AT&T Issue

[kc86]

In the first part of July I finally became fed up with my AT&T service. I was not having any service in my house or the golf course, dropped calls, and lastly calling someone and the call connecting, but silence on the other end of the line. I walked in and cancelled my service. The At&T rep told me there would be no charge for the cancellation since they could not provide me with adequate service. Well taday I received a bill from AT&T for $358.93. After a second thought to throw the bill away I decided to call. After thirty minutes I was told my service was not cancelled and still active. After other conversatoin I was able to get the past two months of service taken off the bill, but they want me to pay almost $200 for the cancellation fee. So after moving up the ladder of customer service reps and getting no where so I hung up. I believe Monday I will be calling the Public Service Commissioner. Does anyone have any other ideas, and by the way i'm not paying it either. Thanks for letting me rant.

[SFDdelta1]

In the first part of July I finally became fed up with my AT&T service. I was not having any service in my house or the golf course, dropped calls, and lastly calling someone and the call connecting, but silence on the other end of the line. I walked in and cancelled my service. The At&T rep told me there would be no charge for the cancellation since they could not provide me with adequate service. Well taday I received a bill from AT&T for $358.93. After a second thought to throw the bill away I decided to call. After thirty minutes I was told my service was not cancelled and still active. After other conversatoin I was able to get the past two months of service taken off the bill, but they want me to pay almost $200 for the cancellation fee. So after moving up the ladder of customer service reps and getting no where so I hung up. I believe Monday I will be calling the Public Service Commissioner. Does anyone have any other ideas, and by the way i'm not paying it either. Thanks for letting me rant.

we had the same problems

been very happy with sprint thow...........

99.00 bucks a month ulimited minutes, internet, and email

E

[Drakeshead]

If you live in the south, no matter who you send your money to, your service is still through AT&T.

Since BellSouth was bought out by AT&T, there have been a lot of changes.

[SFDdelta1]

If you live in the south, no matter who you send your money to, your service is still through AT&T.

Since BellSouth was bought out by AT&T, there have been a lot of changes.

man when it was bell south it was the best service i have ever had and they had the best customer service. If you had a problem it was taken care of right then and there. It started goin down hill with cingular took and and hit rock bottom when at& sucks took over

E

[kc86]

I have cellular south now and could not be happier with my service.

[ducksplorer]

If you live in the south, no matter who you send your money to, your service is still through AT&T.

+1 on that. I do contract work for att connect tech and you will go into a business that has a sprint or verizon T1 line and they probably dont know its actually indirectly through at&t. You think "I'm getting a better deal" or "I am going to get a way from at&t" and your right back with them. Also you take companies like dixienet out of Ripley, they re-sale at&t phone service and internet too. On the cellular side on the other hand thats a different story. I believe they are separated out like they should be. Real competition. I could be wrong though.

[Drakeshead]

SFDdelta1,

It doesn't just stop with customers; we as employees are feeling the pinch as well. AT&T philosophy is, "if you do not want to do what we tell you to do, we will find someone that will do it and at a cheaper price."

As for Cellular South and other wireless services, those can be completely seperate from AT&T with the exception for the carrier portion of the services. Any company can go out and rent/lease land and put up a cell tower and then run fiber back to the AT&T central office where it gets on a carrier, or fiber highway, back to the main companies switching equipment. So, Cellular South has their own cell towers, but AT&T digital technicians and construction crews actually get the service from the central office to the cell tower. From the cell tower back to the AT&T central office the data then gets on a carrier back to Highland Colony Parkway where I believe is the Cellular South switch. So technically all that Cellular South owns is the tower and the switch and lease out fiber space from AT&T.

When services comes from land line, there is no other company in the Southeast US that has a dial tone switch except AT&T. Now, there may be some extremely small communities such as Eagle Lake that have an extremely small switch of their own, but for 99.9999% of the South it is all AT&T.

There reason for this is that there is no possible way to put multible switches in every town and run seperate copper cable pairs to each house. Heck, we would have copper telephone cables running up and down the poles all across the state.

Back in 1978 Judge Green passed down a law to cut out monopolies. Remember, back then all we had was AT&T. So, AT&T broke up and Judge Green also stated that even thought AT&T had placed all of the copper to everyones house, the customer actually owned the copper and not AT&T so the customer had the right to choose their service provider. Judge also mandated that AT&T, at the time, would have to sell their dial tone under other business names (Sprint, Verizon, etc) at a lower cost to the business to resale to the customer for less than what AT&T would be able to sell the service. Basically to even out the playinhg field for other telecommunication companies to get in the game, AT&T had to cut their own services for other business to help get them established in their regions. This is why you saw small companies such as Now Communications open up. They only billed the customer, they never had technicians, etc. All they have is a billing section as BellSouth, at the time, had to do all of the work at a lower cost for Now Communications.

The cut price law was still in affect until two years ago at which time the bill was to expire and congress did not continue the bill. So, to some extent the playing field was evened out.

Although your bill may say "AT&T", you are not really dealing with AT&T. You are dealing with SBC, Southwest Bell Commnunications. SBC and BellSouth combined their wireless service somewhere around six or seven years ago with SBC owning 60% and BellSouth owning 40% to form Cingular. Back in 2005, SBC bought out AT&T, which only delt with carrier service, no dial tone stuff, and SBC took on the name AT&T because the name is recognized world wide. In May 2006, AT&T, formerly SBC, bought BellSouth.

[LODI QUACKER]

WHAT A MESS!!!!!!!!!

[LostBoy]

What's a cell phone?