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SunCom Wireless Offers Free Month of Service to N.C. Customers

Posted on: Tuesday, 23 August 2005, 00:00 CDT

Aug. 23--SunCom Wireless has agreed to give a free month of service to 7,418 customers in North Carolina who couldn't use their cell phones or voice mail in July when the company had a service outage.

The credit is SunCom's response to mounting customer complaints and pressure from the state Attorney General's office to fix problems that have nagged the company this year.

As of last week, the Attorney General's office had received 86 service complaints about SunCom since June, averaging more than one complaint a day.

The Attorney General's office asked SunCom to craft a plan to fix its problems. The company's response, spelled out last week in a letter to the Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division, gives customers more free calling time and makes it easier for customers to cancel their contract without having to pay a $175 termination fee.

"We appreciate SunCom's prompt response to concerns and complaints raised by some consumers," Assistant Attorney General Kevin Anderson wrote in a response to SunCom.

The service and billing problems affected some of the 211,000 former AT&T Wireless customers whose contracts SunCom acquired in December 2004 when Cingular bought AT&T Wireless.

The transfer of those customers has gone smoothly, SunCom has said, but nevertheless many customers have complained about inferior service. To appease concerns that SunCom calling plans are inferior to AT&T's, SunCom agreed to extend free "mobile-to-mobile" calling to the 211,000 former AT&T customers who call any Cingular customer.

"Should any transitioning AT&T Wireless customer nevertheless still not be satisfied with SunCom's mobile-to-mobile service, they are free to cancel" without a termination fee, SunCom wrote.

SunCom also said that if it can't duplicate a customer's AT&T Wireless rate plan, the customer can terminate a SunCom contract without paying the $175 termination fee.

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Source: The News & Observer

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