One of the most tempting things this phone company does is offer free phones. When my Mom and I joined the plan, they did not offer us the ordinary 5190’s they offered us 6190s. You might be saying “ooh” right now, but the 6190 is a more convenient model to use since it has longer battery life and the phone weighs a little less.

A free phone is a good thing because before getting this cell phone plan, my Mom had the old Motorola flip phones. When I say old flip phone, I mean the first bulky gray ones that only businesspersons had or were used as props for a rap video. My Mom was so attached to that phone because she forked in over four hundred dollars just for that phone. I was so embarrassed when my Mom used it, that I usually stayed a couple feet back when it was being operated.

So far the free phones look good to us. Then the company gave us bonus minutes if we decided to join. 1000 minutes for each phone; anytime, anywhere in the US for use within three months. If you have ever wondered how long 1000 minutes are, it is 16.6 hours of talking. I didn’t even know any people whom I can talk to for all that time.

The phone plan my Mom had before was a very expensive one. My mom would occasionally use the phone, then her bill alone would come up to be $80. Signing up with Cingular, my Mom and me would get 450minutes to share for only $65 a month. Not only would we get that, but we would also get free mobile-to-mobile and unlimited text messaging. In contrast, her $80 got her about 275-300 minutes on her previous cell phone provider with no other features available.

My Mom decided to leave her other cell phone plan and go for this one. In our first three months, nothing really went wrong with the service. Call connections were great and we were saving a lot of money.

Then the company threw in another offer as long as we add $10 to the bill for each phone. After our three months/1000 minutes deal, the $10 would assure us a 1000 minutes for each cell phone per a month as long as calls were being made on nights and/or weekends. My Mom decided that it would save us money on the long distance bill as well and really make us save more money in the long run.

So far, so good, until the 5th month’s bill came and it totaled over $300. Apparently, they claim they didn’t activate the other 1000 minutes. Their other claim was that the customer service representative might have done the operation wrong. So as a sign of good will they gave us 50 more minutes to use on our next month’s bill, plus $80 credit. Then that customer service representative claimed that our 1000 minutes were finally activated, but now it was unlimited minutes for the nights and weekends.

The last bill came in and now the total bill was $283. My mom was going crazy on me and claims that I talk on the phone too much and that I caused the bill to go that high. I was upset now too, so I checked out my bill summary. From far away it looks like I did make a lot of calls because my bill summary alone is about eight pages long. Four of those pages just have text message on the summary and Cingular said we have unlimited text messaging.

Now my call summary portion was very weird. I have another friend who I usually call a lot and that is ok because she is also subscribing to the mobile-to-mobile service. Cingular’s mobile-to-mobile is suppose to not deduct any of your minutes because it is UNLIMITED mobile-to-mobile. I look at the number of my friend who has that feature and notice that she is on two parts of the bill. One part is the mobile-to-mobile summary and then the second part is out of the normal shared minutes. I added the minutes they took out on my anytime minutes and they took out almost 60 minutes. Her number appeared a lot on the mobile-to-mobile portion, but why would it also appear to take out my anytime minutes?

Just for record keeping, my minutes on the non mobile-to-mobile calls were about 480 minutes. So now I am looking at all the off peak calls because that is where my unlimited calls come in. I deduct those minutes off and I only used 135 minutes on the peak time.

Then two calls really stick out on my bill. One call to my friend on the off peak (unlimited domestic long distance) hours costs 9.90 for about 20 minutes. I look at the other call I made which was to a city right next to mine (Union City). That call costs $23.30 for about 56 minutes. Can someone tell me why it costs more to call someone who is only a mile away from me versus someone who is about 1000 miles away?

I looked at my Mom’s bill and a lot of the calls were billed in a similar manner to mine. My Dad decided to give Cingular a good cursing and they were ready to give $70 credit right away, but he said that wasn’t enough and they claim that they are investigating the matter, but they haven’t called us yet.

That brings me to the next problem with this company, their bad customer service. For those two operators who were really helpful, this paragraph does not apply to you. No matter what time of the day customer service was contacted we had to wait 7-15 minutes just for someone to talk to you. The errors the customer service representatives have made were already bad. Just last week I tried to text message a friend and my phone told me to call my service provider because I don’t have text messaging. The operator had to reactivate my text messaging. My question is if he reactivated it, then who deactivated it?

Before you even think about making a call during those off peak hours, be prepared to take 5-15 minutes just to get a hold of that person. Usually you receive a message on your cell phone claiming that the number you just called is busy. Don’t believe that message because I could have a cell phone I am trying to call right next to me and it still would say that the number is busy. Then you might get the other message saying that the Cingular Wireless phone systems are busy please try again. It also happens during the peak hours too.

Cingular does have a great coverage area. It covers most of California and Nevada. The coverage area might be great, but calls will get dropped. So far the frequency of my calls being dropped is about once every week to a week and a half. What if I really had an emergency and my call got dropped?

If you see those great offers on the newspaper with the Cingular name, just remember my experience and ask yourself is it really worth it? All the time and money just for a free phone and cheap minutes, is it worth it? Once you sign that contract you must stay with the company for two years or pay a $200 fine for each phone removed from the contract. So now my Mom and I are doing time.






Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 85