Hello Sprint.

After years of struggling to do basic things like send a text message, check my email, open a website, etc on AT&T I finally hung it up. I’d been with them since I was on Cingular and they merged, I bought the first iPhone and despite its shortcomings, loved it. But with the arrogance of Apple and their faulty new iPhone (I knew I could have gotten a bumper to solve my issues, and would have, but it was the principle of it) combined with AT&T’s massive failure of a cellular network.. I jumped ship to the EVO and haven’t looked back. No more being at sport events or concerts and having Katie’s Katana (flip phone on Sprint) be able to text and make phone calls while I’m left with a $600 paperweight cause the network is too congested. And don’t worry, she is getting an EVO as soon as they are in stock.. even though the Katana (shing!) is a bad ass phone. Pretty excited to be able to actually have service when it says I do, and for everyone that says Sprint sucks, in the last week I’ve been to middle of nowhere Maine, Boston, Northeast Ohio, Phoenix and around MA without any issues. Oh, and I pay $70 for unlimited everything. And I almost forgot, I’ll have 4G a year before any other provider throws it out there. Anyway this is all not the point of my post, I just had an awesome conversation with AT&T, breakups- they are always awkward, and wanted to write it down before I forgot how great it was.

I called in to tell them I was canceling my account, find out what my ETF was and make sure I don’t get billed anymore. The lady then asked why I was canceling. Oh man, where do I start. Told her I had an iPhone and didn’t like how Apple handled the newest iteration of the device. But the real reason was because the network was always failing me, usually when I needed it most. Constantly being unable to use any data, send texts, make phone calls, etc, even when it showed full bars. She asked, I told her. On to the excuses and canned customer service responses.

Well, there are plenty of other devices on AT&T. Thanks, all set with the Backflip. Pretty sure AT&T is still in business only cause of the iPhone, goodluck in January when Verizon gets its hands on it.

I’m not sure why it would show you had signal when you were unable to use the connection. Well, let me explain then. Basically its a result of too many users being connected to the same cell tower and AT&T not having large enough bandwidth on the backhaul to handle all the requests.

Well you could use wifi. Um, if I had wireless networks available to me 24/7 I wouldn’t need a cellular provider. That is the point of having a CELL phone. It isn’t a wifi-phone.

But AT&T has over 20,000 wireless hotspots available throughout the US. Yeah, apparently these aren’t in and around all the places I have issues and/or I didn’t have time to search for available wireless networks. Again, I want a cell phone that can access the internet without a hotspot, maybe AT&T should spend more money on their network and less on wireless hot spots to patch the problem.

There was a bit more to conversation, but I tried to be as polite as possible explaining everything but as you can see my patience was strained near the end. The last item she mentioned was the AT&T was working to improve service.. again, sounds good but I’ll believe it when I see it. She was a nice lady, just not very bright, and all I could think of was that she was the epitome of AT&T’s struggles as I spoke to her. Just doesn’t get it.

Anyway, I’d go back to AT&T in the future if they get their shit straight, or Verizon if they stop locking everything down like a totalitarian dictator and charging stupid amounts of money for everything you add to the plan.. especially if either gets LTE up and running, but for now I’m going to take my $70/mo all you can eat 4G wireless on one of the sickest phones I’ve ever seen. Yes, after 3 years with various iPhone models, including using the iPhone4, I can safely say the EVO running Android 2.1 (not even 2.2 yet!) is way, way ahead of anything the iPhone can do.