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Verizon Doubles Early Termination Fee and More
An anonymous reader writes "If you buy a smartphone through Verizon, be prepared for an increase in the early termination fee. Verizon is doubling the phone-subsidy to $350. What's more, is that Verizon also actively charges customers for accidental data transmissions of as little as 0.02kb. 'They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch 'Get it now' or 'Mobile Web'—usually a single key like an arrow key. [...] The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn't matter; they've told me that ANY data--even one kilobyte--is billed as 1MB. The damage is done.'"
I hate Verizon even more now, I didn't think it was possible.
And yet people make fun of me for using a TracFone, for about only $9 per month.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
If you buy a smartphone through Verizon, be prepared for an increase in the early termination fee. Verizon is doubling the phone-subsidy to $350.
You sign a contract with Verizon. Verizon is providing the services. You are contracting with them and saying you will use their services for X years. It's a contract. Breaking a contract is something where both parties agree what the response should be. In this case, Verizon is saying that you are charged $350 if you break your contract and stop paying them what you said you would pay them.
Honestly, I don't see what the deal is. Chances are you are paying what... average of $100 a month for a Verizon plan? So $350 is 3.5 months? Paying 3.5 months for breaking a 24 month contract doesn't seem so unreasonable.
The fact that they ARE using that money to subsidize their "free phone" stuff is irrelevant. If they are able to apply money they get from termination fees to offer cheaper phones and get more customers that way, I see no problem with that.
But... oh well. It's much more interesting to complain about early termination fees as if they are hidden or sneaky or something. As if contracts should be able to be broken by either party without any consequences...
They'll make more now than the class-action will cost later.
Actually, I think their timing couldn't be better! I've got my droid on the lower cancel penalty... For once the early adopters get benefits!
This would make me not get Verizon, if I didn't already have it without the hike tho...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
I understand, on principle why they charge early termination fees. $350 for a smartphone seems extreme, but taking the new Droid for example, the phone costs $550 without a plan and the customer gets it for $200 which is right in line. What doesn't make sense is the fact that if I cancel my contract 1 year and 11 months in, I'm expected to pay the whole termination fee, despite the fact that Verizon has already made back $335 of it. That's just abussive. Termination fees should be proportional to the amount of the contract you are terminating and capped at the amount of subsidization on the phone.
If you use data, it seems reasonable to me to charge a fee even if you just made "a mistake".
Agreed...but the issue is not about paying for the 0.2kb HTTP request you just made, but rather paying for an entire MB worth of data. It's not like billing per kilobyte or even per BYTE is technically infeasible, so why can't you pay for a fractional MB if that's what you use? In fact, there is absolutely no justifiable technical reason for this -- it's pure asshat accounting. This is like plugging in a desk lamp into your wall outlet for 5 minutes and ComEd charging you for an entire kWh.
You know it's asshat-ish when even AT&T has a better policy.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
As for early termination fees increasing, that's what gets you nice phones for cheap. I don't really see a problem with these fees since they are making phones more affordable given that you would have a phone plan anyway.
The pisser is that I want to BUY the phone by itself...and then be able to go to whatever provider I wanted. "Cheap phones" be damned! They should be clear about how much the phone is subsidized...and for how long...and make that as an "adder" to the normal monthly charge. You can either BUY a Droid for $550 outright and have a $40/mo bill...or get it for "Free" and pay an addl $28/month for 24 months (threw in some interest to boot). If you cancel after 12 months, then you owe 12*28, or $336.
But that makes too much sense...carriers would never go for that.
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
If you don't like the termination fee then you should simply use a competing service. Your choice to use Verizon is voluntary. Eventually the market will dictate what Verizon can charge.
Using the DROID as an example:
The DROID with no contract is $560.
Math with the current termination fee:
$200 for the phone +
$175 to immediately break your contract =
$375 (You save $185 over the no-contract price)
Math with the new termination fee:
$200 for the phone +
$350 to immediately break your contract =
$550 (You save $10 over the no-contract price)
Either way you save more than simply buying the phone without a contract. The new fee is high, but I can understand their reasoning.
I have a woman and money. Life is good.
I'm on T-mobile prepaid and i __love__ it. Yeah, i don't talk much. Verizon doesn't have any kind of cost effective service for customers like me. They lost my business a few years back and it's been wonderful.
I can use any GSM phone i want to, I didn't have to tell t-mobile anything about who i am or how i plan on paying, and i think i pay less in a year than i was paying for 2 months when i had a verizon "share plan" for my wife and I.
Finally -- with google voice [and other number re-direction schemes], the concept of even knowing your mobile number is officially uninteresting. I have been telling people the random southern california phone number i got issued when i bought my SIM card from ebay for a couple years now. Nobody cares what my number is, least of all me. If i want to truly own my number i will abstract my identity from my device, carrier, and location entirely -- like google voice (or skype in, or any other service) lets me do.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Where does it say "we'll charge you $1.99 every time you hit the wrong key when you flip the phone open" on the contract?
