Disclaimer: the views expressed on this site do not nessecarily reflect those of my employer
Friday, July 18, 2003
Fight the power..
I'm now living with no land line phone. My cell phone is all. I have AT&T and an older Nokia phone. A few months ago my service quality got suddenly worse. I can rarely place a call, and I can rarely get a strong signal. So I thought about upgrading to a new phone. AT&T has some nice new phones and a support engineer told me that phones with an external antena are much better. But then I find that buying a new phone will cost me over $200 more than signing up as a new customer. And I can't cancel my current phone for another 6 months or $175.
Spoke with AT&T about this at great length yesterday. They offered to drop me to a less expensive plan and riding that out would cost me $120. So I could do that, and then get a second phone at $49, total cost is now $169 instead of $249. What baffles me is that this company is willing to play that scenario out and lose me as a customer forever (I would buy the new phone from someone else). The only incentive they are giving me for staying with them is that I wouldn't have to change my phone number, which I don't really care about anyway. The customer agreement clearly states that there is an early termination fee. And it clearly states that they don't guarantee service. So it would appear that I'm stuck.
When I dug deeper I learned (from AT&T) that they are in the process of upgrading to GSM and are replacing TDMA towers which would adversly effect my service quality on my older phone. And somehow this is my fault and I have to pay for it. They were very good at covering their ass and not letting me get out of this termination fee. It sounded like a lot of people have been unhappy with this because they certainly had their scripts ready. But it does seem unjust. Here is sort of how it looks from my perspective:
1. I sign up for service and find that there is an early termination fee. But I can cancel within 30 days.
2. I get my phone and use it everywhere and its great and I'm happy. Years go by.
3. Suddenly the quality drops significantly and the phone becomes essentially unusable for me.
4. AT&T admits that this is because they are taking down TDMA towers in my area and now my coverage isn't as good.
5. AT&T claims, "hey, we don't guarantee service and you're outside the 30 day period so tough luck".
Is it me, or does this seem gross? They are willing to take $120 and then lose me as a customer forever, rather than make me happy and keep me as a customer for oh, say, hopefully around 40-50 more years. I just don't get it. A quick search on the web revealed that all of these wireless providers have more or less the exact same policy, however many people have succesffuly fought and won a waiver of the early cancellation fee. Unfortunately I don't have the time and energy to do this and $120 hardly seems worth a big fight. They still suck though.
