Image courtesy of Engadget. Obviously.

FIRST REASON TO HATE AT&T

What you see in the picture above is an AT&T 3G MicroCell. It basically acts as your own personal cell phone tower in your house which routes calls over your home cable/DSL connection. A nice workaround if you, like many AT&T customers, have little or no reception in your house.

Except you have to pay for the MicroCell. $150 bucks before $100 mail-in rebate.

Oh, but to get that rebate, you have to pay for a “MicroCell plan” at $19.99/month.

If you opt-out of adding the $19.99 per month you 1. lose out on the $100 rebate and 2. any minutes you use while on the MicroCell will come out of your monthly pool of voice minutes – despite not actually using AT&T’s network to place the calls.

And any data you use on your phone while connected to the MicroCell still counts against the newly imposed 2 GB cap – even though you’re using your own home network and not AT&T’s towers.

So, if I had this “service”, I’d be paying AT&T to let me use my home Internet connection to get the service I’m already paying them for, but not getting.

AT&T should be handing these things out like candy and begging people to use them: it expands their coverage without having to build new towers, in addition to easing traffic on their already fragile network. Instead, they’re charging their customers $240/year to use the phones they paid for on a service they’re charged for each month, but can’t use.

Courtesy of Johnny Mitchel

SECOND REASON TO HATE AT&T

AT&T tethering is also a scam. They’ve capped their data plans at 2 GB/month. Fine. 2 GB is 2 GB, right? No. If you want to use your computer to access some of your allotment of data you have to fork over an extra $20/mo. Jerks.

This is indicative of a larger problem with wireless carriers as a whole: they can’t admit they’re just dumb pipes. I long for the day when I don’t pay for minutes, texts and data – I just pay for access to the network/Internet. It’s all 1′s and 0′s, right? Do tiered pricing if you want. But don’t charge me $20 for access to data I already paid for (both in the form of tethering and SMS).

At home I pay $42/month for (virtually) unlimited Internet access at speeds of around 12 Mbps. I can watch Hulu, play Xbox Live, chat with friends, send email, make Skype calls, do video chats with my parents, etc. It’s my data and I can do with it what I want.

Why not let me do all of the stuff listed above on my phone for the same price? No. Instead it’s $30/mo for data, $20/mo to use that data from a laptop and $20/mo more for text messaging. All on top of a required voice plan which restricts when and who I can call. Absurd.

/venting

P.S. Virgin Mobile has a killer plan here: $25/mo = 300 voice minutes and unlimited 3G data, email and text… without a contract. Wish I could use it with my unlocked iPhone.