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Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Great AT&T Experiences
I shouldn't always complain about things - that's just unhealthy; so, here are three things about AT&T that impressed me.
1. Business Class Broadband
I've been using AT&T's (formally SBC) top of the line business class DSL with five static IP address since 2002 and it's been rock solid. Outages have been virtually non-existent. Occasionally, the bandwidth drops which can be fixed simply by power-cycling the router. There's probably a firmware upgrade that might fix this problem, but it happens so infrequently that I don't have the guts to try it out and risk the downtime if there's a problem.
2. iPhone Upgrade to 3G
This experience went very smoothly. I was most impressed with the fact that our family plan's roll over (RO) minutes remained. I really expected to lose those 4000+ of RO minutes.
3. Prepaid Cell Phone (Go Phone)
My mother has the bottom of the line cell phone plan. She hardly uses her cell phone - maybe 15 minutes/month, but it still costs her about $30/month which is more than $360/year with the fees added in. So, last month, we moved her to a pre-paid option. She got $100 of service minutes that will last a year (plus a sign up bonus of $5).
She had a choice of paying 25¢/minute or 10¢/minute with a daily $1 charge on the days she uses it. Which plan to choose? The key is: will you use your cell phone for more than seven minutes on the days that you do use it? If so, then go with the 10¢/minute and the $1 charge; otherwise, go with the flat 25¢/minute. Regardless, text messages cost 15¢ to send or receive unless they're free marketing messages from AT&T which can be stopped simply by replying with the world Stop.
1. Business Class Broadband
I've been using AT&T's (formally SBC) top of the line business class DSL with five static IP address since 2002 and it's been rock solid. Outages have been virtually non-existent. Occasionally, the bandwidth drops which can be fixed simply by power-cycling the router. There's probably a firmware upgrade that might fix this problem, but it happens so infrequently that I don't have the guts to try it out and risk the downtime if there's a problem.
2. iPhone Upgrade to 3G
This experience went very smoothly. I was most impressed with the fact that our family plan's roll over (RO) minutes remained. I really expected to lose those 4000+ of RO minutes.
3. Prepaid Cell Phone (Go Phone)
My mother has the bottom of the line cell phone plan. She hardly uses her cell phone - maybe 15 minutes/month, but it still costs her about $30/month which is more than $360/year with the fees added in. So, last month, we moved her to a pre-paid option. She got $100 of service minutes that will last a year (plus a sign up bonus of $5).
She had a choice of paying 25¢/minute or 10¢/minute with a daily $1 charge on the days she uses it. Which plan to choose? The key is: will you use your cell phone for more than seven minutes on the days that you do use it? If so, then go with the 10¢/minute and the $1 charge; otherwise, go with the flat 25¢/minute. Regardless, text messages cost 15¢ to send or receive unless they're free marketing messages from AT&T which can be stopped simply by replying with the world Stop.
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