What a long, strange trip it’s been.
Almost two years ago, I renewed my cell-phone contract with what was then AT&T Wireless Services Inc. I was happy to do so-in fact, that was when my wife and I “cut the cord” and got rid of our home phone. We boldly entered the wireless frontier clutching our matching LG flip phones with AT&T service.
Thanks to our new family plan, AT&T was going to let us reduce our overall telecommunications bill while at the same time giving us total mobility. More importantly, my wife could now play solitaire every night on her shiny new phone before falling asleep.
Little did we know, the winds of change were blowing.
Just a few months after we signed our two-year contract with AT&T, Cingular Wireless L.L.C. completed its $41 billion acquisition of the carrier. We didn’t get the “Sprint Nextel” treatment, however; no, we left AT&T behind and became Cingular customers. Cingular told us of the change in one of our monthly billing statements, a statement that replaced the familiar AT&T logo with the Cingular “splat man,” or whatever that thing is.
But not to worry, Cingular promised us that we would come to appreciate the change. (Cingular also made sure we wouldn’t forget we were Cingular customers-the AT&T screen on our phones magically changed one night to a Cingular screen.)
And we lived happily ever after? Sort of. Cingular did have a larger network, which we appreciated when we were traveling. There were some major drawbacks, however. As former AT&T subscribers, we were not privy to many of Cingular’s trademark offerings, including its Rollover program. We were also stuck with AT&T’s old rate plans. If Cingular introduced a new rate plan, we couldn’t sign up for it unless we bought brand new Cingular phones-unsubsidized, of course. More importantly, the content industry decided to drop us like a rotten fish. As former AT&T subscribers, we never saw any new games or applications, and the old AT&T WAP deck remained largely unchanged. My $10 per month data plan sat forlorn and abandoned (until I discovered the wonders of Opera Mini.)
But then last week everything changed! We’re coming back, Ma Bell! With AT&T Inc. (SBC + AT&T) acquiring BellSouth Corp., Cingular will be going back to the future by donning the AT&T logo once again. Ah, the circle of life…
So, if things happen quickly enough, we may actually be able to end our two-year contract with the same carrier we signed up with initially: AT&T. Take that splat man!
