Second try at this long post and to all of you English majors out there I didn't go to college. So go easy.
If you have an old ATT wireless contract and you are now with Cingular beware of taking them up on trying new phones with an upgraded phone plan. I fell for the "30 days if not satisfied you can return the phones and cancel the upgrade" and upgraded my phone plan. When I became unsatisfied I tried to back out of this new contract but according to Cingular customer service I had no ATT contract to go back to. I convinced them to let me continue with Cingular on a month to month basis and they agreed, but they said I would have to give up my free mobile to mobile minutes to which I also agreed.
I returned my new phones after about 14 days and recieved a refund. My salesperson told me to bring in all 3 of my old phones and they would reactivate them with Cingular. This sounded great but once you put a different sim card in a phone that it was not programmed for it automatically becomes "locked". This locking makes your phones worthless unless you want to pay around $25 each to unlock them and Cingular will not do this or even pay for it.
It seems I was stuck with a more expensive phone plan and three useless phones. Customer service said I should just go ahead and buy 3 new phones from them and the problem would be solved. For one thing their multimedia messaging would not work on my new Nokia 6102i picture phones or even my Motorola RAZR V3 phone. I did have someone in tech support finally tell me that Cingular was having problems in my area with the multimedia messaging service.
I learned the hard way of a tactic customer service uses when they don't want to talk to you anymore. They hang up on you. This means when you call back you get a new person who is more than willing to listen to you until he or she has had enough and hangs up on you too. So after a total of about 14 hours on the phone with customer service over the course of a week or so and almost as many talking with my local Cingular salesperson I lost my cool and cancelled my phone plans. They even tried to charge me $175 per phone to do this, but I was still within the 30 days and the fee was waived after a lot of convincing on my part.
Now if I wanted to try new phones what I should have done was open a new account in my wife's name with three new phone numbers. This would have allowed me to keep my old ATT plan. Anyway watch out with the upgrades unless you understand you cannot go back to your old ATT plan.
I'm now looking for a new carrier. I heard Verizon and T-Mobile were good. After 12 years my wife hates losing her old phone number but change can be good.
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steva11 Posts: 1677
Phone Model: w810i/pearl
Service Provider: Rogers
Sun Jul 30, 2006 2:06 pm
if anyone does upgrade form an old ATT wireless plan, they cannot go back. milliions of upgrades go smoothly. cingular will unlock your att phones, but you need to contact customer care.
ZeroAHT Posts: 9
Phone Model: HP iPAQ hw6515
Service Provider: Orange 2g/3g Tier II&TSD BEUC- Cingular
Sun Jul 30, 2006 4:31 pm
Im a cust care rep at Cingular, and all youre talking about can be fixed.
Goto 611 - ( and btw- try to get transfered to Bussiness Care if you can, they/we have much much more authorizations to change things )
As far as the ATT / Cingular thing - and all these ppl saying "It was better with ATT... OK- sit down for this:
ATT IS CINGULAR YOU DUMBASSES!!!!
Look into the bussiness behind it, and basically, Bell broke into a bunch of chunks like ATT/Bellsouth/SBC etc etc- and then they all merged and were NAMED Cingular. Ok- its a new NAME for ATT and BELL. And the bills in Orange instead of Blue, and we are supposed to be nicer to the customers now. But bottom line: ATT IS CINGULAR - so saying ATT has better reception/better this better that/ makes no sense!!! Cingular is ATT upgraded with new better technologies. You were NOT 'forced' (as many say) to go from ATT to Cingular - It was just a paper thing, ok????? You werent forced to go anywhere! ITS THE SAME COMPANY!!!!
