Tony Cosentino has been trying to speak with an AT&T supervisor for weeks, but the company’s customer service representatives have refused to put him through.

At issue is a $652.52 charge AT&T sent to collections for U-verse equipment the company claims Cosentino never returned after ending service. But Cosentino has proof in the form of a shipping confirmation that he did, in fact, return the equipment, but AT&T has refused to listen.

With collection agencies calling Cosentino’s home for more than a year, the frustration peaked when Cosentino was turned down for a mortgage refinance when banks discovered his credit score took an 80 point plunge thanks to AT&T.

That credit hit could have stayed with him for the next seven years, but Cosentino called KOVR-Sacramento’s consumer reporter and let him chase down AT&T for an explanation.

Sure enough, AT&T quickly discovered the last year and a half of collections hell for Cosentino was all for nothing.

AT&T spokesman Dan Newman called it a “system error,” saying “we appreciate you flagging it.” They also agreed to remove the negative information from Cosentino’s credit report so he can win back unblemished credit.

The one valuable piece of news from the entire affair was that Newman disclosed AT&T’s executive customer service number — 1-800-791-6661. This team of customer service specialists is authorized to handle disputes at its  discretion, which gives customers the opportunity to talk to someone that can make things happen, and quickly. If you run into a dispute with AT&T their usual customer service representatives cannot solve it to your satisfaction, call AT&T’s executive customer service and see if you can’t win a better outcome.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KOVR Sacramento ATT Says No to Customers 6-22-12.mp4[/flv]

KOVR’s Curtis Ming is back again to fight Big Telecom, this time on behalf of a Rancho Cordova man who had his credit ruined by AT&T.  (3 minutes)

AT&T wireless customers grandfathered on unlimited wireless data plans might want to think twice about calling to protest billing errors, because the company is using the occasion to strip off unlimited data plans from customer accounts.

Stop the Cap! reader Jess DeSanto is one of thousands of Florida customers who discovered AT&T has a tendency to add “extras” on wireless lines without the customer’s consent. DeSanto had been paying $2.99 a month for “Roadside Assistance,” part of her phone bill since the day she signed up for AT&T, and she never asked for it. She only noticed when a lawsuit required the company to notify customers the service was optional and offered refunds to those paying for the plan without realizing it.

“We always thought it was just one of those fees AT&T puts on our monthly bill, because we have been paying for it ever since we switched to AT&T from T-Mobile,” DeSanto shares. “When we finally learned we should have never had to pay for a service we did not order, we contacted AT&T to have the service removed.”

DeSanto said AT&T promptly took the service off her account, and even refunded more than a year of charges because she never used the service. But the company also quietly stripped the DeSanto family of its grandfathered, unlimited use data plans in the process.

“When I was reviewing the bill, I saw the credits, but I also saw we were suddenly placed on 3GB usage-limited data plans — the unlimited data we had was gone,” DeSanto writes. “Boy was I mad at AT&T.”

DeSanto had to endure a lecture from a customer service representative about how the unlimited use plan and the 3GB plan were essentially identical. (AT&T throttles the speed customers receive on the unlimited plan after 3GB of usage per month. AT&T will charge customers overlimit fees on the 3GB plan if they exceed their allowance.)

“I told them I don’t want to deal with a sneaky phone company switching my services without my permission in such an underhanded way,” DeSanto said. “It’s like buying a car off the lot and after you sign the papers, they drive up in a different car.”

A manager finally agreed to switch DeSanto back to the plans she originally signed up for, but she is still seething over the affair.

“If you are an AT&T customer, you better scrutinize that bill real careful every month, because you have no idea what they will pull next.”

DeSanto is not alone. A blogger named “Michael” reports his unlimited data plan was also eliminated when he called about another AT&T “billing error”:

I’ve had one of AT&T’s unlimited data plans since I first got an iPhone 3GS not quite three years ago. You can thus imagine my surprise when I checked my bill last month and discovered that I had been switched to 3GB/month limited data plan.

[…] When I finally got a rep on the line, I learned that they had made the change on March 22nd when I had called in about another billing error. As it turns out, when I upgraded my phone, they not only renewed my contract, but they also added roadside assistance ($2.99/month), phone insurance ($6.99/month), and something called the “enhanced mobile protection plan” ($3.00/month). (Note that none of these charges were reflected on my signed contract.)

When I called back in March, I had no trouble getting them to remove the unwanted services and credit me for the charges, but… they apparently took this opportunity to also switch me from my beloved unlimited data plan to a 3GB/month limited data plan. Without my permission.

