Fuck you Cingular

We could sign up for a similar plan, but we'd have to send/receive at least 51 messages a month to make it worth it.

I pay $75 a month for 300 daytime minutes (weeknights after 7:00pm and weekends are free), unlimited incoming/outgoing texts and unlimited picture mail and internet/data.

I send WAAAAAY more than that.

(Shakes....you just keep it shut. )

Or else what? You're out five whole dollars?

Well I sent/receive about 15 text messages or less per month. I'd rather be paying 10 cents for each of those text messages, instead of 20-40 cents per text message (which is what it would work out to at $5 per month). Yes, I'm a cheap fucking bastard, but these phone companies try to stick it to us anyway they can. Keep in mind they just tried to charge us more than the agreed upon contract. My new phone is pretty much designed to get me to spend more money. I can access the Cingular Mall at the press of one button, how fucking useful! The games on my phone are only trial versions and they ask you to buy the full versions. They give me six shitty ringtones while encouraging me to go ahead and buy my favorite one. The first day I got the phone, I accidentally pressed a wrong button and they charged me for using the internet, even though I hit END right away.

Within the first 30 days anything can change, including returning and canceling. And that billing doesn't make any sense. Familytalk plans work such that one line is billed at $50 or $60 or $80 and so on and add-ons are billed at $10 a month.

Even though the name will change back to AT&T Wireless, there will be no connection to the old AT&T Wireless. Rates won't change, just the name. SBC, which became AT&T after it bought AT&T, always owned Cingular. They were up until recently the 60% owner of Cingular, by the new AT&T buying Bell South, SBC(the new AT&T) now owns 100% of Cingular.

The reason free incoming SMS will never happen again is it's part of the reason the old AT&T Wireless went under. If Cingular had not bought them they would have went bankrupt. Their rate plans were just too good. There was little money to be made in anything under $70 a month because of everything that they gave away for free.

Careful there MrsA. You pay $5 a month for unlimited IN Network SMS/MMS. That's only valid to other Verizon Wireless Customers while you are in their In Network area, which is most of their network, but there is some places it doesn't apply.

I do not have a land line so I don't mind paying a little extra for my cell phone. I pay $60 per month and I get:

1,000 anytime minutes
Unlimited two-way minutes.
Free nights and weekends starting at 1900 local.
Unlimited text and multimedia messaging.
Unlimited internet usage and e-mail.
Free long distance to anywhere in North America and Hawaii.
Free/no roaming.

Shit. I bet I sent and received 20 - 25 yesterday when the board was down.

[-]The sales rep said something about not being able to do a Family plan, and put her on a "National 350" plan, insisting that that it would be only $10 for each additional phone.[/-] See below.

AT&T was so good. Are there any phone companies that do free incoming text messages still?

Edit: I was just looking at the bill, and I think the National Plan 350 was part of our original AT&T contract from 4 years ago, under a category called shared group 2. The new one is under shared group 4, but it's labeled as some alphanumeric code. Apparently, from January 2-20, we were being billed for both plans. That could explain the $140 bill, but it still doesn't explain why my sister, my dad, and myself were all charged between $30-40 (my mother is the primary line).

I think Cingular hates us for being such loyal customers.

There is no such thing thing as a 350 minute plan. Something is totally not right there. PM me if you want some more help on this. Any other questions would be too personal to ask in public. There is no more free incoming text for the same reason that phones don't all come with cases and car chargers and headsets. Companies found out that people would pair for it instead.

T-Mobile gives shitty reception in my area, and is owned by the Nazis.

