, VOIP, Fring, Skype, Jabber, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, Fring, … plus whatever other consumer applications to come!
  • Other access / applications added today like SIP, SSH, VPN, FTP

While there are new mobile applications all of the time, we’re pretty confident that they’ll work with what we’ve got, and – if not – we’ll fix it. Just let us know!