quote:

Originally posted by bronicabill:

I've been with VZW since AT&T consumed Cingular Wireless 10+ years ago and my Cingular service went to hell, and I've never looked back because it's been excellent!

Yes, I remember that. I had a great (for that time) plan with Cingular. Then, AT&T came along, gobbled up Cingular, and tried to get me onto an AT&T plan. No way, I told them. Then, one of my phones died and AT&T refused to sell me a new phone unless I dropped my plan and went onto one of their crappy plans.

That's when I left for Verizon.

They are awful. I stuck it out with Time Warner until Google Fiber moved in. I've been up 100% up since the initial week of installation. It was shaky the first week but they were still installing in the neighborhood.

I have been with AT&T since the old Bell South days, never had/have any problems. My extended family (except for 2 all use AT&T) All are here in Florida. Maybe it is a regional thing. Worked well when we were all in Hawaii last year.

quote:

Originally posted by festus haggen:
Which carrier does everyone like? Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile or something else?

For wireless I like T-Mobile. If I had to switch I guess I'd move to Verizon. Won't do business with the thing that calls itself "at&t," these days, unless I absolutely have no other choice, and Sprint has become an also-ran.

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Originally posted by ensigmatic:

quote:

Originally posted by arfmel:
Heck, I believe Southwestern Bell was substantially better than AT&T is now.

Southwestern Bell = SBC = "at&t" now.

AT&T begat SW Bell Tele in 1984 then everything changed. Another example of the federal government needs to stay out of somethings.

I gather most of you are complaining about the wireless part of AT&T which has never been good. SBC couldn’t change it. It was a stupid move to acquire it, but SBC just had to get into wireless and it was available for little to nothing. Then turned around and bought the mothership to compound the error. All this done by folks who were old enough to know better, but remembered the glory days when AT&T was king. Of course they spent all of SBC’s money to get a wireless company that had problems and a long distance company that wasn’t nearly what it was in the past. So they’ve spent the last couple of decades trying to make gold out of soiled straw.

In all honesty both AT&T and SBC were great companies. I worked for and retired from SBC while uncle Ed Whitacre was still the boss. It was on it’s way down then, they just didn’t know it yet.

quote:

Originally posted by jbcummings:
AT&T begat SW Bell Tele in 1984 then everything changed.

Nope. Soutwestern Bell is a lot older than that: Southwestern Bell

What became SBC was indeed a Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) that was split from AT&T following...

quote:

Originally posted by jbcummings:
Another example of the federal government needs to stay out of somethings.

Uh huh. Because Back In The Day, where the only thing you could have on "your" phone line was rented equipment from Western Electric, were the good old days, right?

I can just imagine where we'd be, today, if AT&T hadn't been broken up.

quote:

Originally posted by jbcummings:
I gather most of you are complaining about the wireless part of AT&T which has never been good.

Re-read the thread: The problems are with "at&t"s network. Not just the wireless bit, but all of it.

And my experiences with the thing that renamed itself "at&t" were all land-line-based. (POTS, COTS and Hi-Cap.)

quote:

Originally posted by jbcummings:
SBC couldn’t change it.

Ah, but SBC did change it. Before Armstrong, et al, managed to drive AT&T (the real AT&T) into the ground, it was a pretty good TelCom provider. SBC? Ha! When SBC borged Ameritech we all hoped and prayed things would get better in what had been Ameritech territory. Those hopes were short-lived. (Tho I concede they did address some of the most egregious maintenance neglect with the outside plant. Some, not all.)

AT&T was still pretty good, or at least a lot better than SBC. Then SBC acquired AT&T. I feared the worst, and my worst fears were realized. Like I wrote, earlier: The horror sagas I could relate about dealing with the thing that now calls itself "at&t" are almost legendary at my old employer.

quote:

Originally posted by jbcummings:
It was a stupid move to acquire it, but SBC just had to get into wireless and it was available for little to nothing.

Very little of SBC's wireless network, which had been named Cingular, was part of AT&T's wireless network. In fact: Much of AT&T's wireless network was rented/leased space on others' wireless networks. Cingular was mostly SBC/BellSouth-created or other wireless networks they bought-up before they acquired AT&T's wireless network.

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Originally posted by jbcummings:
Then turned around and bought the mothership to compound the error.

SBC bought AT&T for the name. By the time AT&T's management was done with it, there was little else remaining.

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Originally posted by jbcummings:
In all honesty both AT&T and SBC were great companies.

AT&T was once a great company. I can't speak to SBC while it was still regional, but, by the time it borged Ameritech it certainly was not "great." (Nor was Ameritech.) Michigan Bell Telephone used to be a great company, so I guess it's quite possible Southwestern Bell Telephone once was, too.

quote:

Originally posted by jbcummings:
I worked for and retired from SBC while uncle Ed Whitacre was still the boss.