As far as the complaints about the plans and features - OK yes, it is not the same exactly as it was, but - if you could pull your mind off of the 2 minits a month you lost you would notice that you probably GAINED alot of features and aspects of your rate plan. I am not on a side - I just get tired of listening to customers complain of how it was better when they were with the SAME company paying the SAME amount, getting WORSE coverage and MORE dropped calls than they do now! ( Look it up- new unbiased study found that Cingular had FEWER dropped calls and GREATER actual person by person coverage than the competition. Yes, it used to be 2nd rate while they upgraded the 1000s of rusting ATT towers with 2G 3G towers- )
Ok - sorry for freaking. Just I get that call 1000 times a day, and im not "allowed" to tell anyone that ATT IS CINGULAR so I have to listen to them say how much better it was with the same company BEFORE the network was fixed!!!!
Peace to all, thanks for listening to my rant....
Zed@ht
steva11 Posts: 1677
Phone Model: w810i/pearl
Service Provider: Rogers
Sun Jul 30, 2006 4:44 pm
dude, i tell people all the time that there is no att anymore and it's cingular. customers find it confusing when we tell them they're still att when it's all cingular now.
business care couldn't do anything for him if it's an idividual consumer account.
timmyjoe42 Posts: 179
Phone Model: Pearl 8120
Service Provider: T-Mobile
Mon Jul 31, 2006 10:34 am
Why couldn't they make the SIM cards interchangable with the phones and both systems?
Why was I suddenly not able to call the voicemail number in my phone?
Why was the phone upgrade policy of being able to upgrade after a year if I extend my contract for a year not honored?
Why was I forced to switch over to a new Cingular phone and plan when I moved from Chicago to Cincinnati and needed to get a local number?
elmo01 Posts: 2342
Phone Model: Samsung SPH-M510
Service Provider: Bell Canada
Mon Jul 31, 2006 11:02 am
timmyjoe42 wrote:
1 Why couldn't they make the SIM cards interchangable with the phones and system?
2 Why was I suddenly not able to call the voicemail number in my phone?
3 Why was the phone upgrade policy of being able to upgrade after a year if I extend my contract for a year not honored?
4 Why was I forced to switch over to a new Cingular phone and plan when I moved from Chicago to Cincinnati and needed to get a local number?
1. the sim card is the module that reports your useage to the billing computer... it also has the your network info on the card...other carriers have a different network
2. did you make a change to your service (switch phones?)... there could have been a voicemail issue on the go... need more info on that one
3. did you get a phone?
4. there are no new phone numbers in the system for the former ATT services...pretty much no changes on the acct
timmyjoe42 Posts: 179
Phone Model: Pearl 8120
Service Provider: T-Mobile
Mon Jul 31, 2006 12:00 pm
elmo01 wrote:
timmyjoe42 wrote:
1 Why couldn't they make the SIM cards interchangable with the phones and system?
2 Why was I suddenly not able to call the voicemail number in my phone?
3 Why was the phone upgrade policy of being able to upgrade after a year if I extend my contract for a year not honored?
4 Why was I forced to switch over to a new Cingular phone and plan when I moved from Chicago to Cincinnati and needed to get a local number?
1. the sim card is the module that reports your useage to the billing computer... it also has the your network info on the card...other carriers have a different network
2. did you make a change to your service (switch phones?)... there could have been a voicemail issue on the go... need more info on that one
3. did you get a phone?
4. there are no new phone numbers in the system for the former ATT services...pretty much no changes on the acct
1. But if the AT+T and Cingular are now the same network, company, they could have made the new systems read both company's sim cards interchangably. They could have programed new Cingular phones to accept an old AT+T sim card.
2. No changes to the phone were made. I am assuming my default voicemail number was suddenly obsolete, but they didn't tell me what my new one was or how to change it. Instead of calling my voicemail, it called some general voicemail number where I had to put in my phone number again, and password, and it gave me errors that the information didn't match. The only successful way I got into my voicemail was by calling my own number.
3. Cingular did give me a new phone, but I was in the last month of my 2 year at+t contract and had to sign a full 24 month contract with cingular.
