AT&T Wireless ripoff, poor service Watertown MA

AT&T GoPhone disconnects, even if you prepay!!!

AT&T offers a wireless plan they call a GoPhone. One of its main attributes is that it requries no yearly contracts. They just bill your credit card a set amount (for example: 29.99 for up to 200 minutes at 20 cents per minute per month). If you use up your minutes, they will just rebill your credit card and start a new month from there through a process they call. I quote from the rateplan explaination on their website:

"If you are on the automatic rolling option, additional automatic payments will be made every 30 days or whenever your balance is reduced to $5 or less, which ever is sooner. If you are on the fixed monthly option, your automatic recurring payment will only be made once every 30 days."

So, you have two stated options:

1) Fixed Monthly Option: If you use up your minutes, the phone is cut off until the 30 days passes.

2) Automatic Rolling Option: If your balance falls to "$5 or less," your credit card is billed another $29.99.

This certainly implies heavily that your phone would NEVER BE CUT OFF (unless your credit card was denied perhaps).

However, this IS NOT THE CASE because their billing system SUCKS.

Let's say you have $6 worth of time left, and you make a 45 minute phone call (at .20 per minute, or a $9.00 phone call). The billing system will cut your phone off, and you have to call AT&T wireless to have them turn it back on.

Plus, their operators are snotty little wenches who can't IMAGINE how you could be so stupid as to make a 45-minute phone call without first checking to see how many minutes you've used up. Dolt!

They'll then try to "upsell" you to a better plan, and by "upsell" I mean "bait-and-switch" or, to put it like the Mafia would ... offer you a "cut-off protection plan."

Don't Go hear the GoPhone.

Kevin
Watertown, Massachusetts
U.S.A.