AT&T, You Suck

This Wired item is why my latest AT&T contract is my last (plus the fact that I had to spend ~14 hours on the phone with "tech help" to fix my warrantied phone). AT&T Adjusts Data-Throttling Policy in Response to Customer Complaints

Here’s how AT&T’s new policy works, according to the carrier’s updated support pages:

If you have a smartphone that works on our 3G or 4G network and still have an unlimited data plan,

• You’ll receive a text message when your usage approaches 3GB in one billing cycle.
• Each time you use 3GB or more in a billing cycle, your data speeds will be reduced for the rest of that billing cycle and then go back to normal.
• The next time you exceed that usage level, your speeds will be reduced without another text message reminder.
• If you have a 4G LTE smartphone and still have an unlimited data plan, the same process applies at 5GB of data usage, instead of 3GB.

You’ll still be able to use as much data as you want. That won’t change. Only your data throughput speed will change if you use 3GB or more in one billing cycle on a 3G or 4G smartphone or 5GB or more on a 4G LTE smartphone.

Wired reached out to AT&T to determine the degree to which user speeds will be reduced under the new throttling plan, but the carrier hasn’t yet responded.

Tech Help Blues

AT&T and BlackBerry, this time... I wasted NINE hours on the phone yesterday with a multitude of techies from both AT&T and BlackBerry trying to find out why my Torch would not access WiFi. It will log on to the WiFi, but won't use it. It will only go online via the mobile data connection.

Before I finally got to the BlackBerry techs, the AT&T techs (don't know if it was their mobile phone folks or their Uverse guys) found a way to not only wipe all data from the phone, but also corrupt the backup files on my BlackBerry desktop software.

Fun.

So, this morning has been spent re-creating the environment I had made on the Torch over the past three or so months.

A special place in Hell is reserved for the Gmail folks who thought it would be a good idea to not only stop support for the Gmail app for BlackBerry, but also cleanse the entire web of the app. It occurred to me this morning that I still had the Gmail app on my BlackBerry Bold so I copied it from there to the Torch.

The upshot is that the phone is no where nearer being fixed than it was when this started yesterday, and I've lost a lot of data that WAS backed up before the "experts" got involved. Consensus is that the phone is at fault, which is what I told everyone from the start.

Where do I go to get a wasted day and half of my life back?