5 ms·

I loathe AT&T. It mistreats employees and customers. It overcharges and delivers astonishingly poor service. It makes regular billing "mistakes". It willingly,

I loathe AT&T. It mistreats employees and customers. It overcharges and delivers astonishingly poor service. It makes regular billing "mistakes". It willingly, almost gleefully, assists in the violation of its customers rights and privacy. It is a paragon of inefficiency. It fights against progress to keep its anachronistic business model relevant. It uses the legal system as a club. And it ensures that any actions brought against it can at best be Pyrrhic victories. In short, it is truly every bad thing Microsoft has ever been alleged to be and worse. I don't own an iPhone solely because I want less to do with AT&T than I do now.

Xichekolas 17y ago
This is also the company whose sales reps swear up and down, to this day, that they don't offer dry loop DSL "because there is no demand". Of course, if you know the magic phone number, you can call the dry loop division directly, and they are as helpful as can be. I asked one once why they were so hidden... she answered: politics.
- miles 17y ago
  And the magic phone number is...? 1-800-264-0002 But you might want to do a bit of research before signing up: Get AT&T Dry Loop/Naked DSL In 5 Minutes http://consumerist.com/342490/ http://consumerist.com/342490/ AT&T Dry Loop DSL Hard To Find, Get And Cancel http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Dry-Loop-DSL-Hard-To-Find-Get-And-Cancel-100952 http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Dry-Loop-DSL-Hard-To-...
  - Xichekolas 17y ago
    Ah yeah I suppose I should have posted it! That is exactly the number I have. I was told it's for the region that includes Texas, but like you say, they can forward you on where you need to go, and the people at that number tend to actually be helpful.
- 4buot 17y ago
  i never had a problem getting stand-alone dsl...the phone numbers are secret because local carriers never really integrated into Bell Mobility, and Bell Mobility never really integrated into ATT...they are basically separate companies all named ATT to confuse you.
tsetse-fly 17y ago
Most of what you're saying also applies to the other carriers in the US. Verizon has a history of crippling its phones. Sprint has horrible customer service. T-Mobile has very little coverage. There are no good carriers.
- ojbyrne 17y ago
  My experience suggests the same for Canada. And it seems likely that can be broadened to the entire world.
- imajes 17y ago
  t-mobile us on my iphone has been fantastic. Best decision I ever made. :)
- skorgu 17y ago
  I'll take a crippled phone any day over the other complaints (and if my Tour is crippled it's subtle enough that I haven't seen it). There are no perfect carriers but there are less-bad ones.
  - Shooter 17y ago
    Any complaints about the Tour? I'm thinking of getting the Tour on Verizon (and an iPod Touch for 'iPhone' apps and wifi.)
    - skorgu 17y ago
      Well its my first blackberry and I've only had a week or so to get used to the platform so YMMV of course. tl;dr: It's great at its core competencies: voice and email are great. Everything else is a bit unfinished. The bottom line is that so far it's good enough for what I use it for. I'm still crap at the keyboard but getting better, the EVDO is fast enough but not spectacular, the roller ball works well almost all of the time but the horizontal sensitivity seems a bit wonky sometimes, I haven't figured out why yet. (There's no way I'm that bad at brickbreaker so I choose to blame RIM) Email integration is about 8/10, I push email from my gmail account and Exchange at work to it and that workflow is very well executed. However, reading mail on Gmail or Outlook doesn't mark the messages read on the blackberry. It's possible I'm doing something wrong here and I'm not on a BES but it hasn't annoyed me enough yet to really dig for a solution. Also Gmail IMAP sync doesn't respect your filters/tags so if you get new mail it all hits your blackberry. I ended up unsubscribing to a few mailing lists that I never really read anyway because they were just too high traffic to be buzzing me all the time. There seems to be a bit of a compatibility issue with the Tour and the Storm, most apps that require unrestricted TCP access don't seem to work [1]. I can't get jmirc, midpssh etc to connect, they just die with "Invalid URL parameter." It'll be fixed at some point I'm sure but for now there's nothing app-wise that's useful to me. Viigo is acceptable as a podcast client but not much else. Google Voice client is alright, doesn't integrate as well as I'd like but it's workable. AIM works well, Flickr works well. The apps in the app store are great if you're obsessed about a) the weather b) financial news c) sports scores or d) playing card games, outside of that there's not much there. Then again every "must have app" my iPhone friends show me has me rolling my eyes so I suppose I'm just not the target market. The voice quality is top notch. I was on a four hour conference call last night and I set the speakerphone up and forgot about it, no issues either hearing or being heard. That took my battery life down from full to about half. The camera is frankly barely adequate. Plenty of pixels but too much grain. [2] All that said I'm buying my wife one to replace her free-and-worth-every-penny phone in a few weeks so it's safe to say I'm pleased with it. The warts just aren't in places I care about. [1] http://forums.crackberry.com/f35/tour-9630-irc-266165/ http://forums.crackberry.com/f35/tour-9630-irc-266165/ [2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/skorgu/3737195762/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/skorgu/3737195762/
eb 17y ago
You're exaggerating. I've had an iPhone on AT&T for 2 years without any issues. No dropped calls or billing mistakes and no issues with customer service. The rates that they charge are nearly identical to the other wireless providers for voice + data. I'm not saying that AT&T has not had these problems, but your comment does not exemplify the experiences of the majority of their customers.
- imajes 17y ago
  neither does yours: anecdotal experience doesn't speak for the majority.
jf 17y ago
In 2004 I moved to a city where my AT&T TDMA phone was permanently roaming. I didn't pay roaming charges because my plan with AT&T covered my roaming charges. Months later, AT&T set up a single TDMA tower in my area. Because AT&T phones were service provider locked, my phone and hundreds of others like it were forced to use that single tower. Overnight my phone went from having perfect signal everywhere I went, to just short of useless. Every single AT&T representative that I talked to swore up and down that the reason I was getting poor service was not their fault, that the problem was with my phone and that I should get a new phone. Since this happened just as AT&T was moving from TDMA to GSM, I am guessing that this was their way of forcing their customers to move to GSM. I can understand the business case for moving customers to GSM, what I can't understand is why AT&T would do so by using trickery and lies. I will always remember AT&T's shady tactics and blatant deceit and will never give them another cent of my money - I will purchase an iPhone the second it is officially available on another provider.
3dFlatLander 17y ago
"It fights against progress to keep its anachronistic business model relevant." I'd like to comment on that. I live in a city in which AT&T started a test of bandwidth caps. Depending on your connection type, you can download anywhere from 5 gigs to 60 gigs, and it's $1 per gig after your limit. I watch HD video, stream music, download games from steam and software from the apt repositories, etc etc, and I've used 50 gigs this month. Sadly, the only other ISP in town is Charter, and they have notoriously bad service in my area.

