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Verizon Plans $20 Upgrade Fee Even If You Pay Full Price For a Phone (macrumors.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a memo leaked by MacRumors, Verizon is planning to introduce a new $20 upgrade fee starting next week. The new $20 flat rate charge will begin next Monday, April 4, and will be applied to smartphones purchased on a Device Payment financing plan, or at full retail price. The premium will also apply to those who take advantage of Apple's new iPhone Upgrade Program. Verizon cites "increasing support costs associated with customers switching their devices" as a reason for the new fees. The new fee is in addition to the existing $40 upgrade fee for customers renewing a two-year contract with a new device.
Verizon's "baby come back" letters are pathetic.
- because it CAN.
Hello T-Mobile!
dumb phone for the win
And this does not make you look any better. To put up with this is INSANE! Let them squeeze your private parts and milk comes out. This is the definition of a t^Hgit.
Not a religious person, but I'm firmly convinced that if Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Oracle all merged, the gates of hell would open.
Seriously, with added fees like this, it's as if they're trying to get people to leave their service and forcing them into T-Mobile's very very welcoming arms.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
because we CAN!
Even on 04/01....
In the UK, upgrade fees are unheard of. You're being ripped off.
Why do I want to upgrade my phone anyway?
I have a Galaxy Note 3
The new phones from Samsung don't have microsd expansion ability.
I keep my music on microsd cards
BTW I don't do Apple - I gave up buying apple stuff in 1988
as far as switching carriers is concerned, thats not my decision, its a family plan and my mother-in-law is in charge. With all the hassles with verizon she might switch eventually.
I've always just bought my phone on my own because I have an inexpensive plan and put the SIM the new phone. Turn the new phone on and it just works. When I've needed a new SIM because the size changed I've just gotten a new one for the new phone and changed the SIM for my phone number on the website.
Look after getting several HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS I don't understand how you can expect the BABY(Think of the children) BELLS to have implemented DSL to all of the country I mean they have only had since the mid/late 90's to do it and it's HAAARRRED MOOOMMMMMYYYY!, so all of you, should stand up for these defenders of freedom and against the big bad socialist bacauase REASONS!!!!!
"Verizon cites "increasing support costs associated with customers switching their devices" as a reason for the new fees. "
The reality is "we want to continue increasing our profits, and nickel and diming our customers with added junk fees is the way to do it."
I don't get how this would work. This $20 fee would be triggered every time I take my SIM and insert in a new phone? So when my phone battery is dead and I pop my SIM onto my wife's phone just for a quick call I'll be charged $20?
Can someone please explain this for us dumb foreigners? I never could make any sense of the US telephone system.
Its crazy with being charged for *incoming* calls, and roaming charges when you have not even left the country.
Why would the network care if you change handsets? Can't you just buy a new phone from the local tech-shop and swap the SIM over?
I'm seeing in "You may like to read:" a story "10 Confirmed Dead In Shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College".
And find myself wondering, is that ten or two? All part of the light-hearted fun of April Fools.
When a person upgrades their device they pay the costs associated with that upgrade, so how does that cost the service provider anything, exactly?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Many companies have "customer retention specialists" who will waive fees if you threaten to bail to a competitor AND you are a "valuable enough" customer to make it worth their while.
In many companies, almost all customers are "valuable enough," so unless you've made a nuisance out of yourself so much that you are a "net loss" for them, they'll probably work with you.
On the other hand, if this company's attitude makes you want to quit just on principle, then by all means quit. If enough people do, it will send a message.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Must be trying to pay back the 1 millions dollars they got fined for the Supercookie, with no guarantee that they'll stop.
I wish I had the mod points or the time to write an epistle about how right this is. Since the 90's the telecom industry as a whole has received approximately 42 trazillion dollars in tax breaks and outright gubment kickbacks to "improve infrastructure", which, of course, they scrupulously (as a consortium) haven't done. Instead, they've used that money to buy each other, and more lobbyists to collect yet more "incentives". Meanwhile, customers are saddled with more fees, bandwidth caps and piss-poor service in general.
My ${DEITY}, Mexico (FUCKING MEXICO (not being racist or anything, just sayin')) has better phone service than we do.
