AT&T would be in danger of bankruptcy if it were not for the fact that they are surviving off government welfare through the Firstnet contract[1]. It was only buildout requirements mandated by that contract that they even have a modestly functioning network. Their business plan has been to acquire some crappy Mexican carriers[2], DirecTV, as well as the new DISH contract. There's minimal investment otherwise, poor spectrum planning, and rent seeking (domestic roaming gouging using spectrum they were given for free in the 90's) in regions where T-Mobile and USCC don't have buildout.[3]
The last good business move I think ATT made was getting exclusive access to iPhones in 2007 for five years or whatever it was.
And that is why I’ve been paying them around ~$40 per line per month since. Actually, it was also due to them being the only big network with SIM cards I could pop out and use another country’s SIM. Verizon took forever to get SIM cards.
The SIM was why I moved over from Verizon. I could sample/use/trade a lot of phones as I’ve always enjoyed playing with devices. On Verizon I had to go to a store to activate my devices and half the time the sales person would mark me as using an upgrade that I didn’t. I had to fight Verizon enough times before deciding enough was enough. My guess is the salespeople got some bonus or kudos for getting upgrades sold.
CDMA phones never needed SIM until LTE came along. I once had a Verizon "global" featurephone that supported both CDMA and 2G GSM. It had a Verizon SIM for the GSM side but wasn't otherwise needed for non-roaming connectivity over CDMA.
Somewhat related: this idea of adding a "digital waiting line" on top of a normal one is horrible, the author mentions this in ATT.
Disneyland has done this with food, and it's really really irritating. Here is an example of what it is like to get Blue Milk at Star Wars Land in Disneyland:
1) order it in the app and pay for it.
2) it tells you when to go there
3) wait for your phone to turn green, with a group of other people staring at their phone. A person is there to make sure people without green screens don't get in line.
4) you are now allowed to get into a line and wait.
5) you get to the front, and you repeat the order. Someone makes it for you.
I get the desire to replace cashier's with an app. But just let people place an order, give them a number, and let them know where they are in the line.
I'm sure it'd be cheaper for Disney to rent devices locked to their app for a day than pay for these line proctors and the person that's still taking the orders.
AT&T's (corporate) store service is absolutely terrible. I have money, a working phone (or the SIM from a broken phone), and want to upgrade. Why can't I hand you the money and get a new phone without 20 minutes of tapping around on an iPad? And god forbid you have a business account, then it'll take thirty or forty minutes because they have to look through your account to see if there's anything to fix, and then sometimes there's some flow for a business account that doesn't exist in their iPad app so they have to go to a PC. It's like the Apple Store problem except 10x worse since there's rarely anybody else in the AT&T store when I go there.
I kept my last phone well after I should've probably replaced it because I didn't want to go to the store. Maybe they should try some secret shopping, it might show the flaws. Impulse buying a phone (not that it's something you should do, but probably something they want to encourage since nobody buys new phones anymore) is absolutely impossible right now.
(What I'd really prefer is if they'd just allow me to give them money and just hand me the new phone, but inevitably there's some account crap that happens where the new phone won't activate properly and I have to get another phone to call 611 and figure it out.)
Edit: It might just be because of my families phones being on a business account. We've tried to upgrade (or just buy the darn phone without a contract/loan) through the Apple Store before but they won't do it because their POS system can't handle AT&T's business accounts, and even unlocked devices need to be notated there for some reason.
You could skip the corporate store and go to an independent reseller. They'll give you fast service and more money for your device.
Then you'll get your first bill and find they pulled three different tricks on you and you'll spend the next two weeks trying to get it l straightened out.
I hate up selling. I specifically did all my business through your website/app to AVOID personal contact. Don't call me I'll call you (which is hopefully never).
