re: Anybody else have friends freaking out about ATT/verizon

You can sell all that stuff. It's not worthless.

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They neglect their equipment and delay upgrades. This goes for their wireless and landline phones.

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This sounds like one of those old wives tales. Like when the oil industry tanked 80% of river ranch in Lafayette couldn't even afford to keep the power on.

Unless you're a failry high up manager for AT&T, you have no idea if they neglect their equipment or delay upgrades.

Since Baton Rouge is "relatively large" on their scale.

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This sounds like one of those old wives tales. Like when the oil industry tanked 80% of river ranch in Lafayette couldn't even afford to keep the power on.

Unless you're a failry high up manager for AT&T, you have no idea if they neglect their equipment or delay upgrades.

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I know someone that is involved with the land procurement for new towers & switches. She told us that AT&T is constantly moving old equipment in and out of locations to band-aid problems instead of upgrading to what other carriers are using and that's when there isn't a catastrophe going on. They dropped the ball here. There are some parts of Denham that still can't get service.

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it's at the least, laziness not to have a failover system in place servicing this many customers.

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And if redundancy isn't an option, then you have to plan for and engineer away as many potential problems as possible. Like, for example, water in south Louisiana.

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I know someone that is involved with the land procurement for new towers & switches. She told us that AT&T is constantly moving old equipment in and out of locations to band-aid problems instead of upgrading to what other carriers are using and that's when there isn't a catastrophe going on. They dropped the ball here. There are some parts of Denham that still can't get service.

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Anecdotes typically don't mean anything, but when you put enough of them together sometimes a pattern becomes clear.

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But they give a shite enough to allow me to continue having unlimited talk text and data for $90.

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Oh my god, they allow you to give them money? How fricking thoughtful.

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Oh, and I was one of the hundreds of thousands too. Just like everyone else that was flooded in and couldn't get somewhere for whatever it may be, AT&T was also dealing with it. Along with Sprint, t-mobile, etc etc.

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But here's the thing... AT&T's failures made it harder for everyone to deal with the situation.

If this is the only trouble you've ever had with AT&T, count yourself lucky. It should be obvious that I have a long history of dealing with AT&T's failures, and I suspect many other people do, too.

I don't think I paid for Sprint for 3 months after Katrina.

Katrina was also when I learned how to text message. I had never sent a text before that time. Remember back then, most carriers had text message packages you had to buy - 100 texts a month, 300 texts a month, etc. And then you had to pay 40 cents per text for overage. But Sprint said they would make it free for us since it was easier on the network to text rather than call.

AT&T probably should not make things free per se as that will drive up usage on their still damaged network. But they should absolutely not charge people for the down time. And they need to find a way to make it right for people who have struggled to use their service.

I don't fault them necessairly for what happened - crap happens and a lot of people never thought the would flood. But AT&T needs to fix this and make right by their customers.

They did where I was.

Google Fi worked flawlessly for me through out this entire flood. LTE network and no dropped calls.

Phone bill averages $35 a month. Neighbors were coming over to use my phone since it was the only one on the street that worked.