
AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/18/att-is-a-big-steaming-heap-of-failure/
======
spoondan
I loathe AT&T. It mistreats employees and customers. It overcharges and
delivers astonishingly poor service. It makes regular billing "mistakes". It
willingly, almost gleefully, assists in the violation of its customers rights
and privacy. It is a paragon of inefficiency. It fights against progress to
keep its anachronistic business model relevant. It uses the legal system as a
club. And it ensures that any actions brought against it can at best be
Pyrrhic victories.

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.

~~~
tsetse-fly
Most of what you're saying also applies to the other carriers in the US.

Verizon has a history of crippling its phones. Sprint has horrible customer
service. T-Mobile has very little coverage. There are no good carriers.

~~~
skorgu
I'll take a crippled phone any day over the other complaints (and if my Tour
is crippled it's subtle enough that I haven't seen it). There are no perfect
carriers but there are less-bad ones.

~~~
Shooter
Any complaints about the Tour? I'm thinking of getting the Tour on Verizon
(and an iPod Touch for 'iPhone' apps and wifi.)

~~~
skorgu
Well its my first blackberry and I've only had a week or so to get used to the
platform so YMMV of course.

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/>

~~~
Shooter
Thank you for taking the time to respond. That helped me immensely.

~~~
skorgu
Any time.

------
quizbiz
How about one of us create a landing page with a bullet lists of AT&T
complaints? I don't care enough but we could all link to the page at the
bottom of our websites just with the word ATT[1] and soon enough when people
search for AT&T's corporate page, they will find a list of complaints. People
will take note and thus AT&T will be forced to take note as well. On top of
that:

    
    
       - 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?
    

Let's start a movement.

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>

------
tptacek
I'm not seeing Siegler acknowledge whether or not he had enabled TechCrunch's
"safe" AT&T tethering hack, which is notorious for messing up voicemail. This
despite multiple commenters asking him.

(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.)

~~~
tsetse-fly
Can anyone that hasn't enabled tethering confirm that their visual voicemail
hasn't been working?

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.

~~~
santry
FWIW, I've been using the tethering hack from <http://help.benm.at> on an
iPhone 3GS and visual voicemail has been working just fine.

~~~
treyp
try setting your greeting

~~~
santry
Works great. No problem.

------
jsz0
Apple should seriously consider buying Sprint. When they first struck a deal
with Cingular one of my first thoughts was they were picking a carrier that
was within their reach to purchase down the road. Obviously AT&T had the same
idea though. Given Apple's position in mobile electronics it would make a lot
of sense to own their own data network. EVDO data in every device. iTunes
Store over EVDO on every iPod. Extremely aggressive first party iPhone pricing
on Sprint (while still selling a GSM model at a higher cost) They could really
shake things up if they wanted to.

~~~
derefr
Apple would enjoy many benefits from buying a telecom company, but there's one
factor that would almost certainly prevent it: anything bad the telecom did
would then be blamed by the public (even if completely irrationally) on Apple.
Apple makes most of their money from being the "sexy consumer electronics
company", and no matter how you try to spin a telecom, you can't make it
_sexy_. The only way Apple could _successfully_ buy out a telecom would
involve replacing the entire culture of the telecom with Apple's own
dedication-to-snobby-perfection culture, which itself would involve replacing
most of the employees and management with Apple's own. They'd have no one left
to make computers!

~~~
BrentRitterbeck
While Apple has the iPhone, they're not a telecom company. Few companies do
well when they start to stray outside of their core competencies. Think Time
Warner.

------
jrockway
What I get out of this is that it's best to avoid doing business with Apple's
customers. (Nobody has ever filed a class-action lawsuit against Dell for
using 6-bit LCDs instead of 8-bit LCDs.)

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.

~~~
maukdaddy
No this isn't about picky Apple fans. AT&T is truly shitty. I also switched
from Verizon to AT&T for the iPhone and I loathe every minute I have to spend
on AT&T's shitty network. Here in Chicago I drop every other call on average,
and the ones that manage to stay up are usually full of garbled noise. No
signal inside buildings that I used to get full strength on Verizon.

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.

~~~
jrockway
I live downtown and have AT&T. I've never had a problem.

Maybe it's just the iPhone that sucks?

------
ErrantX
honestly, this is the BEST TC post I have read in a long while. Extremely well
written / crafted and contains serious, sensible points.

 _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.

~~~
jrockway
_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._

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.

~~~
ErrantX
To be 100% fair I have more than paid for my phone since signing the contract
:) I rang them up wanting a new phone and asking if they could do me a deal if
I agreed to a higher monthly fee and a full 24 month contract (the phone aimed
at being an Iphone).

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 :))

------
there
so at&t can pay a ton of money to upgrade its network (which apparently isn't
going to be that much faster) and then lose the exclusive contract with apple,
in the process losing lots of customers and no longer gaining new customers
when apple releases new iphones.

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...

~~~
stavrianos
How do you figure that "and pay apple a much smaller amount to..." bit? If
it's in Apple's best interests to leave, then they will. I certainly don't
think that Apple will collude with AT&T to perpetuate shitty service.

------
brk
Wow, I just checked the voicemail on my iPhone and I had 12 (!) voicemails
queued up with no indications that I had waiting messages.

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.

------
charrington
I totally agree that my new iPhone is basically an iPod touch. I get no AT&T
signal at my house and marginal signal elsewhere. And it looks like I don't
even get voicemails reliably. I should cancel my AT&T contract (there is a 30
day grace period) and get an iPod touch instead. There is no phone in the
iPhone thanks to AT&T.

------
dattaway
I "cancelled" my AT&T account a few months ago. Somehow the account is still
open, but accumulating monthly negative charges (credit.) No script from their
customer support can resolve this issue. Technical glitches can be fascinating
and this company has no shortage in my experiences with them.

~~~
jf
Complain to the FCC.

<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.

