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A Mini-Tower to Bring You the Signal you’re Already Paying For

There is a lot of criticism towards AT&T for the spotty service they are getting from their iPhone. AT&T is very quick to blame it on the cell phone tower shortage near businesses and homes. Never fear! They have a solution; put a mini cell tower directly into your living room.
So what’s the catch? You’ll have to pay for it and that is making a lot of customers pretty angry.
The size of the mini tower is no bigger than just a couple of playing card decks and they both look and act like a Wi-Fi spots that you’d see at a cafés. They will redirect the cell phone call from the congested phone towers directly into your home connection.
It’s really a good idea when you can’t get the service but the fact that you have to pay for it because of their lack of coverage is really fairly insulting to the consumer. A lot of customers are already paying in the mid $100s to get their iPhone service but they aren’t able to get or make calls from their apartment on the 5th floor of an Upper East Side apartment in New York City as just one example.
So what this does is really begs the question, how much does one really have to pay to get the needed iPhone service in order to actually use a phone?
Regardless of the complaints though this is something that is really poised to make a splash in sales mostly due to price drops but also the market entrance of AT&T. The other companies like Verizon have already marketed a mini tower to the niche customer that has a limited signal in a basement or in their home if it has really thick walls.
AT&T is looking to help the customer that can’t get a consistent signal. They plan on selling their micro towers for around $150.
The calls are going to be offloaded to an ISP but even though that is the case the AT&T customer is still going to have to pay for the minutes they are using their phone within their existing wireless plan. Is there an out? Of course pay more money, an additional $20 gets you unlimited calling for the month.
When it really comes down to it the mini towers are much better for AT&T than for the consumer. The mini tower is something that directly addresses the deficiency that really gave a black eye to AT&T over the iPhone. The other thing is it really gave the company the chance to lock customers into new deals that include these mini towers. When it comes down to it it’s really definitely a better deal for AT&T than it’s ever going to be for the consumer.
A lot of the consumers feel that they are just trying to find a new way to make money off of them rather than actually spending the money to make their service better and servicing them for the money that they are already paying. They are trying to find a way to turn a profit from their weakness.

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Tags: AT&T

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 4:46 pm by Matt Heman and is filed under AT&T. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.