Michael had no trouble getting his unlimited plan back when he complained. In fact, he was suspicious because it seemed “too easy.”

“[It was sort of]  like they’ve been making this “mistake” on purpose and are ready if/when people notice and call in to complain,” Michael writes.

Detroit U-verse technicians are at high risk of being confronted by crooks looking for valuable electronics.

AT&T U-verse technicians carry iPads, cell phones, and other expensive electronic equipment in trucks destined for service calls, and the crooks know it.

At least 10 technicians have been robbed in northwest Detroit in the last week alone, some at gunpoint.

“They’re scared. Afraid to go in certain areas,” said CWA Union President Greg Streeby. “A tech was approached by an individual with a gun who said, ‘Give me your iPad.’

So far, union leaders have been unimpressed with the reaction of AT&T, leading one worker to suggest the company does not care if technicians live or die.

Thieves learned AT&T’s U-verse branded trucks come stocked with expensive electronics, including cell phones and iPads, and they have become magnets for smash and grab robberies while technicians are inside customer homes. Since the robberies began, some technicians have started bringing valuable equipment inside with them.

Thieves learned to adapt, and are now willing to confront technicians as they return to their trucks, sometimes at gunpoint, and order them to hand over the electronics. Technicians have lost phones, laptops, tablets, and whatever else the thieves can steal and resell.

Jim Simons has never seen anything like it, and he has been working for AT&T as a field technician for more than 20 years.

“We are defenseless. We don’t carry any weapons,” Simons told WDIV News. “Not allowed to.”

AT&T workers were told by administrators there is nothing the company can do about the robberies, at which point a group of workers left and began a union-backed protest outside of several AT&T facilities across Detroit.

AT&T promptly locked out those workers and deactivated their ID badges, and their vehicles remain locked and inaccessible inside AT&T gated parking lots.

The company claims it is working on a solution, but union officials want an extra service technician temporarily sent on service calls in dangerous areas to keep an eye on the company’s property while another worker attends to the customer. AT&T has rejected that proposal.

[flv width=”625″ height=”372″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WDIV Detroit ATT service workers robbed in northwest Detroit neighborhood 6-29-12.flv[/flv]

WDIV first told its Detroit audience about the AT&T holdups last Friday in this exclusive report. (2 minutes)

[flv width=”625″ height=”372″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WDIV Detroit ATT techs protesting over on-the-job security concerns 7-2-12.flv[/flv]

Since WDIV’s first report, safety conditions have further deteriorated for AT&T workers, some of whom have now begun public protests outside of AT&T facilities demanding more safety while on service calls. (2 minutes)

Comcast is running “welcome back” ads in Chattanooga that still claim they run America’s fastest ISP, when they don’t.

EPB, Chattanooga’s publicly-owned utility that operates the nation’s fastest gigabit broadband network, has already won the speed war, delivering consistently faster broadband service than any of its Tennessee competitors. So when facts are not on their side, competitors like Comcast and a conservative “watchdog” group simply make them up as they go along.

Comcast is running tear-jerker ads in Chattanooga featuring professional actors pretending to be ex-customers looking to own up to their “mistake” of turning their back on Comcast’s 250GB usage cap (now temporarily paroled), high prices, and questionable service.

“It turns out that the speeds I was looking for, Xfinity Internet had all along,” says the actor, before hugging an “Xfinity service technician” in the pouring rain. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

The ad closes repeating the demonstrably false claim Comcast operates “the nation’s fastest Internet Service Provider.”

“I see those commercials on television and I’m thinking, I wonder how much did they pay you to say that,” says an actual EPB customer in a response ad from the public utility.

It turns out quite a lot. The high-priced campaign is just the latest work from professional advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners of San Francisco, which is quite a distance from Tennessee. Goodby has produced Comcast ads for years. The ad campaign also targets the cable company’s other rival that consistently beats its broadband speeds — Verizon FiOS.

EPB provides municipal power, broadband, television, and telephone service for residents in Chattanooga, Tennessee

Comcast tried to ram their “welcome back” message home further in a newspaper interview with the Times Free Press, claiming “a lot of customers are coming back to Xfinity” because Comcast has a larger OnDemand library, “integrated applications and greater array of choices.”

Comcast does not provide any statistics or evidence to back up its claims, but EPB president and CEO Harold DePriest has already seen enough deception from the cable company to call the latest claims “totally false.”

