I was surprised to read so many negative reviews of AT&T after being with them for a couple of years. I am certainly not blown away with their service, but I haven't had constant issues with connecting or dropped calls. For me the price of their service plans are good, coverage has been above average, and their customer service has been helpful (yet I haven’t had any HUGE issues).

I have the AT&T Regional Advantage plan which gives me 400 anytime minutes and for $5 more I get 500 nights and weekend minutes (which I got upgraded to 1000 minutes with no fee on some deal they were having after Christmas 2000). I can call anywhere in the country and not pay any long distance, and my home area goes from Maine to Washington DC(outside of that I pay a roaming fee). First minute of an incoming call is NOT free and checking voicemail is NOT free (they were on my first plan, but not now). Evening minutes are from 8pm to 7am, which is good for me as a college student to make evening plans and catch up with people. Text messaging, call forwarding, voicemail, three way calling are all free (except the minutes you are using, but not with messaging). My monthly rate is only $40 plus tax (about $3) and have yet to go over my minutes and need to pay more.

Coverage has been less impressive. I am usually in Cambridge and have had no issues while in Harvard Square or in other parts of town. In Boston I haven't noticed too many issues with dropped calls, but I'm not in town during the day too often. When driving in and around the 95 loop I find there are areas that I will consistently drop calls, but they are few and obvious. I haven't needed to stare at my phone blankly too often because I didn't expect a call to be dropped. The signal can be annoyingly low so that I will just see a "new voice message" message because I was inside and it didn't ring. Maybe because I don't use my phone in high traffic areas during the day I haven't seen the issues others have. I have run into capacity issues, but only two or three times.

I only needed to use customer service when they didn't sign me up for the right service (they didn't give me my 500 nights and weekends and I needed to pay $60 over my regular bill) so I called. At first they told me that they couldn't change a bill that had already been sent. I calmly told that I was upset with this problem (since it was my first bill with this new service) and was cordially placed on hold. When the rep. returned he had refunded me the $60 and offered me 1000 free nights and weekend minutes. They also called me after about two weeks to see if everything was working well, not necessary but nice.

I have heard of a lot of people having problems with their Sprint service and the Verizon was having widespread capacity issues early on. I don't know about Voice Stream, but I've been happy with AT&T. Most of my friends have AT&T as well and I haven't heard of any issues from them either.

TIP: If you use AT&T you can back date a change of service if your use has been very heavy during a particular month. You need to find out your billing cycle date for this to work. If you have been traveling a lot for a month and thus needed their national OneRate service, you can call them before the billing cycle is done and upgrade to the service you need. They don't have the ability to tell you how many minutes you have used, but if you know that you have blown the doors off the number of calls you usually make, you can upgrade your service and it will count for the whole month. After that month you can change back.




Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 40 a month