Showing posts with label ATT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ATT. Show all posts

Saturday, January 8, 2011

CES 2011 - AT&T Failed

AT&T had ZERO presence at the 2011 CES.

Verizon had a GINORMOUS booth, with lots of devices to touch and play with. 
Sprint had at least two, also with gadgets, including one outdoors with a DJ, 10 PlayStation 3's and freebies.

Also, my iPhone 4 had constant problems with data around the LV Convention Center during the show.  Likely a problem with network congestion.  Even if they didn't want to do a booth, they could have rolled up at least one of those mobile cell stations.

So me (and likely others) were using their iPhones, and getting poor data performance from AT&T.  We're being courted by Verizon & Sprint, who have some admittedly nice phones.  And where is AT&T?  Nowhere.

AT&T - you failed You should have had a booth at CES, and you should have done something to improve network performance around what is probably the biggest technology trade show in the United States, if not the world.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

AT&T borked the iPhone 4 pre-orders

As you may be aware, AT&T's servers were not ready for the massive demand for the iPhone 4.

Like a good fanboy, I was all ready to pre-order an iPhone 4 on the morning of June 15th.  I started on Apple's Online Store, and noticed that it kept hanging when it would try to verify my eligibility for the upgrade.  So after about 50 attempts (and re-entering my info that many times), I figured it was worth trying to do it on AT&T's site.  After about 20 attempts, it appeared to go through.  Or so I thought.

Because I was doing so much at once, right after the order went through, my browser crashed.  This prevented me from printing the order confirmation.  So I had no order number, no confirmation of any kind.  I only remembered seeing "Thank you for your order."

Because I didn't trust the way it happened, I decided to try the Apple Online Store again.  After about 4 attempts, that worked as well.  Unfortunately, by that point it was saying that pre-orders would be delivered by July 2 as opposed to June 24. :(  Of course, if both orders go through, that means I'll have spent around $700 after taxes as opposed to $350. :(

I got an email confirmation from Apple almost immediately, but nothing from AT&T.  I therefore resigned myself to having to wait another 2 weeks.  I also assumed that the AT&T order just didn't go through.  Later in the day I got an email from AT&T saying there was a problem with the credit card, and that the order would be canceled if they didn't get new/correct credit card info.  I called the number in the email and waited 35 minutes on hold before the system told me basically "sorry, we're too busy, call back later".  I tried several times after that, for a grand total of about an hour-and-a-half on hold.  This morning I actually got through - to a human being!

There's nothing wrong with the card - it's a debit card and the balance is more than sufficient for this purchase.  However, for some reason their system kept rejecting it.  So I gave the rep my business debit card, which worked.  She told me that from what she could see on the system, it looked like my order would in fact arrive on June 24.  I thanked her and hung up.

So now I just wait and see.  Will I receive an iPhone 4 from AT&T on June 24?  Will Apple send me one on July 2?  Will I end up with two?  Time will tell.