Posted on 03/31/2011 11:11:21 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Several users have written in to note that AT&T is sending out notifications that their terms of service have changed. The update includes a large number of things AT&T users need to be made aware of, including new language addressing AT&T's new cap and overage plans, mandatory binding arbitration, mandatory migrations from legacy DSL to AT&T U-Verse service, and even language giving AT&T the right to terminate your service should you get angry about any of these changes and take it out on an AT&T representative.
The new TOS can be found here and acceptable use policy here, both designed to enforce AT&T's decision to begin capping DSL and U-Verse users in May, directing users to AT&T's new usage portal. Users in our forums note the TOS include language requiring you to upgrade to U-Verse (at potentially higher costs, though they'll forgo an ETF if you have to pay more and decide to leave).
The TOS also informs U-Verse users that if they agree to their AT&T contract they lose their ability to take part in a class action lawsuit, and instead must participate in binding arbitration -- a process overseen by AT&T-hired companies where consumers lose more often than not. Judges time, time, and time again have told ISPs this isn't legal, and the case will soon be heard by the Supreme Court.
Should you not like any of these terms of service changes and decide to take it out on AT&T in a manner AT&T deems unprofessional, the company has embedded a bit in their terms of service allowing them to terminate your connection for bad behavior. According to the TOS, AT&T may terminate your service if you engage in conduct that is threatening, abusive or harassing to the AT&T or Yahoo employees, including, for example, making threats to physically harm or damage employee or company property; frequent use of profane or vulgar language; or repeatedly contacting our customer service representatives for reasons that do not pertain to our provisioning, maintenance, repair or general servicing of your high speed Internet access service after you have been asked to stop such conduct.That provision may come in handy for AT&T when their caps go live May 2. All in all it's a fairly standard terms of service -- giving AT&T every possible right while eliminating most of yours.
Thank you. Just a quickie to see what I can do in a few minutes... :)
I had the service from April - July, 2009. The internet service was no different than my dry DSL line I have had with them for several years before and since. No difference in the service whatsoever.
However, the actual U-verse TV DVR would jitter pretty often. The program would occasionally stop for less than a second and then jump over whatever caused the trouble. If you hit the back-up button one time, the problem would pretty much go away, so it apparently was a buffering problem.
I complained about it several times and they sent out a tech to measure my connection. They claimed I had several times as much bandwidth available outside my demark as was required, so the trouble must be on my side. Since I ran my own wire and was sure of the quality of materials and workmanship, I took that as an insult and chose to go back to Dish Network and DSL.
Here’s the trick to dealing with ATT. They have BBB preferred rating. As such they agree to use BBB arbitration which means they have to pay for it! It’s a trick I’ve used on a couple of companies that went squirrely on me.
I actually recently did it on ATT and they completely changed their tune when BBB called them with a complaint. But don’t tell everyone I’d hate my little trick to get too much publicity—just keep this a secret between us freepers :-)
Laz, after eyeballing some of the things you claimed you'd hit, I find it impossible to imagine that for the right compensation, you wouldn't use a ubiquitous service from any provider.
I have u-Verse and like it.
Got it mainly for the TV option. Like it better than Time Warner cable.
Better remote interface, able to record 4 programs at a time.
But, with cable you can simply put a tee in the cable and run another set. Not so with u-Verse. Must have a box for each set.
Internet is about the same as cable. There are several options as to speed, up to 18 mbps.
Phone, little difference from cable.
Now I do usually get very close to that max (Speakeasy and Speedtest test sites) but c'mon, that's pretty low BW in 2011 and it's the best they offer here. AT&T does offer more BW but just not in this area.
When you have four people with four PCs in a house all trying to DL, surf, play games, etc. where does AT&T get the idea that 6m/512K asynchronous BW is "family friendly"? 512K? That's not even half a T1!! If I had access to another ISP, I would drop AT&T in a second.
The companies I’ve dealt with worse customer support would be TCI back in the days of the first cable modems. I was fortunate to live in one of the two test cities where @home and TCI rolled out cable modem service in the mid-90’s. It was GREAT at first - but TCI took over service from @Home and things went to ##(*&. Would you believe 4 hour waits to talk to customer service? A configuration mistake once put the entire city at 128Kbits/sec download cap for WEEKS.
They eventually were called into explain the poor service to the city council - things got better for awhile - then they sold out to.... AT&T.
Eventually it became Comcast after having changed hands 3 or more times. Service is ... okay. I DO get 20Mb/s which is nothing to complain about.
As for AT&T today - no way would I get one of their phones or use their UVerse service. I’ve looked at the Uverse offering carefully and what Comcast is providing better fits my family’s needs. With these changes in TOS - well they just suck!
