A Brief Note About the Suckage of AT&T
posted at 2:56 am
on Aug. 30, 2012
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I have an older iPhone, a 3GS phone, that I’ve owned now for several years in Canada, and my provider, Rogers, will unlock such a phone (meaning, they will send it a secret code that allows you take it to another cell phone company and use it with their billing services).
Excellent, I thought, perhaps I could use when I travel to the United States and save some money instead of paying Roger’s huge travelling phone rates.
I paid a bit of money—$30?—to have it unlocked it, and I brought it down here with me, and I took it to a Radio Shack, where they told me AT&T had the best deal on a pay-as-you-go plan. Sure, I thought. I’ve heard of this AT&T thing, it’s probably going to be just fine.
The AT&T pre-pay program (if you don’t want a contract) is called GoPhone, and it does seem like an okay deal at first. There’s a plan for $50 / month, giving you unlimited talk, texts and data. Perfect, I said! Gimme that!
But, the man said, this is only for non-smart phones, or as I like to call them, plastic pieces of crap from 2002.
I thought to myself: What’s the point of offering unlimited data on a phone that has no keyboard and can only surf text-only sites? I don’t need unlimited data, that’s like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet but you can only feed yourself from a little ketchup cup with two toothpicks.
No, the man said, if you have a SMARTPHONE, you have to purchase this alternate plan: $25 / month for 250 minutes, unlimited text, and no data plan. Then, you have to buy a limited data plan for $5 for 50MB, or $25 for a GB. That’s an expensive GB, given that you get 5GB for $50 / month with a regular AT&T plan, but whatever.
So I signed up for that for $50, left the store, headed back, and discovered that while my iPhone could make calls, it didn’t have any data plan; it said, in fact, “Sorry, no valid data plan is active for this phone.” So I called the next day to AT&T headquarters and found out that… iPhones are not included in “Smartphones.” Even though it says this NOWHERE on the Web site.
All it says is: “Smartphone users must purchase a data package with an eligible plan to use data/Web services,” and the words iPhone don’t appear ANYWHERE in the limitations or the details.
So, is AT&T saying that the iPhone isn’t a smartphone? That’s a lie, a damn lie, and a stupid lie. No, it’s saying that they don’t want to let people with iPhones use Pay-As-You-Go services, even at ludicrous prices. Bleh.
