AT&T admits to slowing down the Motorola Atrix and HTC Inspire | Hacker News Reader

AT&T admits to slowing down the Motorola Atrix and HTC Inspire

arstechnica.com

29 pointsshawndumas18 comments

> "Carrier reps on Facebook have promised that AT&T will fix the problem with a software update to the phones in April after many complaints were made to the Better Business Bureau."

I'm surprised that worked. I'm pretty sure the BBB is on par with AT&T in terms of sheer evilness.

Can you explain why you think the BBB is evil? Don't they simply supply a center point for raising and addressing business issues?

They are, it is credibly alleged, pay-to-play; the overall tenor of what BBB reports on you can be readily influenced by giving them money.

Being funded by the people you're supposed to keep account of is not the best of strategies.

Unless those you're keeping account of are willing to pay you....

This is how Congress works.

In what way? The people both pay for and keep account of their Government.

Lobbyists.

How do you think laws are written so fast in response to events? Surely there has not been a single law in a very long time that was actually, truly, written by the sponsors in congress pushing for them.

They are written by aides and lobbyists.

Exactly right. It's in practice impossible for politicians to draft legislation themselves and still have the time and political capital to pass it. In modern politics it's a mistake to see 'Senator Smith' as an independent entity; he is more like the CEO of 'Senator Smith Inc.': leading, glad-handling, and making high-level decisions - but the grunt-work of drafting laws falls to lower-level members of the organization, lobbyists, or so-called 'think tanks'.

There is a great book on this subject by Paul Light, "The President's Agenda", that goes into how even the president is usually forced to choose between pre-existing options rather than draft his own initiatives.

My one data point of experience with the BBB: The company sent a response to my complaint saying, essentially, "We have informed the customer we are unwilling to resolve his complaint." The BBB metric weighed this as a satisfactory response.

The BBB operates on the same model that Yelp is (allegedly) operating on: i.e., a consumer-driven account of a business, until the business pays up. There have been credible accounts of businesses being offered a higher BBB grade, and even entire complaints dismissed from the pool for being a paying member. Conversely, there have been reports of the BBB threatening to lower grades for businesses that won't play ball.

Even ignoring these allegations, the BBB's system is broke in a number of ways, the most egregious of which is that they admittedly give paying businesses a higher default grade than non-paying businesses. So, disregarding any consumer complaints, a paying member is automatically rated higher.

And like the controversy surrounding Yelp, usually when these things come to light and indisputable proof is presented, the whole thing is easily swept under the rug as a rogue sales agent not sanctioned by the organization - the issue of creating an environment where this sort of activity is de facto encouraged and abuses are deliberately ignored is, of course, never addressed.

Link to ABC News investigative report on the Better Business Bureau:

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/business-bureau-best-ratings-m...

(Thanks for asking the follow-up question. The two replies already posted prompted me to Google Better Business Bureau pay to play, which is how I turned up the link.)

I am not sure why anyone cares what the BBB thinks of AT&T. Who still uses the BBB to check on companies anyways?

Once again, I feel it necessary to point out:

AT&T is the WORST rated US carrier by Consumer Reports http://news.consumerreports.org/electronics/2010/12/consumer...

And these guys are trying to buy T-Mobile! If they want to be #1, then they should try and do it with better service and planning of their infrastructure instead of dicking around with their customers.

Maybe there's more money in being #2 while you dick over your customers.

So they advertised speeds that the phone were incapable of achieving? That's not just poor customer service, that's a violation of truth in advertising. AT&T needs to be indicted by the doj and the FTC.

The phones will do 4G once AT&T enables it, so it's only half deceptive.

Didn't AT&T already come out and say that their "4G" network is just a rebranded and slightly upgraded version of their existing 3G network?

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