In fact, DePriest notes, customers come and go from EPB just as they do with Comcast. The real story, in his view, is how many more customers arrive at EPB’s door than leave, and DePriest says they are keeping more customers than they lose.

EPB fully launched in Chattanooga in 2010, and despite Comcast and AT&T’s best customer retention efforts, EPB has signed up 37,000 customers so far, with about 20 new ones arriving every day. (Comcast still has more than 100,000 customers in the area.)

Many come for the EPB’s far superior broadband speeds, made possible on the utility’s fiber to the home network. EPB also does not use Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps, which Charter, AT&T, and Comcast have all adopted to varying degrees. Although the utility avoids cut-rate promotional offers that its competitors hand out to new customers (EPB needs to responsibly pay off its fiber network’s construction costs), its pricing is lower than what the cable and phone companies offer at their usual prices.

Comcast claims customers really don’t need super high speed Internet service, underlined by the fact they don’t offer it. But some businesses (including home-based entrepreneurs) do care about the fact they can grow their broadband speeds as needed with EPB’s fiber network. Large business clients receiving quotes from EPB are often shocked by how much lower the utility charges for service that AT&T and Comcast price much higher. It costs EPB next to nothing to offer higher speeds on its fiber network, designed to accommodate the speed needs of customers today and tomorrow.

The competition is less able. AT&T cannot compete on its U-verse platform, which tops out shy of 30Mbps. Comcast has to move most of its analog TV channels to digital, inconveniencing customers with extra-cost set top boxes to boost speeds further.

The fact EPB built Chattanooga’s best network, designed for the present and future, seems to bother some conservative “watchdog” groups. The Beacon Center of Tennesee, a group partially funded by conservative activists like Richard Mellon Scaife through a network of umbrella organizations, considers the entire fiber project a giant waste of money. They agree with Comcast, suggesting nobody needs fast broadband speeds:

EPB also offers something called ultra high-speed Internet. Consumers have to pay more than seven times what they would pay for the traditional service — $350 a month. Right now, only residents of a select few cities worldwide (such as Hong Kong) even use this technology, and that is because most consumers will likely not demand it for another 10 years.

Actually, residents in Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea do expect the faster broadband speeds they receive from their broadband providers. Americans have settled for what they can get (and afford). DePriest openly admits he does not expect a lot of his customers to pay $350 a month for any kind of broadband, but the gigabit-capable network proves a point — the faster speeds are available today on EPB at a fraction of price other providers would charge, if they could supply the service at all. Most EPB customers choose lower speed packages that still deliver better performance at a lower price than either Comcast or AT&T offer.

The Beacon Center doesn’t have a lot of facts to help them make their case. But that does not stop them:

• They claim EPB’s network is paid for at taxpayer expense. It is not.
• They quote an “academic study” that claims 75 percent of “government-run” broadband networks lose money, without disclosing the fact the study was bought and paid for by the same industry that wants to keep communities from running broadband networks. Its author, Ron Rizzuto, was inducted into the Cable TV Pioneers in 2004 for service to the cable industry. The study threw in failed Wi-Fi networks built years ago with modern fiber broadband networks to help sour readers on the concept of community broadband.
• Beacon bizarrely claims the fiber network cannot operate without a $300 million Smart Grid. (Did someone inform Verizon of this before they wasted all that money on FiOS? Who knew fiber broadband providers were also in the electricity business?)

The “watchdog” group even claims big, bad EPB is going to drive AT&T, Comcast, and Charter Cable out of business in Chattanooga (apparently they missed those Comcast/Xfinity ads with customers returning to Kabletown in droves):

Fewer and fewer private companies wish to compete against EPB, which will soon have a monopoly in the Chattanooga market, according to private Internet Service Provider David Snyder. “They have built a solution looking for a problem. It makes for great marketing, but there is no demand for this service. By the time service is needed, the private sector will have established this for pennies on the dollar.”

Ironically, Snyder’s claim there is no demand for EPB’s service fall flat when one considers his company, VolState, has been trying to do business with EPB for two years. He needs EPB because he is having trouble affording the “pennies on the dollar” his suppliers are (not) charging.

Snyder tells “Nooganomics” his company wants an interconnection agreement with EPB, because the private companies he is forced to buy service from — including presumably AT&T, want to charge him a wholesale rate twice as much as EPB currently bills consumers. Snyder calls EPB’s competition “disruptive.”

Nooganomics calls EPB’s low priced service a “charity” in comparison to what AT&T and Comcast charge local residents, and the free market can do no wrong-website seems upset consumers are enjoying the benefits of lower priced service, now that the local phone company and cable operator can’t get away with charging their usual high prices any longer.

