Hey AT&T: The map is the least of your problems

I love Verizon. I love Apple. I can't stand AT&T wireless. My wife had it for a while, and could not get it to work at the house here in Charlotte. Zero bars. Zip, zero, nada. Meanwhile, I get three bars on Verizon, my daughter gets four bars on Sprint, and my wife gets three bars on her new T-Mobile setup... from any room in the house. I really, REALLY want an iPhone, but I want it on Verizon... Their signal works just about everywhere I've ever been.

The Mongolian Idiot in no better.

Can you hear me know...Can you hear me know...Verizon's retarded looking mascot signal tester lost the signal when he came to my home town to test the weak signal on my wife cell phone when we complained about the poor quality service. I can assure you that Verizon did hear me now.

My wife's 2-year contract was cancelled at my request and no cancellation fees were charged. Verizon was reluctant but could not deny the obvious. They still kept sending flyers claiming they had the best coverage for us….some lies never change.

During the period that my wife was complaining about Verizon poor quality service, she (and I behind her) had spend hours on the phone, at the Mall kiosks and even with their direct outlets tech-wizards to >troubleshoot the problem<.

It sound unbelievable but they have replaced 4 times the cell phone and 3 or 4 times replaced the batteries to those cell phone. We did not give up. I managed to corner them on the networks issue. That is when they send their Mongolian Idiot to perform his >can you hear him now?< stunt. Verizon did not take long to capitulate after that.

I had Cingular and the coverage was pretty good and the voice quality was good. Shortly after buying a BlackJack II AT&T took over and now I can't get coverage at home and most of the places I travel to. 3G is non-existant at most of the locations I go to and even when I could get any internet access I couldn't get Email or surf the web most of the time. Called customer service and that was totally worthless. Stopped into the stores and they down-right lied to me multiple times. Bye Bye AT&T

I carry a personal iPhone with AT&T and a company Blackberry Storm with Verizon. I'll take my iPhone running at the slower edge speed over the Blackberry running on 3G every day.

For me, AT&T has changed. A number of years ago, my bundle packages would expire quietly, and I would suddenly get an astronomical bill. In those days, I would simply call up, get on a new plan, and get a credit back for the over-charge -- the customer service folks were always helpful and friendly. About 3 years ago, the same thing happened, except I was away on business (my bill was on auto-pay), and the 'out-of-contract' overage went on for a couple of months because I did not see the bills. Unfortunately, in that time my auto-pay credit card # changed [due to a fraud compromise] ... while I changed it with AT&T and they actually billed correctly one month, then the next month for some reason, they tried to bill the old card. The old card bounced and they automatically went to billing an old, dormant bank account (on file, apparently from years ago) This caused a bounce/overdraft, and ultimately more charges. When I returned, I discovered the situation (and nasty billing notices from both AT&T and my bank). Confident AT&T would make things right, I called customer service, and got completely stonewalled. They shut me off, I moved to Verizon (for much less $ by the way), and AT&T stuck me with nearly $1000 in extra fees over a 3 month period. I would love to own an iPhone, but I will never send another dime to AT&T for any reason.

I've had AT&T since the late 90s and back then, at least in my case, they had solid coverage in my area. Then Cingular took it over and everything fell apart (correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that Cingular bought the AT&T Wireless brand - not the other way around). When Cingular changed it's name to AT&T, my impression was that the name and the logo was the ONLY thing that changed - the service remained crappy. Though I have to say, the 3G speed IS great when you can get it. From what I see, all of the wireless carriers are as fee-happy as the banks when it comes to finding innovative ways to charge you more money. I just read that rather than just maybe improving their service, Verizon is doubling its early-termination fees in an effort to retain their customer base.

I have used AT&T since I got my first cellular phone and I have never been disappointed with their service or with their technology. I have used different telephones, but the service has always been impressive as far as I am concerned. I am now using an iPhone, and as expected, I am still happy with the device and the carrier. Maybe I don't have high expectations, or that am just lucky when it concerns cell phones. I know I had huge problems when I had a land line with Verizon as my carrier. I thought that their billing system was ridiculous and we always had arguments because they always had errors with the monthly charges. I honestly believed they were hiring stupid people. These days it seems that people are lambasting AT&T and loving Verizon all because of the iPhone. Verizon sees AT&T as a stiff competitor for cell phones, and if you examine closely, whatever AT&T has, Verizon wants. Verizon's stockholders and Board of Trustees are "big" people and they will always get what they want. Watch it, Verizon will someday be what The Bells used to be. They will monopolize the telecommunications industry and we will be back to square one.

