Two thoughts occurred to me while reading this...

If your number were to change unexpectedly, all hell would break loose. For one thing, how would anyone be able to find anyone at Disneyland? I could see something like this eventually bringing the whole nation down in utter chaos.

And make sure that address book is backed up. We don't want to be losing Leo's number (if he hasn't changed it already). ;)

Verizon? Don't get me started on Verizon. They are my current company I'm hating with a passion. Blech.

Somehow I think the $175 that you did not pay (or was refunded) will be more than anyone else will see as a payout from the lawsuit.

I suggest you contact the group via the second link in my OP with your concern.

I've had no problem with Sprint over the last three years.

But I'm curious how it would have been possible for people to notice a degradation in service provided by AT&T. It was pretty horrible (both in coverage and customer service) when we were with them before Sprint.

Alex - Before the merger my experience with AT&T service (reception and customer) was amazing. Soon after the areas I used to be able to make calls in were having problems. Dropped calls were the norm rather than the exception. My home, and a mile around it which had full service now had none. I called and they said it was the towers but they wern't going to fix them and I needed to get a Cingular contract if I wanted any further action. This became a regular occurance when dealing with Cingular. Even when calling the number that was provided for AT&T customers. The towers were fixed after I filed a complaint with the BBB.

I'm not sure if you remember my issues with Cingular in the past (I think the thread is somewhere on the Pad) but I was certainly not going to sign a contract with them again, especialy after they said it was the only way to get customer service.

In So Cal AT&T coverage was pretty good as they essentially were what once was LA Cellular - Basicly AT&T got into the market buying local providers, so you got what they had. Thier move to GMS also created coverage issues in several areas. The problem wiath all these companies is that they all have regions they perform quite well in, and others they suck in, so selecting a Company is more about finding a match for your lifestyle than anything else.

Yeah, my experience is that the relationship between a person and their cell company is much similar to the one between a person and their bank. Everybody seems to think theirs is either the best in all the world or the suckiest in all the world.

I wasn't so much responding to BTD's experience as the general one of the entire class of AT&T customers. According to the article linked, in Southern California Cingular sold off its own network after the purchase and continued to use the AT&T network which I would think means that it was Cingular customers that found themselves suddenly on AT&T equipment and not the other way around.

I think as part of the deal, Cingular sold off some of it's towers (I know T-Mobile bought a bunch to enter the market here) but I think the service service agreement between the companies still allowed for sharing the bandwidth, since both are GSM - it may be that they stopped supporting certain GSM bands, or since Cingular is GSM, they stopped supporting AT&T's other (TDMA?) service.

I don't know what those initials mean so I am certainly not qualified to argue for or against the suit. Mostly I was trying to make an ironic comment since my experience with AT&T had been so bad.

But then I go weeks without using my phone as anything more than a very expensive watch.

My experience with Cingular is wonderful so far. I just started with them in December. We merged accounts with my in laws to one family plan, and they had AT&T, that had been renamed Cingular, but equipment wise was still AT&T. They did have to change out their phones do to the network switch, but they took it as an opportunity to upgrade their phones and didn't have any issues doing so.

My Cingular guy who merged everything and set us up with phones was very knowledgable and nice. We had one small glitch with caller ID that they resolved quickly once we reported it. We have had no dropped call issues.

I guess it really is about where you are and what you need.