(no) phone

[miekec]

As some of you may have already noticed, my cellphone hasn't worked for over a month now. At first, I could get called but not call out and the house(cell)phone still worked. That didn't last very long, and the past few weeks I've just had no phone.
Some complete idiot at Sprint screwed up when J was arranging the switch-over of his clinic's (work) account from Sprint to Verizon and moving one phone (temporarily) from the old work account to our personal account, because they were closing their work account. The end result of this major screw-up was that their business account got transferred into our personal account, including the $<4-digit> bill, and the work account has a credit of $<4-digits> and isn't closed. Did I mention that we now have a bill of over $<4-digits>? When we noticed this problem we talked to Sprint, and the agreed-upon plan was that we only pay our actual part of the bills. Sure. Pay your actual bill, we'll fix the problem, and all will be happy. Sounds good.

Not.

A month later, they have now shut off my phone (and the housephone), sent us a new 2-year binding contract, still insist we owe them more than $3000, wasted at least 25 hours of J and my time on the phone with a gaggle of Sprint helpdesk/techsupport/idiots and have driven me up the wall. Some of them would insist it would be fixed in a few days, some of them refused to fix anything, and a lot of them didn't have a clue whatsoever. Plus, we wasted 12+ hours on hold. Literally. The average wait before even speaking to a live person was around 2 hours. Plus, the business accounts department can't (won't) help us, because it concerns a personal account, and the personal accounts department can't (won't) help us, because it concerns a business account.
Needless to say, I don't want any (wireless) relations with Sprint anymore. With the rest of my family already on Verizon, I'm switching to there. Yes, I realize nobody is perfect. They will have plenty of issues of their own, and I'll be stuck with a 2-yr contract at first. Their "unlimited nights & weekends" doesn't start till 9pm, which kind of defeats the purpose, but oh well. So far that's all something I can live with.

Does anybody know of complete show-stoppers? A reason why I really really shouldn't switch to Verizon? It's hard to see from the outside what kind of problems you tend to run into, and when you do see them, it's usually too late to get out. I know they have purposefully and obnoxiously disabled chunks of their Bluetooth capabilities, which is one of the things I need to look into. I want to be able to back up the data on my phone (phone#s, etc) but it looks like they've disabled any file-transfer protocols on all but their most expensive phones. Some of it is hackable. I know, but I don't know how easily or consistently or how well that works.
Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

Comments

[goddessfarmer.livejournal.com]

I am actually happy with verizon. 1) it's the ONLY service that even remotely works at my house. 2) I just had a very good experience with getting numbers moved around between phone to cope while I got a new battery. so I don't see any reason why not. And, hey, calls to/from me would be free!

[nekowoman.livejournal.com]

I know that my phone uses a chip - it looks like a miniature memory card. When I got a new phone, I had them copy the stored information from my old phone to the chip in the new phone I got. As a backup, they took the chip that came with my old phone and told me to keep it in safe place as a backup. I'm sure there are chip readers out there that could access that data. Maybe the phones you're considering use similar chips?

Note: If you do have/use chips, you have to make sure that you store all your information to the chip - not the phone. My phone has the option to default data to one place or the other... somewhere.

On the note of having massive trouble with Sprint... when I lived in Chicago the local evening news station had a segment where they highlighted horror stories such as yours. Part of the story was where the news tried to help rectify the problem. The incentive (obviously) for the company to help resolve the problems was for them to *not* get their names splashed on the evening news for being PITAs to deal with. Just a thought... maybe a well-written editorial to the newspaper or some media outlet would help?

[cherub624.livejournal.com]

It is nearly impossible to find a provider/plan that isn't painfully awful. I was happy with Sprint when i lived in Florida, but when I moved up here the service (phone service as well as human service) was terrible. Then I had T-mobile which had decent phone service but shitty customer service. I hated cingular, so I went with AT&T, whom I was happy with until Cingular bought them anyways.

But, I've had Verizon since January, and I can't say that I've been disappointed. It sucks that my nighttime minutes don't start until 9pm. Because of this, I went over my contractual minutes almost two weeks before the end of my month. When this happened, Verizon service called me to warn me, and offered to upgrade my plan before the end of the month so that I wouldn't be stuck paying a whole bunch of money for the overage minutes that month. I'm ok with that. Plus, at least in the new england area, coverage is pretty good in comparison with other services I've had.

In general though, I don't like cell phones, and one day, one day, I'm going to get away from the magickal land of 24 hour connection to anyone who wants me to do something for them right now, and boil my phone in oil, then tar and feather it.

