The Other Drummer

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.

Ingenius concept: instead of taking screen shots of the phone interface, learn how to use your phone using the actual phone itself.

From the creators:

The…book is the main manual – the phone actually slots into this and becomes the center of attention. Arrows point to the exact locations the user should press, avoiding confusion and eliminating the feeling of being lost in a menu.

Brilliant.

From here.

Dear CNN,

Instead of blasting out the results of sporting events to those who receive your breaking news text alerts (like me) and ruining the game for those who haven’t seen it (like me), you instead send a mass text to everyone informing them that the game has ended and then give them the opportunity to reply with a “Y” if they want to know the result/score.

You’re jerks.

Thanks for nothing,

David

I posted a new poll in the upper right corner of the site. Please take a moment to vote. I’m interested in how you view the services provided by your wireless provider. Do you see them as a source for original content (perhaps Verizon offers video clips from the sporting events that you can have access to for an extra fee each month, in addition to your voice service)?

Or do you see them as more of just a pipe to give you voice and data services?

Or do you see them some other way entirely? I’m honestly curious so let me know on the poll and in the comments.

According to TUAW:

“As Mark Siegel from AT&T explained to me yesterday, “AT&T wants to be as fair as possible to customers who very recently purchased an iPhone.” Thus, if you purchased an iPhone from an AT&T store AFTER May 27, 2008, you have the option of returning the phone to an AT&T store between July 11, 2008 and August 1, 2008 for the new iPhone 3G. Those customers will also be refunded the difference between the price paid for the 2G iPhone and the iPhone 3G.”

I must say I’m impressed. Especially because they’re refunding the difference in the two phones. Well played AT&T, well played.