Fighting AT&T to Get Back My Unlimited Data Plan Was Pure Hell

I didn’t realize it until recently, but I’ve been locked in a tug of war with a $260 billion company. AT&T and I are fighting over the same thing: My unlimited data plan, an old relic of the previous decade, when the original iPhone first dropped.

I’ve spent hours on the phone arguing with customer-service representatives. I’ve spent a lot of that time on hold—for stretches of 30 minutes or more. I’ve visited AT&T’s retail stores probably too many times. All to get my plan back, which AT&T took away without my knowledge or consent when I upgraded my phone in September 2016. In the end I got it back, but it wasn’t easy. Technically, the company graciously lets customers keep their data plan no matter what, but the reality is it’s a little more complicated than that.

Because for years, apart from this policy, AT&T has actually been hell-bent on taking this unlimited-data plan away from customers who still cling to it. AT&T won’t say how many of these plans are still around, but a 2014 Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against AT&T named 3.5 million unlimited-data customers. In other words, 3.5 million longtime, locked-in, loyal customers. AT&T’s been brazen about it too; Walter Piecyk, a mobile-industry analyst at BTIG Research, told me that AT&T used to boast in its quarterly earnings reports how many customers it’d recently switched away from its data plans.

The company, which first stopped offering unlimited data in 2010, came up with all sorts of conniving ways to turn people off of these plans. In 2011 AT&T started slowing data speeds almost to a halt when a user exceeds a specified amount of data (first 2 gigabytes, then 5 gigabytes, and currently 22 gigabytes since 2015), a practice called “throttling” that was so unethical—or certainly the opposite of “unlimited”—that the FTC sued AT&T for this in 2014. In the past the company has also accused many users of tethering their phones to their computers to access the internet, even though many of these people were reportedly old, or had no concept of tethering. Alternatively, starting in 2009, the Federal Communications Commission alleged that AT&T, without telling its customers, simply swapped their customers’ unlimited data plan for a metered-data plan that incurs lucrative data-overage charges. (For this, the company settled with the FCC in 2012 for $700,000).

And that’s exactly what the company did to me—in 2016, years after that settlement. And getting my plan back felt like a battle.

The crazy thing is, I made damn sure before I upgraded my phone that I could keep my plan, and that the transition would be smooth. Every AT&T and Apple employee I thought to speak with assured me it would be.

My first sign of trouble came when I pre-ordered an iPhone 7: I didn’t have the option of keeping this plan. It would be simple, though, all the customer-service people told me. All I have to do is bring my new phone into an AT&T store and they’d make sure my plan was on it.

Unfortunately, when I returned to the store, new phone in hand, the employees there were puzzled. For some reason, they couldn’t select my plan in my profile. In fact, they weren’t sure what was going on at all, and they suggested I call customer service.

That’s when I started to suspect my whole plan—and, of course, my data plan—was unraveling.

But when I called customer service I was assured by the woman on the phone (with a bit of uncertainty in her voice) that my plan was still there … but it would be a good idea to check back in a few days. When I did, I was assured that, yes, I still had my plan. Although it appears as if this first level of customer-service employee doesn’t have permissions to access and select plans like mine (Piecyk, the BTIG analyst, told me he suspects the same).

Then came the emails and texts from AT&T—the kind that an unlimited-data customer never sees. Apparently as my kid was binging on YouTube Kids while we were out to lunch (one of the most underrated perks of an unlimited-data plan for any parent), I’d reached my data limit and was immediately charged $20 for 300 additional megabytes of data.

It was Sunday afternoon, and instead of enjoying my weekend, I was furious. I started second-guessing everything. Did I really have an unlimited-data plan? When exactly was it switched? (Also, “300 megabytes”? What a crappy plan I’d been switched to!)

Back to customer service. At a time when I needed someone empathetic and knowledgeable, the poor woman who helped me was neither. She couldn’t determine my plan, then when she did, she told me that I actually never had an unlimited-data plan. Was I sure that I did?

This was going nowhere fast, and it was at this point that I demanded to speak to her supervisor. She didn’t make it easy, though; she insisted on trying to help me. I responded by demanding to speak to her boss. She warned me it’d take awhile, as he was busy. I said I’d wait.

She was at least right about that last part. Because I ended up on hold for 45 minutes.

Periodically the same woman would speak up, to variously try and sell me new plans, or attempt to convince me I had confused my wife’s phone line with the one I was calling about. The argument was so circular it reminded me of the Comcast customer service debacle that went viral, and made me question whether this was an elaborate prank.

When I finally reached the supervisor, he took care of everything. We talked for only a couple minutes. He was strangely efficient and dispassionate, taking everything down and promising a resolution in 10 days. It’s almost disorienting to have someone listen to you and help you out after spending an hour—or really, a few weeks—feeling slightly paranoid, or at least trapped in an echo chamber.

The whole ordeal, at least until reaching this final piece of the puzzle, may have all been in earnest; it almost certainly involved incompetence. But when taken altogether, the entire experience, from an entirely neutral perspective, felt like a calculated test of your resistance. A battle of wills. Some kind of twisted, astronaut-style endurance training, where the psychological torture will end if only you just hang up the phone and accept defeat.

Whatever the intention, it wasn’t the ideal customer service interaction, according to customer-service expert Shep Hyken.

“The best call centers, when sensing frustration, will quickly try and help move you to a supervisor,” he told me.

Some call centers pressure this first line of customer-service personnel—the catcher’s mitt for the company—to take care of as much as possible, and try to keep things away from a supervisor. Naturally, some employees take this to ridiculous lengths.

“This particular industry has a black eye,” Hyken said. “They’ve been beat up so many times, and you know what? It’s been deserved. But they’ve done with they can to bring themselves out of the basement and into a better place. In fact, AT&T is currently tied with Verizon in second [among wireless carriers] according to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index.”

AT&T doesn’t want its customers on unlimited-data plans for two simple reasons: All this data usage, or potentially unfettered data usage, congests the company’s networks, which could lead to more customer dissatisfaction, and requires a lot of investment to expand infrastructure. The second reason is that unlimited-data plans ruin any mobile carrier’s business strategy of continually upselling to its customers. Because if you already have access to an infinite amount of data, even the greatest salesperson won’t be able to upgrade you from 10 gigs to 15 gigs, then 15 gigs to 20 gigs, and so on. And any strategy that pursues flat revenue is unthinkable in a massive, corporation like AT&T. The company is actually currently offering new unlimited-data plans for a limited time, as an enticement when customers sign up for U-Verse or DirecTV.

Any strategy that will potentially incense customers is a balancing act—viewed in cold, cost-benefit terms by the company. So if AT&T thought it could withstand the PR shitstorm caused by simply cancelling all of these grandfathered unlimited-data plans, it would do this immediately. Verizon, in fact, did it in January—unilaterally cancelling the old unlimited-data plans of heavy users who were burning through 200 gigabytes or more per month. For everyone else with these old plans, Verizon jacked up the monthly fee by $20 in 2015, a 60% increase.

The thing is, there’s no law that allows customers to keep their plan, according to an FCC spokesman. Once your contract is up it’s essentially an at-will agreement, meaning either party can cancel. So I and my fellow grandfathered-in holdouts can’t realistically expect to have unlimited data my whole life. The reality is, I’m only keeping my plan at AT&T’s pleasure.

In other words, I’m relying on the goodwill of a Fortune 10 company that’s sued all the time by regulators, and habitually switches plans on its customers and sneaks phony charges onto their bills.

Wish me luck.

from Fighting AT&T to Get Back My Unlimited Data Plan Was Pure Hell