AT&T sold me a defective new phone once. They replaced it with a refurb, and marked it in their system that I had purchased it that way. They could not be convinced that I should have a 1-year new phone warranty instead of a 90-day refurb warranty.

Just make sure to keep an eye on your monthly statement. AT&T will arbitrarily decide that you should upgrade your plan and charge you more for it - despite your previous plan being perfectly within your usage.

Two defective phones? What was wrong with them?

They were made by LG right before they exited the business and had problems with the screens greening out when they got warm - as in 90°F (i.e. summer in pocket temperatures).

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee - I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me - you can’t get fooled again.’”

> I'm happily with AT&T now.

I never thought I'd hear those words. The one time congress split up a company that I recall, it was AT&T because of all their awful practices, and for YEARS I have heard of their crazy fees and fines, and what have you.

T-Mobile was the US branch of Deutsche Telekom at one point AFAIK. The one German guy I know said that basically the whole country gets fucked on pricing and bandwidth, and that American residential Internet is vastly superior. It's not implausible to imagine the shitty behavior from German telecom companies rubbing off on their US subsidiaries.

As far as I can tell prices in Germany are better than in the US, and broadband while not stellar is fine. My home internet is 500/100 speed and costs 35€ (with unlimited data and calls to landline and mobile numbers, for whatever thats worth). My mobile plan is 8€/month for 10GB of data (5G, of course not great availability outside cities, but LTE is not that bad) and unlimited calls and SMS.

> The one German guy I know said that basically the whole country gets fucked on pricing and bandwidth, and that American residential Internet is vastly superior.

Since "American residential Internet" has been the butt of jokes even in rural Europe for the past decade, I wonder how uniquely bad DT must have been for the US connections to compare favorably.

EDIT:

Or maybe it's the most developed nations being way past the peak of quality of life for its population (which I think is a pattern)?

Reminds me of my employer from over a decade ago; at some point they had the bright idea to try and convert our work stations in Poland into fat terminals, with all the data being stored on the servers in UK. Problem is, their pricey London office Internet connection had bandwidth that was something like 1/10 of what I could get on the cheapest residential connection I could find in Kraków. Way less than any of us was used to. And they weren't planning to upgrade. IIRC, the whole idea got postponed indefinitely after multiple reminders that the London office is already so bandwidth-constrained that we'd rather look for another job than be stuck working in the London office in the first place, much less accept our local machines being limited by a link to their servers.

AT&T is not the Ma Bell you are referring to. Today's AT&T is the continuation of Southern Bell.

> I never thought I'd hear those words.

I didn't either. T-Mobile is that bad.