Att was destroyed as soon as they sold to cingular. I worked as a billing call center rep for Cingular when they bought them. The spent millions to rebrand everything with AT&T including signs at small ballpark fields etc. They had a bounty system where you could get paid if you found an old AT&T sign that hadn't been converted. About six months in they realized that Cingular's brand was despised by customers and that AT&T was really well liked, at least on the cell side. As someone who had to do plan conversions it was obvious that every Cingular option was a huge downgrade compared to the AT&T plans. Across the board their service was worse, their plans were worse and the customer service we were allowed to provide was worse.
Finally they decided to convert everything to AT&T to try and salvage their brand. Overall it worked for a little while I think. But ever since working for them I have never and will never be one of their customers. They were a truly awful company to work for and tied our hands when trying to help customers.
When I say they tied our hands one example would be that they had system hard caps on how much you could refund a customer for incorrect billings. Specifically 75$ per day per account. So if a customer was legitimately owed 300$ then you would need to write it down and each day refund them 75$ until they were refunded their due. I actively kept up with that but if you got someone else who didn't care as much, well good luck ever getting that 300$.
That just seems like such a waste of customer service time, and would chew up more time if the customer persisted, and more money if they pursued legal action of any sort. How short sighted can they be?
> Att was destroyed as soon as they sold to cingular.
The story of AT&T and Cingular is much weirder, see [0].
Once there was AT&T Wireless that became Cingular (with the help of SBC). Then SBC bought AT&T (landline) then the combined AT&T bought Cingular that became AT&T Wireless again.
Completely anecdotal, but as someone who has used ATT and Comcast for internet, and ATT and Verizon for mobile, I’ve had better luck with both Comcast and Verizon with customer service. Which is really saying something, because I’m pretty sure Comcast and Verizon are some of the most hated brands in the US, and not for no reason.
I’d love to give T-Mobile a try, but it seems like every year there’s a new massive security breach…. It does not inspire confidence.
I switched to Ting recently at a co-workers suggestion after switching to Mint (total nightmare). It's been cheap and great, and they use Verizon towers. I have no affiliation, just a happy customer.
I'm curious about why you might switch? Pay as you go is $10 + usage, unlimited T&T & 5GB data is $25. That's plenty data for me since I'm always around wifi.
I have the $45 Unlimited (22GB) since my WiFi in NOLA is not much better than 25 down, 10 up (and since the recent hurricane not even that consistently although Cox promises things will be better than before this week) and had to buy a bunch of topups which annoyed me.
I'm a (happy) T-Mobile customer and my favorite thing about them is that in 5+ years I've never had to go into a store.
Their website was functional but not super intuitive a few years ago, but it keeps getting better, and upgrading my iPhone 11 to a 13 last week, and also my plan at the same time, was seamless.
And now that I have 5G for the first time ever I'm shocked to be getting upwards of 400M down.
I don't think any other network can give me no bandwidth cap, tethering, and free international roaming data for $70/month.
Just a note I actually took my new phone into a brick and mortar and apparently my sim was so old it didn’t have all the new frequencies on it! So especially switching to 5G I’d recommend anyone else to go in once a few years
AT&T customer here. The customer service interactions are abysmal.
I'm on a prepaid plan ($25/m all you can eat, but hi-speed internet taps out at 8GB... after that it's lo-speed internet).
I kept getting texts that my phone will stop working with AT&T's network in Feb next year for some reason (it won't). And that there was a free phone waiting for me at the local AT&T shop.
Cool. Why not get a free phone I thought. I went over to the store and showed the guy there the text. He said they were out of phones and gave me a number to call, and that they'd ship me a phone. (And the dude looked over my current phone and told me it would continue to work with the AT&T network after Feb).
I call that number, am put on hold. It takes 62 minutes to get through to a live human. Explain the situation to him. They send me a phone. It's a garbage phone that loses all charge in 2 days despite not being used. It's available for $40 on AT&T's website (with a prepaid plan). No biggie.
I still get those texts telling me there's a free phone waiting for me in my local AT&T shop.
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Another issue, on their website, when I was signing up for the prepaid plan (a year ago), I was forced to enter a "unit number" for my house... even though there is none. So I entered "Unit 0" and they accepted that.