I just switched from AT&T DSL to Cox cable. I did this two weeks before the new TOS came out.
Twenty times faster download rate, at the same cost as AT&T.
It was an easy decision.
If you could get hold of someone who speaks English without an accent and actually tries to solve your issue instead of just reading their retarded call-center script, customers would have no reason to use profane or abusive language to some Indian or Filipino twenty-something who tries to tell them his name is really Bill
I've dealt with both ATT and TWC.
The level of customer support at TWC, makes ATT&T look like a bunch of *helpful* Eagle Scouts. It took me two weeks of dealing with the fools at Time Warner, just to move my cable over to a new address. And to top off the frustration, they compounded their incompetence by continually giving me a hard upsell for services. AS in: "Sure, our service sucks. You want to buy more of it, right?"
There's a 2nd company moving into my area, the second they offer me a deal, I'm dropping Time Warner.
AT&T? Not great, but I never reached the maddening level of frustration that I did with Time Warner Cable. If it wasn't for the fact that Mrs WBill and the kids watch TV, I'd have pulled the plug completely.
FIOS is da bomb!
“FIOS is da bomb!”
I’ll check it out when it makes it to my zip. Verizon’s customer service when things go wrong is horrible. However, the optical system has a lot of fantastic engineering (I did some work on qualification of the connectors, cabling, and hardware used in the distribution. BTW, Verizon was a miserable company to work with as a vendor).
We broke down and signed up for UVerse about a year ago. We absolutely hate it and are waiting for the contract to run out so we can go back to DirecTV.
Just last night we were watching UVerse On Demand programming and half way through, it said the program was no longer available. It basically froze the entire TV. Had to turn everything off and went back in to On Demand to try and start the program over and no such luck. We saw half of the show.
Another small complaint we have is that the schedule is always off, so when we set the DVR to tape a program, we don’t get the show we wanted. Also, our DVR is a waste of time. It will tape a series as programmed and then all of the sudden it will drop off the schedule and we’ll think, hey, we haven’t seen that show in a couple of weeks, why isn’t it taping??? Apparently, others have had this issue as well. You have to go in and set it up again.
These things happen ALL THE TIME at our house. We had much better luck and reliability with DirecTV.
We had AT&T iPhone 3GS service. It sucked.
I have U-Verse TV and Broadband here only because Verizon didn’t offer FIOS here at the time.
It’s pretty good and reliable. Very little downtime and TV approaches FIOS quality.
I don't like the other stuff, but I have a hard time viewing giving customers a new, more satisfying way to cancel a service so bad it almost qualifies as fraud, as a bad thing. If it was me, I'd call them up and commence with the obscenities and keep ramping it up till they cancelled, which is what I called for in the first place. Isn't this a MUCH more customer friendly cancellation policy than say, AOL's, who would do dishonest and abusive things to avoid honoring your intent to cancel?
Call them up and tell them how bad it sucks, and keep getting more strident about it till they cancel you. See, when THEY want to cancel, contracts are no obstacle.
They say this as if they expect it to REDUCE "bad behavior"! As hard as it is to escape from most telecommunications contracts for non-performance on THEIR side, sounds more like a free pass to me.
I realize this is about DSL, but AT&T recently took over my mobile broadband data service from Alltel... They sent me the wrong type of modem. I called to get it changed. After three transfers and enough time on hold to go over my ‘minutes allowance’ for the month, I finally got to someone “who could help me”.... Someone who didn’t speak English very well... Who demanded my social security number before we could progress.
After I told her that it was illegal to demand a SSN for identification, and I wasn’t going to give it to her, she said she couldn not proceed with the discussion without it.
So I told her to go to h377, and figured out a way to get around the wrong type of modem issues.
So, After fifty dollars of expenses and five hours of software hassles, I finally got connected.
At first I was pleased, once all the technical problems got worked out, because my bandwidth / download speed was four times faster. But there is a huge downside... They have shut my connection down completely from 10PM to 10 AM every day since they took over. And I have waste hours on the phone to finally talk to someone in some foreign country who will demand my social security number??? No thanks.
Unfortunately I’m out in the boonies and my only alternative is Satellite Internet which costs three times as much and apparently has very similar service issues (or, rather, lack of service).
I hate AT&T. Call them All Trouble and Tedium.
I spent four hours on their website to try to find someone I could email, or fill out a web form or something, and I could only find telephone contact info.
Oh, and half of the manuals and communications that they have sent me have been in Spanish ONLY.. Someone might inform them that New Mexico is slightly different from Mexico, and that English... at least for a short time more, is the default language of the state.
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