My patience with AT&T has just ended as well.
That their servers and personnel should be overwhelmed is not surprising. I can forgive them for not spending the money necessary to handle the spike in demand. Much less forgivable is the way they have communicated -- or, more specifically, chosen not to communicate -- with their customers.
I pre-ordered this phone a week ago and specified AT&T as my carrier. I am already an AT&T customer, and they have my email address and phone number. So why didn't they send me an email (or a text for that matter) to warn me that activation on the 14th might be difficult?
Worse, much worse, is the message presented when your activation attempt fails: "Your activation is still pending. You will receive an email notification once your activation is complete.” That much at least is clear, though how long roughly one should expect to wait for the email is not indicated (a few minutes? a few hours? a day or so?). But then, in the next paragraph, in much smaller type, it says: “We’re sorry There was a problem connecting to the server. Please try again later.” Whoa. Apparently I’m not just supposed to wait for an email -- I have to try again later. Or maybe I should pay more attention to the first paragraph since it’s in bigger type. What exactly am I supposed to do, wait for an email or try again? I don’t know. Probably, I should retry -- that seems most likely and can’t hurt. But then, after retrying a few times, I wonder, well, how much more time am I going to waste on this?
So that is why I came to this forum -- to see what the experience of other uses was so that I could get an idea of what to expect myself, since AT&T had not bothered to inform me. Fortunately at least there is that: other p****d off customers sharing their bad experiences. So my decision is made: when my contract is up, I will switch to another carrier. Verizon, for example, seems to have better coverage as well as better rates. Its seems unlikely that their communication with their customers could be much worse.
(Someone might say: Is it such a tragedy that you aren’t able to activate your phone right away? Would it really hurt to wait a day? My answer is, No, it’s not a tragedy, just an irritation, but a wholly unnecessary one. As for waiting a day, well, I am scheduled to leave on a trip later today, and I scheduled my departure specifically so that I could take my new phone along. I knew I was receiving the phone today. It never occurred to me that activation would be a problem.)
The problem seems to be limited to AT&T according to CNET.
