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AT&T to Leave Residential Business
Herve writes "Just got it from a press release on the AT&T website: 'AT&T will no longer be competing for residential local and standalone long distance customers. The company stressed that existing residential customers will continue to receive the quality service they expect from AT&T; however, the company will no longer be investing to acquire new customers in this segment.'"
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Their phone calls were annoying, and after an experience with three consecutive rude customer service people back in 2000 I swore I would never do business with their consumer arm again.
My grandfather and uncle were both Western Electric engineers, so it's kind of in the family working for AT&T (their part went to Lucent). After the breakup it was all over for that company, they couldn't do anything right. PC marketing, Unix marketing, selling leased lines, every time I dealt with AT&T it was a hassle and they were inferior to their competition.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
After working there 21 years, it was easy to see that the company had become just a shadow of its former self. There's not much left other than the name. People still associate the name with the 1.1 million employee behemoth that it used to be. Back in the day, doing things right was the way things got done. Now, at less than 60k employees, saying its done is job one, and making it work (or not) is an afterthought. It's really sad.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
For years, in the UK, I thought that AT&T was the
...
height that all companies should try to strive to.
In 1996 I moved to the US. I started out with NYNEX who weren't much of a problem, however,
when they became Verizon, I decided to try AT&T.
What a fucking disaster. They blocked my 3rd party
DSL installation for months without providing any
reasons to the 3rd party provider. They refused
to let me carry my phone # even though I was
moving from one apartment to another, in the same
building. They started to heavily spam my snail
mailbox even though I was now a customer of
theirs. After months of this crap I dropped them in favor of Verizon - that was 3.5 years ago. In March, this year, they started sending me phone bills (containing no calls) even though I told
them to fuck off years ago.
My god what a hassle it was to get them to stop...
when I finaly got through to one of their drones
the excuse was that verizon had not told them, 3.5 years back, that they do not have my business
any more. The _really_ sad thing is that when I terminated service, verizon, myself and AT&T were
on a party line where verizon confirmed that they
would be dealing with me and AT&T was out of the picture - I believe that is required by law.
They stopped for a month and started again. After serveral months of this they have now started to
send me bills with a balance of zero(0). Man!
what an inept and fucking wasteful company. I
shudder to think what it is like to work there
I hope they burn in hell. Its no wonder no one wants to deal with them.
- Moomin
Can paraphrase exactally what has changed in the last 20 years and how it happend?
in a nutshell? Poor Management.
They made really bone-headed decisions. They bought TCI an dother cable companies in an attempt to get into the cable biz but lacked the management that understood cable (and let go all the top management from those cable companies.) They acquired MediaOne cable in 2000 and that caused a HUGE amount of infighting because the mediaOne people were not made to conform and join the team which created a huge us/them inside the company further ripping it apart until Comcast acquired the cable arm and started to fix what was wrong.
Their advertising wing switched form giving the company a good image to the annoy everyone to hell with telemarketing. They refuse to keep tight reigns on their telemarketing companies so slamming by AT&T is a common occourance.
Overall the management of AT&T is watching the company spiral the drain and have no idea how to fix it.
It's the same cause at every failed company.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What the hell business do they have left if not for residential and stand alone customers? Its like McDonalds deciding not to sell hamburgers anymore.
A big part of the reason for that is that the Bell Labs division went to Lucent when it split off. I think it's terrible that Lucent is on it's last legs, most people have no idea how many innovations came out of that group of people.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
The phone company generated a lot of ill will amongst their customers-with-no-choice in the 60's and 70's (see Lily Tomlin's character, Ernestine) altho their stock was always considered a good stable investment that you could pass on to your children. If history is any guide, and it often is NOT, we just might see this same pattern of crumbling happen to Msft in 20/30 years, if not sooner - a great investment, but lots of PO'd customers. Once the customers wise up to what's going on and seek better alternatives those vast monopoly profits won't be guarenteed.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Since I dumped AT&T's long distance, they have been mercelessly and relentlessly calling and begging me to come back. Since I had a prior business relationship, it doesn't matter that I'm on every do-not-call list I know of. They can still legally annoy me for 18 months. It also doesn't matter that I tell them to take me off their list and stop calling. They're still trying to endear themselves to me. Might work.