Yeah, T-Mo may fighting a better fight, but their security issues dog them. Maybe the average consumer doesn’t care, but I find it hard to champion a brand that gives such a half effort to protecting their customers’ information.
Most people's threat model considers their personal data leaking to someone who might financially exploit them MUCH MUCH MUCH more of a threat than their call records ending up in bulk in some NSA db. Because most people are rational.
The problem with that position is that you know nothing about the other 2 players.
Security breaches are always a matter of when, not if. If you think that AT&T, Verizon or any of the 20 MVNOs that interface with their systems don’t have similar vulnerabilities, I have a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn with your name on it.
My SO had to switch to a new unlocked phone she already had and needed to change a mini-SIM to micro-SIM. The process took two hours with AT&T and traveling to two different stores because "only corporate stores" can do certain things for customer service.
They are completely clueless how to provision a fucking phone. Never mind the idiocy of issuing a non-convertible mini-SIM when she got it around 2013.
I recently switched away from AT&T, in large part because of their horrible customer service. This article really resonates.
In early 2019, I added a new line to my plan in what was supposed to be a "free" phone (I was assured of this by the customer service rep on the phone), and wound up getting charged $499 + setup charges for it immediately on my next bill, in addition to what my bill normally is.
Since my bill was on auto-pay, $750+ came out of my account that month. I called immediately to reverse it and turned off auto-pay. It took 10+ calls over the next 2 months to get the whole situation undone. My next bill was $1,000+ along with late charges and cutoff notices (I was not paying until it got fixed). It was so aggravating that I started a spreadsheet to keep track of all my support calls, who I spoke with, and when.
I finally got the situation resolved and all the charges reversed after getting connected with a high-level tech support person in the US who actually had the power/authority to make the required changes to my account. Even though I stayed with AT&T for the next year or so after that (I was also moving houses and didn't want to change cell service at the time), the experience turned me off of AT&T forever.
I now use Ting Wireless ( https://ting.com ) and am a very happy customer. They are an MVNO that uses AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile so they are not always 100% as reliable as the big providers directly, but the price is WAY cheaper ($25/mo per line with all taxes/fees included!), and the support is top notch. I can basically just call and connect directly with a customer service rep that can fix any issue I have at any time without hassle or transferring through 4 layers of call centers. Ting is worth a look if you are considering a switch.
Many years ago I did coding for a web hosting company. They actually had a retail store in the front with the rest of us in the back.
Twice a year an AT&T business sales guy would come through and he'd always have three trainees with him. The boss would never have the time to meet with him. So I interacted with him and trying to be helpful I told him when our contract was up. I said if you come by within 30 days of the contracts expiration you might have a chance at the business.
He never even wrote the date down. He came through every six months on a set schedule and always with the three different trainees. I wondered if he even wanted the business? Or maybe felt they wouldn't let him be competitive. Either way he wasn't the guy AT&T wanted training other sales guys cause he set a poor example.
I believe what they said happened, as it happened. Although, I'm not sure it is constructive to extrapolate it to either AT&T or T-Mobile as a brand though.
I've been on both networks at various points and my recommendation is to check Google Map Reviews before heading to either one's stores as some are consistently dreadful and others are fine/good.
Both get licked by Apple's stores though, but the staffing difference is very apparent upon entry (I'd guesstimate 100% more floor staff in Apple).
At least they aren't as bad/predatory/unpleasant as car dealerships though. When I'd pick dental appointments over car shopping/buying, you know it is egregious. They turn what could be a "fun" experience into a stressful annoyance.
I use a local cell provider, but get to roam unlimited on ATT & TMobile when I'm out of state. Local cell providers are awesome; amazing service, good service & prices, etc.
The only hiccup I've found is international calls on roaming are insanely expensive. I had a $100 phone call to South America roaming when it would have cost ~$10 in network.
I worked in a large Telco store as a sales consultant for around 5 years and I have some views on this, having served thousands of customers.
