Would you like an AT&T cell tower within 100 feet of your home?  Some residents in Walnut Creek, Calif. are on the verge of finding out if AT&T wins approval to install a cell tower on property belonging to St. Stephen Church, located in the middle of the Buena Vista subdivision, filled with residential homes.

Now, a local neighborhood group is charging AT&T with playing power politics by using their connections with local civic groups to influence local officials to quickly approve the cell site.

Some residents suspect the local government is more than a little cozy with the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce.  It’s newly installed chairman of the board just happens to be Ken Mintz, area manager for AT&T.  Although Mintz says his job does not involve choosing or lobbying for cell tower sites, he is responsible for meeting with local officials on an ongoing basis to discuss AT&T business matters important to the company.

Mardi Veiluva, leader of the Walnut Creek Buena Vista Neighborhood Group, considers AT&T too close for comfort with city officials.  The group points to the city planning commission being predisposed to accepting AT&T’s word that the church is the only possible place for the new cell tower, even if it is within throwing distance of nearby homes.

The group also claims the city failed to follow up on what they feel is false information purposely given by AT&T to city officials in order to sell their tower siting arguments.

The group won a city council directive to force AT&T to fund the hiring of an independent consultant to review the facts and get back to the council about possible alternative cell sites, but was disheartened when the city hired the consultant in a closed process, not subject to an open review.

The city hired Los Angeles-based Kramer Firm Inc., a decision immediately questioned by some group members over alleged favoritism to AT&T.  Firm owner Jonathan Kramer has more than two decades experience dealing with utilities, and has hardly been their best friend.  In 2003, Kramer blasted Comcast for improperly grounding their cable lines in Modesto, Calif.  Kramer has no ties to AT&T.

AT&T plans to add at least 55 cell tower sites in greater San Francisco in the near future to address congestion and signal problems.

AT&T claims Mintz is not influencing anyone in his position, city officials deny being lobbied by Mintz, and local residents will probably unsatisfied no matter who agrees to AT&T’s cell tower placement recommendations.

This brings the inevitable conundrum: people want improved cell service in their local communities, so long as cell towers are located far away from their neighborhoods.

Cell phone companies invariably defend their choices for cell tower sites as the best, if not the only option.  Nearby residents protest, and often local officials have to find a compromise location, or insist on efforts to camouflage the resulting tower (with varying degrees of success.)

 

AT&T has a deal for first responders.

Where cell service is wiped out in a natural disaster (or doesn’t provide adequate coverage even when it does work), the phone company is willing to sell emergency officials their own AT&T mini-cell-tower site — for up to $45,000, not including ongoing monthly service fees.

The Remote Mobility Zone is a briefcase-sized portable cell tower that will typically provide service for a dozen or more concurrent callers over AT&T-licensed spectrum.  The company sells the equipment, but buyers still have to pay a monthly service charge, users must have a qualifying AT&T voice plan, and the data service that comes with it operates at slower-than-3G speeds.

“In the pivotal first minutes of a natural or man-made disaster, AT&T Remote Mobility Zone provides a solution to help maintain critical mobile communications,” said Chris Hill, vice president, Advanced Mobility Solutions, AT&T Business Solutions.  “With AT&T Remote Mobility Zone, users can set up a cell site in less than 30 minutes.”

That’s much faster than AT&T can fix their own cell sites when they go offline in a disaster.

A consultant to first responders, Jim Davis, tells Stop the Cap! the portable cell tower may sound like a good idea, but will meet resistance because of the “optics” of taxpayers paying for private cell phone company equipment.

“You are effectively asking taxpayers to pay for AT&T cell towers, and that is going to present a political problem in a lot of areas,” Davis tells us.  “What is even harder to justify is the fact AT&T charges monthly service fees from the moment the device ships, whether you use it or not — and the service only works with AT&T GSM cell phones, which is fine as long as fire and EMS rescue services are equipped with those phones, and many are not.”

Davis tells us Sprint/Nextel has a significant portion of the cell-phones-for-emergency personnel-market, especially in the east.

“Sprint aggressively prices their services to this market, and their phones won’t work on AT&T’s cell site.”

Davis says the Remote Mobility Zone is likely to present a better fit in the corporate world, especially in the energy sector.

“This device makes sense if you are hydrofracking for natural gas in Pennsylvania, or drilling for oil in Wyoming, or even on an oil drilling platform,” Davis says.  “Those installations are up and running for longer periods of time and are in relatively narrow spaces, perfect for AT&T’s half-mile service area using this device.”

“AT&T is going to have to market this very carefully, because the company is effectively selling a product to cover gaps that AT&T has created themselves either through inadequate coverage or damaged cell towers they should be responsible for fixing fast enough to negate the need for this product.”