As for VoIP, I'll keep my POTS a while longer. A year or so ago, 40% of all public IP traffic was spam sent by wide open brodaband zombie PCs. Now, it's at least 70%. See a trend here?
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Thoolie asks...
"Just wondering, 20 years ago all you could get was ATT, now they are selling off their arms and legs left and right. Can paraphrase exactally what has changed in the last 20 years and how it happend? (I think we all know about the anti monoploy suit and the baby bells, but there must be more?)"
There's a couple of pretty good books available that will give you some excellent ideas as to What Went Wrong with the Bell System, and much of it can be blamed on the U.S. legal system.
For starters, I recommend 'The Rape of Ma Bell: The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World' by Alfred Duerig and Constantine Kraus. It will give you divestiture and breakup from an engineer's perspective. You can find an excerpt from the book here.
Another good one is 'A Voice in the Wilderness' by Alfred Duerig. That one's more of a dedication and autobiography for Constantine Kraus, but it will also give you some more insights into divestiture and What Really Happened.
Both books are out of print, BTW, but you should be able to find them either through Abebooks online, or from Ebay. I got my pair through finding used booksellers with copies on Abebooks.
While I'm thinking about it, the Bell System Memorial site is a wonderful resource for both historical and technical info on the once-great Ma Bell.
From my perspective: The divestiture and breakup of the Bell System was utterly unnecessary, along the lines of using an antiaircraft gun to kill mosquitoes. There had to have been other (and better) ways to go about allowing consumers to connect their own goodies to the lines, encourage development of alternative services, etc.
Happy hunting.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Unless I am wrong about what you are referring to as "home phone service", you are wrong here at least regarding the long distance plan level I have. I pay $2.95 per month and get 5 cents per minutes 24/7. This monthly fee/per minute combo is the lowest I have seen. I was paying $3.95 per month for the same per-minute charge through IDT America until AT&T called. AT&T may have even given me a check for $X when I switched.
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
Thank heavens for this, maybe more people will be spared the hell I had to go through with that bastard of a company.
I had AT&T when I moved to my first apartment out of college. I had had them for college long-distance and thought it was ok, not knowing better. After a year of struggling whenever I wanted to switch plans or adjust information on my bill, and constantly getting phone calls from them for different services, I decided when I moved to my current house, AT&T would be taken out with the garbage.
So, I cancelled 2 weeks before I left the apartment (with a long and arduous phone call with a really nasty, nasty woman) and signed up with Sprint (who were and continue to be just as friendly and helpful as heck). For 4 months after I moved and my long distance had switched, I still got bills from AT&T...mostly just the minimum, but it started building up. I got nasty letters telling me about collection, lawyers, etc. So I sent back a nasty letter, detailing that I had cancelled, if they'd check their damned records, and there was no way in hell I would pay anything.
An apologetic letter arrived that stated that they'd be glad to terminate my account and my balance would be erased. Well, good.
6 months later, I receive a bill from AT&T. $0.00 owed. I throw it in the trash. Six months from that, the same thing...zero dollars owed, thanks for being a great customer. More head scratching followed, paper wafts towards circular file.
I haven't lived at the apartment for 4 years now -- the phone number changed when I moved to my new house and it hasn't been reused for anyone. About every 6 months I still receive a bill from them for $0 that I look at, giggle, and then throw in the trash, amused at the sheer stupidity of it all.
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When the phone companies were split up, I retained my AT&T long distance account out of habit and inertia. One day my bank offered free trials of their online bill-paying service, so I tried it out, with no problems with any company--except AT&T.
The service says to allow one week for payment. I authorize payment THREE weeks before the bill is due. Online screen shows bill as "paid" TWO weeks before it is due. AT&T claimed the payment was two days late. After a lot of phone calls the bank got me an image of the cancelled check showing it was, in fact, cashed ONE week before the bill was due. Got that?
