matt-groff.com

The CEO, CFO, President, and board members of AT&T should be in jail. I can understand that AT&T is in this business to make money, and I can understand that they want to keep people from upgrading their device everytime a new one comes up. But we must remember that AT&T is getting a 2 year contract for every phone they sell. There is no way that they are not making a boat load of cash.

Robbery is the crime, and hard time should be paid. The iPhone, in all inclinations, is a different type of device. For different types of devices, different rules should apply. There is no other cell phone out there that sells 500,000 devices in a weekend. There is no other cell phone out there that requires the waiting in line of 6 hours starting at 4am. No other cell phone has apple and AT&T stores opening up 2 hours before normal time.

This is why the 18 month grace period for upgrading a cell phone should not apply towards the iPhone. It’s not exactly a normal phone. And we must remember that even if we get a new iPhone every 12 months, AT&T isn’t losing out on money, because our old cell phones will be sold to other people and thus more AT&T Subscribers. And if for some reason Apple doesn’t upgrade every year, then we’d gladly keep our 3G for 2 years, blame apple not the consumer.

AT&T is already holding millions of iPhone users hostage with it’s more dropped calls, 3G deadzones,  and all around cell phone access dead zones. I just bought a home near the susquehanna river, this area is covered by 3G and has been for over a year. Just across the river I can see the cell phone tower, however I have zero signal on my phone the majority of times. This is not just in my house, but outside my house, up the street, down the street, standing on my roof. Did AT&T forget the lovely borough of Marietta? It sure seems like it.

But that’s a little off base. With every new iPhone purchse AT&T is getting 24 months of service. The cheapest service plan for AT&T is $39.99. Over a 24 month period, that is $959.76. There have been over 40 million iPhones sold, between the first model and the 3G model. The Edge model had a $20 a month data fee, and the 3G has a $30 a month data fee. If we split those in half and get $25 an multiply that by th 24 we get, $600. So $959.76 + $600 = $1559.76 on average of iPhone subscriptions. This doesn’t take into account the $20 a month most of us pay for unlimited text, or that some of us may have more than the minimum amount of minutes given in the $39.99 base plan.

$1559.76 per user, and 40 million phone sold. Let’s assume that 35 million of them are still on AT&T and still active. 35 million times $1559.76 is $54,591,600,000.00. That’s correct, over $54.5 billion dollars will be brought into AT&T just from the iphone alone. That doesn’t take into account the texting, the phones that AT&T has that aren’t iphones, and the cost of the phone.

Fifty four point five billion dollars and AT&T has to jack up the price of iPhone for people who bought the 3G the day it came out last year, so that we cannot get the newest iPhone for a discounted price. You greedy fucking bastards. What is wrong with you? The iPhone is a different sort of device, I shelled out $400 for my first one, and $300 for my second one. I shouldn’t have to shell out $400 for my third one because you want to pad your money lined pockets a little more.

This, not to mention is all on top of the fact that current 3G owners and 3Gs owners will not have tethering and MMS right away. AT&T is predicting that MMS will be out at the end of summer. And I did a little research, it may be sooner than that. On the AT&T site you can change your text messaging unlimited plan for the iPhone to the Messaging unlimited plan for the iPhone. It won’t actually make a difference on your phone you still can’t send MMS but it’s there which means that it’s coming soon. But I’m still pissed. AT&T says it wants to be able to bring MMS to customers in the best way possible. Oh? So when Apple said that it’s 3.0 software would feature MMS that wasn’t enough time to devise a plan to bilk your customers out of more money to stuff your mattresses with? And we all know that Apple cleared with AT&T that it would be doing the MMS here soon. No way were they caught off guard, Apple wouldn’t go behind the backs of it’s largest provider and sneak this MMS feature in would it? 

Tethering will never happen with AT&T, simply put AT&T already has 3G devices out there that provide internet connections for laptops. They wouldn’t ever let you piggy back a data connection for your laptop with your cell phone when they can force you to buy one of their neatly packaged data plans.

And what really get’s my goat is that MMS and SMS for AT&T costs them nothing. To my knowledge, there are two different types of signals that are used for cell phones. The signal from the tower to your phone, and the signal from the satellite to the tower. The signal from the tower to your phone is used for data, phone calling, etc etc etc. It does cost AT&T money, but not much. The signal from the satellite to the tower is a large wave that if not used, just goes to waste. AT&T pays for a certain amount of this signal, and it’s more than enough to handle the transfer from the tower to satellite and so forth, and the calls and cell charges we are getting more than cover the cost of it. But the signal just goes to waste.

So what does AT&T do? They decide to use the wasted part of the signal for, you guessed it, Messaging packets. So when you send a text message or a picture message, it costs AT&T absolutely nothing. It’s free to them, that signal has already been bought and paid for. Whatever isn’t used is wasted, and there is more than enough to go around. So that $20 a month you paid for texting unlimited with your iPhone, yeah 100% of that is profit for AT&T. And they can’t find it in their hearts to give us MMS and Tethering from the get go… Greedy fucking bastards.

But I can get you tethering, and maybe MMS.

Check your version of iTunes, should be 8.2.0.23. This is the latest version of iTunes, and it’s no good. Sync and backup your iPhone and uninstall iTunes. After you uninstall itunes, go into your My Music Folder or wherever your itunes library is located and rename the itunes folder to itunesold or something like that.

Go to the internets, find itunes versuin 8.2.0.10. It came out in May, I was able to find it on a torrent site, be careful. Download and install.

Go here and save the ATT_US.ipcc file to your desktop.

Plug your iPhone into laptop, select it in itunes, then hold the shift button down, and hit update. Change the file type to ipcc and find the file you downloaded in the previous step. Your iphone my freeze, do some funky stuff. Give it a minute or two. After it looks like its ok, turn off your iphone and turn it back on.

Go to settings, General settings, Network, and you should have tethering. You’ll want to uninstall the old version of itunes, delete the itunes folder it created, rename the one you previous called old to itunes again and reinstall the itunes you had before.

Now for MMS… I was able to get tethering, but MMS, not so much. Rumor has it that if you pull your sim from another phone that isn’t an iPhone, put your iPhone sim in that phone, make a few calls check your voicemail, do this for like 30 minutes or until you see that the att website has picked up your new phone. From here, on the web go and change your messaging settings to one that includes MMS. Go through the legal BS, click ok etc. After you do that, swap the SIMs, turn on your iPhone and you should have MMS. I tried, it didn’t work, but im impatient. You may have better luck.

Now to call AT&T for the fifth time today and bitch that I’m not eligible for the $199 16GB 3Gs.