Organisations such as T-Mobile, AT&T and even the Telco I used to work for in Australia are fortunately/unfortunately made up of people just like you and I. This means that your experience of dealing with a telco or a brand is highly dependant on the person you speak with in store. These people aren't all incredibly motivated people, nor are they all at their very best everyday like they need to be as people in front of customers. It's no excuse, but it is a factor.
I was around before and at the point the digital waiting line came into play and it is overall better than not having one. In this story, the problem is that clearly the store didn't have enough staff serving customers to visually justify that the store was busy enough to put someone in a queue. I worked in a shopping mall so customers who walked into a our visibly very busy store were happy that they could get some food or continue shopping while waiting.
With regards to availability of staff, where I worked we followed a "My customer my responsibility model" where it was your responsibility to follow and resolve a customers problem. As stores provided not just sales but also customer service across consumer and business mobility products and internet services. The tricky part is that a customer might come into the store with a complex billing problem and it require almost an hour to resolve. In a store of perhaps 4 active consultants, on a busy day if 2-3 people are working on complex customer support queries, you wont have enough people available to advise people on what mobile to buy.
I am tired of dealing with cellphone services providers. I treat them as such, a service company. I buy my phones from directly from apple, never from ATT. I simply pay my monthly bill and when I upgrade, I hustle to have the "activation fee" waived. I have 6 lines under my plan, they usually give in. Maybe I should start looking into Business account like someone else mentioned here.
Group chats where everybody uses iPhone work through iMessage. If only one person switches to Android they get downgraded to MMS (open standard) which is much worse.
Why these people don't use OTT apps like WhatsApp I'll never know.
I’ve had T-Mobile for over 10 years in the SF Bay Area and can confirm T-Mobile is actually decent to deal with and service was good. I recently had to switch service to AT&T because they’re the only one with a service tower near my house in Marin. The AT&T employees were a PITA to deal with when getting a SIM so I just ended up ordering one on Amazon for a couple bucks and activated it via phone.
Is AT&T the new discount carrier now that T-Mobile has been buying up spectrum for the last decade? I just moved my whole family off them just to consolidate on a carrier I like a lot more, and in the process noticed that they actually had the cheapest per-meg data rates, by kind of a lot. It wasn't enough to keep me, but it was interesting.
I prefer cutting out as many middlemen as possible. I figure if the seller is incentivized to provide the best service to the highest profit margin/least volatile customers.
All of the major providers wholly own a MVNO now. The only difference is that during times of congestion you are not first line. Other than that it is probably the same billing systems, policies, etc.
Unless you need to be first priority on a congested tower, not much reason to actually be on Tmo,Verizon,ATT.
If a significant proportion of the market switched, they’d cut prices on the proper brands and raise the wholesale rates. Retail stores and advertising work.
Interesting. I wonder if ATT's upcoming shift to a whitelist model for phone activation, thus forcing many of their customers to purchase new hardware, is also related to this rot.
Last Monday I bought 2 iphone 13 pros. One from Apple and the other from Verizon. (The Apple Store app on my phone wouldn't let me upgrade a number that wasn't attached to my iCloud account. So I stupidly bought it from verizon)
We got the 13 pros in the mail on friday and neither me nor my wife liked the phone and we decided to return them.
The return with Apple was easy and smooth. At the verizon store the manager immediately challenged me on why I was returning it. I said it was too big for my wife, he then asked what phone she had and then pulled up a chart showing how the two devices were effectively the same size. He claimed my wife was lying and that she would be fine with the 13 pro. I replied with thanks but my wife didn't want the phone so I'd like to return it. He then put me in a queue and told me the return would have a $50 restocking fee.
The entire return experience was so terrible and hostile I almost walked to another carrier's store and moved all my lines. I may still do that.
The overall experience did renew my desire to NEVER buy a device with verizon again.
I can imagine that ATT and Verizon are largely in the same place, they're the behemoths in the market and no longer have to innovate for market share. So the way they increase margins is by fleecing their customers with "activation fees" and "restocking fees".
