Does AT&T Wireless Have Any Shame At All?Does AT&T Wireless Have Any Shame At All?

Based on want I have seen, AT&T is institutionally predisposed to be anti-consumer--and now they want to acquire what has consistently been the low-cost supplier?

Based on the title, you might be thinking that this piece is about AT&T's ludicrous claim that they should be allowed to acquire T-Mobile USA on the grounds that it will be good for consumers. Frankly, that's just too preposterous to even address. No I'm talking about your good old deceptive marketing practices that these slobs just can't seem to get over. I guess it's no surprise that the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) ranks AT&T lowest of all national wireless providers. But hey, second lowest is T-Mobile!

What I'm talking about is "cramming" or the underhanded process of slipping unwanted charges onto a customer's bill in the hope that they will not check too closely and just pay. AT&T has actually done this to me twice in the past six months, and they're apparently training their customer service reps to spin all manner of misinformation to deflect blame.

My first run-in was about six months ago when I noticed my monthly bill seemed to be higher than it used to be. Poring over the details I found one phone was being charged for Voice Dialing--$4.99 per month. That phone has its own voice dialing, and we don't use it anyway. Another line had Roadside Assistance--$2.99 per month. Both of our cars are leased and have roadside assistance included. Needless to say, none of this was "ordered".

The coup de grace: AT&T Navigation on 2 lines at $10.85 per month each! I can get directions for free either with Google Maps or Superpages (which I prefer), so who in their right mind would buy AT&T Navigation? The answer is "nobody", so the "marketing plan" says cram it on the bill and hope you won't notice.

Now if AT&T were even remotely interested, they could contact the customer before they start billing. They have my email address and regularly send me emails to tell me my bill is "ready to pay". I guess an email saying "your bill is going to be higher than it used to be" is more than they can handle.

Anyway, I let my wife argue with them for a few hours on the phone (no joke), and in the end they said they would credit back the amounts, but they could only go back 3 months; apparently there's a statue of limitations on common decency--no "Boy Scouts" in this crew.

Fast-forward 6 months but now I am watching more closely. Presto! I'm getting charged $2.99 ($3.25 with tax) for "Where", apparently a service to help locate restaurants, movie theaters and such in your local area. This one is on my phone, so I'm sure I didn't order it, but I do remember a bunch of new, unwanted applications (i.e. "crap-ware") showing up on my BlackBerry when I upgraded to the BlackBerry 6 operating system. By the way, if you can upgrade to BlackBerry 6, it does provide a bunch more features, but not all of the carriers distribute it (e.g. Verizon doesn't).

I do remember opening the "Where" application to see what it does. Apparently that constitutes a "sale" in AT&T's book, and charges will start appearing on your bill. Maybe that was in the "Agreement" that neither I nor anyone else ever reads, but no email or text confirmation from AT&T--I guess they didn't want to clutter up my inbox. By the way, Poynt does the same thing and it's free. For movies I like Flixster, which is also free.

The icing on the cake is that you can't even delete the useless applications they dump on your device hoping that they can spring the trap and start charging you! So now I have a folder I created called "Junk" to store all of these. When I asked the AT&T customer service rep about this, while getting the charges removed, she advised me that, "The phone manufacturers load the software and AT&T has no control over it". That is absolutely and categorically incorrect. Every byte that's on that thing when you buy it or when you update it over the air (as I did when upgrading to BlackBerry 6) is controlled by the operator.

Of course, I'm still smarting over their BlackBerry Bridge snub. At BlackBerry World this year, RIM gave each attendee a 16 Gbyte PlayBook tablet--nice giveaway. The best feature of the PlayBook is this secure Bluetooth connection to your BlackBerry smartphone called BlackBerry Bridge that allows you to read the emails, calendar entries, and contacts from the smartphone on your PlayBook (it would be nice if it could do the same with text messages, BBMs, and other apps on the smartphone, but I guess we'll get that in time).

The big surprise is that AT&T won't provide the BlackBerry Bridge software! Back in April, an AT&T spokesman said, "We have just received the app for testing and before it's made available to AT&T customers we want to ensure it delivers a quality experience." RIM sent it in a timely manner to every other carrier in the world but not to AT&T? I don't think so.

And they want us to think their taking one more competitor off the field is going result in the consumer getting a better deal. Based on want I have seen from AT&T, they are institutionally predisposed to be anti-consumer, and now they want to acquire what has consistently been the low-cost supplier. All I can say is, "Really?!"