Until AT&T bought Bell South a while back I had not had many dealings with them outside of a T1 circuit or two that I had to manage. Honestly I wasn't happy with them then and I'm even more unhappy with them now.
I've been a Bell South/Cingular customer for a long time. My first personal cell phone was with a company (I can't remember their name for the life of me) that merged with another company and became Cingular. I had always been pretty happy with them. Service and coverage were both good and dropped calls were rare. Then along came AT&T. Now coverage stinks and dropped calls are a common occurrence. I'm not sure what exactly changed to cause this. Did they knock down some towers to make coverage worse? Are they randomly pulling the plugs on some calls just to irritate customers? It seems to me that since they inherited a good network that things would only get better as they added their infrastructure to what already existed. Obviously I'm wrong there.
I also have a AT&T aircard that I use (or try to use) when I'm working remotely. Actually I was pretty happy with it at first. I'd go to my favorite local coffee shop to work and had good coverage and no real problems. The when that shop closed I had to move to other coffee shops to work and I can't find one that has decent coverage. I get 2 bars on a good day but mostly one. Try to run VPN with one bar. Not gonna happen. Then when I do get going I lose the connection and have to reinitiate it. There are 3 coffee shops within a short distance of my house that I've tried working from and all of them are in bad coverage areas. They are not all side by side either. They are spread out so that I should be able to find decent coverage. So now instead of driving 2 to 4 miles away to work I'm having to expand my reach. Last week I tried a coffee shop about 9 miles away and had poor coverage. Today I'm at another one about 7 miles away that sits right in between 2 interstates and still coverage is poor and it continues to drop. Even in downtown Atlanta I have problems.
So I want my Cingular back. I want to go back to good coverage and to times when dropped calls and connections are rare. I want to go back to the good ole days!
