Here’s some grade-a confusion for customers of Cingular, like me, who were also customers of AT&T, like me. But first a little history lesson…
In February of 2004, Cingular Wireless bought AT&T Wireless to create… Wait for it… Cingular Wireless.
Fair enough, but AT&T customers were duely screwed in the change over, we had a sweet deal with international call with AT&T (6c a minute to the UK), when we switched over to Cingular in July we were told we could keep that rate…
WRONG!
Cingular had us on their own plan, international calls to the UK became 19c a minute which pissed us off as they failed to tell us that at the switch over, and calling the UK became very important while planning the wedding, so we got screwed royally with calls for a period.
Now today it’s announced that with the SBC merger with AT&T, SBC, who with BellSouth, own Cingular, will be looking to sell the company off under the name AT&T…
Confused? you will be…
Apparently Cingular didn’t really take over AT&T as such, SBC/AT&T held 60% of the company, BellSouth the other 40%. So all us AT&T customers who got screwed in the Cingular “take over” were really screwed by AT&T under a different name (so to speak)… Thats a nice way to treat your customers, hike up the prices and blame it on another company.
The king is dead, long live the king it seems.
So now are we going to get screwed once again by the switch over to AT&T? Time will tell… But seriously, Is it Cingular Wireless or AT&T Wireless? Is it Sprint or Nextel? In the space of a few years cellphones in America became a helluva confusing, not just for customers…
Om Malik muses over the renaming
Readers of Gizmodo contribute via the comments of their post
PC World: AT&T: It’s Baaaaaaaaaaaaack!
Techdirt invites you to follow the bouncing wireless name
37 Signals calls it a lesson in brand confusion
Confused? As I said, you will be…
SAN ANTONIO-SBC Communications Inc. is reportedly planning to launch an AT&T branded wireless service that will use the network of SBC’s current wireless joint venture, Cingular Wireless L.L.C. SBC’s plans follow the closing last weekend of its $16 billion acquisition of AT&T Corp.
Contrary to published reports, Cingular said it is not changing its name to AT&T.
“We are continuing with the strong Cingular brand that we have spent the past five years building and promoting,” said Cingular spokesman Clay Owen.
SBC’s chairman and chief executive officer Ed Whitacre said in an interview over the weekend that Cingular would drop its brand name for the AT&T brand in most of its markets. BellSouth Corp., which controls the 40 percent of Cingular, said in the story that it did not have any objections to the name change.
Owen said Whitacre’s comments were related to SBC-which changed its name to AT&T following the purchase-and its plans to launch an AT&T branded wireless service that it would sell in select markets using Cingular’s network. Owen likened the set-up to Sprint Nextel Corp.’s extensive mobile virtual network operator agreements.
So there will be an AT&T Wireless (so to speak) using Cingular networks but NOT actually Cingular…
Comments
2 responses to “Confusion From Corporate America”
Holy schmokes…
Well, as long as they don’t rape us in the ass like they did before, I guess I don’t care what name they take. But since I’m on my soapbox, I’m going to bitch for a second. It really sucked that when I called AT&T a few months back, they were all “oh… well, you can’t make any changes to your plan without signing a new contract… and you can’t sign a new contract unless you switch to Cingular… and you can’t switch to Cingular unless you pay a huge amount of more money.”
And I bought into it… hook, line, and sinker. Just so that I could increase our minute pool knowing that wedding plans would mean lots of phone calls. I should have shopped around at other cellular companies, but I was lazy and figured “Hey… it’s the same company now, right? How much different could it be? I’m sure everyone’s rates are about this much right now.” And then our next phone bill had like $100 worth of calls to the UK at 19 cents a minute (after I was told we would still get the same 6 cents a minute feature). “Whoops! Sorry about that, Miss Miller. The sales person must have been mistaken. Sucks to be you, since you signed a 2-year contract. Thanks for calling and have a nice day.”
Arggggghhhhhh…
But ya know what? That’s water under the bridge. But I do think I’m going to propose something. Why don’t those Owen and Whitacre guys get their names changed since they seem to like changing names so much. I say “Tweedle Dee” and “Tweedle Dum” would be rather fitting.
dude. voip. sipgate. pay normal rates to talk to the UK. really. :)