Its great to hear that TMobile is stepping up the customer service game. This may be enough for me to switch.
I have used t mobile for like a decade. They’re a better carrier, but I have had terrible experiences in their stores before too. You’re at the mercy of randoms working retail.
The best experience is no experience. Just buy your phone directly from Apple and perform the SIM swap yourself.
Apple’s stores are worse than the ATT situation in this article. For most of COVID you literally could not walk in and get added to a waiting list, you had to make an appointment. And each store had rude security guards shooing people away. It might actually still be like that.
It sounds like he got lucky and had a positive experience with one person but that doesn’t scale at all.
I just moved my whole family to Google Fi because there IS no store, and all account management is dead easy on a very well-built website. Took me several days of waiting on hold with AT&T to get the numbers transferred, and now I can never log into my AT&T account again because it wants to 2-factor the sim card in my car (my only remaining line), but it's already proven worth it for my mental well being alone.
So true, even for Apple or (insert beloved company here). Between the turnover, low salaries, and the terrible scheduling patterns, you're blessed if you get someone who doesn't assault customers.
Consequently, most retail seems to focus on training employees to "not be bad" vs "being more good."
>Consequently, most retail seems to focus on training employees to "not be bad" vs "being more good."
More like they just don't give adequate training time at all. I've never had a retail job that gave as much time with the training material as the material itself said you'd spend with it.
Best Buy had very good training during the tenure of the previous CEO. It was emphasized as an important part of one's duties as an associate and incentivized with generous accommodations (I'm watching a large OLED I was able to buy for 1/3 retail; I was able to truthfully attest to its quality thereafter and made quite a few sales on that). My understanding is that good and plentiful accommodations are essentially gone now (at corporate, not the vendor's, behest; workers looking to get a television accommodation will apparently have to win a sweepstakes), and that training focuses less on product knowledge and more on high-margin service and branded payment upsells. If you think you hate hearing about thowe as a customer, imagine how tired the salespeople are getting nothing but constantly chided for not ruining customers' credit.
Leadership matters, and unfortunately, much of retail's are cynical number crunchers who don't understand the value of investing in labor. Guess what, not even Amazon can get away from the necessity of quality customer service; that need won't be automated away anytime in the near future, and you really don't want to anyway (algorithmic up-sell is terrible at edge cases and exhausts everyone else short-term).
>training focuses less on product knowledge and more on high-margin service and branded payment upsells.
This to me is the death knell of brick and mortar retail. It's like this everywhere. There is absolutely no focus on actually helping a customer make a decision based on what they need/want. It's just a free mark to pitch whatever thing management is incentivizing. If I can't actually trust the intentions of a salesperson what on earth am I doing in there?
But let's be honest, even if there was a focus on product knowledge- it's almost always better to do research on the internet. You can get a much better lay of the land from many sources instead of just one person. The products will be cheaper by 10-20% on Amazon usually, and you get to read a ton of reviews. This just happened to me at Micro Center this past week. I was bored, decided to go into the store to look at KVM switches. A salesperson approaches and asks if I need help, it's clear immediately that he doesn't know anything about KVM switches and he's reading off the back of the box trying to figure out the answer when I ask him questions. I decide to buy the one I was already looking at before he approached and he put his sticker on it.
Afterwards, out of curiosity, I looked it up on Amazon. Was a full $20 cheaper. The switch ended up not even being able to support high refresh rates so I had to return it anyways.
Plus they all want you to sign up for their credit card and give them your email and zip code. It's super gross.
I have to push back a bit. Internet research only gets you so far and can be quite difficult. In the best cases, we were able to get into from our vendors that wasn't normally accessible to the public. And even without that, customers were happy to have someone who could answer their questions directly. Even when we had to look something up, they often appreciated that we were more familiar with the relevant terms needed to find the information they were seeking.
