I haven’t been an AT&T customer for nearly ten years, so having purchased one of their prepaid phones, I have to say, I am utterly stunned by their phenomenal efficiency.

It took AT&T less than three minutes to infuriate me and make me wish I never got suckered by them. Maybe that’s too strong—I’ll know more after I actually start using the service. But my initial impression is: run away, run far far away!

Recapping part 1: I am setting up my iPod touch with a mifi device to use it as a primary cell phone and infotainment device. It seems prudent, since that solution relies on no less than four or five different hardware and software services (details to come later), to have a secondary cell phone in place for plain old phone calls. And GPS. And maybe Google Maps. Perhaps some light web browsing. You know, the basics.

I chose AT&T for the following reasons:

1) Primarily, it’s because the Clear mifi uses WiMax in its 4G coverage area, and roams on the Sprint network everywhere else. That’s CDMA, so I should also get coverage on Verizon networks where Sprint has network sharing in place. AT&T uses GSM, so that gives me access to AT&T and T-Mobile towers. Toss in wifi, and I’m pretty much set up to use any current wireless telecom standard on Earth.

2) AT&T offers a $2-per-day unlimited text-and-voice plan, only on days that you use it. I can go a week without using my cell phone on general principles, and that was when it was my primary phone. So that made sense to me over T-Mobile’s $30-a-month (and up) plans.

(Add to this that while T-Mobile still offers the “Even More Plus” plans, they’ve decided to take it off their website and replace them with a completely different set of parallel prepaid plans. So if you want to become a T-Mobile customer, you have to know the secret handshake, rather than just research online what they’re willing to sell you. Annoying.)

3) AT&T is currently offering a refurbed Pantech Link phone, knocking the no-contract price down from $160 to $30. Thirty bucks? No-brainer. (Although most of their other refurbs are only $20 off the original price, so one wonders how many Links are in their refurb supply chain, and just how they all got there.)

Sounds great, right? Except that it turns out to suck.

T’Poof

Both Ts in AT&T stand for t’poof—the T is silent. T’poof is a Vulcan expletive which loosely translates as “bend over and grab your ankles,” but its common usage is remarkably similar to its English homonym.

I started with the data plan because it’s the A-number-one way that the phone can be useful even when I’m in a WiMax or Sprint coverage area. The Link has GPS; the iPod touch doesn’t. GPS won’t do diddly without a data plan to download the maps. I’ve generally been pretty happy with wifi-based geolocation, but c’mon—one technology talks to frickin’ satellites and requires relativistic calculations to work at all, and the other one merely relies on a fantastically complex map of all wifi hotspots in the world. I mean, both are amazingly cool… but satellites and relativity? Sheesh. No question which one is more Star Trek.

But look closely at the data plans that AT&T offers. Five bucks gets you… a megabyte. A frickin’ megabyte. And if you don’t use it in 30 days, you lose it. T’poof. Gone.

Twenty bucks gets you 100 megabytes, which sounds much more reasonable—which is to say, it’s still a buttload of money for that teaspoon of data, but 100 megs sounds like enough data to be husbanded for a month. The problem: it also expires in 30 days.

Keep in mind that two days ago I had a Virgin plan for $25 a month with unlimited 3G data, text, and 300 minutes. I dumped it to avoid paying any regular monthly fee. But with these “offers” from AT&T, I’m looking at probably shelling out about the same amount of money, on a monthly basis, for far less service. I had figured I’d toss 100 megs on the phone and just use it as needed. Nope. My data goes t’poof too quickly.

Which leads us to the second way that AT&T sucks. The standard way these prepaid phones work, you toss some money into the account, and then you use that money as a debit account from which you purchase services or pay-as-you-go options. I.e., with no plan in place, it’s 10¢ a minute for calls, and 1¢ per kilobyte of data. Let me repeat that: 1¢ per kilobyte. Phrased in 21st century terminology—since I haven’t thought in kilobytes since 1988—that’s $10,485.76 for one gigabyte of data.

