Comments on: iPhone drama: True AT&T gripes vs. uninformed chatter, Part 2

By: Anthony

Anthony — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:25:28 +0000

Thank you so much for writing this article. I am an AT&T employee and, while not speaking for the company, as an employee we face these same challenges day in and day out and I am glad to see that you reporting fairly and honestly. Here’s to more years with the iphone and here’s to a better future for it.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 07:25:50 +0000

Very well written, I have never used MMS and to be honest for me I have been able to email my pictures and it has been great for me. I can seen how some people would be upset about this. Tethering is another issue though. I wish they would get this to start working. Having I have been with AT&T for over 10 years with very little problems its nice to see this article come to light.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:29:52 +0000

You made a lot of good points in your AT&T story, and my view on the missing MMS is that its a lot easier to write a piece of software to allow a phone to have MMS then it is to upgrade a nation wide network of thousands of cell towers to handle the feature. So me personally can give AT&T some lead way on that. My only and biggest issue I have with AT&T is when I went from the first gen phone to the 3g phone and they charged me $10 a month per phone even thou they didn’t have one 3g tower in my whole state and took them 9 months to get one, personally they should have refunded that. To charge somebody a fee for something they aren’t providing is sad for a big company like AT&T to do.

By: Genevieve

Genevieve — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:52:30 +0000

I actually agree with you just about completely. The only truly legitimate complaint I have heard is their ridiculous evasiveness about MMS and tethering. They are the only one of the companies that offer the iPhone worldwide who were not ready, or within days of being ready, when OS 3.0 came out; yet they should have been the first, since they are (supposedly) in a closer relationship with Apple than the various other companies in other countries. I hadn’t heard about the SlingPlayer controversy (in fact this is the first time I’d even heard of SlingPlayer), so I can’t comment on that.

Despite how much it irks me that AT&T so badly dropped the ball on MMS and tethering, I am still quite loyal. They were the first company to have full, reliable coverage in my area (many years ago as Cingular) and continue to be consistently at the top of the list for coverage and signal. There are confusing and/or questionable details here and there, but that is in no way different than any other cellphone company, and generally tend to be more above-board than most of the others.

All in all, thank you for writing this, and I hope many more people read it and stop to think.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:58:42 +0000

Thank you for writing an objective article. AT&T has network flaws, MMS and Tethering should be available now, I’m torn on the SlingPlayer App but understand customers complaints.

AT&T took a huge risk and it’s paid off and they have been getting scrutinized for it. I commented on a different online article that for example I prefer Hyundai’s warranty program but I want to buy a Chevy. Since I prefer Hyundai’s service shouldn’t I be able to buy a Chevy through them?

Every carrier has good spots and bad spots for network coverage. We have too large of a country for any carrier to just all of a sudden have complete coverage for everybody so the Carriers try and make the best decisions they can. It’s really easy to invest in big cities because your return on investment is pretty quick but in rural areas you might be putting in sites that won’t pay for themselves in decades.

Thank you again for the article it is nice to read an iPhone article that doesn’t blame AT&T for everything that goes wrong with the iPhone. AT&T has it’s flaws but the other carriers do as well. People also seem to forget that before the iPhone AT&T was still the largest cell phone company in the states, the iPhone just made that gap bigger until Verizon bought Alltel.