Slashdot Mirror
Dumping ISP May Cost Customers $150
Dumpling$9 writes with a link to an article that seems to speak volumes about the modern consumer relationship with service providers. IBT reports on the outrageous fees facing users who drop their internet service contracts before they are up. "Pricing broadband competition can be difficult. Broadband is rarely priced as a stand-alone service. Whether offered by a telephone company or a cable company, it is usually bundled with other services such as voice and video. The advantage to the customer is easier billing and usually a price break. But the down side is if they drop one of the services to pursue a better deal elsewhere, they lose the discount ... It remains to be seen whether penalties for Internet customers will cut down on churn. Consumers Union in its annual cell phone survey found that nearly half of all cell phone subscribers who were considering switching carriers were deterred from doing so because of early termination penalties."
This is a major reason I've never used anything other than locally owned ISPs. Sure I pay slightly higher a month but they have a clue and treat customers like, well, customers.
If you get Roadrunner cable with the free AOL, then cancel Roadrunner, your AOL contract will cease to be free and it will continue running. You have to wade through the horror that is canceling AOL, preferably before you drop Roadrunner.
A lot of people have been bitten by this.
You're forgetting about monopolies.
In my area, if you want broadband there is one option: Comcast.
What a choice.
I am waiting for the corporate apologists to show up.
"Hey! Why don't you read the fine print."
"Gimp! Research your damn options and pay the extra $60/month for a contract-free options."
"GUH! I have no patience for stupid consumers."
But, seriously folks, why are these things okay?
Why is small, difficult-to-read fine print okay?
Why can't features be in fine print gotchas be in large print?
Why is it that a company can advertise something as true that others can show to be false?
Why can a company call themselves "perfect" when it's not?
Why is it okay that a company obfuscates things from their potential consumers?
But, I know, I'm stupid because I didn't understand the legalese. I'm an ass because I didn't pay the extra fee for the contract-free option. I'm stupid because I didn't pay the extra $60/month.
Of course, I'm stupid until one of these little things hits the one that accuses me. Then they're like, "HeeeeeY! WTF, yo?"
As though...
m
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Agreed. I switched to speakeasy DSL and I pay 2.5x what I paid for cable. I could've gone with sbc, I mean AT&T now, but I've already tried that before and just had too many problems. Why do I pay more? I need internet, I work from home, and Time Warner apparently doesn't make enough money to give me anything other than a busy signal or a "We're working on it..." answer(my net was done for over a week, I spent 4 hours on hold throughout the week, couldn't get an answer or anyone to come out, and more than 75% of my calls were given a busy signal). After this, I can have an actual T1 put in, or move into a datacenter. But speakeasy answers the phone, and I haven't had any trouble at all(despite my neighbor on DSL who is having mucho mucho trouble and borrowing my wifi now).
We did that once, and they re-formed. This time, make sure to dump the remains into molten steel.
I am not a crackpot.
Termination fees and contract lengths make sense to me. I agree that in some cases it can be anticompetitive (if exorbitant termination fees are used to mask poor service quality), but in many cases they are in lieu of a connection fee for initial labor or hardware, and it allows the customer not to get hit with overwhelming initial costs, but still lets the company bank on recouping their initial expenses-- It's recouped bit-by-bit, but still as good as guaranteed.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
the ISP dumps the consumer?
I've got 3 friends who have had their Cable Modems turned off because "they used excessive bandwidth." In those cases, I suspect the early termination fees are not recoverable. If that's the way it works, and you want out, just write up a little program that downloads lots of big files...put it in an infinite loop and voila...in a month or two, the ISP will cancel you.
Let's see... in the US a cell phone costs $350 or more. That is the list price from the manufacturer. You can find deals where you buy a phone and all the carrier does is provide the connectivity. Almost nobody does this in the US.
The other option is you pay $3-4 more a month and get a "free" cell phone with a minimum length contract. Almost everyone does this because phones break and they have zero resale value.