TracFone's voice service ends up costing me about 14 cents per minute when they dont offer me a bonus code, which is rare.
When you start talking about $350 charges I am thinking well fuck, thats at least 2500 minutes
And you know what happens if I break my phone? I pay $30 for a new one, and I don't even have to argue with anybody.
"His name was James Damore."
Ha! Ha! Ha! I really screwed Verizon over!!
Hey, wait...
Point is, no matter how much Verizon sells a phone for, that phone can only do one of two things: be used to make Verizon money, or go in the trash. Is it justifiable for a CARRIER-LOCKED PHONE to be contractually *fully* subsidized by the purchaser? If this was AT&T, T-Mobile, etc. I could see the point - I take my phone and run, screwing the company out of money. But with Verizon's phones, regardless of how long I am with them - the phone will keep making them money!
First rule of Verizon: the people in the stores know nothing and are not backed up by the home office.
This means the people in the stores will tell you things that are completely wrong. This can result in your being charged extra for things because the people in the stores have no ability to enforce their promises. The 800 number is the only "customer service" that exists for Verizon. Even at a "store manager" level, they have no power, no training and no ability to get anything done. This pretty much means they are there to dial the phone and put the customer on the phone with the 800 number customer service people.
The stores seem to exist to provide an image of local, in person support when none really exists. I have dealt with some good stores and some bad stores, but over all it doesn't make any difference - because the manager can promise you something or interpret some vague statement for you and then you get a bill that says exactly the opposite. Calling the 800 number gets responses like "they shouldn't have told you that" and worse.
End result is very simple. Verizon stores are perhaps a place to pick up a phone. They cannot do anything more than that for you. Expect nothing and you will not be disappointed.
The cure for that is to STOP GIVING AWAY FREE SPARE BLACKBERRIES, not FUCK ALL YOUR USERS.
Given that they're the ones that make it such that the "up" key defaults to "Mobile Web" on their BREW based phones, my problem is still with Verizon. Given that the data charge granularity is ludicrous (orders of magnitude worse than their call granularity), my problem is still with Verizon.
I was on Verizon for several years. After a phone went bad (dropped in a stream), I went back to get a new one and they required me to change my cell plan to a new plan where nights and weekends moved an hour later. Well, that was somewhat annoying having it move to 8:00 because most of the people I call are two time zones over. Unfortunately, that phone was an utter piece of excrement and after a few months, it started dropping calls very frequently. I called Verizon to complain, and they said there was a tower down that might be affecting things. A few months later, I moved to a different area where there was no such problem and still dropped calls. After a few months of this, I decided to get another new phone that actually worked.
Now they wanted me to move my nights and weekends to 9:00 P.M. I basically said "No way in hell. Can I get a phone without changing contracts if I pay full price?" They said no, and their only suggestion was to buy a phone on eBay. I looked at my options, priced out what I would get from other carriers, and switched to AT&T the next day. I even kept my old phone number. Even though AT&T's nights and weekends started at 9:00 just like Verizon's, I got so many more minutes than with my Verizon plan that it more than covered the difference. And when Cingular took them over and I changed to a plan with roll-over minutes, the difference became even more dramatic. Now, I'm on an iPhone plan. Every so often, I think about the friends and family who are still stuck on that nickel-and-dime-you-to-death Verizon network, and I feel sorry for them. AT&T sucks, too, of course, but not like Verizon does. It's good to see this news and know that they still haven't changed.
As for me, I can't wait for LTE rollouts to become widespread. At that point, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon will all be using compatible networks and people will be able to switch without changing phones. Then, these companies will have to start actually competing with each other instead of paying lip service to competing. You'll also see massive screaming to put an end to early termination fees if you provide your own equipment. Life will be better. Here's hoping, anyway. The only question is how long it will take before Sprint joins in and makes us a single-standard country as we should be....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Which is a VERIZON UI.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
"Contrary to the GP's post, the penalty is, in principle, because of the phone subsidy."
I think that's incorrect.
If you get a $200 phone for $100 because of 2 year agreement, not considering interest, you think, "right, subsidy of about $4.16 per month". But yet, when you hit the 25th month, the monthly service doesn't go down by $4.16. Worse, if you bring your own phone to the carrier, they don't lower the price.
In my opinion, you're getting a subsidy for the difference between the "normal" price and the price with the two year plan because you've committed to a 24 month revenue stream. [That doesn't hold true in the second case though; if you bring your own phone and agree to a 2 year plan, you don't get a break in price]
A fair termination fee would be the difference between the phone price you paid and the phone price without plan subtracting the amount of time that you paid them for the plan. Perhaps that should even be waived if you turn in the phone.
But let's stop playing this game. Carriers charge people a lot of money for everything *because we pay it*. It has nothing to do with right or wrong.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
You say this as if there is some other cell provider to run to