AT&T Merger with Cricket Sucks

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@blownaway wrote:

This merger of AT&T and Cricket is horrible.  First I just bought an expensive Samsung Galaxy S4 not even a year ago and I am being told that I have to buy a brand new phone when the merger is fully complete (March 2015).  This is ridiculous - who is sitting around with an extra $400 a year to purchase a new phone.  As large a company as AT&T they do not have the capability to switch my phone over.  One more thing Customer Services sucks - they do not know anything or understand your question and I promise you if you call back with the same question you will get a completely different answer.  No one knows anything.

 

I guess AT&T is keeping their answers and good customer service on the down low.

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Your CDMA phone will no longer work on the Cricket network as early as March 2015. That's because the CDMA network will be shut down. No, AT&T can't "switch your phone over" any more than Ford can switch your car's engine to gasoline to diesel. 

Really - you are comparing phones to car engines.

{keep it courteous}

you have a CDMA phone ATT has a GSM network so you have to get a new phone.  It sucks but this is why Cricket can say they have a bigger network than Tmobile and Sprint because they do on ATT's.

I agree.  It is just a few months from when my expensive CDMA Cricket smartphone (less than a year old) becomes inoperable and I've heard nothing from AT&T or Cricket about the transition plan, other than I will be forced to shell out hundreds for a new phone that is compatible with AT&T's network.  I've called Cricket and they know *nothing* about AT&T's plan is to incentivize Cricket customers to stay, if it even exists.  What I'm expecting is similar to what Sprint offered US Cellular customers when Sprint bought them out -- i.e., a $100 phone credit toward a Sprint-compatible phone, and a $50 service credit so that US Cellular customers didn't bail.  AT&T has offered no such courtesy to Cricket customers, and that just irks me.  Maybe they will, but the fact that I have to wait so long to find out if they are going to make a similar offer leads me to believe they don't give a crap about Cricket customers.

A month later, still nothing.  Instead of waiting for AT&T to make my Cricket phone a brick, and hope for some kind of compensation from AT&T for forcing me to buy a new phone to work on their network, I decided to take my business to Verizon.  They are currently offering a $150 credit per line to switch, so that made the decision easy.  I'm now a happy Verizon customer.  In contrast to AT&T / Cricket, I'm finding the Verizon people to be consistently professional and helpful.  AT&T blew it.  I was more than willing to make the transition to AT&T from my Cricket service, but their lack of communication and apparent indifference towards me as a customer cost them my business.  Dumb.  Treat your customers (and potential customers) with consideration and respect; don't leave them in the dark.  That's Customer Service 101.

so you went from prepaid to postpaid?  And criket is not going anywhere just moving from CDMA to GSM

Sprint only gave those credits due to the fact that it was postpaid to postpaid.  Prepaid has always had to pay full retail for phones.  

I think you're missing the point. AT&T is screwing over thousands of Cricket customers and they DON'T CARE ONE BIT!  Cricket shouldn't have been selling phones over the past 7-8 months, since the merger with AT&T, knowing that they won't work after March, but they continue to do just that.  The point is that AT&T is gaining millions of unearned $ by forcing customers to buy new ridiculously expensive phones (oh, but they'll give you a free deal on their piece-o-crap phones (which are all of them other than the Galaxy & iphones) all under the guise of "providing better service". What a crock!! WE ALL NEED TO BOYCOTT AT&T ONCE THEY RENDER OUR PHONES USELESS!!!

that person who posted about switching from a diesel engine to gasolone or whatever is just plain wrong.. at&t or circket CAN SWITCH YOU TO GSM but they JUST DONT WANT TO. or its because SAMSUNG is stopping them.

this whole CDMA vs GSM discussion is meaningless when you factor in LTE. as long as you have an LTE phone. it is possible to switch from CDMA to GSM because LTE phones have both technicalogies in the single phone

take a verizon iphone 5 or above. its CDMA for voice calling. but because it is unlocked you can operate them on tmoile or att or any gsm carrier

another example is iphone 6. or iphone 6 plus. they did not disable the cdma radio.. meaning its possible to bring unlocked phones bought at tjhe apple store to verizon. , however they wont activate it. but if you have a sim that is already activated it already works

sprint is diffrent. sprint wont budge or any of sprin'ts prepaid carriers. i dont think they will ever unlock iphoes. its not because its a CDMA vs GSM issue. its because they dont want to and they have an agreement with apple.

the whole CDMA vs GSM when it applies to LTE PHONES IS DEAD. PLEASE STOP TELLING PEOPLE OTHERWISE.

If you remove your GSM sim from your CDMA phone, your phone will fail to operate if its LTE

if you remove your GSM sim from your LTE phone and you are in a 100 % CDMA area with no gsm at all, you phone will fail to operate.

if you have a CDMA phone and they wont unlock it , then i would keep paying for cricket. and keep my fingers crossed, because i also read that att wants to mail out ATT SIM cards to cricket legacy owners. 

id keep it until the very last week before CDMA dies. and if they havent figured out how to break manufactuerer exclusiveitty deals or unlock the GSM SIM SLOT that all "CDMA" lte phones have, then i would dump them and switch to a differnet carrier

the bottom line is every single "CDMA" LTE phone on the market has a perfectly good GSM radio already built in. and they are both being used. and they requrie each other to operate. becaause they are a matched pair.

the CDMA is needed for voice services. the GSM in a CDMA phone is used for data services. the CDMA MEID is required for activation purposes.  when you make a telephone call the CDMA radio turns on and the GSM radio is turned off. when you are using data , the GSM radio is turned on and the CDMA radio is turned off. once the sim card is activated it is the sim card that authenticates your device to the network. the cdma radio is not used for authentication. it is only used for voice calls

everyone who says you cannot use a CDMA LTE ENABLED  phone on a GSM carrier . they are plain wrong. if they say you have to change the engine, they are just wrong. im sorry. 

they are stuck in 2012. 

please inform everyone that it is now 2014 and its been 2 years since the iphone 5 and other LTE phones have been released and the CDMA vs GSM rules are somewhat obsolete. 

things you can do with lte

bring unlocked phones from cdma to gsm

thigns you cant do with lte

bring gsm phones ( like the iphone 5, 5c and 5s) to CDMA carriers

bring a sprint phone to verizon

bring a verizon phone to sprint

if you can't bring a LTE cdma phone to gsm, its because the manuacturer or the cell phone company has stopped you, because of a sim card lock