Verizon Wireless Doesn’t Want Me To Get An iPhone
Posted by beehive on 22 Jul 2008 at 09:18 am | Tagged as: Uncategorized
I want to get a new 3G iPhone.
In order to get one I will need to cancel my current contract with Verizon Wireless - one year early. By ending the two year contract early I will end up having to pay a cancellation charge of up to $179.
While I normally would want to take such a penalty charge, the iPhone is a phone that will actually allow me to be on the REAL internet (something that my current Treo doesn’t do) and the plan is a full $30 cheaper per month with the standard plan that I currently pay with Verizon Wireless.
I’ll actually end up saving $360 by switching from the overpriced Verizon Wireless plan to the AT&T Wireless plan. Given this I don’t mind the cancellation fee and the $199 3G iPhone cost.
I called up Verizon Wireless last week to find out if since I was halfway into my contract I would end up having to pay the full $179 or hopefully less. For those of you with a poor sense of memory or are new here, I’ve had a bad past with Verizon Wireless customer service reps - which you can read up on here and here…
Last week a gal by the name of Rene picked up on the Verizon Wireless end and upon hearing that I wanted to learn about cancelling my contract early so that I could get the iPhone she immediately became the worst iPhone/AT&T service rep - she also became a classless tool of Verizon Wireless.
Rene blasted the iPhone saying that the data is only available at hotspots - despite AT&T reps assuring me that data is available anywhere that the phone has reception as well as the fact that I’ve seen people use the iPhone data service when not in a hot spot.
After Rene’s extremely poor customer service by way of tacky competitor bashing she hung up on me.
I kid you not, she hung up on me. I can speak to my sister for an hour on my cell phone at work and not have it drop at all, but when on the phone with Verizon Wireless it miraculously “cut out”.
iPhone, hear I come. Verizon Wireless, prepare to be banished into the land of unneeded, untrustworthy, and shady businesses in my mind - you’ll spend an eternity living with Time Warner Cable.
That is an out and out lie. I just got an iphone (switching from Verizon to do so), and internet works absolutely fine when not in a “hot spot”. If you want to use WIFI, instead of the data service, then you need to be in a wifi hotspot, but since they require you to buy an unlimited data plan, it’s kind of irrelevant (although it is much faster if you’re in a 3G coverage area).
Also, I think verizon is feeling some pain from this - My contract with verizon was up last march, so i had been patiently waiting for the new iphone to come out to switch. When I ported my number at the apple store, they told me I probably didn’t need to do anything else, but, just in case I called verizon when I got home just to confirm that I didn’t need to do anything else to cancel my account. As soon as the sales rep heard that I had ported over to AT&T for the iphone, she got very curt and pretty much hung up on me as well.
It’s verizon’s own damn fault. Apple originally approached them, because they have the largest network in the US, but they insisted on “locking down” the phone the way they do all phones with their shitty proprietary vcast service. So apple went to AT&T instead.
Thank you Sam for verifying this for us.
I just remembered — AOL used to pull this crap. You’d call in to cancel, and they would be completely impossible about it. And then, once you had fended off their every BS argument, they’d ask you to hold, and cut you off.
They pulled that on me twice in a row. It’s a good thing you can’t murder somebody over the phone.