While many AT&T residential customers continue their exodus from the company’s forthcoming Internet Overcharging scheme, there are many rural Americans who have just one choice for broadband service — AT&T DSL.  For them, escaping usage caps is not as easy as calling the local cable company and arranging for new service.

While consumers continue to register their displeasure with AT&T over capping Internet usage at 150GB for DSL or 250GB for U-verse, there appears to be a way to get away from the usage limits while still maintaining your AT&T DSL service — switch to a usage-cap-free business account.

AT&T sells business broadband service to at-home, small, and medium-sized businesses at a substantial discount for the first year — $30 a month for up to 6Mbps.  A one year term commitment is required, but that likely won’t present any problems for customers who don’t have any other option for service.  With an AT&T modem/router already in place, making the change should just require a phone call to AT&T.

The company may offer different pricing and service plans depending on the region where you obtain service.  Former BellSouth customers may get different promotions than former Ameritech customers do.  We also found a few customers who still were able to access AT&T’s “usage measurement tool” on their business accounts, but business customers have not been notified usage caps apply to them, and we suspect that will continue to be the case.  AT&T promotes business class service at $25-30 a month in one offer we found, and service was even available to those who don’t want a business phone line.

After the first year, rates increase substantially, but we’re hopeful AT&T will learn the error of their ways and rescind their unjustified usage limits before the year is up.

If you are going to switch to AT&T’s business class service, share your experiences in our comment section to help other readers.

 

 

Verizon Communications formally closed its acquisition of Alltel in January 2009, but some former customers are only now feeling the impact as they transition to… AT&T.

That’s right, AT&T.

Although Verizon acquired the bulk of Alltel’s national customer base, the federal government ordered Verizon to sell off its future Alltel customers in communities where the company would likely be the overwhelmingly dominant player.  Verizon sold off most of these orphaned customers, numbering over a million, especially in the Mountain Time Zone, to AT&T.

The transition from Alltel to AT&T would be a bumpy one because the two companies use different wireless technologies, meaning every customer would have to be provided with a new phone.  Alltel’s customers remaining with Verizon didn’t experience this, because both companies use CDMA technology.

AT&T agreed, as part of the deal, to supply every one of its new postpaid/contract Alltel customers with brand new GSM phones (although AT&T was unwilling to provide free advanced smartphones like Apple’s iPhone).  Prepaid customers were less lucky — they only received discounts off new phones.

Stop the Cap! has talked with more than a dozen affected customers in Arizona, New Mexico, Michigan, Utah, Wyoming, Iowa and Colorado about their experiences as they transition to AT&T service.  With AT&T now proposing to merge with T-Mobile, which could also mean some new phones for T-Mobile customers, we wanted to learn what customers thought about being moved from one carrier to another, what their experience was before the transition and after, and whether they intend to stay with AT&T.

Our panel included a young man from Utah who used his phone at home and outside of the state as he performed mission work for the Mormon Church in rural Florida.  We also spoke with a retired couple living in Arizona who chose Alltel because of their unlimited calling circle option to stay in touch with friends and family in Minnesota.  Also participating: a travel agent in Michigan, a realtor in New Mexico, a self-employed contractor in Colorado, a farmer in Iowa, and several others who shared their stories with us in e-mail.  By mutual agreement, we’re keeping their last names private because some have pending disputes with AT&T.

Breaking the News: Alltel Sells Out Their Customers to Verizon

When Karen, a realtor from New Mexico first heard word that Alltel was selling out to Verizon, she wasn’t sure exactly what that meant.  There was considerable confusion in her part of southern New Mexico mostly because the local media does a poor job of covering telecommunications stories.

“In New Mexico, everything in the media is centered around what is going on in Albuquerque and everything else is given little attention, except in the local newspaper,” Karen says.  “But whether you are in Las Cruces or Roswell, the quality of the story depends on the quality of the poorly paid reporter.”

Karen was not worried about the sale at first, because she was aware Verizon had a good reputation for cell phone service.  She had originally selected Alltel because they had good rates and friendly customer service.

“If I ever had a problem with my phone, Alltel would always fix it, even if it was out of warranty,” Karen explains.  “That meant a lot to me because they didn’t have to do that, but it was why I always renewed my contract.”

Heath, who runs a home-based contracting business in southern Colorado, didn’t like what he was hearing from the start.  Neither did Marion and Will, a retired couple living outside of Phoenix.

“We had our dealings with Verizon back in Minnesota when we lived there and we never liked them because they cost too much,” Will says.  “Alltel was a great choice for us because they had a calling circle plan that let you make unlimited calls to certain numbers, and we talked with our daughter back in Minnesota daily using our cell phone.”

Confusion about the deal only got worse when Alltel (and in some cases Verizon) notified our panel members they would not be Verizon customers after all — they were being sold off to another cell phone company.