I was in the telecommunications field, in one way or another, from somewhere roughly around the mid-1970s until my retirement, in mid-2017. Call it ±40 years.

Well if it matters, AT&T is a Texas company and it does lean conservative as well as its CEO Randall Stephenson.

"AT&T has a long history of giving to political campaigns. Since the Center for Responsive Politics started tracking contributions in 1990, the telecommunications company has donated about $48.5 million, mostly to the Republican Party and its candidates."

AT&T, bad enough to make you prefer Verizon.

I have had AT&T cell phone service for years and no complaints. Must vary by state but my service has always been good.

I've had Verizon Wireless since 2000 and have never had a problem with their service or customer service. Coverage has only rarely been an issue, and that only out in strange places in the country. It would take a lot to make me switch.

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Originally posted by CoolRich59:
The tactics they use sure are reminiscent of a certain fictional olive oil importing firm featured in one of the best movies ever produced.

I've been with AT&T since 2000 when they were called Cingular and have never ever had an issue with them.

My wife had T-Mobile when I first met her and her service and reception SUCKED. I got her on my plan right away and she's happy.

Here in the Tx Hill Country, service is spotty. They assured me that their service covered my neighborhood with a strong signal. It seems strong, but calls are dropped all the time. They assured me that the prob can be corrected by my purchase and installation of a repeater on top of the house for 300 dollars. I’m looking for alternative providers now. Like most large corps in Tx, the own the legislature and any regulatory help is out of the question.

quote:

Originally posted by maxdog:


They assured me that the prob can be corrected by my purchase and installation of a repeater on top of the house for 300 dollars.

My Dad was complaining about missing calls/dropped calls/spotty service in his basement man cave that has thick concrete walls. I got an AT&T MicroCell from eBay for around 80 bucks and set it up for him and problem was solved. Needs to sit near a window where it can get a somewhat decent cellular signal, but connects to the internet (in his case, FIOS) and basically becomes a mini cell tower in your house. Works pretty well.

Ive been with ATT (cingular, back in the day..) for just about 20 years. There was a time when the cell service was iffy in my town, but it was the best service available where my son was going to college, so we suffered through it. The past 7 years, or so? Excellent, problem free service. I have no complaints, at all. Ok, a price reduction wouldn't hurt, but honestly, I wouldn't do that much better anywhere else.

After building networks nationwide for all the carriers I would say Verizon is best, second is T-Mobile. I have been with TMo since they were VoiceStream.

Att is a joke (imagine .gov running a carried) and Sprint won't spent money to improve their network, that will change soon but I would give it 2 solid years before Sprint cleans their act up

quote:

Originally posted by festus haggen:
Which carrier does everyone like? Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile or something else?

Ex AT&T (Bell Labs) employee here. Wife and I had AT&T cell service for more than 20 years, through all the various name changes: BellSouth Mobility, Cingular, AT&T... I might have forgotten a "name of the week" for that company.

I spend a lot of my working time in the office in the back of my hangar. There are a couple of AT&T dead spots on the airport, my hangar office being one of them. I would have to walk out onto the taxiway to get a useable AT&T cellular signal.

Everybody I knew, who had Verizon service, had absolutely rock solid coverage. I looked into Verizon, found their rates to be pretty high, and I was not impressed with their customer NO-service.

Then I ran across Total Wireless. This is one of the several MVNOs owned by TracFone. It seems that each of the TracFone companies has a different model. Total Wireless meets our needs very well. They run on the Verizon network, so they have great coverage in the areas where I go. No contract, strictly month-to-month, if you want to drop them you just stop paying, no need to "terminate" with them. The have plans for single phones, two phone plans, three phone plans, and four phone plans.

We (wife and I) are on a two phone plan. Using our already owned (Bring Your Own) Verizon-compatible iPhones, the startup cost was ten bucks per phone to purchase a nano-SIM. No activation fee. Monthly charge is sixty bucks for the two phones, unlimited text and talk, and a 15 GB pool of shared data. 5% discount if I were to go on "auto pay," but I haven't done that yet. Taxes and junk fees with an MVNO (cell service re-seller) are WAY lower than they are if you buy your service directly from one of the Big Guys. Total add-ons for us are regular sales tax, 6.5% if I buy the service card in Orange County, 7% if I buy it in Seminole, plus twenty cents per month for each line, for some sort of 911 fee. So my total monthly cost for two iPhones, talk, text, 15 GB data, is $64.30. AT&T, when we had it, was at least 50% higher with much less data.

Speaking of data, if we were to run out of the 15 GB data, highly unlikely since we have never used much more than 1 GB, Total Wireless offers a fairly inexpensive add-on for more data. Unused data from the add-on rolls over from month to month, as long as the basic service plan is continued.

I have not found a better deal than this.