Perhaps unlike most folks here, I actually like AT&T. They've provided me adequate service for the five years or so that I've had iphone service with them and have mostly been responsive to my complaints. But I have noticed is that you can talk to five different people in customer service and get five completely different answers to the exact same question. That was evident recently after I traveled overseas and noticed on my bill, that I was being charged for a small amount of data usage (.8m), $16. I'm still not sure what it was for since data roaming is always turned off on my phone and I had purchased one of ATT's global texting plans, which allows for a certain amount of picture, video and regular text messages, inclusive. (50 txts for $10 a month for example.) Through repeated contacts with ATT customer service I was given at least 10 different reasons for the data usage: voicemail; texting pictures; the phone's initial attempt to connect to a foreign network; accidental turning on of data roaming. One guy who put me "on hold" to see about waiving the cost, could be heard cussing up a storm about how it was only $16.
Now that I'm preparing to travel overseas again and would like to take my phone along, I called to ask to speak with a manager in ATT's INTERNATIONAL DEPARTMENT, assuming I could get clarity on some of this. Surely a manager would know. I was wrong. A rep told me that with a global texting plan, I could only send picture or video texts (which both require data usage) if I had data roaming ON or was on wifi. I knew this to be wrong because ATT's own website said all three features were included in their global texting plans and because I had used the feature many times in the past, sent pictures and wasn't charged. So I asked to talk to her manager, who said the same thing and added that I needed to have some kind of media feature on the phone. I asked if she had a manager, talked to him, -- George DeCruz -- who said the same thing. And to make it stick said he was going to put it in my file, (which contains information from all your contacts with them so they can justify screwing you when they need to.) I'm not worried about that but how can so many people be so ill-informed about the services they are hired and trained to provide? And why isn't there someone higher up the food chain able to answer with some level of competence what appears to be fairly mundane questions about the service this company provides?