The end.

I love Verizon!

[redembers.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't deal with anyone else. I had so many problems with Cingular and their bad billing practices that I switched about 5 yrs ago.
And I haven't had a problem since.
I always buy the insurance for the phone because I have teenagers who drop stuff in water, or lose them.
and yeah the night time minutes not rolling over or starting till 9 IS an inconvience, but nothing more.

I have verizon wireless, and verizon on my home phone as well.

I say go for it.

[zigamorph.livejournal.com]

I've had a Verizon account since 1995. Well, technically, I had a NYNEX account, and then a Bell Atlantic account, and then a Verizon account. But you get the idea.

If you cite another Verizon account as a referrer when you open a new account, that other account gets a $25 credit and costs you nothing.

There's no question that Verizon can be frustrating to deal with at times. At one point or another, I've had to deal with all of the major carriers, either on my own behalf or a client's, and I currently consult for T-Mobile, Sprint, and Nextel dealerships. (I express my own personal opinions here, obviously.)

In terms of coverage, Verizon wins hands-down. In the Boston-Providence area, T-Mobile coverage is almost as good, as long as you don't venture too far away from major roads. Sprint coverage sucks, although it's tolerable if you stay in the metro area. ATT coverage sucks harder, even in the metro area.

Verizon customer support staff all speak English and are located in the United States. That's saying a lot if you're used to dealing with Sprint.

I've never minded that nights start at 9:00pm. I was one of the very first Verizon customers on the free nights and weekends plan when they started offering that, and it led to a lot of confusion that required them to assign me a personal representative and send a corrected bill every month. Originally, nights started at 8:00pm for Verizon, per my 1999 contract, and I was grandfathered on that until I changed plans in May 2006.

I never even come close to using up my monthly allotment of peak minutes, since I have 1350 available. With a PDA/Smartphone, at the time the only available options (http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/controller?item=planFirst&action=viewPlanDetail&sortOption=priceSort&catId=448) were 450 minutes for $80 per month or 1350 minutes for $110 per month, where these plans include unlimited data (very important), unlimited nights and weekends, and unlimited in-network calling. (They have since added a 900 minute plan for $100 per month, but I wouldn't really care about the $10 monthly difference.)

I've had recurring problems where Verizon doesn't honor their contract as written, and I've had to confront them on it. To their credit, I've always won those since I could back up what I argued. For example, when I started going to and calling southern New Hampshire frequently, I was being hit for roaming charges when there and long distance charges when calling there. I faxed them the pertinent contract paperwork from 1999, showing that southern New Hampshire was considered to be within my local area, and they changed their billing system to agree with the contract.

You should be able to get a one-year contract from Verizon with far less trouble than from almost any other carrier (other than an MVNO). Usually, you take a $50 hit on the promotional purchase price of the handset, but otherwise the terms and pricing are the same.

Verizon has a promo now where new contracts can get unlimited text messaging, which is not usually offered. As a practical matter, since you can get 5000 messages for $20 per month anyway, upgrading to unlimited is not going to be an issue for any but the heaviest users.

I have heard about the Bluetooth issues as well, but I have a very high-end handset, the XV6700, which runs Windows Mobile and is extremely hackable. It does not seem to have any restrictions, and I can send and receive files via Bluetooth without any trouble. If you want data access via cellular, then Verizon and the XV6700 are ideal, achieving broadband speed with either standard USB cabling or acting as a Bluetooth modem. I have an irregular informal series on hacking the XV6700 on my LJ. (http://zigamorph.livejournal.com/tag/cellular)

Backing up the address book from Windows Mobile is a bit of a pain, as you are supposed to be coerced into using Outlook, which is supplied on CD with the handset. However, there are several good freeware third-party applications that do this, all using the .NET Compact Framework to output the address book as XML.

Feel free to catch me on IM if you have any further questions I can help with.

Helio

[zigamorph.livejournal.com]

If you are a very heavy user of text messaging and voice minutes, you might want to consider a deal from Helio, who are an MVNO using Sprint. Sky posted (http://mysticnightsky.livejournal.com/157733.html) about her rather amazing deal to get the Ocean for 50% off the device, free activation and $10 off the first 12 months. Helio offers an unlimited everything plan — unlimited voice minutes, unlimited text messages, and so on — for $120 per month before that coupon Sky found.

[miekec]

Thanks for the extensive reply. Yes, I know that all carriers have their own brand of crazy. Besides, the only thing I *really* need my phone to do is (gasp) be a phone. All the other gadgets are nice, but not required.