Slashdot Mirror
FCC Inquires About Controversial Verizon Fees
olsmeister writes "As previously noted here on Slashdot, Verizon Wireless has been increasing their early termination fees and actively charging non-data customers who accidentally press the wrong button and go online. The FCC has now sent them a letter asking why. The PDF of the letter can be viewed online. Maybe someone at the FCC does read Slashdot."
The FCC gave Verizon two weeks to reply. And when a government entity or a large company sends someone a letter as serious as this, it usually has a statement to the effect "We'll take your silence to imply refusal to cooperate. If push comes to shove, we will take it to court."
They should also make text messaging free.
That's right. I wrote free.
If you put the price of a voice call, in 3 seconds to the (stupidly) expensive $.15 per minute, and compare it to the 3 seconds it would take to send a text message, you will find it negligible: .15/60 = $.0025 per second. $.0025 * 3 seconds / 10kbps for the voice data transfer = $.00075 dollars per kilobyte (aside: $.771 dollars per megabyte).
Now let's say, for the sake of generosity, it takes a 16KB packet total, up and down for ack, all carriers, etc., to send a text message.
It would cost $0.012 by my numbers...
Draw your own conclusions, I am just playing with units.
Does Verizon allow you to block data?
My wife's parents ended up with some incidental charges for accidental data access on their phones, called AT&T, and they refunded the amounts and asked if they wanted a "data block" put in place to prevent them from accidentally accessing data again. "Yes" "OK, we're all done, thanks for calling AT&T". Next day, my father-in-law tried the data access, and it came up "unavailable", and they've never seen a charge since.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
My Father died in October. He had a shared Verizon account with my Mother. They charged Mom $100 to terminate his account, even after I explained that he was dead. I wanted to terminate Mom's account as well, as she only talked to Dad on her cell phone. They refused to do it without having to pay more than $100 beyond the first $100! They told me Mom had to keep the account until it expired in July. While she racks up charges for a service she will not use; Her income is now very limited, she should be using the money to buy food and keep the house heated. A bit off topic to this tread but all of the paperwork and people you have to contact when someone dies is an absolute nightmare. People have been dieing for a really long time now, you would think it would be an easy one click process. Who is up for stating such a service? Oh right, Amazon already has that patented...