VITAL STATS:
Plan:
$35/month
350 anytime minutes and unlimited nights* and weekends.
(*Nights start at 9pm).
Free Voicemail (which is reliable)
Free Long Distance
Free Roaming within my area (which includes California and Las Vegas and some other places I've never been).

Primary Use: To call friends, to give to people I need to talk to ASAP, and to call long distance to my girfriend during nights and weekends.


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As has been suggested to me...
If you want the review to progress
chronologically, please read the
original review and then the updates.
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UPDATED REVIEW (May25.01):
REGARDING UC BERKELEY RECEPTION:
I made a statement that reception for the Cingular phone is good on the UC Berkeley campus. I need to revise this recommendation. It is good in many places. Obviously, indoor reception is generally bad in some of the larger buildings. However, there is really bad reception at the Haas School of Business, and so if you are one of those people, get AT&T.

Nowadays, I average only a few dropped calls per month. I make about 4 calls a day.

I frequent call from Evans Hall and Cory Hall and Edwards Track. Reception in all these places is pretty good. I can get voicemail on the corners of Evans Hall. I get 2 of 5 bars in Cory Hall.

SERVICE AND BILLING
Still, service is pretty iffy from the Cingular company itself (but I hear this is true of all cell providers). Billing mistakes abound in the industry. I, however, had much trouble because I don't use many of the features, except occasional SMS messages.

Note: There is a cool feature that my Girlfriend uses to message me through the Internet. She messages me and then I call her back on my unlimited night-time minutes. It was handy when she had her long distance cut off.

One nice thing in Berkeley, CA is that Parrot Cellular on Shattuck is helpful and I would refer business in the area to them. When I locked my phone while playing with security features, they helped me figure it out. The people I've talked to were honest and told me which phones had horrible problems and which didn't. They also had a recommendation on what phone has the best reception, something you can't find on the Cingular website itself. Of course, I double check what they say at home, just to make sure they aren't selling me a feature/phone I don't need.

Because of Parrot Cellular's helpfulness, I am upgrading my review from 2 to 3 stars, but I still can't recommend it. I think the reception is passable and I am keeping the service at least for a few more months.

UPDATED REVIEW (Aug27.01):

I've chilled out a bit about my disdain for cingular. I've had a few good customer service interactions. But at the same time, the customer service is inconsistent and sketchy, which is a problem if anything bad happens.

Furthermore, the following places at UC Berkeley do not get reception very well:

Haas School of Business (no connection)



UPDATED REVIEW (Jul28.01):

I just got called from someone from Cingular pretty promptly today. They gave me very good answers. So right now I think Cingular is a bit better than I originally thoguht.

But I still hold that their customer service is very hit-and-miss. I've had a few bad experiences, different answers coming from different people, long on-hold times, etc. And then I ahd this one good experience.

WHAT HAPPENED was that I had my cell phone stolen, a horrible experience. I didn't have insurance and I just wanted to buy a new phone and get it activated. Then the people at the local store told me that I had to either buy a phone from them or get a compatible phone that was new or previously used by Cingular. That sounded strange, but they just told me, "That's the way it works".

So I emailed the cingular people and then Bob told me that the reason is because, to stop cellular fraud (people stealing your airtime), these phones have security features. If the phone used to be used by Cingular, they have the code to unlock it. If it was used by another carrier, the other carrier would have to unlock it and we would need the old account number and the original owner's permission. That made sense.


ORIGINAL REVIEW:

Berkeley, CA

* Why did you choose this service?
I chose this service because of the advertising and because of the special olympics plan. I have wanted a cell phone for a while, but since I met a girlfriend in Santa Rosa, I needed a way to call her cheap.
Figuring I would only call her at night and on weekends, when I'm off of work, I thought that getting unlimited weekends would be great. I also wanted free long distance to call my folks down in L.A. The cheapest plan to do so was what I *thought* I needed, but I was wrong.

Cingular already has the cheapest "plans", and when the Special Olympics $35/month plan came around, shaving $5 and giving 50 more anytime minutes to the comparable $39.99 plan, I decided to splurge. Not to mention the free phone.

Starting service was FAST and easy, but not the best service, now that I look at it. I dropped into Parrot Cellular on Shattuck before I had to catch a BART train. I asked the person how long it would take to get me a cellular phone, and he said "about 15 minutes". He was right. After 15 minutes, I had a phone, and after charging for about 1 hour, I got my first call, from Cingular, signaling to me that my account was activated.

