Cingular Wireless
Ripoff unable to honor contract but expects us to

My wife and I had wireless service from Cingular for about 5 months. During this time I was unable to use my phone consistently. I was able to make 1-2 outgoing phone calls for every 10 or so attempts. I would get a recorded message telling me that I wasn't a recognized user.

As a doctor it was very difficult to take the time to make multiple attempts or find another phone to use and yet this is exactly what I was forced to do. My patients were often unable to get through to me despite the fact that the phone was on and with me all day. I would receive messages days after they had been left and then once deleted they would reappear in my message box.

My wife had similar problems but not near as consistently as I did with my phone. I called customer service multiple times and was told that I needed to turn my phone off more often - something that many people who have these phones never do and still do not have a problem. So I tried that. If I turned my phone off before every outgoing call then I had about a 50% success rate of dialing out. I still was not receiving calls consistently. There were days where my phone would be turned off 10 or more times so I could dial out.

So I called again. I was told that I was assigned the wrong phone number. So this was "corrected". Still no improvement. The phone was returned by my wife and "exchanged". It was later returned 3 more times, one of which it was disclosed to me that the internal parts had not been exchanged after all although it was noted as such in the computer.

There was much more that happened but the gist of it is here. Despite my wife's trouble with her phone it did not interfere with her life near as much as she used it primarily to get hold of me in emergencies. The real problem came when my wife traveled to a funeral in TX and had car trouble. I was unable to reach her for 4 hours and she couldn't call out on her phone either. Both of us recieved various messages about not being "recognized users" or not calling "active numbers".

I returned to the business where we obtained the phones and requested that they discontinue our service. They let me use a phone (since mine didn't work) and I called customer service. I again requested that our service be terminated and questioned whether there was a fee that would be charged. The woman replied that there was a fee and I asked what could be done so that we would not be responsible for it. She told me that she had "taken care of it."

I was later suprised to find a $398 charge on my american express as a cancellation fee. We have disputed it and gotten nowhere with the employees that we have spoken to. All of them (about 8) have insisted that we were required to uphold our end of the contract. We have offered to return the phones but refuse to pay the cancellation fee.

It is my belief that we were not obligated to fulfill our contract after 5 months of waiting for Cingular to even begin fulfilling their end of the contract. One employee actually said, "If you had given us long enough we would have resolved the issue." I don't know just how much time and money reflects "long enough." We have spent quite a bit of money in the short time we were with Cingular and certainly are not anxious to hand over more.

I liken it to renting a home but not allowing the tenants to move in. They can see the house and every once in a while walk through it but never live there. No one in their right mind would insist that the tenants have a legal obligation to continue paying rent. And they certainly wouldn't be required to pay a deposit. Contracts bind BOTH parties, not just the consumer.

I truly believe that good people work at Cingular. I just haven't talked to any that were willing to help me yet.

James
Little Rock, Arkansas
U.S.A.

Company: Cingular Wireless
Country: USA
State: Arkansas
City: Little Rock
Site: cingular.com

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