I get 5 bars everywhere apart from on the tube

Yah well you live in Europe. The whole cellphone industry is an illustration where the free market lost to government mandate. The European governments mandating a cellular standard and assisting in one network has made cell phones vastly cheaper to own and operate. Also with the one standard innovation has been focused on making the phones themselves do more and more. Here we have a patchwork of incompatible networks where everybody has to independently buy time on other people's networks making the owning and operation of cellphones much more expensive per minute. This has also led to the companies themselves making it such that once you got a phone a subsidy lock for most people would ensure that phone would be useless if you wanted to change carriers, even if your contract ended. Hell with CDMA technology, even unlocking it won't make much a difference as the nature of the tech makes it so it's useless with another carrier most of the time. If one standard had been agreed to here in the 90s then we'd be lightyears ahead of Europe and if it had been the same standard then cellphones as a whole might be much more advanced.

I use T-Mobile. And as I understand it, that lets me in on the ability to use (unlocked) Cingular -- sorry, AT&T -- handsets such as the iPhone (if I wanted to shell out 6 Benjamins... Jeeeeeezus) with a significantly better coverage area than CingAT&ularT offers.

First off, T-Mobile has far weaker national coverage maps than Cingular, the other GSM technology carrier in the states...

Second, it is illegal to unlock a Cell phone incoded to a specific carrier in the US, and if you get cought by the fcc, you can be fined...

No Ted, it's most definitely not illegal to unlock a phone in the US.

you can be fined for it, at least in a retail celular store. I know of one location which got busted by the FCC on rt46 in jersey. the store got hit up with a fine and the owner shut it down shortly later, because one of his guys was unlocking cell phones assigned to a carrier...

I call BS.

fine was $250 per cellphone known to be modified (ie unlocked)


Something to do with modifing a certin class of telecommunications divice against FCC regulations without a liscense or FCC permission. Radio shack made a big deal to make sure non of the people working in their stores was doing that. If you did, it was grounds for termination...

It is not illegal to do it, Ted.

Cingular will do it for their customers after 6 months of service knowing full well the phone will never perform 100% with another carrier.

While you can use an unlocked phone, it'll never perform as well as a T-Mobile branded phone. The reason is because American carriers all handle call completion in different ways. Cingular for instance connects all calls at 850 mhz and then will switch to 1900 mhz if needed. That is hardcoded into the phone, unlocking it will not change that. T-Mobile only used 1900 mhz so in areas where there is a competing 850 mhz signal the phone will try and complete the call on a frequency that T-Mobile doesn't use. This doesn't happen all the time, but will result in extra dropped calls. As far as coverage area, T-Mobile's native network is the 2nd smallest in the country, only the Sprint CDMA network is smaller. In well over half the country you're already roaming onto what's left of the Cingular 1900 mhz network.

Lucky. I got one.

Yup. Same paradigm in play. Carriers have now found out not only will people pay for ring tones, but if shit is loaded in the phone they'll pay for more ringtones and thus need a data plan to cover those charges as well.

It is illegal only if your contract states that the phone is not your property, or if you are modifying the device in such a manner that it goes against FCC regulations (in other words, it starts interfering with other devices).

I'll also add that one of the cell phone providers went after a company that offered phone unlocking, because they claimed that the DMCA protects them from having the software reverse-engineered. Their claim was that because they offer phones at a discount, that the phone should be tied to their service. So Radioshack probably told its employees it was illegal because they didn't want to have to be the ones fighting the big court battle against Sprint or Nextel or Cingular over the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (which is a poorly written piece of crap).

Oh, I found this nice little link. Before 11/17/2006, it actually WAS illegal by the DMCA, until the copyright office came out with its newest exemption list. See #5

http://www.copyright.gov/1201/docs/1201_recommendation.pdf

See, I was right, they just changed the law two months or so ago that I wasn't aware of.

Nonesense. It was never illegal to unlock the phone, what they went after was companies trying to reverse engineer encryption techniques used in phone calls. It's apples and oranges. It's been Cingular policy to unlock phones after 6 months of ownership for the last 4 years. There's been businesses in New York City that would do the same thing for just as long.

You can argue with the link I provided, but it's pretty cut and dry.

You're misunderstanding what they were trying to prosecute, that or I'm personally guilty of multiple felonies on behalf of a large corporation at work. Hmmm......I wonder which it is.