All Articles Tagged AT&T

AT&T has modified their Terms of Service to bar their customers from griping. Their new terms of service now includes language that states they can terminate your connection for doing things that “tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.” An important distinction: the threat gag is just for the DSL portion of AT&T, aka BellSouth.

I don’t expect it to work; actually, I expect it to backfire. Case in point, I’m going to slur the name of AT&T in this very sentence when I would not have otherwise:

the halls of AT&T are nothing more than a powder room for dandies, johnny-come-latelies and fops; the same is equally true if not more so for AT&T’s parents, affiliates, and subsidiaries.

According to an exclusive by macapper.com, picture messaging and AIM could be in the works with the so-close-you-could-stab-it 1.1.1 update. I’ll grant that it could just as easily be a screw-up by AT&T, or maybe he’s got his iPhone on some non-iPhone plan and just temporarily forgot about it. Maybe, though, it’s the real deal. You never know.

What is up with you, AT&T? Seriously, are you singling me out for some reason? Am I a special needs case? Didn’t you announce to myself and the rest of the world that you would put an end to unnecessary paper carnage for iPhone data billing? More importantly, didn’t I already disable printed invoicing in my account profile…months ago? So why do you do me like this?

I go to my mailbox and discover that you’ve sent me, again, not one…but TWO impregnated billing envelopes, packed with over 60 pages of invoices, like two overstuffed burritos. This makes the third consecutive month that you’ve sent me these love packs by mail. What have I done to deserve this? Have I not paid my bill, loyally, on time each month? Enough is enough. You’re starting to creep me out, as though you are stalking me. I can almost feel Stan Sigman standing outside my window, holding his cue cards.

While browsing today I found Dobson’s coverage map. Dobson is the wireless company that AT&T is in the process of gobbling up. It’s not a huge network, but it’s enough to make Dobson #9 or so in the US. As you see above, it will at least bring a bunch of coverage to Alaska, Kentucky, West Virginia, the Texas Panhandle region, and the Great Lakes region. If you want to check out the overlaps in coverage for yourself, here’s AT&T’s coverage map.

figures 1 & 2: some iPhone backgrounds that relate to bricks or bricking.

So a bunch of display iPhones were stolen. Not really news; they took the Treos too (good call on that). The AT&T store guy is unconcerned that the iPhones were stolen, since Apple can brick (deactivate, render useless, turn into a heavy shiny thing, etc) the phones remotely by their serials.

Wait, what?! I can’t decide if I should be discomfited by this or not. I wonder if he’s posturing for AT&T’s sake, or if this is something that Apple can really do.

But for real, if Apple can do this to stolen phones, they can do it to hacked or unlocked phones. Again, that’s if they can do this at all. Or should I perhaps say, if they’re willing to do this at all. Bricking phones willy-nilly across the internet would burn through a lot of the goodwill that they currently enjoy, so I doubt it would happen. Maybe the remote bricking process requires AT&T to ask Apple to destroy the phones really nice. So yeah. No discomfiture.

On the internet, no one can hear your bluff. A blog claims to be offering a $100,000 reward to anyone who can produce a free software unlock solution for iPhone, and deliver it by the chimes of midnight tonight. Of course, no information whatsoever is given to back the legitimacy of this claim, such as who its underwriters are so I’d wager this cash payment is coming from someone’s HP deskjet printer. Nothing more than a single email address is available for correspondence, which doesn’t instill confidence.

My favorite quote from the site, which gives good insight into the minds behind this project…

Me and my friends are very involved in the open source community and yet everybody who worked on IRC, now is concerned about getting paid and charging everybody for an unlock software. I can’t believe it, it’s like Linus Torvalds would start charging for compiling the kernel.

Imagine that…expecting payment for your work and talent. Why, it almost sounds like Capitalism!

Yeah, these are a bunch of kids.

I’ll make a counter offer for anyone who can produce such a solution; one shiny wooden nickel. Any takers?

ReadSource

It looks like the unlocking service of UniquePhones.com is ready to unlock the iPhone, but AT&T lawyers have slowed down the process. Their unlocking service was supposed to have been available today; instead, all that is available at their iphoneunlocked.com site is an opportunity to give them your IMEI and your email, in what they call an invite.

It is now 12N EST – the time when we said we would be offering iphone unlocking software to our customers.

We have the software. It works. And we are ready to go.

Seems AT&T is a bit annoyed at the idea. A middle of the night phone call from a Silicon Valley law firm is slowing down the release of the software to you.

Stay tuned.

On their blog, they mention the difficulty of knowing what to do with the code in the event that AT&T bans them from operating an unlocking service. The lawyers will figure that stuff out fairly promptly, I would imagine. I figured this site to be legit, it’s too much work to be a fake and do the linking with uniquephones.com, so I registered for an invite. It looks like they expect to be up and running within the week:

Your details have been stored, expect an invite code in the next few days!

I just received a text message earlier today from AT&T, notifying me they are eliminating itemized details in billing, which has been the cause in a recent massive bloat in billing from the wireless carrier.

At&T free msg: We are simplifying your paper bill, removing itemized detail. To view all detail go to att.com/mywireless. Still need full paper bill? Call 611

Nice to see AT&T going green. And it only took public humiliation to change their policy. Who knew?

Thanks to Scott Berks for tipping me as well.

AT&T has made a change to my bill, and I didn’t ask for it. I just received this text message from 604-1:

AT&T free msg: We are simplifying your paper bill, removing itemized detail. To view all detail go to att.com/mywireless. Still need full paper bill? Call 611.

Awww, no more 300 page box bills. Hooray for the environment! Also, and I’m sure this is totally unrelated, but this will save AT&T a wad of cash on postage.

Let this serve as a warning to all readers about the dangers of unexpected international roaming charges. Heric Silva shares his experience and illustrates why you need to keep an eye on your iPhone while traveling overseas.

I recently went to Europe for 9 days. I used my iPhone over there and it seemed to work very well. I received my bill the other day and it was over $1200, yes $1200. When I had my Treo I usually get a bill for about $400 to $500 when I was in Europe. Now the problem is that the iPhone does not have anyway of controlling the amount of data you receive, unlike the treo where you can limit the amount of email data you download and giving you the option to download the rest if you like and letting you know the size prior to downloading it so you can see if it is worth the money. When I used my iPhone and press any of the applications that require updating to retrieve stock, weather, email or whatever it needs…you get hit really hard on the $ per KB international roaming charges. Also the email client does not store the downloaded/viewed emails it always has to pull them down from the web so even if I already looked at it it would download it again and incur roaming data charge!

This is a major flaw that will cost users a bundle. Why do they bother to give you 8GB of memory if they don’t even use it for email storage and downloaded files. The iPhone is essentially an iPod with a phone and the phone portion is very limited.

I called AT&T to complain and they said “sorry these are all legitimate charges, give Apple a call.” I have called them but I was on hold for about 45 minutes so I gave up and will try again. I think they should pay my bill, their poor design causes the users to incur unnecessary data charges.

This flaw should be made public and they should re-reimburse all users that have incurred these massive charges.