Top Carriers Hit With Lawsuits

what i don't get is why someone hasn't sued because cingular made you buy a new device. Its GSM, all they needed to do was unlock the existing GSM phones and put a cingular SIM card in it. All your doing is pissing people off. A friend of mine who is a manager at Cingular still has an AT&T nokia 6820, as soon as his service started to go downhill he just unlocked it and it started workin like a champ again.

Actually unlocking the phone and just popping in a Cingular SIM card wouldn't have fixed any issues an AT&T customer was experiencing. The problem with the old AT&T phones was that none of them were ENS capable and could not "read" that a blue tower and an orange tower were on the same priority level. That's what the 64K SIM card was created for...ENS capable phones.

Correct me if I'm wrong, or just fix what i screwed up, but didn't cingular sell off their old 1900 network to T-mobile because they owned "too much" spectrum and the FCC didn't approve of it? T-mobile allowed cingular to use that network with their blue customers for a certain amount of time before t-mobile charged cingular. So in reality... AT&T customers were actually mad at T-mobile for their crappy reception 😁

That did occur but blaming T-Mobile for it would never happen.

Are you kidding?

Cingular used questionable practices in order to obtain that money in the first place.

Are you telling me people do not have the right to seek legal recourse when they are taken advantage of by a Corporation such as Cingular? That's like saying you can't sue a thief for your money back.

You might wanna think long and hard before responding, because many of the devices and services you take for granted as being reliable and safe to use are only so because of direct result of lawsuits.

If your so upset about the costs of this, perhaps Cingular should have thought about that before they used such policies.

More to the point, why not get upset about the millions of dollars in re-branding and advertising that are ...
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captainplooky said:
You might wanna think long and hard before responding, because many of the devices and services you take for granted as being reliable and safe to use are only so because of direct result of lawsuits.

If your so upset about the costs of this, perhaps Cingular should have thought about that before they used such policies.

Prove to me the policies that Cingular used were different than what any other company would have used. Prove to me that Cingular deliberately degraded the quality of their network so that they could force customers to migrate. Prove to me that any activation fee paid to Cingular by an AT&T customer was unjustifiable when every single customer, new...
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I tell ya what.. it's just too damn bad that i shredded all my Cingular/ATTWS merger crap when i moved..

we were given all kinds of crap that showed what areas were going to be effected and when... How to enforce the 18.00 upgrade fee and rebuttals for customers that don't want to pay it.

Cingular knew exactly what they were doing and it was their holier then thou attitude that pissed everyone off and got them busted..

Prove it to you??? That's what the lawsuit is for... AT&T service did degrade a lot (tdma & gsm) when cingular took over and they lost a lot of customers because of how they handled it. They wanted everybody off the old charter plans and sign them up with a new plan. People who were happy with their plan and phone were forced to either suffer degraded service til the end of their contract, pay an etf, or sign up with cingular. They took over customers who were happy with their service and forced them into a more expensive plan and charged them to pay a `change billing system` fee. The argument for the lawsuit is valid. Proving to the court, not you, is what the lawsuit is about.

First of all, Cingular did nothing that breached the clauses that were WRITTEN INTO AT&T CONTRACTS IN THE INSTANCE OF A MERGER OR BUYOUT.

Secondly, what are all of these customers that left Cingular you speak of? It doesn't seem that way since churn rate has dropped considerably EVERY QUARTER since the buyout. Cingular is doing just fine.

When I was employed for cingular the contract stated that basically service if not guaranteed everywhere. A current employee could prob quote it better, AT&T would have a portion in their contract with the same thing. If you sign up saying you agree that you will not have servce everywhere.... then you don't have service everywhere.... why are you mad?

churn rate has dropped possibly because unsatisfied AT&T customers would have left relatively close to the merger. As the number of AT&T customers dwindled due to their signing new contracts with Cingular or paying the ETF, there would be less customers dropping out of the service. The question is not whether the numbers dwindled the but both the numbers themselves and the difference between them during the subsequent quarters.

pardon my lack of experience here but i was under the impression that AT&T customers could upgrade without the upgrade fee. if you use the vip tool it waives it and offers a 20 bill credit. Is this a new policy in dealing with AT&T customers then? Further more i was told that tdma could get out of contract without an etf. I've only been with cingular for a couple of months and have converted many AT&T accounts from blue to orange and have done so with little complaints due to improved quality of service.

jdod is right no wireless carrier garantees service everywhere you go 😈 and as far as the 18 upgrade fee i dont know what the big deal is, these customer "former ATTWS" had to pay a 15 dollar upgrade fee anyway. I remeber paying myself as a customer 🙄 Nobody made you migrate thats the point in fact there is customers still using former ATT wireless SIM's and plans.... I agree with RUFF this is a case of Greedy consumers..... 👿


i gotta go now i gotta sue Dish Network for making me buy a new HDTV

perhaps you should read the TOS of the old AWS...

i'm pretty sure that there are stipulations in there regarding mergers and buyouts...

I have been a cingular agent for 6 years... most of the people that this affected were the penny pinchers who were on old TDMA contracts with GSM devices

so what you're saying is that Cingy has no business changing people over from outdated contracts that people were on back from the days of ameritech wireless?

you know what plans i'm talking about... the ones that were like 9 bucks a month for 20 minutes... people got all up in arms about that, but seriously, if you are only using 20 minutes a month, and you're not in a contract any more, you should switch to prepaid... because at that point, you're costing cingular, or any other provider, more than you're giving them just by keeping that old ass plan.

In cingulars defense. They are a business. Businesses live on money. So a business is going to find all ways possible to make money if not more of it. In turn to give back to the customer.

cingular was not wrong in charging AT&T customers the $18.00 upgrade fee because cingular customers had to pay it when they upgraded. Also AT&T customers could migrate to cingular at any time and would not have to pay a cancellation fee. After a certain point in time AT&T customer no longer had to pay the upgrade fee, and now get the phones at new customer prices.

So here... the AT&T customer is being treated better than the existing cingular customer.

As far as service being degraded... Well if AT&T customers phones couldn't pick up the cingular ...
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I'll Buy that for a Dollar!