Looking back, I realize that they didn't tell me everything, I had to read through the fine print and discover some surprising things:

BAD NIGHTS = nights, in this market, are defined as calls from 9:00pm to 7:00am (give or take a minute). Also, after digging on their website, all calls are billed based on start time. So, calling one minute early for 30 minutes, eats up 30 anytime minutes. (Thank God they didn't mess witht he definition of "weekend".)
ACTIVATION FEE = Yeah, it was plainly written on the contract, but it somehow didn't register for me, and the salesperson didn't point it out either.

Giving the salesperson a break, maybe he thinks everyone already knows this, but, more likely than that, maybe he just doesn't care...

* Describe your experience with this service.
So my Oddyssey began after I got home my first night:

NO RECEPTION IN MY APARTMENT. This devastated me. I live on the 1st floor of a 4 story apartment in the butt-crack of an L-shaped layout. It's not a happy place to be, but I get NO service in my apartment. I get lousy service on my porch. I get lots of dropped calls at home. (BTW: I live on Blake and Ellsworth, for those of you living there.)

Otherwise, service was par, a mixed bag of good and bad. Sound quality is good and I get good recpetion walking around the UC Campus (but I haven't tested it everywhere). I can even get reception in the dungeonous concrete tunnels of the track stadium where my office is. But, at my house, it sucked, and considering that I envisioned my cell phone to be a universal locator, this was bad news. Also, I got a few dropped calls for no reason, even when connections were good. At night, I often got notices that there were no available network connections, showing me that Cingular was overloading its network, maybe. The cheap "plan", perhaps, was paying for cheap infrastructure.

I LOVE VOICEMAIL/CALLER-ID. I can see who is calling (usually) and then choose whether to take their call or not. Also, when I have voicemail, a little icon pops up on my phone. It is very convenient to always know if there is a message for me, especially when I am at home, without reliable voice service. (I have found 1/4 of my apartment gets intermittent signals so that I can see if I have voicemail always, even if I can't get voice calls always.)

* Bad Company
Cheap infrastructure is only the beginning of the bad company of Cingular Wireless. After doing some searching after I got my plan, I realized that Cingular's per-minute rates (45cents peak, 40cents off-peak ("nights" and weekends) are MUCH higher than most other plan's. This worried me, since I didn't have lots of anytime minutes and my phone had no way of tracking it.

So, I decided to look at its online bill pay system to 1) pay bills online and 2) track my monthly minutes. I tried their online system, and it just simply FAILED the first time I tried it. The second time, it gave me several errors and I had to re-login several times. Eventually, I was able to take a look at my plan and billing address. However, when I went to look at "this month's minutes", it gave me more errors.

("In my search, I found that Cingular may, on occasion, accidentally charge minutes from one month to another month. It's in their fine-print somewhere that this may happen, especially if calls are made when roaming outside one's calling area. They aren't specific.)

Lastly, my phone was just stolen. I declined insurance. I reported it to the store I bought it from, and they were helpful, telling me to call a number and report it. But what sucks is that the number is only available on weekdays, as is their customer service line. So the person who stole my phone could be calling Bolivia (the people at the store told me that the phone is activated to call internationally, at $2.50 a minute) and I sure as hell won't be paying for it. I tried to report it online immediately, but I couldn't. I sent them an email.

Their email response time is 2-days. Whoa! They must be getting a HUGE number of complaints or something. They should have some way of reporting cell phone theft, just like Credit Cards have.


I've been working with customer service in many of my recents projects, and I know that money spent making things easier and clearer cuts down on customer support costs. 2-days for response means 1) they don't have a good email response system or 2) they are a getting lots of requests/complaints.

So, reading between the lines,
**Cingular isn't customer focused.**
I've read about 4 epinions that Cingular customer service is terrible, and a few that say otherwise (mostly old epinions). This means that customer service is not consistent which is the worst when one is trying to track down a problem. Plus, it isn't very up front about its limitations. Instead, it hides them from you and you don't know if the service works for you. Next, it implementation of its web services and its network is real shoddy.

* Who should choose service?
Short term users who only use it at "nights" and weekends and who don't mind not always getting service. In the long run, you want a dependable company that will help you, not hinder you, when something goes wrong. If you want a cheap service, with lots of free features, and don't mind bad ception a lot of the time, Cingular can work, but pray that nothing goes wrong. Also, borrow a friend's Cingular phone to see if it works at your apartment.

* What other options should people consider?
I hear Verizon and ATT have good reception. My girlfriend has ATT and has reception in my home. I read on another epinion, this was due to their use of a different antennae/communication system. Their system has better recpetion, but not as good sound quality. I would go for reception anyday.

Also, with the large headaches that can result from cellular phone mischarges, I would definitely go for the plan with better CS, even if it costs $5-10 more per month.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 35/mo