Also, different carriers in the US have different requirements for phones, different standards and different technicians. For the most part you can get them to activate any phone, as long as it is one they support. By "support" I mean that it works on the right frequencies (remember, three systems in the US) and they have it in their books so they can provide information about the phone when you call up and say something isn't working right.
This pretty much means that you need a new phone when you switch carriers, period. Selling used phones works, but only when the buyer uses the same carrier. And every carrier has their own testing program and vendor qualifications so the fact that you have a Nokia phone on Cingular doesn't mean that Verizon has qualified that phone model to work on their system, even if it would work on their equipment.
What this means is in the US until something changes with cell phones a plan is useless without a phone and a phone is useless without the plan that it came with. Value of phone without plan = 0. Can carriers be utterly unreasonable about termination? Sure. But they will also often waive the termination fee if you aren't coming in with too much attitude.
I was within 2 months of fulfilling my 12 month DSL contract with SBC when I got married. My wife already had RoadRunner so after I moved, I called SBC (AT&T by then) asking them to disconnect my service. But since I fully intended to complete my financial obligation of the contract I wanted to pay for the remaining two months.
They refused! I even tried asking them to disconnect my phone, but keep my DSL account and/or service active - even though I wouldn't be using it. Nope - no deal! They said that anything short of transferring my wife's phone and internet service to AT&T would result in a $200 termination fee. I honestly tried my best to fulfill my financial obligation, but that was apparently not good enough for them.
I've had RoadRunner bend over backwards to woo me, saying "Call us if you're even THINKING of switching - we'll work with you..." Thanks AT&T, for not being willing to work with me at all, you've forever lost me as a customer.
To cut a long story short, after 3 months we'd had enough of the endless outages and slowness of the Talk Talk ADSL service, even though we'd signed up for a minimum of a year with them. Having done some research on the web, I realised cancellation of the contract wouldn't be easy - so rather than wasting time with an underling in a call centre, I wrote a letter directly to their managing director, explaining how Talk Talk were in breach of contract for not providing us with the service that they'd advertised. Within 5 days of sending the letter, a senior manager from Talk Talk called me, promised me a £20 credit to my account and my MAC number within 7 days so I could go to another provider - no arguments whatsoever.
I never got the £20 credit but had no problems with changing ISP.
Cut to March of this year, my missus' 12 month mobile contract with Talk Talk ends and she decides to swap provider to a better deal. Talk Talk decide to invoice us £24 upon cessation of the service and when I ring in to their call centre, I'm told £4 is for call charges and £20 is a *LATE PAYMENT CHARGE* on an account we have been paying by monthly Direct Debit from our bank account.
I offer to pay the £4 call charges but tell the agent that if he insists I pay the late payment charge, then I would have to invoice him directly for the £20 ADSL account credit that I never got, along with an additional £20 late payment charge I was adding on top of that.
Suffice it to say, having put the guy in a situation of not being able to read a script from a screen, he accepted the £4 call charge and credited my account with £20 to cover the late payment charge.
The moral of this story is to to give them as good as they give you.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
My current ISP ClearWire not only slaps you with a 180 dollar early cancelation fee, but after the term of the contract (1 or 2 years) they automatically enroll you into another identicle contract. So if you don't cancel at the end of your term you automatically get sucked into another 1 or 2 year term. Probably the nastiest Terms of Service I've seen from a company regardless of if their service was good or not. I hope other companies don't end up following suit and start turning their business into a flat out money grab.
Ha, damn right.
I share a net connection with my flatmates, we abuse it heavily. They wrote to us within about three weeks of being connected and asked us to leave, said they would waive all the connection charges (about £50 or nearly $100) and the yearly contract.
If you do get one of these letters, take the ISP's offer: they might drastically cut your line-speed if you don't. We didn't leave, a particular flatmate didn't want to, so they massively slowed our line speed down, it's supposed to be 8Mbps, but sometimes my 2G phone's internet runs faster...