You can buy cards at any CVS or 7-11 to add funds to your account, or you can go online and use plastic. Here are the terms for that:

See that third column? Your money expires. Put funds in the account without using them—say, for instance, you’re using a $2-a-day plan and you don’t want to think about it—and your frickin’ money expires. There’s an unwritten rule: folks who sell debit cards—be it a prepaid phone, a Starbucks card, or gifted plastic—can screw you up the posterior with fees or what have you, but money doesn’t expire. Money is money. Services expire. Folks who sell debit cards make their profit from having your money between when you buy the card, and when you spend the funds.

Except on AT&T, where money goes t’poof. But it also goes t’fizzle. I put $25 into the account to buy the $20 data plan—more on this in a bit—since I figured I’d probably burn a bunch of data setting up the phone. Then I popped into the web interface on my MacBook to buy the plan… and the only option was to pay an additional $20 for the feature.

Turns out, if you want to buy a data plan with money you’ve already given to AT&T, you need to call their 800 number, talk to Julie the Robot, and she’ll happily debit your account from the money you’ve already given them. But online? Where, say, you can “manage” your account? There, your option is “please hand over your credit card, thanks. That $25 credit you’re seeing, right there onscreen? Pay that no mind.”

Far as I can tell, AT&T just tried to trick me into paying them more money. And really, that’s kind of slimy.

Odd Man Out

Take another look at the payment chart:

Two thoughts come to mind:

1) The services I’m using so far are $20 a month, or $2 a day. $25 isn’t evenly divisible by 2.

2) $15 goes t’poof in 30 days. 15 is less than 20.

So even before we consider the quantum value of money where AT&T is concerned, we have the additional issue that it’s necessary to hand AT&T chunks of money in amounts which are poorly suited for the services they’re offering. It’s sort of like selling a bunch of brightly colored spheres, then requiring you to buy an irregular heptagonal case to carry them in.

Conclusion: AT&T—We Suck Harder!

Let’s return to the original philosophy of this exercise. I’m jumping through hoops because 1) while the iPhone is pretty damn nifty, 2) it’s saddled with AT&T service, and 3) AT&T doesn’t sell unlimited data plans and sticks with 3G (also Apple’s fault, to date), so 4) I’m-a-lookin’ for something more useful.

Sidebar: Yes, I’m aware that Verizon is rumored to get the iPhone in January. Which was made more interesting by the announcement that they’re launching 4G LTE service in December, so one wonders if that theoretical CDMA iPhone also gets LTE. (Addendum 12/2: No.) However, there are several things to keep in mind:

1. I’ve heard this every year since 2005. I’ll believe it when I see Jobs coming down from the mountaintop with his new stone tablets.

2. All of the crappy things that AT&T is doing to the iPhone are practices which were pioneered by Verizon. They’re the worst offenders in the US for crippling their phones—which is precisely why I have happily refused to be their customer since I cut my Bell Atlantic landline in 1996. I expect the fabled Verizon iPhone to be far more larded up with limitations than AT&T’s version.

3. That Verizon iPhone? Two-year contract. Whole point of staying off-contract: so I can switch phones whenever something better comes along. Which is guaranteed to happen when Apple upgrades the iPhone and iPod touch in 2011, if another company doesn’t beat them to it.

What truly sticks in my craw about AT&T’s iPhone plan is that they charge you $20 a month to connect your iPhone’s data to your laptop. There’s no additional data included with that $20 a month; it’s just what you pay for the privilege of doing something which I’ve been doing for free on AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile since 1997. Sprint charged $40 for the Phone-As-Modem plan, but that included unlimited data. I don’t mind paying $40 a month; I mind being forced to pay $20 for nothing at all. It’s philosophical.

Then AT&T comes along and offers me a different phone that—what a concept!—gets me interested based on the quality of their offering. Two bucks a day, moderate data—and fuck me gently for not reading the fine print closely enough before buying the phone. I should have known better, simply based on the Death Star logo on the box, that my odds of being satisfied with this were measurable only with electron microscopy.

More shortly when I review the Pantech Link. But my initial impression based on the last few hours: this was a perfectly good phone until it was ass-raped by AT&T. It may take away the crown of Worst Gadget Ever from the Virgin Kyocera Loft. And I strongly suspect that in 30 days or less, my relationship with AT&T is going to go t’poof.