The independent retailer that I got my HughesNet from a couple years ago is also a Dish, DirecTV and ViaSat retailer. When I went to his shop to check out HughesNet before I signed up he was in the middle of unpacking all of the sales literature and demo phones for the AT&T prepaid stuff. I asked if he was branching out to cell phones and he just looked at me a laughed. He is located in a very rural portion of Southern NY and most of his customer base is rural and remote in Southern NY and Northern PA, he said AT&Ts service is the pits. Verizon is king as far as reception goes and in many less remote areas T-Mobile is now equal to or better than AT&T, especially is smaller villages.
When he came to do the install for Hughes his wife called him while he was activating my modem. I made a comment about being surprised he was able to get the call, especially while in the house, since cell phone reception is so poor in my area. He said it was fading in and out be he could make out what she was saying then he made a comment that if she called his AT&T phone it would have probably went straight to voicemail. Then he took his AT&T phone out of his pocket and said ‘yep, no service’. He told me typically he just leaves the AT&T phone in his truck as it’s pretty much useless to him.
AT&T is not a wireline provider in my area or anywhere within several hundred miles of here, Verizon owns most of the Northeastern US. AT&T Mobility’s coverage is severely lacking when compared to Verizon Wireless and to some extent even T-Mobile. I said this before, If AT&Ts whole plan is to use DirecTV to coerce subscribers into subscribing to more of there services, that is not going to work in my neck of the woods or a lot of other place too I would imagine. AT&T has no legacy services like POTS or DSL and no residential fiber anywhere near here and their wireless service is mediocre at best. Most people I know with AT&T Mobility are Apple lovers who have been with them since their exclusivity on the iPhone and have never bother to switch to another carrier.
A couple years ago at work one of my main motivations for bringing in a secondary data circuit for guest use was AT&Ts non-existent service. Between various vendors stopping by, customer training classes we hold and customer demos and open houses we see a decent amount of non-employees where I work coming in from all over the country. It seems like AT&T has a huge corporate presence and just about every time we had a large amount of outside guests the sales managers would complain to me that their guests can't make phone calls or get email, I would ask is the person on AT&T and the answer 100% of them time was Yes. So after getting approval I ordered a business class cable modem connection and installed a few WAPs in the area's guests are most likely to congregate. AT&T should get a commission from Charter for a sale
