Cingular to Raise Rates for Old Phones

August 1, 2006 By Geoff Duncan

Happy with your aging Cingular phone? Cingular's not, and plans to raise your rates as a way to encourage you to abandon TDMA.

Cingular Wireless really wants to standardize its mobile phone network on GSM technology, and to do so, it really wants to shut off old-style analog cellular service on its network. Of course, the Federal Communications Commission has mandated that analog service has to keep running under February 2008 (in part to provide service to rural and other areas for which digital cellular service is not available). So Cingular is doing the next best thing: it plans to drive its remaining old-school users of Time Division Mutiple Access (TDMA) phones off the network by raising their rates in order to reduce its operational costs.

According to Cingular, it plans to start charging users of TDMA phone an extra $4.99 a month as early as September 2006 unless they upgrade their phone to new models which use GSM. According to Cingular, some affected customers will be eligible for discounted upgrades, but the move is estimated to impact about 4.7 million Cingular subscribers, or about 8 percent of the company’s customer base. Cingular notes that the quality of service offered by its GSM network is better than both its TDMA and analog networks, and the company hopes to be able to shut down its TDMA system in early 2008.

Showing 3 comments

AlphaBear at 8:00pm 1st August 2006 Cracks me up that everyone talks about getting "locked into a contract" on an existing service. Just decline the $50/year or so discount and buy your phone without a contract. You only get locked in if you think that you should get the phone for a discount! Personally, my freedom to leave is worth the 50 or 100 bucks they would have discounted. You choose which option you want. It's not like they make the phones you get. They buy them and sell them to you with or without a discount/contract. Don't confuse frugal for lack of choice.
Matt at 2:22pm 1st August 2006 Look, it's only 5 bucks. And if your the dude clinging onto your 1980 motorolla cause your eyes are so bad that you don't dare venture into modern technology, I think they should make the charge double. OR they should provide those customers with a free retro looking digital phone that will suffice in the meantime. I agree it's a shame that they want to lock them in, I hate that part of cellular commerce. But those people hanging onto their freedom are going to have the either bite the bullet, or pay the piper.
Diggbot at 11:43am 1st August 2006 IMO Cingular is just tryint to get their existing, older customers to sign up for a new plan so they can lock them in. Very poor tactics.