Alltel -> Verizon -> AT&T -> Frustration

Micah, our reader in Utah first contacted us more than a year ago to express his confusion about why he was not only losing his Alltel account, but now he was somehow ending up as a customer of AT&T, a carrier he definitely wants nothing to do with.

“I figured I could at least live with Verizon because they are everywhere, but as I started performing my mission work for the church in rural central Florida, I learned from my parents I was actually going to end up a customer of AT&T, something I definitely never wanted,” Micah says.  “AT&T is terrible in Utah and worse here — nobody wants AT&T unless you are in Orlando or Daytona Beach.”

“At first we thought, cool, new phones for everyone,” Shanie told Stop the Cap! from her home in Muskegon, Mich. “AT&T has been promising major expansion of service here in western Michigan since they notified us they were taking over for Alltel, but then we started learning the details.”

While Shanie’s family of four would be given four new phones, their choices of new phones were limited, although AT&T called them “comparable.”  Many of AT&T’s smartphones were not covered, even if families already owned smartphones purchased from Alltel.

“We also discovered if you wanted one of these advanced phones, it meant a new two-year contract with AT&T, effectively forcing us to stay with them longer,” Shanie says.

Jed, a farmer outside of Sioux City, Iowa says AT&T did a poor job keeping him informed.  Jed stopped receiving all communication from Alltel (other than a bill) and never heard a word from AT&T.  Instead, one of his neighbors warned him that his Alltel phone was going to quit working by the middle of May.  Jed was upset because the deadline for him to choose a new free phone had passed and he never had the opportunity to make a choice, never having been notified about any of the changes.

“The newspaper might have said something about it, but we don’t get the paper here and nobody has much time to spend watching television,” Jed shared.  “We would have thought AT&T would have notified us, but they apparently forgot we were here.”

Last week, a new phone arrived from AT&T in the mail, unsolicited.

“What a way of doing business — we thought at first it was some sort of fraudulent purchase and we almost didn’t accept it from the driver,” Jed said.

AT&T has been sending out new phones all month to customers across several states, encouraging them to call and activate them on AT&T’s network.  Once customers do that, their old Alltel phones will quit working.  That was a problem for Shanie’s daughter at college in Grand Rapids.  When mom activated her phone, the primary one on the account, her daughter’s Alltel phone stopped working.

“AT&T has you call a toll-free number to activate the phone, but first they require y0u to accept the terms and conditions for doing business with AT&T, which can include contract extensions for some people,” Shanie said.  “I had no idea activating my phone would end service on all of the other Alltel phones on the account.”

Alltel customers in these states had new AT&T phones shipped to them on this schedule.  The second date refers to the service transition cutoff date:

Arizona	January 27, 2011	February 10, 2011
Southern New Mexico	February 7-8, 2011	March 2-3, 2011
Michigan and Montana	February 16-21, 2011	April 6-12, 2011
Colorado, Northern New Mexico	February 23-28, 2011	April 13-18, 2011
Iowa and South Dakota	March 4-14, 2011	April 19-28, 2011
North Dakota	March 15-21, 2011	April 29-May 5, 2011
Utah and Wyoming	April 1-6, 2011	May 9-12, 2011

Bailing Out for Alternatives

Jody, a soon-to-be-ex AT&T customer in New Mexico, says there was plenty of fine print to wade through when he prepared for the switch from Alltel, and he didn’t like what he saw.

“AT&T is very tricky about how they handle customers who want to depart Alltel and avoid becoming an AT&T customer,” Jody says.  “You cannot cancel your Alltel contract and avoid an early termination fee, but you can cancel AT&T within 30 days of switching and escape a hefty exit fee.”

Indeed, AT&T’s transition website says Alltel customers who want to switch providers will face an early exit penalty as long as their Alltel phones remain active.  Those who switch and activate their new AT&T phones get a 30 day window to drop AT&T and avoid an ETF:

If, after moving to AT&T service, you choose to discontinue your AT&T service, you will have a 30-day period to opt out of your AT&T contract without an ETF. After that 30-day period, standard AT&T terms apply including any applicable ETF.

Jody got his new phone and promptly canceled his AT&T service.  He switched to CellularOne, a company with a legacy name but a very local network.  It has its own cell towers only in northern Arizona and parts of New Mexico.  For everywhere else, it depends on a roaming agreement with… AT&T.

Jody’s CellularOne plan still offers completely unlimited calling, texting, and data for around $80 a month, and that includes AT&T’s nationwide network.

“CellularOne offers a much better deal than AT&T, but you can only choose from three lower end smartphones — no iPhone to be had here,” Jody says.

Heath in Colorado wants out of AT&T as well.