Occasionally, a customer who was very knowledgable would come in; it was 50/50 whether they were someone we could accommodate by skipping past technical advice and focusing on inventory ("Is it in stock at the sister store?"), services, and deal-making. The other 50% were, frankly, assholes who definitely should just be buying possible counterfeits off Amazon. Sorry that we don't have time to research the differences between two high-end receivers that we'd have to special order anyway; for every one of your exceptionally rare requests, there are dozens of customers who need us to walk them through troubleshooting a basic system set-up (where components can be from one of a dozen different companies), so that's where the energy is going.
Best Buy functioned most effectively as a sort of library-esque community center where residents could receive basic tech assistance across a wide range of microprocessor-driven products (which we would then sell you); something similar goes for much of retail. Workers are conscientious, but there is a limit to the advice the structure can afford to give for free.
You wouldn't walk into a grocery store and expect the butcher to be able to walk you through preparing a sous vide steak with white wine sauce or whatever; they could point out what cut would work best, but beyond that, you'd hire someone to teach you.
I would think retail/general public facing working environment being basically the least desirable working environment, the most capable people will always self select out for better opportunities, especially since the pay is the lowest.
My local apple store can now be walked directly into. I concede I didn't go there during the launch of the new phone. I did go there a few weeks before to buy an accessory, and it was free of fuss. I can confirm that during the still-COVID-but-almost-open phase, there were tents, appointments, and rude people.
I really feel like Apple's stores are an embarrassment. I understand they have some really unique challenges with way more foot traffic volume (especially during COVID times) but my issues with them started way before COVID.
Apple has gotten so much larger as a company than it was when the iPod was it's most successful product, but it's stores are basically still the same.
They should have started moving away from the in mall concepts a while ago or figured out a way to better handle the massively increased volume for things like service and order pickup. They do have bigger standalone stores now, but only in very dense city centers.
I remember having to wait for 20 minutes like 8 years ago just to pick up a phone case I bought online because only certain people could go get it. I wrote a thoughtful email and got a reply back from the store manager saying "yeah you're right, you've already paid you shouldn't have to do that"
One time I walked in to buy an iPhone and also had to wait 10 minutes for an "iPhone specialist" - a regular Apple employee couldn't ring me up.
It sucks because you can tell they do spend a lot of effort on having good customer service and support, but it all comes together in such a bad way in their in person stores.
I can text Apple at any time and get excellent support that way. I just only buy things online/do support on text and phone.
This is less and less true. TMobile has rolled out 600mhz 5g on the old Nextel push to talk frequencies it acquired in the Sprint merger. Rural coverage is vastly improved, like far far exceeding the other two.
At least in areas where Nextel had a serious presence.
Yeah, I’ve been quite happy with T-Mobile as my personal carrier for the last 7 years or so. Up until recently I had an AT&T phone for work, but the new company is T-Mobile. I’m on the road a lot didn’t realize how much I took for granted with AT&T tethering speeds. Even in greater LA area, the tethering seems markedly worse with T-Mobile (N=1).
Out in the sticks of Arkansas, my iPhone 12 popped up a 5G signal a few days ago. Have no idea where that tower could possibly be. Going to be sending the drone to scout it soon. Were on Verizon, but have switched to Ting, which does use Verizon towers. Could they be showing 4G services as 5G?
Indisputable. Everyone knows T-Mobile has worse coverage than Verizon. But not everyone knows just how much improvement has been made in the last 5 years, especially due to Band 71 coming online in most places.
My last visit to T-Mobile wasn't the most pleasant. My Pixel 4 XL (ordered from Google) was totally broken and so I went in to buy one at T-Mobile so I wouldn't have to wait for shipping. They charged me an extra $50 for me to pay upfront instead of financing it. Been a customer for 15 years and this is the thanks I get for choosing them as my retailer.
When cell phones came to Sweden in the 90's, all the carriers did the exact same thing, offering phones and plans as bundles. But after a couple of years of fierce competition, margins were so thin that it was 100% obvious that any plan that came "with" a phone was essentially just their regular phone plans + a payment plan for the phone. You saved absolutely no money by paying for your phone through a carrier, and for the last decades I've always bought my phones separately, and getting phone plans separately.
