Filed under: iPhone
AT&T removes on-line iPhone plan customization
Josh Walker tipped us off to his post today about AT&T removing their online iPhone plan specification options. You can no longer go online and take EDGE off your plan. In addition, customer support representatives reportedly will no longer remove EDGE as a feature option, as they did for me when I called up a week or two back.
So what does this mean for iPhone customers? It looks like my contract-free $29.99/month iPhone option is officially at a dead end, at least for now. As for those of us who cancelled our EDGE service when the option was in play, we'll have to wait and see what AT&T decides to do.
Removing EDGE is not a great option for people who use their iPhone on the road--for maps and directions, for SMS, and so forth. For those of us who live and work around ubiquitous WiFi hotspots and who rarely, if ever, use the data features on the go, this downgrade was a great way to save $240/year.
Let us know in the comments if you've recently attempted to remove EDGE from your plan and whether you succeeded in your efforts.
Update: Reader Zak Kitzmiller says this is a normal downtime screen that regularly occurs. Have you been able to remove EDGE recently? Let us know.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Drupa said 12:17PM on 11-29-2007
EDGE is what kept me from buying an iPhone. It's just too slow. I've got a rev. A EVDO card in my powerbook which almost always pulls speeds over 1400K down. Why would want to go back to what is essentially a few beats faster than dial-up?
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phi said 12:41PM on 11-29-2007
Difference is: its always on, and it'll win in a battery drain contest.
How often can you whip out your powerbook when you're standing in line at the grocery store/dmv/etc. and check something on the web?
mckoder said 12:21PM on 11-29-2007
I would like to do the opposite: Keep unlimited Internet, but cancel voice because it is too expensive. I make maybe 5 local calls a month, half minute per call. And for that I am paying $40 per month plus taxes. Previously I had a prepaid phone from another carrier, for which I was paying $10 a year. You read that right, ten bucks a year. The first year its $100, after that if you pay $10 per year you get $10 worth of new minutes plus you get to keep the unused minutes from the previous year.
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mentalsticks said 12:36PM on 11-29-2007
doesn't that say 'temporary' AND 'technical failures'?
AFAI can see this doesn't mean anything (yet) for iPhone customers... or am I missing something?
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Jon Niola said 12:40PM on 11-29-2007
Off topic, but I see we got the new comment system here that the other Weblogs Inc sites have been using. Nice!
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phi said 12:41PM on 11-29-2007
yeah, i just noticed too! sweet!
Nick said 12:49PM on 11-29-2007
I think you would be interested in read that AT&T made this decision right after making this one....
iPhone $27.99 deal put on hold 10 comments
posted by Chad W. Taylor
As predicted, the AT&T Corporate Marketing Department “slapped” the Colorado AT&T store and asked them to cease their $27.99 offering until further notice.
AT&T Customer Care got a lot of phone calls from the “hearing” people complaining that they felt it was unfair that we are getting “special treatments” hence the order made by the AT&T Marketing Team.
You can read more about it here.... http://www.deafmac.org/blog/
What makes me angery is that the so called "hearing people" are complaining, oh PLEEEZE! Hearing people have hundreds of phones to choose from, with dozens of plans. So many phones come free or cheap. Deaf people can only pick phones that has a keyboard, and must have a phone that has a data plan to allow them to instant message & email which is their only form of communications when out of the home. There is no way a deaf person can just go to a pay phone to make a call.
I think AT&T made up the complaint to stop the service. I think that AT&T need money and to do that it has to sell the iphone with a minimum $59 a month plan.
That is why I am using T-Mobile.
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Patrick McCarron said 12:58PM on 11-29-2007
I noticed this screen last week as well, pretty sure they removed the ability after the story got spread around. That's a bit long of a downtime to explain it being temporary, since I can change features on my other line without issue.
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Oseary said 1:05PM on 11-29-2007
That "technical difficulties" screen has been up (for me at least) for the last two weeks.
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Towform said 1:34PM on 11-29-2007
One clarifier: EDGE isn't required for SMS since text messages use the control channel.
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Peter Payne said 1:52PM on 11-29-2007
Um, I live in Japan with a prepaid registred iPhone. It's pretty darned useful even not as a phone, and when I go back to the U.S. I've got a nice prepaid phone to use. I love it. Personally, I'd only use the phone as a prepaid device (I think around $40 a month for X number of minutes and unlimited net), even if I lived in the US.
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bneyman said 6:12PM on 11-29-2007
Edge beats the hell out of no data access, even though it is a bit pokey. I've also been amazed by the range of coverage. I've been able to use Edge in rural Georgia and West Virginia when I couldn't even get phone access to AT&T.
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Stephen said 12:41AM on 12-05-2007
Just thought I would let others know that I called up AT&T tonight and had the remove my EDGE plan. The representative did so and I checked online to confirm. I forgot to ask her to block EDGE connections and now that I've realized that, the phone is now OFF. I'll call tomorrow and have them do that for me.
Tomorrow is the start of a new billing cycle so we will see if the system automatically dropped me back onto the plan. Will let you guys know.
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