Cingular Hates Their Longtime Customers

August 2nd, 2006 Davis Posted in Uncategorized |

Everytime I see anything written about Cingular I know that it has to be about how they are screwing someone. This time they have decided that they want to charge an extra $5 per month to long time customers who refuse to upgrade their phone to Cingular’s new system. I will never understand how they became as popular as they did, but I’ve never seen any company consistently try and harass their customers more then Cingular. I’ve been a Cingular customer twice in my life. The first time I was smooth talked into signing up with them, but immedietely began to have problems. Whether it was realizing that I didn’t check the fine print on what nights meant (my night starts a lot earlier than 9pm) or finding out that they prorated my first months bill after the fact (fact my first bill was over $300), lets just say we didn’t start things out on the right foot.

A little over 2 years ago, I wanted to switch from a local carrier in San Francisco to something more reliable and decided to pay a premium to get AT&T Wireless. I wanted a nice phone that didn’t cost me money to use my mp3s, so I picked up the 2 year contract to help subsidize my cost. Of course no sooner did I sign the contract, then Cingular bought out AT&T Wireless for boatloads of money. The entire time I was an AT&T Wireless customer Cingular continually tried to hard sell me on switching to their network, but I kept refusing after seeing what they did to Thomas Hawk when he wanted to use his Audiovox. Maybe this is part of the reason why they have to fine their customers $5 a month for not upgrading their phones, but frankly I think this is a bad move on their part. First they lock you in with long term contracts, then they refuse to let you transfer your phone number until the government makes them and now they want to charge you extra for service, but you can’t transfer your phone to someone else because they’ve intentionally locked down your phone to their network. Something about this just doesn’t seem right about this, I’ll let the class action attorneys sort this one out, but I smell funny money. Ultimately, when I read things like this, it makes me glad that I paid a little bit extra to buy an unlocked phone instead of being held hostage to a bad cell phone company.