Big news for 12 million Alltel Wireless subscribers, Alltel has been bought out for $27.5 billion and will be taken private by its new owners. From SmartMoney:
The deal must be approved by Alltel’s shareholders and by regulators. It is expected to close by March 2008.
Inside is an official Alltel internal company document on what they’re supposed to do when customers call up asking to cancel their cellphone service.
Over the past week, it’s been quite a learning experience here at The Consumerist. Former and current reps from all of the major wireless companies have written in, sharing their tips and tricks and confessing their sins. It’s been a fascinating look inside the daily life of a sales rep, but what have we learned?
Here in New York, we don’t really know much about Alltel. They seem like happy, fun people who live on that “farm” where all the city dogs go when they die. “Sorry, Becky. Spot went to live with a nice family at Alltel Wireless. He’ll be happy there.”
Rumors are flying that the largest rural cell phone provider, Alltel, is being stalked by Verizon like an alley cat on a delicious plump mouse. Is it true? Maybe, but probably not. Even though both carriers are CDMA (T-mobile and Cingular are GSM, a different technology), it’s likely that the price of Alltel would be too much for Verizon, despite the fact that a merger between the two companies would make Verizon the nation’s largest provider. From ZDNET:
“Verizon has had a significant amount of success growing organically,” [an industry analyst] said. “I just don’t see any reason why they would need to buy Alltel. They can build their own network for a lot less than $30 billion.”
Now that your phone is your own, you can unlock it. Depending on the type of phone it is, unlocking can be as simple as getting a code from your phone company, or as difficult as “drilling into a shield over the main circuit board to tap into the right contacts and kicking the phone into a special diagnostic mode to get at the unlocking code.” Uh, yeah. Thankfully there are smart people at PC Magazine who can give us the lowdown on the formerly shady practice of unlocking a cell phone.Yay!
Consumer Reports has released the results of their cell phone customer service survey. Sprint and Cingular were among the lower-rated performers, while Verizon came out near the top of all cities surveyed. Apparently in Cleveland, Pheonix and Tampa there is a company called Alltel that people are very fond of as well.
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