AT&T's apology for Thursday's outage should stretch to a cup of coffee The $5 credit AT&T is offering to customers affected by last week's major outage highlights that compensation when a provider suffers downtime is unlikely to get even close to the inconvenience or cost to business. AT&T said Thursday's outage was "due to the application and execution of an incorrect process used while working …
By random chance I was working through my taxes last week when the outage landed. I needed to access a number of financial institutions to get the correct data.
Many of them have the half-arsed attempt at MFA - they send a text message for verification. Pretty tough to get a text message when AT&T is knackered. As a result I could not access my banking for the majority of my finances.
I know text message MFA is craptastic at best for security. Targeted attack, cloned phone, and game over. However, I did not realize how fragile it is when dependent on large Telcos to deliver the access code.
Needless to say, I called their help lines and requested real MFA. Surprisingly most front end helpdesk people knew exactly what I was asking for, why I was asking, and then apologized for not being able to deliver proper MFA security. So clearly they had been called about it before....but their InfoSec either doesn't get it, or isn't listening.
Discussed using the latest and greatest voice bioauthentication with the CISO and his right hand minion of one of the largest Healthcare payer corporations in the USA.
So called expert right hand minion goes on to immediately kill any discussion of voice bio because "In the mid-70s my coworker impersonated me so well, he could fool all voice bioauth systems." DUHHHH! So mobile phone MFA was deemed the most secure method.
After waiting a reasonable amount of time, and with the help of an internal ally/co-conspirator, Mr. Minion suddenly had several Help Desk tickets per day opened in their name for almost a month. "How are they getting thru our MFA?"
At least, they sure did in The President's Analyst (1967 American satirical black comedy film -- description is from Wikipedia, where the link goes).
AT&T fails massively, tells customers to use Wifi calling, but fails to highlight that WIfi calling is only available to customers who buy their phones directly from AT&T at AT&T prices. So no, it's not an option you lying sack of dog poo. And the meager $5 credit doesn't apply to prepaid customers for no logical reason other than being stingy. They seem to be deliberately trying to make everyone hate them, and it's working for me.
I think AT&T is the most crapulant cell phone company in the US. In the past, (due to Verizon and Sprint using CDMA, and AT&T and T-Mobile using GSM), you had Verizon and Sprint only permitting phones on a whitelist on their networks (no SIMs, and the phones tended to be customized enough between Verizon, Sprint, and US Cellular that they were not very cross-compatible anyway). And AT&T & T-Mobile being more lax about things.
No longer! When Verizon began converting to 4G LTE, they switched to SIMs and allowing ANYTHING on their network that is physically compatible. T-Mobile (who bought Sprint) continued to do this as they switched over to 4G LTE service. AT&T has gone to a whitelist -- even previously working phones they got a friendly text saying effective some date, the phone would quit working and cut them off! (I'm not referring to them dropping their 2G and 3G networks -- you can have a fully compatible phone with 4G, VOLTE, 5G, and all the bands AT&T uses, and they will not let the phone register if it's not on their approved phone list!!)
$5 per account cap? That is a joke. I mean, typically you can have these low-cost plans for like $10-20 (especially prepaid), and the "unlimited everything" sort of stuff running up around $25-40 a line depending on the details. If someone is paying $250-400 for 10 lines, they seriously can't stump up a full $8.33-$13.33? You'd think they would have the sense to realize the bad PR of paying the same to someone with 5 lines as someone with 10+ lines on their account.
But, AT&T has had a history of questionable behavior (a recent example, a few years back, they offered a 2 year price lock... then raised people's rates within a matter of 2 or 3 months. THEN tried to violate their own terms allowing people to cancel penalty-free if any "materially adverse" changes were made. Instead of just crediting those people who called in to complain a $42-63 credit to cover $2-3 price raise for the remaining 21 or so months, or even a $2-3 credit to cover that month, or letting them cancel, they tried to tell them they could not cancel without paying early termination fees despite the contract terms saying they could. Eventually people filed FCC complaints and the FCC told them to cut that crap out and follow their own contract terms. Amusingly before the FCC responded, a few people read that AT&T would cancel unlimited data plan users if the data use was really extreme ('unlimited' plans with limits are a whole 'nother kettle of fish...), so being unhappy over that $2-3 price raise they got the cancellations they wanted by intentionally sucking down Linux ISos and speedtests and junk all month so they would be up in that 1TB+ data use range and get cancelled.)
"$5 per account, not per line? Then it would make sense to have each family member with a separate service provider."
Well, there's two main types of services in the US.
Prepaid, generally it's per-line and prices accordingly. This is "Pay as you go" service, you pay per month. The disadvantages being you usually don't get roaming coverage (which is not a big deal these days -- AT&T and Verizon have massively more coverage than they did 10 years ago, largely through buying up regional providers and integrating them into their networks; T-Mobile also has massively more coverage largely by running 600mhz spectrum on their sites that they didn't have before about 5 years ago, making their previous "swiss cheese" coverage much more solid.) Other disadvantage, since you are paying per month and are in no contract the cell co is free to modify or remove that plan, you may go to renew one month and find out the plans have changed!
Postpaid... it's typical to have the single-line pricing on this be QUITE bad. Like $50+. They REALLY encourage "family plans", by making it like $60+ for the first 2 lines, but then lines can be added on for typically $20-30 a pop so the price per line gets decent when you add enough lines on there. Advantage being, USUALLY the cell cos will just keep letting you stay on the plan you are on forever, so if you find a plan that is a fantastic deal you don't have to worry about them not offering it any more. In the past, postpaid used to also offer phone discounts that prepaid users did not usually get; however, that for the most part is a thing of the past (making there be that one less reason to go postpaid over prepaid.)
In other words.. prepaid, feel free to have each line on it's own account or even it's own service provider. Postpaid? The pricing would get out of hand if you did that.
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