Growing pains - and lying by ommision Verizon wishes it had the problems AT&T does: 8 million iPhones paying $30/month. At the CTIA conference in San Diego three weeks ago, AT&T's CTO said their data traffic has grown 5000% in twelve month. One multi-media iPhone 'eats' as much data (and blocks out) as a couple dozen wireless voice conversations. Not being very multimedia rich, the Blackberries each company manages cause a lot less problems than clusters of iPhone users in SF accessing their Google maps at the same time.

Where is Verizon's 'lie of ommision'?

They have a big red map of cell tower coverage with 3G cellular radios. The vast majority of those towers are connected at their base station to one or two T1s (some T3s or a microwave T1) Two T1s could have easily handled the 50+ voice calls that Verizon gets on the tower, BUT NOT THE HEAVY TRAFFIC CAUSED BY 3G MULTIMEDIA DEVICES. Who can call Verizon's bluff? Nobody, until they have 5-8 million multimedia devices worth using. That is 15-18 months at the earliest - Androids and what?

Both companies are furiously working to put fiber to their towers. Tens of billions of $ investment - sadly T-Mobile and Sprint can't afford it, so our two 3g/4G/LTE companies will be Verizon and AT&T - you think you get shafted now, wait until there are only two choices!

In teh mean time, you whiners are complaining that your cutting edge technology doesn't work as good as the WiFi in your office... how many years did it take to get WiFi working? 26 months ago you couldn't have imagined having an iPhone type device in your hand and have it work 90% of the places you need including while you are driving down the Interstate.

digitalFlack

CTIA notes (not mine):

http://mickeypapillon.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/highlights-from-att-cto-j...

Regarding Verizon's "Can you hear me now" ad - of course I can, now that I switched from Verizon to AT&T. Lots of people can find lots of anecdotal evidence of why company X's service doesn't meet their needs. So what, anecdotes are easy, cheap - and meaningless. So Verizon hypes their 3G coverage. Geez Louise, what did you expect them to hype - their limited Bluetooth service? The data service speed debate sounds similar to the old question "Would you rather have bad data or no data?" The few times I found myself lost in a relative remote area, I definitely appreciated slow access to MapQuest over whining that since it wasn't 3G I wouldn't use it.

Att is terrible. Reception, cust service, dropped calls, etc. all are horrible under Att. They clearly have no clue what they are doing.

Here in Western Maryland the joke is "If you want a cool phone go AT&T, if you want to make a call, go US Cellular! Even here in the mountains US Cellular provides 3G. AT&T, not even Edge is available 24/7. I have the tech rep's cell phone number (it's a US Cellular phone) because AT&T's contracted tower shuts down for maintenance on Sunday mornings.

The customer service problems that are mentioned must have started about the time that SWBell purchase/remerged with AT&T. SWBell has a long history of lying to the politicians and customer base. In the 1990's when the west coast was booming with ISDN, SWBell went to the Texas legislature to get multi-millions in tax relief. They got it for the promise that they would have ISDN in every Texas home within 2 years. I live in the DFW area. DSL was available to me before ISDN. What did they do with those multi-millions? They bought cell phone companies and merge with other regionals. Claiming that there was no 'cross-over' of public tax money was a transparent lie since that tax money went to their expenses which would have been covered by their income otherwise. Large sections of Texas still have no broadband access. Verizon is no better. I had a family plan with 5 phones (ie big monthly bills). My 3 daughters attended school in Kansas. Verizon cancelled our contract because we were 'unprofitable'. They really meant that inspite of monthly bills in the hundreds of dollars, their payments to other cell companies in Kansas for the 'flow-through' traffic were more than they wanted to pay. So we ceased to be customers - and are not to this day. It's not just these two big companies. It's a disease that is destroying America! 10.2 percent unemployment!! YE GODS!

Why are we arguing about spotty 3G coverage? The current US standard is 4G, and only Sprint has it. In Europe they are already up to 5G in some places, with far faster broadband Internet services than we have in the USA. Instead of Verizon and AT&T fighting each other over coverage claims for yesterday's technology, why aren't they concentrating on at least bringing the US into the 21st Century by building out 4G Cellular and 100MBPS Wi-Fi, like Sweden has?

I have two cell phones. One that my place of work issued to me which is an ATT phone and my own personal cell (Verizon). "If" I can connect on my ATT phone, the sound quality is so poor I ask people to call me on my personal phone. Voice mails on my ATT phone usually arrive up to 5 days (not an exageration) late. Voice mails on my Verizon phone are instantanious. I would like very much to own an iPhone, but will never get one until they are available on any network except ATT.