I recently moved to Wisconsin from San Francisco, and changed to SunCom from AT&T Wireless, as my experience with AT&T's service had been amazing (never had signal problems) and they said that SunCom was their associated service in the Midwest. Right from the start, I had problems, and documented them by calling customer service: dropped calls, no one could hear me, couldn't get a call out for 15 minute stretches, calls wouldn't ring to my phone, etc. Finally, after calling customer service and having them re-program my phone the 4th time, I decided that enough was enough; I was paying $50/mo and getting nothing from it because I was never able to make calls. However, when I went to disconnect, they told me that they would charge me $100 for the remainder of my contract -- $12.50/mo for each month remaining -- which had reverted to a year (without my knowledge), even though they had, in my mind, breached the contract with crap service that I couldn't use. When I told them that this was unacceptable, the customer service agent told me that there is no guarantee in the contract that the service will WORK, and even if they tried to fix my phone and found that the problem was on their end, I would be charge for terminating my contact.

My other complaint, in addition to this completely foolish policy, is that they never offered to go to my area to check the reception themselves until after I had disconnected my cell phone and was disputing the resulting charges. When I asked her what the point of doing this would be, because I had already disconnected service, the customer service agent told me that that way, they would know if the problem was with the service or with my phone. I mentioned that I had flown to the Bay Area the week before and the service there had been flawless (of course out there, it switches you over to AT&T's network, which is apparently superior in every way to SunCom's), but this didn't make a difference. She then told me that she has never heard of this area having a problem before, which is ironic, considering the fact that I had been complaining about it at work the day prior and three co-workers told me that they have heard nothing but bad things about SunCom.

I cannot emphasize the following enough: DO NOT use this service in the Madison area. I have since switched to Cingular, and have had no problems whatsoever.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 50