Including Everything Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Google Voice’

ATT Wireless recently launched its A-List, which is their version of “your 5″ (or 10 if you have a large family talk plan). A-List lets you add commonly used phone numbers (landline or mobile) to your “A-List” and essentially have those minutes be unlimited and not count against your plan. While this works so far for most people, others have noticed that it worked early on and not any longer with Google Voice numbers.

I personally use a Google Voice number as a mobile office number. Not primarily for the free calls, but more so for the transcription features it offers. When a user calls in to my Google Voice number, if they leave a message, Google will translate that as best it can to text and send me an email or SMS text message with the attached audio file and text from the message. This has proven invaluable when in a meeting, watching a movie, etc.

Here are the promoted features for this service:

So now for the good part. ATT, being the typical large corporation that they are, is blocking heavy users from using an in-bound Google Voice number. They are letting you your Google Voice number to your A-List, but tagging it in their system as an anytime-minutes call, while reducing your monthly available minutes if you receive a call to your Google Voice number.

I fail to see how this is in any way different from my choosing to forward an office phone (which I do via follow me features) when out of the office. To me, there’s no difference. I have a choice as a consumer to let my customers reach me wherever I am.

For some additional background, when ATT first came out with its A-List offering (which is only available to larger plans, by the way), I called up ATT and asked if they cared that I planned to add my Google Voice number to my A-List, explaining that it would ultimately lead to unlimited calls if customers or friends called me through my Google Voice number. One two separate occasions when talking to an ATT customer service representative, the unified reply was “We don’t care. That’s what it was designed for” (to sum it up in so many words).

How then, does ATT reserve the right to publicize an offering with clearly spelled out rules on its website, yet go against those rules? I (for one) feel another FCC investigation coming, along with the possibility of another class-action lawsuit. Just because you’re a large company doesn’t mean you can walk all over your customers.

Join the discussion here.

I welcome discussion from ATT on this post and invite them to comment. I’d like to know how they can justify something like this. It doesn’t seem right.

Informational Resources:

• ATT A-List landing page
• A-List FAQs

Other News:

• NY Times’ Pogue: Verizon, AT&T scamming mobile customers by charging for…
• FCC considers realigning access charge rules