Pat Phelan: Telecomms DisruptorSubverting telecomms from the edge of industry

This just about sums up the attitude of large mobile carriers to their customers.
Tamara Granger doesn’t make her calls from the correct area to suit her mobile carrier so it just fired her.
She pays her bills on time, doesn’t cause them any hassle, is not a pain in the butt to the carrier like I am and she still gets the flick.

“Essentially, AT&T offers nationwide calling plans that include no roaming and no long distance charges,” said Alexa Kaufman, an AT&T spokesman. “Our national calling plans are designed to give customers value and convenience. In really, really rare instances, however, we come across customers who use our services outside of our footprint. We find that they’re roaming far more often than they’re not roaming.”

So essentially Tamara is just outside the AT&T coverage area and she roams onto other carriers which charge AT&T a fee for use of their network, you can imagine that of the millions of AT&T subscribers this must be an unbelievably small percentage and would be worth keeping if for nothing else just to avoid the bad publicity. No, every penny counts and with bean counters rather than mobile innovation running all cellular carriers now Tamara had to go.