AT&T Giving $5 Credit to Customers Following Major Network Outage

[Shirasaki]

Mobile rates in the US are absurd. The more lines you get, the cheaper it is for the lines.

Most start out around $65 for 1 line and go from there. Here is an example from AT&T:

View attachment 2353232

Here I thought my $72 AUD/mo ($47 USD) mobile phone service fee was already pretty high. US beats that too.

 

[Steve686]

By issuing such blank credits, AT&T basically tells their customer: your inconvenience only worth $5, no Matter how you are being impacted during the downtime. As for the claim of “hurting their bottom line”, come on, give me a break of that. They can easily recoup that amount Of “loss” in no time from customer base.

You don't "recoup" money you spend. It's spent. It's gone.

You may make more revenue, but that revenue covers your other operating costs.

The only way you will "recoup" the money you credited to people, is if you ask for the credit back.

 

[Steve686]

Sometimes I have to request it but with Spectrum I have always received a credit of a lot more than $5.

A credit for what? And how much?

For you to say "always received a credit", that implies your service is impacted more than the average user?

 

[phenste]

I pay about $230/month for 6 lines of unlimited w/tethering. This works out to $7.67 per day so the $30 credit is the equivalent of 4 days of service. I never even noticed there was an issue until someone told me. Victory is mine!

I don’t care about getting the credit as failures do occur and the phone companies run massive networks. Lessons learned from are the result and will improve service. It was good for AT&T to grant the credit. It’s also good for the customers of T-Mobile, Verizon and others as they will benefit if/when they have substantial issues or failures.the credit is now the standard. I’m sure the CEO’s of the other companies were initially thinking this would help them convert some customers. That hope disappeared when the credit was announced. They now are cringing knowing they are on the hook when they have issues.

my guy, can I like, borrow your rose-colored glasses? I’m legitimately jealous of what a non-cynical outlook on life you have…this outage will change absolutely nothing, these companies have nothing to learn as long as their revenue source continues to come pouring in (which it always inevitably will because having phone/Internet access is considered a necessity in 2024).
also, given that you commented directly after this saying that you won’t be contacting AT&T for extra money, where are you getting that $30 figure from? they were pretty clear about it being $5 per account—not per line—in the email they sent out.

btw…Verizon and Tmo both had outages too

 

[bakerzdosen]

Personally, I cannot imagine being the engineer with "fingers on keyboard" that got the routing (BGP) wrong and caused all this... (assuming the same person wrote it as implemented it - although that's not a guarantee by any means.)

 

[Shirasaki]

You don't "recoup" money you spend. It's spent. It's gone.

You may make more revenue, but that revenue covers your other operating costs.

The only way you will "recoup" the money you credited to people, is if you ask for the credit back.

Ok but my point is those ”losses” on giving $5 credits to affected customers are nothing for AT&T.

 

[GIZBUG]

Just curious, what is a reasonable price they should pay for being down?

$25