Deborah Dwyer, an EPB spokeswoman, told the website the company got into the business with state and city approval, followed the rules for obtaining capital and pays the taxes or payments-in-lieu of taxes as the same rate as corporate players. “We believe that public utilities like EPB exist to help improve the quality of life in our community, and the fiber optic network was built to do just that. One of government’s key responsibilities is to provide communities with infrastructure, and fiber to the home is a key infrastructure much like roads, sewer systems and the electric system.”

Snyder can’t dispute EPB delivers great service. He also walks away from the competition-is-good-for-the-free-market rhetoric that should allow the best company with the lowest rates to win, instead declaring customers should only do business with his company to support free market economics (?):

“If you are a free market capitalist and you believe in free markets, you need to do business with VolState,” Mr. Snyder says. “And if you’re highly principled, every time you buy from a government competitor, what you’re voting for with your dollars is, you’re saying, ‘It’s OK for the government come in to private enterprise and start to take over a vast part of what we used to operate in as a free market.’”

Perhaps Snyder and his friends at the Beacon Center have a future in the vinegar business. They certainly have experience with sour grapes.

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Comcast’s emotionally charged ad, using paid actors, was produced by advertising firm Goodby Silverstein & Partners. The commercial running in Chattanooga is a slight variation on this one, which targets Verizon FiOS. (1 minute)

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/EPB Ad.flv[/flv]

EPB uses actual customers, not paid actors, in its own advertising that calls out Comcast’s false advertising.  (1 minute)

Recognizable New Yorkers are fed up trying to keep track of new security measures thrown at them by their telecommunications companies.

The New York Times Fashion & Style section (really?) took a dive into the frustrating world of pre-assigned passwords, captcha codes, and user verification questions that confound New York’s more prominent citizens, sometimes with hilarious results.

“It’s a nightmare,” the comedian Tracey Ullman told the newspaper. “These passwords just keep getting longer and longer. I try to think of a startling emotional thing that jogs my memory or something that’s frightening, or my grandmother’s name with 666 at the end. But I really don’t know what to do.”

In an effort to respond to an increasingly security-conscious online world, providers are password protecting subscriber information and equipment to keep prying eyes out. But sometimes those anti-hacking, anti-eavesdropping, anti-identify theft efforts become mind-boggling to confused customers who end up locked out of their own accounts.

Among the latest trends: locking down wireless routers with passwords straight out of the box.

Bernhard

Any long time Wi-Fi user already knows America’s largest open wireless network does not come from AT&T or Verizon Wireless. It comes from a company formerly known as “Linksys” (today Cisco). Customers confounded by wireless security simply plug in their new routers and start using them without setting any Wi-Fi password or enabling security measures.

Time Warner Cable tried to lick that problem by issuing pre-assigned passwords to customers using the company’s wireless router. Unfortunately, comedian Sandra Bernhard, never smart to antagonize, ended up with one that came with a mish-mosh of letters and numbers (they range from 13 to 28 characters) that cannot be changed.

“We have that one written down somewhere, but where it is I’d be hard pressed to tell you,” Bernhard told the newspaper, noting that her relationship with the cable provider is “an S&M experience without the pleasure.”

Verizon and AT&T love their creative security questions, designed to verify you are who you say you are. But New Yorkers who think too deeply about the questions are sure to be tripped up by the experience.

Jeffrey Leeds, a fixture on the New York social scene, tells the Times he hates questions like, ‘What is the name of your first girlfriend,’ because he unsure if that means the first girl he slept with or the first one he liked who never returned his phone calls.

The confusion inevitably leaves hapless customers writing down their password and security questions on sticky notes or in a notebook, which entirely defeats the purpose of private “only you should know” passwords.

Courtney Love thought she could outwit the hackers with her own system, based on mnemonics.

“You use the lyrics to a song,” she said, for example, “ ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ — litswd-1 — and that way you can’t forget it.”

But the newspaper reports that worked until Love was tripped up by “Hey Jude.”

“I kept forgetting if it was ‘Hey Jude, don’t make it bad’ or ‘Hey Jude, don’t make it sad,’ ” she said. “So I gave up on that.”

But the most reviled security measure of all is the deadly, incomprehensible “captcha” code — the barely decipherable slanted text and numbers that real humans are supposed to be able to identify but spammers using automated tools cannot.

“Don’t you hate those?” Ullman said. “I always get those wrong because it looks like they were written by someone on LSD. It’s awful.”