AT&T is gone, good riddance.

[dragoneggs]

After many years of using cell phones and plans for work and family, I have learned a couple things...

1) Reception (especially outside the cities and even very rural) is important to me. This issue is narrowing between carriers.

2) Carriers plans vary and depending on your use, one carrier could be significantly better than other but you have to do your homework.

I have been on Sprint, GTE, AT&T, (sure I'm forgetting a couple) and have settled on Verizon. That said, I'm not advocating any of them... first thing is to understand is you and your family's requirements and then shop around. Nowadays, I think the carriers try to lock you in on a new phone payment plan, since you can now easily transfer your phone number.

 

[milkman]

Funny thing. We bundled all our services (Cell, satellite) to AT&T and upped to unlimited data and we're now saving $100/mo over our previous costs. Dish Satellite was one of the worst. We started at $79/mo. and it ballooned to $180/mo. in the 3 or so years we had it. They're all a racket and get you in on a cheap price but continue to raise it as you take your eye off the automatic payments.

We too had the DTV and AT&T phone service bundled and the unlimited data. The phone portion was over $150 a month.

 

[milkman]

Milkman do you care to share who you moved to for your mobile carrier?

and have you had any chance to compare signal strength/data speed etc ?

I switched to Consumer Cellular, kept my AT&T phones and get the same coverage I was getting before. I now have 5Gb of data, but if I go over, they bump me up to 10 GB and charge $10 more for that month and the next month I go back to 5GB unless I go over again. I've only went over 5GB of data once while on AT&T.

 

[milkman]

How much was your early out penalty with ATT? My early out was $225. The savings with my new provider is $55 a month. I took the early out with 4 months to go, net cost to get out was $5.

Stuck a huge old style TV antenna above the rafters in the garage the same month and told Charter what they could do with the monthly cable bill.

Being FREE is AWESOME!

No early out penalty, my 2yr contract ended Nov 15th. I bought an outdoor antenna and will mount it to the DTV dish mount when I tell them to take a hike. I get 23 local chanels with the antenna and have Roku for other entertainment.