For several months last year, I was involved in a long distance relationship, and phone calls constituted a very large proportion of my interaction with my BF.

For several months last year, I was involved in a long distance relationship, and phone calls constituted a very large proportion of my interaction with my BF. Unfortunately, at the time I was both living in SF, and an AT&T customer. The constant dropped calls drove me crazy -- as you pointed out, several dropped calls in a very short window of time was quite common. The nature of a conversation changes when you're always afraid you're about to cut off. You get paranoid every time you hear a pause in someone's speech. And sometimes you get the the point where after the umpteenth redial, neither of you says anything, because you know you won't be able to talk long enough to finish a thought. Eventually I switched to T-Mobile, and moved across the country to live with my BF again. Now, with this looming acquisition, I'm faced with the prospect of becoming a reacquired AT&T customer, and again being dependent on a company whose service was so crappy as to have literally brought me to tears more than once. Yes, AT&T's infrastructure is already stretched thin -- but I wish their approach to increasing network capacity didn't involve dragging me back in.