cingular

—>"Jurgis" writes,  More »

—>As the second coming of the Jesusphone 3G draws near, we wanted to remind customers of other wireless carriers that there are ways to escape your existing cellphone contract free of early termination fees, and trade your piddling Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile bills for hundreds of pages of gloriously itemized AT&T charges. Or just switch carriers.  More »

In response to yesterday's post, another AT&T employee writes, "Just to clear up some confusion, AT&T may charge an administrative fee when paying your wireless bill with a representative. There is no charge to use the automated payment systems. The source for this is the tagline on my bill."  More »

—> An anonymous AT&T employee who says to call him "Vernon" wrote in to tell us that starting next Tuesday, March 11th, some customers in the Southeast who call in to make a payment will be charged $5, with the fee going nationwide by May. He writes, "I feel this is taking advantage of our customers' trust, because even when we put it on all of their bills, and let people know, there will be tons of reps that won't let the customer know they're being charged for taking their payment."  More »

—>AT&T Mobility's CEO Stan Sigman has announced his retirement after 42 years with the company. The AP says:

Sigman began his career with Southwestern Bell Telephone as a stockman in 1965. He stayed with the company as it grew from the smallest Baby Bell to the nation's largest telecommunications company through a series of aggressive acquisitions.

—>Naked DSL, (DSL without the requirement to have a landline), will be available nationwide by the end of the year, according to statement made by AT&T to the Wall Street Journal.   More »

Like many many companies, Cingular has a little thing in their contracts saying that if you use their service, you void your right to a class action lawsuit and instead have to go through "mandatory binding arbitration," which is basically an extra-judicial corporate court exempt from many of the basic rules and laws and procedures and rights of real court. Well, today, that clause was ruled "unconscionable" by the 9th Circuit Court Of Appeals. Therefore, lawsuits can proceed against Cingular and go to real court, not monkey court. Hooray!  More »

—>The Supreme Court of Washington State has ruled that consumers cannot sign away their right to participate in a class action lawsuit, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  More »

—> Apple has posted the rate plans for the iPhone and a few reader questions have been answered.   More »

—>Dustin paid the price for following Consumerist's advice and never giving personal information to people who call and claim to be from your phone company or your gas company or your bank. Someone called Dustin claiming to be AT&T and demanding that he confirm the last 4 digits of his SSN. Dustin honestly thought, as we would, that it was a meth-addict trying to get his SSN.   More »

—>Whoever writes the scripts that CSRs are required to spit out has extremely poor social skills. When your company screws up someone's billing, then shuts off their phone and tries to charge them a fee, that's your mistake. Fixing it is not "a courtesy." It's also not a "one-time courtesy."   More »

—> Let's face it. Cellphones are here to stay and you need to know a little something about how they work if you're going to know which one is right for you. Over at Yahoo! they've got a list of some cell phone acronyms that you could learn, thereby increasing your knowledge of the world around you. We know most of our readers are pretty well versed in everything cellphone, but its still worth taking a look.  More »

—>Be wary of people calling your cellphone claiming to be from your service provider and offering to upgrade your phone packages. They may actually be independent dealers trying to make a quick buck.  More »

—>Chris exchanged his messed up Blackjack with Cingular (now the new AT&T) under warranty replacement. Now Cingular (now the new AT&T) can't find the phone that he sent back and keeps trying to bill him $349.99 for it. Repeated calls to customer service are unsuccessful and provide contradictory information.   More »

—>Matt's voicemail stopped working so he called up Cingular to get it fixed, and while he was there he had them check out the rest of his account to make sure everything was ok, but they found something disturbing.  More »

—>Here's a roundup of all the contract clauses regarding "materially adverse changes" for all the major cellphone carriers. When they starting charging new fees or raise the price of a service, you can use this section to argue that you need to be let out of contract without early termination fee....  More »

—>AT&T is charging users of its prepaid calling cards up to eight minutes per minute spent making an in-state call. The practice began in February and affects in-state calls made from every state except Illinois, Indiana, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.  More »

—>The Chairman of the FCC, Kevin Martin, has issued a stern rebuke to the telecoms that blocked their subscribers from accessing free Iowa-based conference call providers. Quoth the Chairman:

We actually contacted the companies that were listed in the press [reports] and said our rules prohibit you from blocking consumers' access to any of the service providers... One had stopped blocking, but we heard complaints the next week that they were restricting access, sort of narrowing the pipe. We called them back and said, no, no, you can't artificially degrade [service] either.