I became a Cingular Wireless customer about 18 months ago. My cell worked fairly well in my apartment, and was rolling along fine until the begining of this summer.

Suddenly my phone (and my friends phones that also use Cingular) were having trouble placing calls from certain parts of the city we lived in. The phone would say we had full signal, but when we try to dial about half the time we get silence followed by a beep for "call did not go through." So with Cingular I can't even make an outgoing phone call half the time, and neither can most of my friends who are Cingular wireless customers.

Well, bad luck, I lost my phone on Monday. Until recently when I've had an insurance claim on a phone I was able to go into a store say, "Hey, my phone is broken..." and they would just replace the phone in the store on that trip after confirming the phone was indeed borken. Well Cingular Wireless has decided that being competitive in the marketplace is no longer an issue apparently, because now they're making their customers call an 800 number to file the claim and then they'll have the phone shipped to you. That means I have to go maybe a week without a cell phone. Does Cingular care that I don't have a landline at home and that my phone is my only source of contacting friends and family? No. Cingular doesn't care about anything but what is most convenient for Cingular (the laziest cell phone company in the world.)

In the past when you went into a Cingular store to do an insurance claim the associate would say, "Well, here are your options" and you could choose which phone you wanted from those options. Now when you call the 800 number they say, "If we don't have any refurbished versions of the phone you lost we'll send you a 'comparable' phone." So I ask what happens if the comparable phone doesn't meet my needs, and they tell me, get this, "you're stuck with it."

Oh yes! I pay insurance on a phone, and now there's a possibility I'll be stuck with a really crappy phone. Sounds like a violation of my good faith to me.. but I'm not a lawyer.

Did I also mention that Cingular requires a $50 deductible to make a claim on the insurance?

I happened to still have my old old phone from when I first signed up to be with Cingular wireless and thought, "Hey, I'll just get a new sim card for the phone and skip all this hassle." Those sim cards are supposedly great, they keep all your phone numbers on them, just switch it to a new phone and you're up and running! Guess what, they want $90 for a new sim card! What a rip-off! In europe you can buy $5 calling cards for pay phones that have the same sim card in them.

So the moral of the story is don't go to Cingular because you will just end up getting screwed big time. When you look around your city and see all those Cingular wireless stores just remember, they are only there to sign you up. After you are signed up they will not provide you with any services.

Cingular Wireless is part of SBC and it seems that their customer service policies are from the days when they had a monopoly as a local phone company. Exercise your right to choice friends and you will find yourself in a much happier, Cingular B.S. free, life.

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