AT&T vs Anyone Else, My Cellular Saga

I have to admit it, when I find a good company I tend to be very loyal.

My first cellular carrier was well, I don't remember but it was back around 1990 or so I think. I stayed with the carrier through a number of buyouts and name changes. In no particular order, they were Centel Cellular, Sprint Cellular, 360, and several others I can't remember, finally ending up as Verizon Wireless.

Even as Verizon I was with them a long time, at least six years. I'd been with "them" so long that when a Verizon employee would pull up my account they'd ask me "What kind of account number is that? I've been here xx years and never seen one like that." And Verizon was a good company. I can count the number of dropped calls on one hand over the entire span of my use of them. They never fouled up a bill and the only time I had to call or visit their store was to get a new phone.

Then it came time to where I needed to be able to tether my phone to a notebook and use it to get on the Internet while traveling. Nope, I can pay $60 a month for unlimited Internet but that's only using the phone. No tether.

You see, Verizon had (or has, I don't know what they currently do) a habit of disabling features on their phones. A brand X model Y phone might be able to do such and such, but if Verizon offers a similar service, that feature is disabled in the Verizon versions. I was used to patching the phone so that I could upload pictures to my own website or to my computer, download ring tones to my phone from my computer, etc. all without paying Verizon 25 cents a shot to use their service to do those functions.

Well, they'd disabled the ability to use their phones as modems, unless you pought one of the $700 PDA models that were about to be discontinued.

Now I'm a professional geek. The only way I can leave town for a trip or on vacation is if the boss can call me up about a problem and I can get into our work network with my notebook to fix it.

I quickly found out that Verizon was more interested in catering to teenagers than business people.

So I grudgingly moved to Sprint, taking my number with me. This was two years ago. I pick up a Samsung A-900 each for my wife and myself, a 550 anytime minute shared family plan, unlimited data/phone as modem for each of us $40 vs $60) and a few other bells.

I've dropped a lot more calls, but not nearly as my boss does with his AT&T phones and network. Sprint gave us good service though.

Then my boss gave me an O2 Atom, one of the sexiest and best built PDAs I've ever used. (I started with the Palm Pilot Pro and have had two HP Jornadas and an iPaq.) This thing had everything... phone, Windows Mobile 5, bluetooth and WiFi, 2 megapixel camera and more. But to keep from having errors on startup it needed a sim card. And my boss telling me how great his AT&T service is...

So I headed down to AT&T, Atom in hand. I didn't need a deal. I didn't need a phone. I didn't need any special favors. Just a sim card and a data plan (if I'm getting the sim card, why not use this on the internet?)

First, they tell me that I HAVE to be on a two year contract. WTF? "Hi, if you want to do business with us, you have to lock yourself in for a year." I pitched a bitch and pointed out that they were doing nothing but providing ME data service at a hefty price. So it was pure profit for them no matter how long I kept it. They came down to "only" a one year contract. I should have walked out the door at that point.

But I grumbled and figured that if I didn't like the Atom, I'd just get a Blackberry and finish out the contract.

Well, the first thing I discovered is that AT&T's network here in Las Vegas sucks. "More bars" yeah right. Perhaps their executives hit more bars... the second thing I discovered was that using their data network was like Verizon or Sprint at 1XRTT. Pig slow.

So I called up to complain and cancel (if I could). Sure, they'd cancel my account, but I had to pay a hefty early termination fee. So I hung up in frustration.

THEN I get a statement from them showing that to add insult to injury, they were charging me a $95 activation fee!

I called again and basically got told to shove off.

So I took the credit hit and never paid them a dime. I used the thing less than a week and tried canceling right about that time. Yeah I still get mail and calls from the collection agency.

Fast forward another year or so to this week. I my son talked me into an HTC Mogul. Looking at the specs, it's an O2 Atom several years later with almost the same specs.

Slightly taller, not as much of a quality feel and sans the built in FM radio. However it adds a slide out keyboard, internal GPS and Windows Mobile 6 instead of Windows Mobile 5. And more memory.

All in all, I'll trade a little quality (feel) and the FM radio for those features. Plus I don't need AT&T!

So I called Sprint. My two year contract was up. After talking nice to a nice lady for over an hour, she'd re setup my account on sprint.com (it got wiped after a security upgrade), moved me to the $99 a month "Simply Everything Plan", moved my wife off the shared plan to her own 200 minute plan, gave me a permanent 35% discount on my bills, a big credit and a new Mogul.

The call more than cut my monthly cellular bill in half but gives me even more features. In fact, it's the same as me getting the $99 plan for $88, my wife's 200 minute plan for free and then Sprint paying me $7 to accept this new phone. (Though with the $18 upgrade fee, I'll be paying $11 for the upgrade.)

Oh and the first test I did with the phone? Yup, data transfers and web browsing. Not as fast as our T1 at work or my 10mbit/sec cable modem at home. But an order of magnitude faster than AT&T! I pity the fools that moved to AT&T just to get an iPhone.

My boss still thinks AT&T is great. Then again, he's never had anyone else for a cellular provider.

As far as I'm concerned, for technical service it's Verizon, Sprint then AT&T.

For customer service it's Sprint, Verizon, AT&T.

For a combined effort, it is Anyone Else, then AT&T.