And I'm amazed that this shit still flies in the US, that consumers still haven't figured this shit out.
I've lived in the US for almost a decade now, and I've never had a phone subscription or bought a phone through a carrier. Always buy unlocked phones. Always get a pre-paid subscription.
If I buy a phone and don't like it, it's between me and wherever I bought the phone, and I can look up their return policy before I make the purchase.
If I don't like the carrier I'm with, I can switch the next month, and the new carrier will happily help me port my number to them for free.
Don't get plans. Don't get multiple "lines". Don't get family plans. They're traps. Expensive, annoying, traps that cost you time and money and hassle.
Your premise that you don’t save money by buying your phone through the carrier is incorrect.
AT&T has had generous trade-in options to upgrade an existing iPhone to a new one since forever. I’m typing this on an iPhone 12 that was bought for list price, but AT&T offered somewhere around $350 for an old iPhone 7Plus that was half broken. There’s absolutely no way I would have been able to resell that old phone for so much in the open market or through Apple’s trade-in program.
If you paid attention, these kind of trade-ins have been possible ever since the second iPhone appeared on the market.
It’s true that the trade-in locks me into a 2 year contract, but I can live with that: the plan matches my needs very well, so I don’t care, and I don’t upgrade phones every year either.
That doesn’t mean that I like AT&T’s customer experience: they signed me up for a warranty plan behind my back that I had to cancel after seeing my first bill. But that’s orthogonal to the earlier point.
> There’s absolutely no way I would have been able to resell that old phone for so much in the open market
AT&T is not a charity, so how do they make that possible?
> It’s true that the trade-in locks me into a 2 year contract
> they signed me up for a warranty plan behind my back that I had to cancel after seeing my first bill.
There you go. That's how you're paying for it. You're not saving money, stop deluding yourself. TANSTAAFL. Was it worth the hassle?
They only need to "get you" once with a useless tacked-on charge, and they've made back every dollar that you "saved" by buying your phone through them. And if they get you a second time, it's pure profit for them.
All wireless carriers offer huge incentives to come to their network. Because there’s a lot of friction for people to change.
Offering generous trade-in programs is just part of the same tactics. They’ll make just a tiny bit less profit, but it’s way better than seeing a customer go to somebody else. The cost of a cell phone network is dominated by capital investments.
I can do math. It looks like you can’t? Because it’s really not hard to take the regular price of a phone vs what you get after incentives and compare which one is cheapest. And then do the same with plans and compare those with prepaid.
I see prepaid plans for $40+taxes and fees for prepaid and they don’t offer what I want, for which I pay $55 after all taxes and fees.
So for around $10 or $240 more over 2 years minus $350 in trade-in, I get the plan features that I want and the phone that I want. IOW: I get a better deal all around than what I’d get with prepaid. Financially and feature-wise.
Would you please care to explain me how I’m the dumb one here, because I clearly don’t get it.
As for that tacked on charge: the guy in the store obviously added it without my permission to pad his commission. I hate it too. It took me 5min on the phone to get it reversed. I already wrote that it was orthogonal to the concept of getting a better deal vs buying straight from Apple, but somehow you didn’t get that.
No, it really isn't. A giant for-profit corporation is using every trick in the book, every little bit of marketing knowledge and know-how, to psychologically reassure you and lull you into thinking you're getting a "good deal". You're not.
> I already wrote that it was orthogonal to the concept of getting a better deal
It's not orthogonal, because that is how they make money off of you, which is why they're offering incentives to get you onto their network. Once you're on a plan, the bullshit starts, and you'll have to be on your guard so that your plan doesn't change from under your feet.
You might save some money in the absolute sense, but you're paying for it with vigilance and hassle and annoyance. And if you slip up once, they got their money back. A large part of their business model is simply to saddle their subscribers with high-margin useless crap, hoping enough of them won't notice.
