Seriously T-Mobile, come up with more excuses for me to give you money.

I've been a tmobile customer since 2007. In the middle of last year I took my line from a family plan into an individual plan. That involved speaking to 7 different people (several of whom contradicted each other as they then forwarded me to the next one) and being hung up on 3 times (as they messed up the transfers).

Then the bills I started getting were truly bizarre with numerous unspecified additional charges and credits. (My very first bill had 5 regulatory fees!) At one point when I called in again, the rep took 80 minutes to figure out the bill (ie what the various numbers were for) and then another 30 minutes dealing with the ones that shouldn't be there. It didn't help that what customers are shown on their bills and what the reps get to see are not the same, and took about 15 minutes to establish that.

Around the new year they sent an email saying that you could make impossible to have slamming, except of course they took about 7 paragraphs to say that. They said it could be disabled on the website, so off I went. I couldn't figure it out since there was absolutely no setting with text remotely similar to their email. Their rep couldn't find it either and had me call back again during business hours where another person first picked 2 other settings that couldn't possibly be it, before finally settling on "Block Content Downloads" as being the setting which doesn't match up its description.

TLDR: I would be pleased to encounter the same competence you did, and would be far more pleased if things worked so I never had to call in the first place. Whenever people talk about how good someone's support is, they never seem to express the negative that they had to call in the first place.

My point is not that T-Mobile sucks, but that all cell providers will provide delightful fair service to many, and cheat and piss off some. Take it with a grain of salt when someone says that one company is "scum."

I can only second kevingadd's advice to try and not tie yourself to one with a longterm contract. The fewer customers they have locked in, the more careful they have to be about not pissing them off.

They made having a smartphone affordable and made it easy to upgrade by reselling your unlocked phone online (recouping most of the unsubsidized cost).

I'll check out those options. Thanks.

Keep in mind the top $30 plan (unlimited data) requires you to activate a new phone that you have to buy from Walmart.

When you order the sim from T-mobile directly, you can activate it. You can purchase it online from them for 99 cents.

I get to walmart and they tell me I have to buy one of their shitty phones to activate the plan. I call customer support again and asked if I could return the sim I bought at the store, and they said "it depends on the store."

Lied to and pissed off customer here. Just ordered a sim online and we'll see how that goes. I'm going to try to get a refund for this card anyway.

You can also regularly get a T-Mobile prepaid phone of some variant for $20 at Walgreens, which comes with the "Activation Kit" (SIM card and secret number) as well as a terrible GSM-only phone you can throw away.

What separates T-Mobile is that they're much less evil. Things like making pre-paid cards easy, giving you a discount if you're not on a plan, not going to bat in Congress for SOPA etc. They may be stupid or unfeeling sometimes, but they never seem to be actively opposed to one's freedom like the other big carriers are.

There is no way to use a smartphone without using data. Smartphone OSs use data in the background for so many things, for even voicemail. So, in this case, I think they are justified in adding a data plan. It is near impossible to use iOS or android without data, even when using them without any apps.

Er, turn off mobile data and rely on wi-fi. Calls and texts still work and your phone will behave as if you are roaming abroad (i.e if you crack and turn on mobile data, prepare to open your wallet).

if apple hadn't bent over so badly to allow telcos to screw the customers with the whole tethering fiasco (which is still going on. unbelievable. all you sheeple giving out free money) they wouldn't even know you had a special needs phone.

If it did phone home when data is turned off explicitly then I'd have been completely and utterly screwed by AT&T for the month I spent in Europe.

what if i need to use data and plan to control how much i use? As i did on all my travels for the first day or two until i could secure a local SIM card.

And if they don't have data in the plan the carrier by default just doesn't forward the packets

AT&T (and most of the wireless industry) are merely toll-gate operators - they are very good at making sure you pay for any usage - even the usage you didn't want to make (ie, receiving an MMS on your non-data flip phone that you didn't intend - sorry, that's $2).

Which is >95% of the time for me, and many people.

"Them" is almost all wireless companies, what Verizon does, AT&T follows soon and vice-versa so consumers cannot penalize them. Startup costs are in the tens of billions and you have to fight incumbents so they essentially have a monopoly (or duopoly, or...)

I've used AT&T for many years. I'm not always delighted with every policy - the now changed policy of refusing to unlock out of contract iPhones was a particular bone. However I have almost always been satisfied with the service and have had no problem contacting them to correct billing issues.

Why people feel entitled to services at the price they choose is beyond me. Telecom is a competitive market. Just because someone somewhere can get cheaper service doesn't mean you deserve the same.

In the last 15 years we've gone from Dewey decimal to better than Hitchhiker's Guide. Stop your bitching and appreciate what you have. Your ungratefulness is likely to bring a well deserved meteor strike leaving you with fewer telecom options.

Because it isn't a competitive market. Wireless telecoms have been granted licenses to spectrum by the FCC so they can run their businesses. There's a limited amount of spectrum and it's hard for new companies to get any of it. The wireless telecoms industry is anything but competitive.

How is that not competitive?

The only carrier you can choose with GSM is T-Mobile. But wait, they use the 1900MHz 3G band, so if you've got a phone that doesn't use that band, you're stuck with EDGE data.

LTE won't change this, they've chosen different bands.

Telecom networks are extremely expensive to build. Having more than a few on the same technology would be wasteful, and consumers benefit from a diversity of technologies in the long run in addition to some level of network compatibility.

But seriously, don't like your network? Sell your phone on eBay and buy a different one that works on a different network. How hard is that?

Even with MVNOs, there aren't many real options. If Verizon were GSM it'd be a lot better, but as of now you are really locked in.

Did you read the article? ATT detected he had a smartphone and upgraded his plan to include data, forcibly. That's like GM saying, oh we've detected your car comes with OnStar and are activating the OnStar plan. If you don't like it, you're more than free to sell your car.

I was perfectly happy with my previous contract. If I'm being "ungrateful" for the privilege of getting charged extra for a service I didn't agree to, then I guess we have different definitions of gratefulness.

http://gizmodo.com/5342749/att-forcing-data-plans-with-all-s...

They have a humorous justification: to keep their customers from having massive data bills by accident. Yeah, right...

The key to having a WiFi only smartphone on AT&T is stealth. You must keep a dumb phone around to switch to as necessary, and then you can sneak a smartphone on the network that has never been seen by AT&T as a smartphone. For example, you might buy a T-Mobile (only) unlocked smartphone and then put your AT&T SIM card into it. Be sure to disable all the data network interfaces first thing, as they may give you away. You can buy a dumb phone to AT&T to verify for $15 on sales from GoPhone, or any number of other prepaid phones.

I would be interested to know if now, ab initio, AT&T is able to detect that a specific IMEI number is a smartphone. I think the worldwide range of IMEI numbers is too vast for that to work, and thank goodness T-Mobile didn't merge with AT&T.

Regardless, calling AT&T scum is out of line. You are not mandated to purchase their services.

Sometimes, it's crazy, but people expect real competition versus oligopolists that mostly collude between themselves and show zero concern for regulatory action.

> Telecom is a competitive market.

Can you appreciate the dissonance between these two statements?