Or is it at&t now? Assuming nobody puts a stop to it, AT&T is buying out BellSouth. For those not paying attention, that means that of the 7 Bells resulting from the original AT&T split, 4 of them are back under the long distance company, and Verizon has the rest except for Qwest having the old USWest. I guess 3 is better than 1 at least, although the bundling the local lines with other things is worse in my opinion than covering larger areas.
Of course that also means that BellSouth won't be complaining about dropping the Cingular name anymore either. Back in November when SBC bought AT&T and changed their name, they said they'd change from Cingular back to AT&T as a brand. Of course with their campaign to move to Cingular and claiming it's better, everyone wondered how long it'd be before they actually tried it. Of course BellSouth owned 40% and was pissed but couldn't do much about it. Now that's out of the picture, but everyone still seems to agree it's a bad idea (last part of article).
It'll be interesting to see what all this happening does to the customer bases. It seems a lot of Cingular customers had no clue that the company eventually plans to change the name again. They're also still losing ground on customers. Add on top of that the new warnings about off network use and in at least one case I know telling people they have a month to switch to another company because the account is costing them too much. Then the big northeast outage tonight... Hopefully that's not going back to their old pre-merger history of not being able to keep the network running. I've been saying for a while that Cingular needs to really improve, primarily to become a competitor with Verizon on something other than cost. Once that happens both companies should improve for customers. Hopefully that'll happen sooner than later, although all this buying companies can't be good for the cash they could be dumping into network upgrades.
My family just switched to Cingular because we now live out in the middle of nowhere and it appears to be one of the few services that gets coverage here.
Interesting to know they are planning some weird stuff...
Back in MN, we had Verizon and hated it. We apparenly lived in a dead zone.
Lo, unfortunately I doubt things are gonna get better if you're still a Blue account. They seem pretty adamant about getting people to switch, to the point where all upgrades and new agreements seem to only be available to Orange customers. One thing to note is IIRC Cingular prorates the ETF, so in the next few months it may become worth it to you to just switch. As for the canceling, if you port your number you won't even get to talk to anyone.
As for the only coverage and the dead zone in MN, that's part of my reasoning. For the most part you have to go with what's available in an area. Verizon knows they're the best at this point. They are gaining customers at such a ridiculous rate that they have no motivation to fix problems like that. Once Cingular can really compete and stops pissing off their customers, both will have to fix stuff like coverage holes and should be expanding coverage areas to keep/build customer base.
It'll be interesting to see if they do it before Sprint overtakes them. Sprint actually has the best quality network where they have coverage. The problem is they're PCS only (which is actually apparently one of the big problems with Cingular GSM in MN too - they rolled out on PCS and haven't moved any to Cellular yet) and half the phones they sell look cool but make the network look horrible. It was nice before VZW locked it down and I could force roaming onto their network - such clean audio. Enough of a rant though...
Yeah, I know of another person who got a letter from Cingular saying we don't support you anymore.
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
I hate Cingular with the fire of a thousand suns. I wish they'd give me a one month ultimatum, because i would switch to Verizon. (I still have about 6 months left on my "2 year contract" that I don't remember signing up for.)
I can't prove it, but I'm positive they did something to my phone or at the very least, the old school network that I'm still running on. They keep trying to sell me their new network, and I keep asking them "Why would I pay more money for fewer minutes, a smaller coverage area, and the same reception?" And I know it's no better than the old network because my friend had it and had just as many problems as I did. I rarely had any trouble before the merger, and as soon as my phone service became Cingular, I had nothing but dropped calls, weird scrambled messages coming across my phone screen and terrible customer service reps (when I could even reach a real person).
Personally, I think you're right. Cingular should be pouring that money into the network and worry about making what they already own run at the standard its current customers enjoyed pre-merger. Otherwise, they will continue to lose people to Verizon. If I'm going to pay more money anyway, I'm going to go with a company that is nationally recognized as having the largest, most reliable network. Since they now offer service up in my former hometown, I am no longer stuck with Cingular for my only option.
I say that when I cancel, and they ask me the inevitable "Why are you leaving us?" I'm going to respond with, "Well, because I don't think "hate" quite gets at the level of loathing and disdain I feel for your company."