4. There might not be new at+t numbers in the system, but what about old ones that are switched over, like the chicago one I gave up.? There should be some old AT+T numbers floating around. Why couldn't a number be ported in?
elmo01 Posts: 2342
Phone Model: Samsung SPH-M510
Service Provider: Bell Canada
Mon Jul 31, 2006 1:06 pm
[quote="timmyjoe42"][quote="elmo01"]
timmyjoe42 wrote:
1. But if the AT+T and Cingular are now the same network, company, they could have made the new systems read both company's sim cards interchangably. They could have programed new Cingular phones to accept an old AT+T sim card.
2. No changes to the phone were made. I am assuming my default voicemail number was suddenly obsolete, but they didn't tell me what my new one was or how to change it. Instead of calling my voicemail, it called some general voicemail number where I had to put in my phone number again, and password, and it gave me errors that the information didn't match. The only successful way I got into my voicemail was by calling my own number.
3. Cingular did give me a new phone, but I was in the last month of my 2 year at+t contract and had to sign a full 24 month contract with cingular.
4. There might not be new at+t numbers in the system, but what about old ones that are switched over, like the chicago one I gave up.? There should be some old AT+T numbers floating around. Why couldn't a number be ported in?
1 One network 2 billing systems...your old sim ... the network identifier was 89310380... thats what the billing computer sees...it routes your call (airtime) to you account to be billed to the appropriate airtime bucket..your new cingular sim starts (I think) with 8901...in any case its a different routing... SIM cards are a 1 time use item for your security not for your convenience... you could have gotten new phones that were unlocked... just not from cingular/frmr ATT...
2 back to your voicemail... did the difficulty occur before or after you got your new phone?... if it was before did someone delete or change your VM retrieval number?
3. and under the term of that offer you had before ...after 12 months of a 24 month contract you would be given the opportunity to upgrade and it would be another 2yr contract (a rolling 2yr renewed at 12 months for another 24 months to get a new phone so if you maintained that you would always be 1 yr left in contract)
4. you moved... you wanted a local number...(remember cingular fufilled a request) nobody forced you over... you chose to do so...once your old Chicago number is released its gone... poof... into the void for 60 days.. when it emerges for recycling its in the cingular number system...no longer accessable by the old system...as for porting you can only port in a number for use that is native to your zipcode in Cinci...
timmyjoe42 Posts: 179
Phone Model: Pearl 8120
Service Provider: T-Mobile
Mon Jul 31, 2006 1:25 pm
1. I was told by a Cingular rep in a Cingular store that an unlocked phone would not work properly on the Cingular network with an AT+T sim card.
2. My wife and I both had the same problem accessing our voicemail. We were happily on AT+T, everything worked fine, then after the switch was announced (I'm not sure of the date and time) but then all of a sudden we could not access our voicemail the way we had previously. We would have a voicemail, and the screen would say "Call Voicemail" which instead of just popping us into our voicemail, sent us into the computer asking for numbers and passwords that did not allow us to hear our messages.
3. I was just mad, because we were stuck with our Nokia 3200's and one of them broke, but Cingular would not honor the upgrade policy and give me a new phone, unless I switched both lines in my family plan over, but my wife's phone was working fine, and she had no reason to switch. Then We each would have had our own plan, with AT+T and Cingular, which would have cost us a ton more a month. It was ridiculous that they could not accomodate us somehow without forcing me to switch over. I ended up buying an unlocked piece of poop nokia that was an old AT+T phone from an independent mom and pop shop for way too much because I needed it ASAP.
4. If the 2 companies hadn't merged, I would have been able to switch to a local number when I moved with no penalties, but because my company disappeared, I had to officially switch to Cingular. It seemed unfair that anyone who wanted to call me, now had to pay long distance charges when I live down the street, yet AT+T would not let me out of my contract, even though they were not offering me the same services in my new location.
beware of taking them up on trying new phones with an upgraded phone plan. I fell for the "30 days if not satisfied you can return the phones and cancel the upgrade" and upgraded my phone plan. When I became unsatisfied I tried to back out of this new contract but according to Cingular customer service I had no ATT contract to go back to. I convinced them to let me continue with Cingular on a month to month basis and they agreed, but they said I would have to give up my free mobile to mobile minutes to which I also agreed.
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