Now get this. Remember, this is the first month I'm using the online bill-paying service, and have never paid a bill late before (in something like twenty years), didn't pay this one late, and even at the beginning AT&T acknowledged having received payment.
I start getting obnoxious calls every evening from a collection agency.
Even after AT&T acknowledges that the bill was paid, the collection agency keeps calling.
Even after AT&T says the collection service has been told to stop, it keeps calling. (The collection agency, or at any rate the people who are calling me, say they have no record that AT&T has told them to stop).
Even after I mail the collection service full documentation of everything, including screen shots of the bank's online bill-paying records and the image of the cancelled check, they keep calling and people at the collection agency tell me they have received the records and everything is OK, the collection agency keeps calling. (The people who are calling claim not to have been told to stop by the people at the agency who acknowledged receiving the records).
EVENTUALLY they do stop.
At this point I'm a tiny little bit furious so I fire off an angry letter to the office of the president of AT&T telling the story, opining that a refund of the month's bill would be fair recompense for my bad treatment and that if they'll do that we'll call it even and I'll stay with AT&T.
I get a phone call on my answering machine from the president's office saying they completely understand and agree are sorry it all happened and they will send me a check for $65 and want to keep me as a customer.
The check doesn't arrive.
Here is a company that could have easily kept me as a customer. The only, single, solitary thing they needed to do was not to actively drive me away.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
One word, 'transistor'. AT&T when they were a monopoly arguably the best R&D, Bell Labs. The thing with R&D is you're basically paying a bunch of smart people to go play and use their imagination. So you have these people who probably come up with a few thousand ideas that amount to crap and occasionally come up with something like the transistor. Thats really hard for a bean counter to reconcile. They traded that for several years of profits but nothing really new, Who knows what Bell Labs may have come up with that AT&T would have had the rights to.
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
If AT&T had never been split up, I think we would still be making calls using a big rotory dial phone. Or you could pay $5 a month extra for tone dialing. Long distance would be $1 a minute. DSL would be unheard of. Sure this would all be federally regulated, but it's not hard to convince the regulators to let you raise rates as long as you put together a business case for it. Despite some of the headaches, deregulation is the best thing to ever happen to telecom. It worked out well for many companies, and would even have benefitted AT&T if they hadn't enormously screwed up.
One investment firm derated their stock to "junk bond" status, joining the ranks of once-mighty firms like Charter Cable. Another firm's report has labeled the company as a "prospect for a takeover, or buyout".
IMHO, if they don't do something mighty desparate here shortly, they will be permantenly mired in the red with no way out of it except for selling out, or bankruptcy.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Am I the ONLY one here that has actually used AT&T local service? (as in they were my carrier for local-only calls) Everyone is spouting about their long distance service, which I have never used, but I have been an AT&T local service customer for the past two years.
Over the years I had become so disgusted from my dealings with Ameritech/SBC that when I heard AT&T was providing local service in my area, I signed up right away. I figured ANYTHING had to be better than SBC. I had always found SBC/Ameritech's customer service reps to be rude, incompetant and just plain lazy. It was commonplace to have to call back multiple times to have a change made because the reps simply didn't do their jobs. And before you could hang up they would hound you like vultures trying to get you to buy their stupid add-on services.
Being an AT&T customer was an enlightening experience. Every single time I called them for any reason the representative was very polite and efficient. They were so good I even went out of my way to report one of their reps for being so helpful and nice. The price was the same as SBC +/- $1. I had my bill automatically charged to my credit card each month and never had a problem in two years. (trying cc billing with Ameritech resulting in getting overbilled and I had to discontinue it).
In short, AT&T local service was like the opposite of Ameritech/SBC. AT&T represented everything I wanted from a phone company. After two years with them I cancelled my service last month only because I'm moving and I'm going to be without a phone for a while, but I was sorry I had to leave them, and I'll be bummed if I wont be able to sign up for their local services at my new place.