Even if you're on Verizon. AT&T's position is "We just provide the roads you drive on. If your car drives a thousand miles without you wanting it to, it's not the fault or will of the highway department." Never mind the fact that if carriers wanted to rip customers off, they would simply disable network access entirely, freeing up bandwidth for more important clients. No, it's a far more Romulan level of ploy to put bricks on everyone's pedals and then deal with everyone else complaining about degraded bandwidth. Three things will kill a lithium ion cell. Time, temperature, and use. And transmitting data constantly will result in two of those three, with time doing its own thing. And you can't replace an iPhone's battery without voiding your often-dismissed warranty. Curious indeed. It's almost as if Apple wants people's phones to burn out, so they have to buy new ones.

Try talking to Apple thirteen months after you've bought your phone. Then try talking to your phone service provider at the same time. See who tries to charge you for help.

My defective heart that likes to stop and drop me to the ground at random intervals could stand replacement. Of course, I wonder if my current heart was a mimeograph copy.

Yes, this irked me when I saw the lie that Apple was leading the charge. Apple can brick pretty much any device they want, but they won't. Anyone who gets hooked on using Apple devices tends to KEEP using them, and even a thief will eventually become a customer. In the past seven days, I have had Apple representatives tell me that AT&T is responsible for supporting iTunes and iOS issues, that the iPhone does not use a SIM card, and that iCloud was untested beta software (also Siri). Meanwhile, the last time I called HTC, they gave me everything but the keys to the safe and a ride in the company jet.

Because the typical person doesn't care for detailed information, and it's faster to just say "unlimited", as in "not ten megabytes". People then took this to mean "download all of your WoW patches with your phone so your home ISP doesn't throttle you" or something.

There are already people who don't pay. AT&T will not care, and in the end, it won't be AT&T who can't get a home loan because of an outstanding debt. Just take your business elsewhere. That's all that matters to corporations. Losing money to competitors.

But sir, your data IS effectively unlimited. Your speed of ACQUISITION is limited. I read the terms of service in detail well before I got a phone with AT&T. All of this was spelled out back in 2007 as a potential eventuality.

...but AT&T would be shutting down all of the call centers for AT&T and T-Mobile in the Philippines upon completion of the merger. Also if you've ever talked to somebody who sounded like they picked up English on a bus ride to their Farsi classes, you probably talked to somebody in the Philippines.

"Anonymous" as a proper noun defies anonymity, so it's no real wonder that these people failed to cover their tracks.

The ONLY smartphone-class phone on AT&T allowed to be set up with unlimited data right out of the gate is the ORIGINAL iPhone. Yes, you can still use it to this day. The only data options for the original iPhone are unlimited.

In an "unrelated" note, if you already have a smartphone-class device with unlimited data, even if you migrated from another carrier that was absorbed into AT&T, you're entitled to keep your unlimited data if you change to another smartphone, be it through upgrading or simply just acquiring another phone through your own means. All iPhones are smartphone-class devices, even if they aren't truly smartphones.

I'll leave it up to the people with more sense than that of a mayonnaise jar to connect the dots.

AT&T's policy for data connect devices (PC cards, USB dongles) is if you lost an unlimited data plan (and you will, because the system is putting EVERYBODY on 5GB automatically), you can cancel that line with no ETF, keep the device, even if you just upgraded.

Of course, not every CSR reads the contract text, so you may need to speak to the right person.

Not the case for phones, though.

Yes. I started service through Wirefly, and the ToS was presented in its entirety. I didn't care for the terms during three halfhearted attempts at signing up, but after I learned everything about AT&T, I decided that I wasn't some ship-jumping consumerist who had to have cell service in the bottom of a flooded silver mine.

I had a home phone and a backup prepaid cell, so eh, nothing to lose.

I've never tried to start service with VZW, T-Mobile, or Sprint, so I don't know what information you get up front with them, but with any US cell provider, you still get a trial period during which, if you decide that the service is no good where you live/work/hang out, you can return the phone, cancel, and depending on how soon into your service you are, pay nothing, or a partial month plus activation fees.

AT&T's policy is if you return by the third day, you only pay for each day of service you had, and your activation fees get refunded.

Anyway, I started service with AT&T after learning how over 90% of all persistent dropped call issues on AT&T involve some model of iPhone.

If it were the network, then it would be every phone, no? So I bought a BlackBerry Curve 8900, and I've had three dropped calls in 19 months.

People frequently drop their iPhone in a mug of beer (HOW?!), or jump in the pool, or some other stupid way of destroying it, then put their SIM card in a basic phone. Then they have a store or customer support remove their unlimited data because oh it's soooo expensive, then expect to get it put back on well after it was announced that the only way to get it back was to never voluntarily remove it. If you already have a smartphone or iPhone unlimited data feature, you are more than welcome to keep it if you upgrade or simply swap phones to another smartphone or iPhone.

If it was removed because someone at Walmart bungled an upgrade or something similar, it can be restored, just don't wait six months to call in about it.

Now, maybe Verizon doesn't know, but some of the heavy abusers of cellular data with iPhones use upwards of 40-50 GB per month. You're not going to use that much data browsing the web, but with a jailbroken iPhone, you can get a 7 to 14 megabit connection shared with a whole network of computers for all of $30 per month... and that is spelled out as abuse of the service in the ToS, which is written in very basic English.

I assume that unlimited data will be revoked again once LTE rolls out, or it will be exclusive to the first iteration of CDMA iPhone.

FYI, the only data services available for the original iPhone are all unlimited data, with varying amounts of SMS message allotments. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.

Don't you see? You're already indoctrinated. The reapers are controlling your every thought! That said, science fiction is at least cautious. For what reason would a machine intelligence seek peaceful interactions with organic life? Do you see bacteria as something worth communicating with?

Out in the boonies, you're most likely connected to a GSM transceiver. 2G. EDGE. Wide coverage, punches through walls like the Hulk. AT&T really only puts up 3G towers in population centers, and outside of Colorado, you're likely to get poor reception if anything more dense than a single human is between you and the tower you're on. Why? Signal frequency. Colorado just got switched over to a lower frequency to prevent the ridiculous signal attenuation from the EVERYTHING that blocks line-of-sight from where people are, to the tops of the towers.

And the last time I dropped a call on AT&T was when I was calling from inside of an aluminum-sided house, on county-owned land (not even in an actual town). I tend to drive hundreds of miles on my days off. The only real coverage deadzones I've found are radio deadzones near military facilities, or the usual "30 miles between gas stations" areas. But then, my chosen phones have removable batteries, and nobody ever calls in to complain about dropped calls with them.

That said, avoid every LG phone made since Spring of 2009.

I'd say a good 97% of all dropped call complaints on AT&T come from iPhone users. Not that I keep score, but every time I hear "customer is getting poor signal, dropped calls", I immediately think "another damn iPhone call". I'd assume unlocked iPhones work well, because odds are, they're not connected to UMTS towers much of the time. It's the phone. It's been trash since day zero, when Apple didn't supply AT&T with any documentation on the original iPhone until five minutes before launch, making for a lot of fun for everybody trying to activate the hockey pucks. Did you know that all the Visual Voicemail breakdown crap this past summer was from Apple pooping out repeated failed updates, jamming up iPhones that hadn't even been updated? Check Settings, General. If you have "Profile" listed there, surprise! Delete the corrupted AT&T profile and watch your messages roll in after two minutes. Also, anybody who knows how cell phones work knows better than to expect uninterrupted calls while driving. You're playing tarzan between towers. There isn't always a long vine in reach. Unless you're doing 120.