said by ddeisz:You're giving AT&T way too much credit if you think their systems for POTS, cell, etc. are connected in any way other than for billing. Even at that, they can't always keep them in sync.
I could tell you horror stories having personally worked on a handful of system projects for Ameritech/SBC. I seriously doubt much has changed.
Been there, done that with Ameritech/SBC enterprise projects, and in general your assessment is close to the truth.
However, when I got my first AT&T/BellSouth "dry" DSL account (after the FCC forced them to do it as a requirement for the acquisition/merger), I automatically got a $5.00 per month discount because I was also a Cingular customer. And later, when I ported a couple of phone numbers to AT&T CallVantage from Vonage, I got another $5.00 per month discount for each phone number because I was an AT&T DSL customer. In both cases, I don't recall having to tell anyone that I was already an AT&T customer, or beg for the discount; just my name and address was apparently enough to generate the discount.
As a side note, the $5.00 per month discount on the DSL service was short lived (it only lasted for a couple of months). The reason it disappeared was that it was a BellSouth/Cingular discount, and when the official name change to AT&T occurred, the discount associated with the now officially nonexistent entities died with the BellSouth/Cingular names.
