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The bug of the eight digits with Wataniya came back yesterday, but this time it has evolved into something worse. Not only I couldn’t make a call at the intersection, but I kept calling while going forward to Fahaheel and I got like 5 consecutive “We cannot redirect your call, please add #2 infront of the number and dial again” Ofcourse, I’m calling Batriq @ 1888000, so it’s already changed to new numbering plan. I then got another 5 busy or idle responses, the type that happens when there is coverage problems. The problem started from 2nd Ring Road & Fahaheel intersection, and went on till Cairo St. #35 a Fahaheel Road. Such a long way to call it a cell handover problem isn’t it? Unless ofcourse if the edge of the cells run all along this Fahaheel Road area, which would be simply bad design and/or worse installation and configuration.

I wonder what happened to the guy roaming the world over the red carpet really :)

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So I didn’t wait for next week to re-do the test of the Eightg Digit Curse. Nothing better to do in weekend right! :). The result however was contrary to last time. I called 3 consecutive times, twice at stationary (remember physics?), and then once while driving. What was different? Could it be under heavy load at night, as I usually call at night, and this time it was Saturday morning? Maybe. This will have to wait until next week :)

The one thing I’m sure of now is, I remember I frequently faced similar problem before calling Batriq from the same area and time.

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You would think after all this time the chaos of the eighth digit is gone, at least from the telecom companies side. Perhaps some people still got unchanged numbers, but that’s normal. Yesterday however while I was going to order my regular thursday night Batriq meal, I called “1888000″ Wataniya line only to get a message saying “you can’t reach this number, and you must add 2 to it”! I look at the number again and figure, they must’ve done something like this

if ( number.length() == 7 && isMocNumber(number)) {

   add2Prefix();

}

Immediately after I left the 2nd Ring Road traffic light intersection with Fahaheel road away from the city, a second call made it. Hmm… Is it just by accident, or it the specific cell I was in? Maybe I will try again next week :D

Do you get such problems up till now?

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I’m not sure if they had newspaper ads or anything else, but this is a short notice. Wataniya sent mass SMS to it’s customers last night informing us they are moving to the eight digits plan today (Friday), and we have to add 6 to all the Wataniya numbers.

If you saw already, there is a converter tool to convert your phone contacts from 7 to the new eight digits numbering plan accordingly. It’s been also updated just recently to allow you to specify which operator you want to convert specifically, to adapt to this gradual migration phase.

I suggest you try the Java version if you can get the latest JRE 1.6, as the Windows version is built on an old release and is causing some compatibility issues. Ofcourse since it’s commercial software, I can’t afford to spend thousands for the sake of this program, and neither I intend to extend my Windows development life cycle. So please, bare it :).

Popularity: 28% [?]