AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure
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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.
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.
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/
AT&T Dry Loop DSL Hard To Find, Get And Cancel http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Dry-Loop-DSL-Hard-To-...
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.
Verizon has a history of crippling its phones. Sprint has horrible customer service. T-Mobile has very little coverage. There are no good carriers.
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/ [2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/skorgu/3737195762/
The "invalid URL parameter" can be solved in midpssh by switching the connection to TCP/IP instead of Auto. I haven't found a solution for jmirc yet but of course I can ssh to a box running irssi.
A few more observations: the trackball responds better to a very light touch, pushing down even slightly seems to affect its resolution horizontally. I didn't notice this on a co-worker's Bold but it may change with age.
Also last night it silently stopped receiving mail. I came into the office to 97 unread messages that were never pushed. Forcing a reconcile didn't find them but pulling the battery did. If this happens again there will be a chat with Verizon and/or RIM in my future.
There's a small flaw with the headset socket, it appears to be slightly too deep. Pushing headphones in all the way doesn't work, you have to pull them out just a tick. Which is useless as then they get knocked back into place when a gnat farts in the next zipcode. The included headset does work but it's crap. I picked up a set of bluetooth A2DP earphones [1] which are frankly only adequate.
[1] http://www.plantronics.com/north_america/en_US/products/mobi...
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.
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.
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.
- Update your twitter with your AT&T complaint
and give it the hashtag #ATT.
- Contact The Consumerist Blog, try to
get their awareness (is anyone connected to them?).
- Any other ideas?
Stop complaining and start acting.
I already did my part, I'm no longer an ATT customer.
---
[1] Based on http://www.google.com/trends?q=AT%26T%2C+AT+and+T%2C+ATT
(I think TC readers may have another nasty surprise waiting when AT&T finally gets to running 'awk' on the logfiles those tethering sessions land in.)
There were a slew of people on the MacRumors forums that were tethering and didn't realize that their visual voicemail had been broken for days.
Sprint definitely has a history of horrible customer service, which maybe Apple could finally slay. I live in their home market (KC), so obviously coverage is great here, but not sure if it would be sufficient nationwide to be worth it to Apple. That said, Amazon apparently thinks coverage is sufficient for the Kindle.
Definitely an interesting idea... who knows if Apple really wants to bother running the network though. It could take a while to raise network and customer service quality to meet Apple-customer expectations (ie. perfection), tarnishing Apple's hard-earned brand name along the way. Claiming all the successes (the device) and blaming all the problems (the network) on AT&T could be convenient.
They could buy Sprint and have it "spin-out" another company whose job it is to provide the communications for Apple's products. Apple would be hands-off the old Sprint, so long as the Apple-communications company got all the resources it needed.
They are much more demanding than the average customer -- Apple makes AT&T provide special exclusive features, and then their customers hold them to higher standards. "There isn't enough bandwidth." "Torrents download too slowly!" "Everything is too expensive."
Not to sound like an AT&T fanboi, but the other providers are just as bad. The pricing is the same, you get locked in, and the bandwidth isn't even as good. (At least AT&T lets me use any GSM phone. Try that with Verizon.) The US just doesn't have the infrastructure to provide exceptional cell-phone service (like, say, Japan does; with millions of people in a very tiny space). With people constantly demanding more bandwidth for less money, I can't imagine there is much room in the budget to upgrade the 3G network in the middle of nowhere. Sorry, it's the reality of living so spread apart.
Still no MMS even though their other phones have had the feature for ages. God forbid you want to use the network in a crowded venue - Solider Field, Wrigley, Lollapalooza, network is shit anytime there are more than 5000 people nearby. Simply unacceptable service in a city this size.
Maybe it's just the iPhone that sucks?
The "we are too spread" argument may work if you get shitty service in the middle of nowhere, but its unacceptable for large metro areas like NYC, SF
Sure, AT&T is "just as bad." I am convinced that the phone carriers are operating as a cartel. They fix prices. Their primary business model is "how much can we screw the consumer and get away with it?" Just because they all do it isn't an excuse.
I’m so pissed off that I kind of want to call AT&T and demand that they call each of the people I missed calls from and personally apologize. Instead, I’m writing them this very public condemnation.
I would do the former. I really would. Here in the UK phone companies have such a monopoly amongst themselves.
As a consumer I feel regularly screwed. At the moment I am stuck with a shit 18 month old phone because it is out of warranty and upgrading to a newer model (despite being a 10 yr long customer of my current company!) is too expensive outside of the limited free upgrade time.
I sympathize heavily. No one hacks together a phone startup because it is such a closed business. Look how much awesome stuff developed when starting up on the web becomes easy - I hope mobile networks go the same way.
There's a choice between voda, orange, t, o2 and others and it doesn't seem so bad. Of course O2 seems to have the same problems like at&t - not good enough infrastructure and not enough coverage to handle iphones properly (and now they will get Pre as well, unfortunately). And there are crappy carriers like Three which should DIAF long ago. But otherwise, many offers are sensible.
You're forced to go the 18 months contract route mostly when you're buying the cheapest stuff, which is fair enough. Otherwise, I don't think the situation is bad at all.
This may surprise you, but that's actually how much a phone costs. Turns out we haven't quite gotten them to grow on trees yet.
I can't think of any industry (other than video gaming) where someone gives you something for free so you'll use their service; count the one free phone every 2 years as a blessing. If you want the latest-and-greatest, you have to buy it, just like with everything else.
When I first rang them last month there was 6 months left on the contract and they were quite happy to do this - except they wanted the full 6 months paid off first! That's more than the phones original value. I offered to pay the value of the phone (seeing as they get my custom for 24 months locked in - and I am a 10yr customer). not interested.
I agree - trying to get something for nothing is silly :) but I think I deserve some reward for my loyalty? Especially as I will actually be paying for the phone AND increasing my contract amount (and locking in for 24 months - which really means forever as it's an Iphone :))
I'm not sure mobile networks will ever go the way of the web startup. I think they had been there before, in their early days. If anything, we ought to hope the web startup doesn't go the way of mobile service providers...
or, it can not upgrade its network and just pay apple a much smaller amount to keep them locked into at&t, keeping all of its locked-in customers while increasing their prices, and continue to get new customers every time apple comes out with a new iphone. apple gets to sell more phones while pointing the finger at at&t for any network problems.
i wonder which one they'll do...
AT&T service has been horrible since I got my iPhone (~ 1 year). I kept a blackberry on Verizon, which is my primary "phone" (the iPhone has been more for email/web). However, I have a VoIP # as my primary phone that rings my desk, vzw phone and att phone all at once. Apparently a good number of calls ended up in my att mailbox, with no indications.
http://esupport.fcc.gov/complaints.htm
Just be sure to reply to every piece of mail that you get from the FCC and AT&T on time.