Xichekolas 17y ago

This is also the company whose sales reps swear up and down, to this day, that they don't offer dry loop DSL "because there is no demand". Of course, if you know the magic phone number, you can call the dry loop division directly, and they are as helpful as can be. I asked one once why they were so hidden... she answered: politics.

miles 17y ago
And the magic phone number is...? 1-800-264-0002 But you might want to do a bit of research before signing up: Get AT&T Dry Loop/Naked DSL In 5 Minutes http://consumerist.com/342490/ http://consumerist.com/342490/ AT&T Dry Loop DSL Hard To Find, Get And Cancel http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Dry-Loop-DSL-Hard-To-Find-Get-And-Cancel-100952 http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Dry-Loop-DSL-Hard-To-...
- Xichekolas 17y ago
  Ah yeah I suppose I should have posted it! That is exactly the number I have. I was told it's for the region that includes Texas, but like you say, they can forward you on where you need to go, and the people at that number tend to actually be helpful.
4buot 17y ago
i never had a problem getting stand-alone dsl...the phone numbers are secret because local carriers never really integrated into Bell Mobility, and Bell Mobility never really integrated into ATT...they are basically separate companies all named ATT to confuse you.

tsetse-fly 17y ago

Most of what you're saying also applies to the other carriers in the US. Verizon has a history of crippling its phones. Sprint has horrible customer service. T-Mobile has very little coverage. There are no good carriers.

