Welcome, Consumerist readers, and all others. Thank you for taking a minute to stop by! Here is my list of complaints after Cingular suddenly dropped my calls for a month straight, refused to do anything about it, and I lost hundreds and hundreds of dollars as a freelancer. Please also take a minute to check out some of my other recent posts, like the Top Ten Life Tips from CEO and Business Guru Rajesh Setty. But without further ado, Ten Reasons Not to Do Business with Cingular:

1. They don’t honor contracts from the companies they’ve acquired. They have forced thousands of customers to purchase new equipment and pay new fees to join their network.

2. Their call center CSRs are very well-trained—at screwing you out of your money! No matter what problem I call with, they never fail to suggest I buy some new hardware or add-on service. And research shows that 2 out of 3 people have a difficult time saying no. Lord knows I hate having to say it, but I DO! ‘Cuz you ain’t getting another penny out of me!

3. Their customer service line is absolutely horrible, with one of those voice-recognition systems that doesn’t recognize voices very well. And you inevitably end up at the wrong office—the person on the other end of the line asks you for your damned account information all over again, and then wonders why the hell you ended up at their extension. And you are inevitably forwarded to another department. Can anyone say waste of your time and mine?

4. Anytime anything goes wrong with a piece of their hardware, they will NOT fix parts or offer you a replacement, they will try to make you buy brand new equipment. And if you still have a measly 2 months until your contract is up, you ain’t gettin’ a product discount! You’re paying retail. (Reason 4.5: those damned upgrades are just a method of getting you to sign your life over for another 2 years in exchange for a pitiful discount.)

5. They have a system of labeling customers by how profitable or unprofitable they are—and if you’re unprofitable, good luck getting any quality service, upgrades, or discounts. They actually are trying to force these individuals out of their contracts early.

6. When they “upgrade their technology” and their network no longer supports your 2- to 3-year-old phone (something I very firmly believe they do on purpose), they will NOT offer you a new phone that does work, so as to fulfill the remainder of their contract with you by providing satisfactory service. They will ask you to buy one from them.

7. Offices do not share information, thus if you call the emergency helpline on a Sunday, they will not give you a status update of what other offices are doing to fix your problem. Trust me—in essence, they are doing nothing.

8. Case specialists that the CEO’s office “assigns” to your account when you are experiencing difficulties with service may ignore your calls for weeks. (In case you want, here’s his address by the way so you can write and give Stan Sigman a piece of your mind.)

9. If you choose to leave the service because they are no longer providing it to you or any other issue where they have not held up their side of your contract (Cingular believes in one-sided contracts), they WILL try to charge you the $150 early-termination fee. Thanks! :)

10. They are part of the biggest telecommunications monopoly in the world—the whole AT&T/BellSouth/Cingular/SBC family of companies. Ever since the FCC broke up Bell for aggregating this exact same way, these telecoms have been merging and buying each other up again. You think a company that brings in a thousand new customers a day cares about your problems?

11. Bonus! This one’s a kicker. The ads I see everywhere that say “least dropped calls”? Pure BS marketing. I’ll just let Wikipedia explain:

During the first quarter of 2006, Telephia reported that during an extensive nationwide test of major wireless carriers, Cingular Wireless dropped the fewest number of calls across the country. Cingular in turn began advertising with more aggression the “Allover Network” citing Telephia as “the leading independent research company.” This was in stark contrast to the Consumer Unions published “Consumer Reports” which slammed Cingular for static and dropped calls and J.D. Power and Associates’ findings. (J.D. Power and Associates consistently puts Cingular in the bottom (or near the bottom) of their “overall customer satisfaction” list.)

Telephia initially refused to provide details on its study, and a spokesman for the company has said, according to the Boston Globe, that “Cingular shouldn’t have even mentioned the company’s name to a reporter.” The research company later stated that Cingular had a “statistically significant lower dropped-call rate than the competition across some market/time period groupings,” but that Telephia had “no knowledge of the specific methodology… Cingular used to reach the nationwide ‘lowest dropped call’ conclusion.” [Bold emphasis is mine]

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I’ve recently switched from Cingular to T-Mobile, back to Cingular, then to Verizon. I am paying more now for Verizon than I did for Cingular (I believe I was one of those unprofitable customers, because I still got a great plan at the same price I started with AT&T Wireless about 3 or 4 years ago on), but Verizon has given me excellent service so far. They have not dropped on me at all, with the exception of one or two calls as I was driving cross-country out in the absolute middle of nowhere (to be expected). And I really like their personal touch; I don’t mind paying for excellent customer service as opposed to horrible customer service.

Here is a little more from the Wireless Consumers Alliance on why wireless providers can (and do) control your phone and limit your choice of phones. This applies to all the wireless providers, but Cingular especially I have found to be unwilling to port over numbers or unlock their phones for customers to use on other networks. You paid for it, you should be able to use it on any network you want:

Even though most wireless phones have the capacity to operate over compatible systems, access is restricted by software in the phone that is programmed, and reprogrammed over the air, by your wireless provider.

This restriction forces your phone to use your home system and the systems of affiliates, without regard to which wireless provider offers the best service in the area where you are making or receiving a call. Furthermore, your phone is “locked” by your wireless provider to prevent any changes and to prevent you from taking your phone with you if you change to a wireless provider with a compatible system. The reason why your wireless provider effectively “own” your phone is early on, the industry obtained a waiver of the anti-trust laws from the FCC and the Department of Justice allowing them to sell phones and service as a package. This practice is known as “bundling” which was the reason why the telephone companies were able to limit consumers’ choice in phone instruments for so long. “Bundling” eventually lead to the break up of the Bell system.

Today, wireless providers use bundling to control the cellular telephone equipment market and the providers select a limited number of models from a limited number of manufacturers for sale/to consumers for use over their systems. An anti-trust complaint is now pending in U.S. Federal court which challenges the right of wireless providers to control the phone market.

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I am hoping that one of these days, the FCC breaks up the whole AT&T family of companies for good. And in the meantime, I’d definitely recommend steering clear of Cingular wireless, AT&T residential services, and any of their internet options through SBC or otherwise. Absolutely ALL of my experiences with these companies have been negative.

What experiences have you had with wireless or internet service providers?