As an example, if you compare 5G coverage for AT&T's prepaid vs regular plans, you'll see that 5G is available on cheaper regular plans than the prepaid ones. Why is that? Are they a charity? Is it out of the goodness of their hearts they're offering it to their loyal customers?
No, they're doing it, because they know they'll make more money off of you, on your $55 regular plan, than they'll do off of someone on a $55 total prepaid plan.
There are 3 networks in the US. Verizon, ATT, and T-Mobile. T mobile is good in urban areas, but breadth and depth wise, I think it is pretty established that Verizon > ATT > T-Mobile, and the prices reflect that.
My solution is to simply never deal with agents at the mobile companies, especially not the minimum wage ones in stores and reseller outfits paid on commission. And I always just buy from Apple, although Best Buy is probably fine too.
I also have not had a contract with ATT in a decade. I just buy my phones from Apple or Google and pop my ATT SIM in them (or not even that nowadays due to eSIMs). And ATT might have done a credit check on me back in 2008, but I do not recall seeing them on my credit report ever so they must only check it once and then never again assuming you keep paying on time.
So many companies seem to make it their business model to manipulate laws and the market to force you to stay with them instead of trying to do a good job so that you want to stay with them.
It can't cheaper or easier to do the former, so I suspect it's due to a sort of pervasive psycopathy.
I don't think it's that simple. There's a lot involved in switch carriers, and it's worth taking the time to cool down from the initial frustration and evaluate your options more objectively.
> it's worth taking the time to cool down from the initial frustration
No it isn't.
Every single company in America needs to operate like Chick-Fil-A. You will never have a bad Chick-Fil-A experience. Ever. I've eaten there for over 25 years. The slightest problem with anything is immediately resolved to your satisfaction.
And why is that? Because there's competition, and because they want to be the best fast food restaurant in the nation.
There's no incentive for any of these companies to do that, because there's not enough competition. I imagine it's a combination of regulation, high start-up costs, and probably other factors of which I'm not aware, but we should definitely have more than three major carriers.
Must we always bring this up whenever Chick-fil-a is mentioned? The GP was clearly talking about in-store customer service practices.
CFA was in hot water because it’s religious founder was donating to charities deemed anti-lgbt. Not because they were assaulting, accosting, or discriminating against LGBT customers. I didn’t see any mention at all of acts of discrimination in the restaurants against anyone LGBT and nothing that would imply their customer service model pays special discriminatory attention towards anyone LGBT.
I've typed up about three long responses, but I don't know why, because this is just an idiotic segue with nothing to do with what I said... I can't believe I almost fell for this stupid troll shit.
Convert to a business account. I have a dedicated person at VZW I can email or call any time and get whatever I need done. I get an email with a click to authorize this order button. That's it. I haven't been in a physical store for years.
MVNOs are great. If you want to be on the Verizon network and happen to have Comcast, their xfinity mobile service is super cheap. You can buy one data pool and split it across your whole family, and the cost per GB is $15 or so. Unlike all the big carriers, they don't charge a per-line monthly access fee. I have five people on my family plan and the cost per line is almost always under $10/mo.
If you need to be on AT&T's network, there are other MVNOs like Pure Talk, which has good customer service and pretty good pricing.
One downside to MVNOs is they often lag behind the major carriers in getting support for smartwatches and cellular-capable tablets. But other than that, they're great!
T-Mobile is better than them, but frankly, once their network improved enough to be competitive to Verizon and AT&T they no loner are as good as they once were.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
This feels like another spot where a judge could lay down a pretty easy beneficial anti-monopoly ruling (like the recent app store ones): make texting work properly w/ other platforms.
It doesn't hurt the iPhone user experience in the slightest, and it doesn't cripple the brand... it just makes it easier for others to compete.
[1] https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/technology/342398-whe...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/at-t-to-buy-mexican-carrier...
[3]https://ruralwireless.org/industrys-wholesale-roaming-rates-...
In short, fuck AT&T.