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Cingular-AT&T Wireless Merger Complete
bigmase521 writes "PRNNewsWire, Phonescoop.com, and this thread on Howardforums.com, are reporting that the Cingular/AT&T Wireless Merger is now complete. Cingular bought out AT&T Wireless for ~$41B to become the nations largest cellular provider. Details of the merger, and full press coverage, including the audio of this afternoon's conference call can be found here, and Cingular and AT&T customers can see what is/isn't changing for them at newcingular.com."
Its too bad this could not have taken place sooner. I dumped AT&T a few months ago due to very poor customer service and because AT&T had absurdly high rates for international calling when I travel (calls from New Zealand to the US were something like $8.00/minute with AT&T) I went with T-Mobile at the time and have been for the most part satisfied, although coverage in remote areas of the American West is weak due to a less well developed GSM network. After reading an article in the Wall St. Journal (not linked because its a subscription article) this morning, it turns out however, even if I had remained with AT&T nee Cingular I would have had to deal with the same coverage issues because Cingular will move their customers from TDMA phones to GSM phones.
So, just like when the TDMA markets were rolling out some years ago, it took a couple years to expand them to remote areas. I suspect fairly uniform GSM coverage throughout remote areas in the near future. Perhaps if Cingular provides better service and lower rates, they might win myself and many others back.
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I have AT&T, and the area I live in (Los Angeles County) has lots of Cingular zones. Whenever my phone in on a Cingular network, I have to dial the area code of people I am trying to reach who are in the same area code as me. If you try to just dial the number without the area code, Cingular says it cant connect.
This just happened to me again today, so this merger may be complete business-wise, but there are still bugs to work out of the network.
Vonal Declosion
Nope.
Vodafone.
They're not in the US. About 6 billion people aren't either.
(Note: I *AM* in the US. I use Sprint. Commence mocking!)
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
I'm a Cingular subscriber and I recently bought a Sony Ericsson T637, which is bluetooth enabled. I can sync it with my Mac and my bluetooth headset with no problem, as well as connect to other bluetooth phones. I'm not sure how Verizon cripples bluetooth, but from all outward appearances, Cingular does not cripple it all.
"Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
- Deep Thought
AT&T Wireless split from AT&T Corp back in the summer of 2001.
Vodafone owns 44% of Verizon Wireless, so they are in the US. Sort of. In that half-assed sort of way.
ATT Wireless was never much better a company anyway. They're both morally bankrupt companies. I work customer service for ATT Wireless, and for the last 6 months, ATTWS management have been saying nothing but 'renew every single contract you possibly can', customer service be damned.
Rollover minutes are a fair, humane feature. The equipment both Cingular and AT&T offered has always had that certain geek factor not provided by most other providers (though T-Mobile looks pretty good in that respect).
The thing is, I've been at Verizon for over two years as a refugee from some truly horrible Cingular service. Specifically, I had terrible luck trying to find an optimal place to use my phone, a problem I haven't had at all with Verizon.
I'd love to get a Sony/Ericsson Bluetooth phone, something that Verizon just doesn't offer (their Motorola phones' Bluetooth implementation seems to be gimpy). But without decent reception, well, it wouldn't be much of a user experience. I'm going to be watching what develops here closely. If Cingular gets its act back together with regards to reception, sure, I'll go back.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
I'm now on my second Bluetooth phone from AT&T, and both have synced just fine with my Macs. I haven't tried using them in a Bluetooth-enabled car, but they're by no means limited to use with headsets, for example.
This one's a Sony-Ericsson T616; its predecessor was a Nokia 3650, "world phone" but unfortunately AT&T "built out" their network in the rural areas around me using a different GSM frequency band than any of the ones supported by that tri-band phone. (It was 900/1800/1900MHz; they had 900MHz in town, but out of town deployed somewhere around 800-850Mhz. Wankers.)
Here, Cingular is inheriting a pretty good network; FCC databases show that AT&T's tower count in this county is about double anyone else's. I think some of the others are trying to build out and catch up, so maybe in a few years I'll have other feasible options.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Cingular+AT&T
Sprint
Verizon
Alltel (they DO have national coverage, anyway)
T-Mobile
US Cellular (I know they exist, but I think there are large areas where you can't buy their phones (where I live, for one). They still work, though - we looked at US Cellular when trying to find a good actual plan (we were on prepaid))
Nextel
Tracfone (does that count, though?)
Virgin Mobile and Boost aren't listed - they are really Sprint and Nextel's prepaid services, and Boost is most definitely not nationwide.
>why on earth do I need a new phone to change how they bill me?
Because the billing is done now with four different billing systems, two of which they outsource completely.
I happen to work at the company that currently does AT&T Wireless. We have an older legacy mainframe system where most of their billing is done, and a newer unix client/server system that they were in the middle of migrating to when this happened.
The phones are on completely different networks now, and the billing system your service uses is solely determined by that. Until they consolidate their billing by either merging to one system (which takes years) or by enhancing each system to have identical billing features (which could take as long), the only way to get billed by a different system, and get the billing features you want, is to change networks. Some phones can be switched, some can't (you can't take a TDMA phone and switch it to GSM unless you want to be stuck with analog-only service). You may have to get an new phone to move from a AWS network to a Cingular one.
>the PHONE doesn't bill me
*sigh*
Cingular Wireless Office Of the President Stanley T. Sigman 5565 Glenridge Connector Atlanta GA 30349 404-236-6000 THIS WAS SOME HARD INFO FOR ME TO COME BY