slant eyes

**** WARNING! LENGTHY POST ****

I live in Southern Ca and have Cingular/At&t as my cellular provider. Been with Cingular since they were still Pac Bell.

**let's visit October 2006/November 2006**

Due to the merger and the upgrading of regular Edge towers to 3G towers, I received many letters from Cingular warning that if I didn't bring in my phone and upgrade the SIM card, I would damn near lose service. I go to store by my house and they tell me 3G towers are not up in my area and so upgrading my SIM card would result in *insert word for make worse here* service. I go home and return 3 weeks when I get a notice from Cingular with a big 'Warning' (or something of that sort) across the top, saying I need to upgrade my SIM card. I go back, same story, just disregard the notice.

My contract has been up for some time and I was reluctant to upgrade and tie myself down for another 2 years as is common practice for Cellular Providers these days but the new Samsung BlackJack just came out and I soooo want it. I get one on the upgrade program, tying myself to another 2 years of contractual service and go about my merry way. What's 2 years? I got my new toy!

Then it started. Dropped call after dropped call. I will be on a call then all of a sudden, busy tone! WAIT! I was on the call first! So within the first 30 days, I bring the phone to a Cingular store and tell them what's going on. They inform me that the 3G towers are still not up and that is why my calls are dropping. OK -- but why the hell are they wanting me to switch my SIM card anyway then? That's another story. So they assure me it is not the phone, but the service. To give it a bit and all will be better. Meanwhile, I was able to lock my phone on the Edge network, mind you, this is what was so special about the phone, the fact that it was 3G compatible. Oh well, whatever makes it work.

Calls got better. I dropped less calls, but enough to be pretty disenchanting. I go back 2 months later in February and same story. No one bothers to look up my account or anything. Finally, the 3G towers appear to be up as the 3G bars on my phone suddenly came on. But do calls keep dropping? Yes they do. I call a CSR by the name of Chris and he is helping me troubleshoot my phone when lo and behold, my call drops. He tries to call and when I go to answer -- no service!!!!!!! When my phone finally cooperates a bit, I ask the CSR I speak with to have him call me back, she claims she e-mailed him and that I should just wait.

About mid-April-ish, I decide to give them another ring as my calls keep dropping. This time, the lady was super shocked at what I was dealing with. She looks into the situation and says, it appears your phone software was never updated. She tells me she will send a signal out to my phone to have it updated and to 'tell' my phone how to look for the new 3G towers. She then said, if this didn't work, then it would be the fault of the phone, maybe I got a phone from a bad batch. I shut off my phone for 10 minutes, as she advised, and turn it back on. VOILA! It now says AT&T instead of Cingular. Does this mean all is well? Before she ended the call, she did tell me to give it 2 weeks for everything to work properly. I end up giving it a month and a half. Calls still dropping. Calls still not going through. All the while Cingular taunts me with the 'Fewest dropped calls' campaign -- oh how I wanted to punch the TV.

So now that service is not the issue here, it must be the phone. So I call up Cingular/AT&T and ask to replace my phone. Mind you, I have had these issues, documented or not, since the first week of ownership. But when I brought it to the Cingular store, they just shooed me away saying it was the 3G towers that weren't up yet. So here comes the blistering part, they say, 'We can only send you a refurbished phone because it's been 6 months.' WAIT! What? It's been 6 months cuz they wanted to play games and I stupidly played along! I just wanted a new phone. Same kind. Just not refurbished. I paid for a new one, it had problems, I did what Cingular wanted me to, now I have to take a refurbished one? I spoke with as many managers and supervisors as I could to no mercy.

So I e-mail Cingular Compliance for a record of comments by CSR's that I've worked with in preparation for a lawsuit. Some man calls me and explains to me that it was my fault for not doing anything about it. I explained I was following their orders and knew nothing about cellular technology to dispute their claims. He disagreed saying, 'If you bought a car and it didn't drive right, regardless of what the dealer says, you should bring it back.' I fire back, 'If i knew nothing about cars like I know nothing about Cellular tech, and the dealer told me it's like a baby, it needs to warm up and get running, I would believe him, cuz after all, I know nothing about it.' He offered me 2 solutions. Either take the refurbished phone or pay full price for another phone. Does anyone else see me as being shafted here? Or is it just me?

He calls me again the next day, offering 2 months service credit to my account. Yeah, 2 months for the 6 months of agonizing dropped calls. I ask him for the CSR comments and he said he can't release those until they are subpoena'd from a lawyer. He then tells me upon looking at my account, I've done an upgrade and filed for 2 insurance claims on my old RAZR phone for 2 Cingular 8525's???? He said, 'Do you know this can be considered insurance fraud?' I told him those weren't me. I bought a BlackJack, what the hell do I need to insurance claim an old phone for? At that, the price point differences were too great to achieve that. You're replacing a 2 year old phone for one that costs 600 bucks??? He didn't buy it, suggesting that many people do this to sell it on eBay. I don't even have a damn eBay account!

So that was my battle thus far. I wanted to see the comments to see if I even had a case. I wanted to take some legal action to get a new phone. I didn't think I was being unreasonable. I didn't want some monetary repayment, I didn't want a refurbished phone. My new phone was messed up from the start. I paid for a new phone that didn't work, and all I wanted was a new phone.

I asked my neighbor, who is a family lawyer, and he said he could at best get me out of contract. I asked a friend, he said it wasn't worth a lawyer's time to litigate.

So point of my long-winded, uphill battle is...I don't know...I'm damn lost. What I thought was a sure win legally is now just a maybe. Looks like I may have to pay full price for a phone just to use the service.

I know of the ways to get out of a contract, but up until the BlackJack, service for me was great. I don't feel a need to leave Cingular/AT&T over this stupid incident.

Anyone with any ideas?

Again, sorry for the long post. I tried to sum up my now 8 month battle.

__________________
no man or woman is worth your tears - and the one who is, won't make you cry

question authority, don't ask why, just do it!

JumpinJesus

We had AT&T/Cingular for a few years as well. Our service was fine until the network switched over to Cingular. When that happened, we were in the same boat as you. I think we had a call completion rate of about 5%. The most frustrating part about this was right outside our window was a gigantic "Raising the Bar" billboard.

After about 8 months of this and continual runaround from Cingular, we terminated our contract early and switched to another carrier. Cingular sent us a bill for nearly $1,000. Naturally, we flipped out. We called, demanding an explanation. They had the audacity to tell us that not only were they double billing our early termination since we had 2 lines but they were also "prorating" our bills through the end of our contract and charging us for that as well.

Shesus dealt with them and on more than one occasion used some very foul language with their customer service reps after getting the usual non-answers from them. Finally we told them we'd pay for the part of the month we used them and they could stick their early termination fee ($350) and their "prorated" bills up their asses because we weren't going to give them a penny for it. We paid them the $70 we owed them for the month and that was it.

We never heard from them again. Nor did they report any of this to the credit agencies.

While I'm not necessarily telling you to do the same. It seemed to work out o.k. for us.

Why they chose to just let us go is a mystery, but they did.

Good luck with this.

__________________
"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

The_Jazz

Are you serious about the lawsuit or are you just threatening one? If you're just threatening, they're calling your bluff. If you're serious, you should already have a lawyer and get advice from him.

My suggestion is to figure out what the frustration of a lawsuit along with amount of time you'll spend on it is worth and compare that to what you're likely to recoup from Cingular in the best case. If the former amount is less than the latter, I'd say you don't need to file a lawsuit and just do what you can to get out of your contract as soon as possible. Maybe you can get them to drop you as a client if you're annoying enough.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo