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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."
Yeah...sucks. This is a "duh" story. Of course, you don't have to sign a contract if you don't want to, and just pay more in the short term. This hasn't been news since Ma Bell was broken up.
I don't respond to AC's.
So, in summary, if you sign a contract which has a clause which requires a penalty for early termination, service providers charge you that penalty. Duh!
The business is very competitive, and there are lots of incentives to switch carriers. If you're not renegotiating with your cellular and broadband carriers when the contract comes close to ending, you're unwise.
I don't excuse the size of the fees, but they will be disclosed if you ask the terms of the agreement. Don't want to pay a fee? Don't sign up, or don't break the agreement.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
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.
You have a choice of cell phone carriers. You don't have a choice of internet service providers. You have whoever has a monopoly on your phone service in your region and whoever has a monopoly on your cable service in your region. If you terminate your service early, exactly where are you going to go?!
Fuck this. Just a further attempt to fuck the consumer over.
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.
Don't sign up for a contract you might want to break out of.
If you do sign up, then don't bitch about your own stupidity.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I am the anti-consumer, when it comes to broadband. I will dump all service at the drop of a hat, and switch to a competitor...The whole deal. I mean, cable, phone, I don't care. I have all the equipment to switch between Direct TV and Cable, and Cable and DSL, Phone and IPtelephony (direct TV is bundled through the phone company in my area), and whichever company pisses me off, I dump 'em.
When we moved to a new place, the first thing I did was run cable to my office. Not because I want to watch TV there, but because the first time the phone company pisses me off, I dump 'em.
I think they're scared of me...Last time my service went down (morons from the phone company screwed up my settings working on a neighbors equipment), they told me three days. I told them if it wasn't done before I got home from work the next day, I was calling the cable company...It was done when I went home for lunch.
These days, if you have more than one option, make the most of it...Treat them like the bitches they are, and make them grovel for your money.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Your ISP is subsidizing the cost of equipment instead of charging you an up-front sign-up fee. If you leave, your monthly payment is no longer paying that off. It makes perfect sense.
It stinks that we can't get it for free, but that's the way it works.
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.
It's easy to get your ISP to drop you.
download a lot of non-copyrighted material (you don't want to get in trouble) off of a file-sharing network. they will get rid of you and you won't be responsible for the disconnect charge.
easy.
Note: In case of monopolized areas, none of this applies.
Every contract I have ever had with a cell phone provider or internet provider or cable provider had a set expected length of contract AND a set date when that contract would be terminated. I may be mis-remembering, but I'm pretty sure NONE of them have been over two years. In EACH case there was some sort of incentive to get a lower price and some sort of incentive to switch carriers. Many times the switch incentive is enough to pay for the termination fees, if any.
It seems to me that if you sign a contract with a company for a couple of years, you were paid to do it with a lower price. If you want to cut and run, you pay and should. This is not anti-consumer, this is stupid-consumer who didn't read the contract and now wants to bail ahead of time.
It's the same with 'bundled' services. They are always trying to get you to 'bundle' everything with one carrier. You take them up on it at your peril. If you never bundle services you keep your versatility intact. yeah, it may cost you more, but are you sheep and go ga ga eyed every time they offer you ten bucks?
Don't get me wrong. My Starband sucked so bad I dumped it the month my contract was up. My Dish Network was so bad and the customer service so God-awful I fired them on the spot and threw the dishes in the dump. But I'll tell ya, my DSL is so reliable and fast that it's worth my while to sign a contract. Absolutely no problems.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
don't despair.
You may have done this already, but find a Not For Profit credit counsiling, they may be able to get verizon to drop the fees. They can also help with credit cards. They basicallt call the credit agency and they work out a plan.
Every case is different.
In my case, I didn't have to pay car payments, credit payments, or a home mortgage for 6 months. Yes, the car and mortgage payments were put at the end of the loan, but even then it was a life saver. We didn't have to much on credit cards, so we eventually got that paid off and never got another one.
Do it today, now...right now.
It was a year of finacial hell, but if I didn't go to that credit counsiling I would be in a lot worse shape today.
Just be sure it's a not for profit company, and if you have to paty them anything, leave. Find another. You don't need more payments.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wow, is this a DSL FUD campaign?
I work for a support outsourcing company. I've worked for three different cablecos and there are three more here right now, included in that six are all the major players (Time Warner, COX, Comcast). Not one of these six do not offer cable modem service as a stand-alone service. Also, except for special bundled pricing arrangements, all of them are month-to-month (no contracts).
Where are these mythical cable companies that force your to take video service and have contracts? Sounds like AT&T and co. are trying to draw parallels that don't exist between their refusal to sell naked DSL and their standard contracts vs. cable internet.
The problem is I know Verizon has contract-free DSL service, and I'm sure they offer service without phone included as well.
To me, the idea of signing up for any kind of contract for internet service with no quality-of-service guarantee is just stupid.
The reason for the excessive churn is simple: poor customer service, and poor billing policies to prevent it. To stop it, all companies would have to get together and agree to these rules.
The way things are right now, the standard promotion is 6 mos-1 yr, and there is a 1 mos-3 mos waiting period for a new full promo. All that does is encourage "promotion hopping". Throw in the standard free installation and customers will happily jack-knife between providers each year so they're always on a promotion. If they call and threaten to cancel, they can many times get a temporary price cut that is close to what new customers get.
This all sounds great to customers, but it can mess with the market as a whole in terms of what the "standard rate of service" is. Many people think that broadband service is too expensive in the U.S. compared to what you get in other countries, and I'm not going to get into that, but when it's so easy to get a discounted price for service the very term "regular price" becomes meaningless. If broadband providers want to keep their customers around, they are going to have to work together so they eventually are stuck paying the "market rate". Once you have people having to evaluate service based on what the providers think its really worth, you're going to see some changes in what's considered acceptable service for the price and what the price is. Right now the people who lose out are the ones not on promotion who are having to subsidize the huge numbers that are on the provider's balance sheet. Customers who don't call and bitch about their bill every week should not be penalized like this.
I have Dish Network for TV. When I signed up, the phone rep wanted me to sign a 2 year contract. I simply told them that I wasn't interested, and so they countered with a 1 year contract. Didn't really feel like that either, and so they finally offered a no-contract plan but required like a $49 activation fee. Fine by me.
Same deal with Cingular. They say a 2 year contract is required, but it isn't. All you have to do is ask for less. They'll do a 1 year and might charge you $25 or $50 more for the phone. Big deal. Bring your own phone and tell them you want a month-to-month plan, and they'll do that too.
Same deal with Verizon DSL. They have a month-to-month plan with DSL that costs a couple bucks a month more than the contract price. You just have to ask for it.
The point is, you have to stand up for your rights as a consumer. Tell the company, "I'm here, I'd like to pay for your services, but your terms are unacceptable. What can you do about it?" If they won't bend, find another company that will. I have no sympathy for people that blindly sign contracts and then whine about the consequences later.
We did that once, and they re-formed. This time, make sure to dump the remains into molten steel.
I am not a crackpot.
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...