I have had it about up to here with you, AT&T. It's like Lucy keeps pulling that football away and I keep on falling for it, year after year, like good old Charlie Brown. Why you gotta do me like that?We used to get two bills: landline/Internet and wireless. Now, thanks to the vast, foul, pullulating ball of suckworms called U-Verse, we get three bills a month for three separate, expensive, craptastic services. [And while I'm asking questions, AT&T, why do you give so much money to Rick Perry? - but that's another story.]
Internet Suckage: My main man JJ at the AT&T store at Harlem-Irving Plaza (the HIP, where the hipsters shop) sweet-talked me recently into ditching boring old AT&T DSL and getting U-Verse Internet. Said we'd pay half as much and it'd be twice as fast.
Then: $30/month, one 2-wire modem/router, loaded a bit slow but it never failed.
Now: $38/month, back to two boxes (separate modem & router), slightly faster but it fails every day, multiple times a day. I can't get my DSL back because AT&T doesn't offer it in this area anymore. Where are the lower payments? Where's the more reliable service? Oh yeah, he said faster.
Wireless Suckage: Not as bad, but still really expensive. I tried to leave AT&T but they kept pulling me back in. Their prices have always seemed high but they reel you in with fairly good coverage - plus, one time I accidentally made several hundred dollars' worth of phone calls that I didn't mean to make, and when I called them in a panic, they waived the whole thing instantly. So even though it's pricey, I appreciate the latitude customer service people have to cut you a break. But it's a really deeply unhappy marriage and I'm forever on the verge of leaving. Recently, in a fit of pique, I cut the cord and switched to T-Mobile. However, the coverage was not that great, and the phones true shitbag devices (of course we are talking about the cheap freebie phones, not the fancy ones). At least with AT&T you can get a decent phone for either free or a low price.
Landline Suckage: A total waste of money. Have you looked at your landline bill lately? Do you even have one? The actual phone service part is worth about five bucks. The rest of it adds up to $35. And this is for a phone that has not received a useful call in years. I know it's handy to have when the power's out and you need a phone, but is it $420 worth of handy?
Need more evidence of how much AT&T sucks? A few minutes' Googling barely scratches the surface:
Twitter: AT&T Sucks (attsucks)
Facebook: AT&T Sucks
AT&T General Care & Support Forum: AT&T Sucks
Youtube: AT&T Sucks (Second City Parody)
afterdawn.com: AT&T sucks, says latest Consumer Reports survey
Who-Sucks.com: 8 Reasons Why AT&T Sucks Beyond All Belief
Respite and Nepenthe: AT&T Sucks (credit for billboard)
4 comments:
While I have little loyalty to corporate giants, I've had ATT for quite a while, switching to Uverse a few years ago and overall it's been pretty good. It took 3-4 visits from the repair guy to get the internet reliable, but now it is. I got the slowest Uverse speed available and it is way quicker than DSL was. The WIFI is pretty cool, we can get netflix on our TV, so we don't have/need/want cable.
The internet is $35/month, about what DSL used to cost, and a lot less than the flyers I get brag about after the virtually free teaser period. The phone is $44/month with unlimited long-distance, so it's fixed. What is irritating about the phone is exactly 25% of it is a whole slew of different taxes. As I am holding out on the whole getting a cell phone thing, this is instead of another cell phone on our Verizon bill. An additional cell phone would probably be cheaper than $44/month, but I'm just not very good at cell phones . . . .
My one real complaint about the set-up is that they never fixed the jack coming into the kitchen, so the base unit has to be in the basement, which limits its range, puts the answering machine out of sight and mind, etc. We just got tired of calling ATT out after a while and let it go.
I do sometimes feel like the bastard step-child in the relationship by not getting the cable, which is primarily what Uverse is for.
By the way, if your land-line is not Uverse, but your phone is cordless, it would go out in a power outage anyway. There is a battery backup on their installed equipment, so the Uverse actually might be more reliable in an outage.
I put way more thought into this than I would have thought . . . .
Mike
Think AT&T sucks now? Try moving across town and taking your land line with you. Or moving a business two blocks and trying to keep the same phone number that your customers use. If you see a grown man crying downtown, chances are it is because AT&T has just assured him that customer service is their #1 priority, and they will absolutely restore his business phone service before the end of the month.
Hi.
We fired AT&T for the second time a few months ago. We fired them the first time more than ten years ago because their local and long-distance per-minute charges were consistently 36% higher than those available with a cheap pre-paid calling card. They offered no plan in our area for which they did not charge per minute for even local calls at least some of the time, even on weekends.
We fired them for the second time because we now do not have a land line in our home and their cell service had gotten so bad and so unreliable that we went nearly a month without phone service at all if we were in our hometown. We had to drive ten miles and park in the grocery store parking lot in a neighboring community if we wanted to make or receive calls. When we able to make a call in our hometown, AT&T would drop it within 15 seconds. Customer service was a fount of lies about "working on a tower in your area, blahblahblah" --oh, yeah, for THREE WEEKS? Um, no.
We went with Verizon. The sound quality isn't the best all the time --it's mostly just really loud-- but we haven't been without cell service even once since August of 2011.
AT&T has recently acquired TMobile, so now they can make TMobile customers unhappy, too.
Oh, the AT&T monster is out of the box now... Thank you for your feedback, Anonymous, Mike, and Kevin. Also appreciate your recommendations on alternate services.
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