Ogo owners, who in the United States have had a questionable future ever since the merger between AT&T Wireless and Cingular now know their fate. Cingular has announced they will shut down the Ogo network October 10th.
Cingular blames the root cause on major upgrades to their network. In actuality, this is due to Cingular planning to shut down the AT&T Wireless GSM billing system by the end of the year. All standard AT&T Wireless plan codes have been migrated to the Cingular existing billing system. This is the same reason Cingular has shut down GSM GoPhones that were opened under AT&T Wireless as well. The amount of effort needed to migrate these plan codes is questionable, however, Cingular did view internally both Blue GoPhones and the Ogo as ventures they wished to divest for any reason that they could.
However, Cingular is offering Ogo customers an interesting proposal. For $14.99/month (the same rate as Ogo customers pay currently), they can have a special Data & Messaging plan. This is essentially Cingular’s MEdia Works plan, without the (usually required) voice plan. Voice calls will be billed at $.40/minute (the Ogo did not have voice calling), and the plan includes 1000 text messages, 500 multimedia messages, and 5 MB of data. Cingular did not comment on the lack of unlimited data (which was part of the Ogo plan), or if Ogo customers could add on unlimited data later.