ojbyrne 17y ago
My experience suggests the same for Canada. And it seems likely that can be broadened to the entire world.
imajes 17y ago
t-mobile us on my iphone has been fantastic. Best decision I ever made. :)
skorgu 17y ago
I'll take a crippled phone any day over the other complaints (and if my Tour is crippled it's subtle enough that I haven't seen it). There are no perfect carriers but there are less-bad ones.
- Shooter 17y ago
  Any complaints about the Tour? I'm thinking of getting the Tour on Verizon (and an iPod Touch for 'iPhone' apps and wifi.)
  - skorgu 17y ago
    Well its my first blackberry and I've only had a week or so to get used to the platform so YMMV of course. tl;dr: It's great at its core competencies: voice and email are great. Everything else is a bit unfinished. The bottom line is that so far it's good enough for what I use it for. I'm still crap at the keyboard but getting better, the EVDO is fast enough but not spectacular, the roller ball works well almost all of the time but the horizontal sensitivity seems a bit wonky sometimes, I haven't figured out why yet. (There's no way I'm that bad at brickbreaker so I choose to blame RIM) Email integration is about 8/10, I push email from my gmail account and Exchange at work to it and that workflow is very well executed. However, reading mail on Gmail or Outlook doesn't mark the messages read on the blackberry. It's possible I'm doing something wrong here and I'm not on a BES but it hasn't annoyed me enough yet to really dig for a solution. Also Gmail IMAP sync doesn't respect your filters/tags so if you get new mail it all hits your blackberry. I ended up unsubscribing to a few mailing lists that I never really read anyway because they were just too high traffic to be buzzing me all the time. There seems to be a bit of a compatibility issue with the Tour and the Storm, most apps that require unrestricted TCP access don't seem to work [1]. I can't get jmirc, midpssh etc to connect, they just die with "Invalid URL parameter." It'll be fixed at some point I'm sure but for now there's nothing app-wise that's useful to me. Viigo is acceptable as a podcast client but not much else. Google Voice client is alright, doesn't integrate as well as I'd like but it's workable. AIM works well, Flickr works well. The apps in the app store are great if you're obsessed about a) the weather b) financial news c) sports scores or d) playing card games, outside of that there's not much there. Then again every "must have app" my iPhone friends show me has me rolling my eyes so I suppose I'm just not the target market. The voice quality is top notch. I was on a four hour conference call last night and I set the speakerphone up and forgot about it, no issues either hearing or being heard. That took my battery life down from full to about half. The camera is frankly barely adequate. Plenty of pixels but too much grain. [2] All that said I'm buying my wife one to replace her free-and-worth-every-penny phone in a few weeks so it's safe to say I'm pleased with it. The warts just aren't in places I care about. [1] http://forums.crackberry.com/f35/tour-9630-irc-266165/ http://forums.crackberry.com/f35/tour-9630-irc-266165/ [2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/skorgu/3737195762/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/skorgu/3737195762/

eb 17y ago

You're exaggerating. I've had an iPhone on AT&T for 2 years without any issues. No dropped calls or billing mistakes and no issues with customer service. The rates that they charge are nearly identical to the other wireless providers for voice + data. I'm not saying that AT&T has not had these problems, but your comment does not exemplify the experiences of the majority of their customers.

imajes 17y ago
neither does yours: anecdotal experience doesn't speak for the majority.

jf 17y ago

In 2004 I moved to a city where my AT&T TDMA phone was permanently roaming. I didn't pay roaming charges because my plan with AT&T covered my roaming charges. Months later, AT&T set up a single TDMA tower in my area. Because AT&T phones were service provider locked, my phone and hundreds of others like it were forced to use that single tower. Overnight my phone went from having perfect signal everywhere I went, to just short of useless. Every single AT&T representative that I talked to swore up and down that the reason I was getting poor service was not their fault, that the problem was with my phone and that I should get a new phone. Since this happened just as AT&T was moving from TDMA to GSM, I am guessing that this was their way of forcing their customers to move to GSM. I can understand the business case for moving customers to GSM, what I can't understand is why AT&T would do so by using trickery and lies. I will always remember AT&T's shady tactics and blatant deceit and will never give them another cent of my money - I will purchase an iPhone the second it is officially available on another provider.

3dFlatLander 17y ago

"It fights against progress to keep its anachronistic business model relevant." I'd like to comment on that. I live in a city in which AT&T started a test of bandwidth caps. Depending on your connection type, you can download anywhere from 5 gigs to 60 gigs, and it's $1 per gig after your limit. I watch HD video, stream music, download games from steam and software from the apt repositories, etc etc, and I've used 50 gigs this month. Sadly, the only other ISP in town is Charter, and they have notoriously bad service in my area.