“They drop calls all the time and their network strength is awful in my neighborhood, and I depend on my cell phone and don’t have a landline,” Heath says.  “I don’t know why we had to be stuck with AT&T who apparently de-commissioned Alltel’s towers, which used to deliver a rock solid signal here.”

But not everyone is heading for other carriers.  Sam in Farmington, New Mexico says AT&T is bringing 3G to his community and mobile broadband speeds have been much faster than what Alltel used to deliver.

“AT&T’s data plans are overpriced, but if you can hang onto your existing Alltel plan but use it on AT&T’s network, it’s not so bad,” Sam says.  “Unfortunately, you cannot upgrade to an iPhone and keep Alltel’s plans — you have to pick one of AT&T’s.”

The Future for T-Mobile Customers

Although T-Mobile shares the same GSM network technology AT&T uses, the two companies have different frequency allocations for their respective networks.  T-Mobile customers seeking access to AT&T’s network will probably need new phones to access it. While AT&T claims T-Mobile’s own largely urban network will supplement AT&T’s own coverage, customers may need new equipment for that to be true as well, unless AT&T co-locates their own cell antennas on T-Mobile towers.

Former Alltel customers tell Stop the Cap! AT&T didn’t offer the latest and most popular phones for their swap, and some customers too far away from an AT&T store had to get a new phone without being able to try it.  AT&T allowed customers to exchange phones within 30 days, which helped some of our readers, but most felt the entire idea of being forced to switch to AT&T an inconvenience.  Most were also disturbed that one of the competitors in their area was disappearing, and considering Alltel served largely small cities and rural areas, there was already a lack of choice for most.  In total, three of our readers are staying with AT&T, two left for CellularOne, one chose to switch to a prepaid plan, and the rest went with Verizon after all.  If Alltel were still around, every customer we talked with for this piece would have stayed with them.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has declared war on the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile, suggesting it would result in a nationwide cell phone duopoly that will stifle innovation and eliminate competition.

“If AT&T is allowed to swallow T-Mobile, competition will be stifled, growth will be stifled and wireless innovation will be jeopardized,” Hesse told attendees at the Commonwealth Club of California Friday.

Sprint’s announced opposition to the proposed merger came during a speech that was supposed to be about the company’s environmental initiatives, but Hesse opened his remarks warning of the dire implications should the nation’s second largest wireless carrier absorb the fourth — T-Mobile.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse delivers remarks at the Commonwealth Club of California – Friday, April 15, 2011. This edited clip covers Hesse’s remarks regarding the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile. (12 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

Sprint has signaled it is willing to spend lobbying dollars to fight the merger in Washington, where it faces a review by the Justice Department and the FCC.  The declaration of war by Sprint did not go over well at AT&T, where the company’s top lobbyist Jim Cicconi trotted out Hesse’s prior statements to use against him in a company blog post:

As recently as last October, Mr. Hesse said the wireless industry is ‘hyper competitive‘.  The month prior, his CFO talked about how ‘tough‘ retail competition is in the wireless market, citing at least six major competitors.  In February of last year, Mr. Hesse said, “M&A is absolutely a way to get the growth in the industry, if a particular transaction makes sense for anybody.”  He went on to say, “I think consolidation will be healthy for the industry, some consolidation. It is, needless to say, very competitive.”  And in January of last year at a Citi Global Conference, Mr. Hesse said, “Well, there is no question that we have an extremely competitive wireless industry in this country and that the pricing is getting much more aggressive.”

Given that Sprint is a major competitor to AT&T in the hyper competitive wireless market Mr. Hesse describes, no one should be surprised that they would oppose this merger.  But it is self-serving for them to argue that the highly competitive wireless market they cited only months ago is now threatened by the very type of transaction they seemed prepared to defend previously.

Sprint was reportedly interested in pursuing a merger with T-Mobile before AT&T sealed their own deal with the German telecommunications company.

Cicconi’s remarks about a “hyper-competitive” marketplace conflict with marketplace reality:

• A combined AT&T/T-Mobile enterprise would control 42 percent of the American wireless marketplace;
• Verizon Wireless would control 32 percent;
• Sprint would maintain third place with a distant 17 percent;
• Every other carrier combined (Cricket, MetroPCS, Alltel, and other regional players) would have just 9 percent.

In fact, after Sprint, other carriers AT&T routinely cites as “serious competition” individually have just three percent or less of the American market.

Hesse told his audience that besides concerns about innovation and price, also-ran carriers other than AT&T and Verizon are likely going to get stuck with less advanced handsets and face little or no access to latest generation iPhone and Android smartphones, often made available exclusively to larger carriers.

“Whoever the supplier is, you can say, ‘Hey, I’ll take all of your production,'” Hesse said. “They could restrict our access to some of the cool devices.”

Hesse predicts his company will ultimately not be the only one opposing the merger.  But smaller carriers have had little to say since the merger was announced.