As for the rest, flamebait.
How to convince people to switch carriers.
guaranteed to make people walk.
Fee's are nothing new, been a Verizon customer for over 20 years. Nothing close in coverage is the reason I stay. I don't upgrade as frequently as some people who feel the burn in their wallet every time a new phone comes out. Verizon has deals where they wave the fee's which is when I typical buy. Of course we pay for all the others who jump around and can't stay with one carrier. They are always trying to get a deal on service or a phone. But it's possible Verizon may rethink this added upgrade charge. I think they will see significant push back from it.
It sounds like Verizon figures people just compare the base rates, and is taking a page from the airlines and is trying to get revenue from anything you do.
We do what we can, because we must.
Rent Seeking
1.5Mbps [...] means getting blurry 480p videos with Binge On enabled.
Back when the warez scene was using MPEG-4 Part 2* as a video codec, it was common to squeeze a movie into a 700 MB AVI file to fit onto a single CD-R. A 93 minute movie would have allowed 1 Mbps for video and audio combined. And nowadays, it's more common to use the more sophisticated MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka H.264) video codec. Did the blur somehow get worse, or did user expectations get better? Or is this blur caused by some sort of peaking behavior, in which a scene release at 1 Mbps ABR can have short bursts of 2 Mbps or more balanced by sub-0.6 Mbps stretches with less action, while a 1.5 Mbps Binge On stream is capped at that rate?
* Commonly called DivX or Xvid after its popular encoder implementations.
My contract was up and I was tired of all the high prices.
Then you switch away from Verizon.
To whom? Just as all four U.S. carriers raised their SMS rates in lockstep a few years back, they can all raise their data rates to unapproved domains in lockstep.
Why do people put up with all these BS fees the Verizon charges? I use the same network through an MVNO for a flat $30/month including all taxes and fees. I've had no issues and get more LTE data than I ever use. I bought the SIM for a subsidized $0.01 shipped and there was no activation fee. In fact, my first month was 1/2 price.
Yes, there are a few missing features. I don't get VoLTE, WiFi calling, or visual voicemail. LTE speeds are also throttled but I honestly can't tell the difference with normal usage. I certainly don't think these things are worth the extra $$$ a contract would entail.
Does anyone even use SMS anymore?
You can't (or can't in my country) sign up for Yahoo! or Gmail without it, as the providers want to ensure that each account is associated with a real person who is less likely to abuse the service by sending automated spam. In addition, numerous providers are moving toward two-factor authentication by receiving SMS. Twitter, for example, produces an error message to the effect "Carrier is not supported" if I try to add a landline instead of a mobile phone.
Let's try this again:
People who want crap video should have had to opt-in instead of making everyone opt-out.
Defaults ought to meet the preferences of the majority. I imagine that more people want to save money by accepting "crap" video that's still superior to DivX-era torrents than have a philosophical objection to defaulting to said "crap" video.
Everyone else is telling their stories, so.
I had a 3G-class MiFi card from VZW. They were rolling their network from 3G->LTE in the area where I work, and the card went from “perfect coverage” to “maybe" to "don’t even bother" in the space of about a month. I’d bought the card less than two years ago at this point.
About this time, I got a, “You’re eligible for an upgrade,” email from Verizon, so figured I’d go to the store near by one lunch break. Picked out a new LTE card, which would have cost me $99 to get a working device again. During check-out, sales drone told me my existing 3GB/month plan (more than enough for my needs at the time) was discontinued, and I’d have to pay an extra $20/month for a 5GB plan I didn’t need or want. No way to grandfather existing plan. They justified the mandatory increase because, “it was faster.” Accurate, but considering I was satisfied with 3G speeds and wouldn’t have upgraded absent them forcing the issue, not a reasonable excuse to increase my rate by 40%. Still, I needed tetherable data, so I grudgingly continued with the process only to then be told the upgrade email was “sent in error” and I would actually have to pay full price for the card.
So $99 + $20/month increase turned into $300 + $20/month increase just to continue using a service that Verizon unilaterally broke by changing their network within the reasonable lifetime of a device they sold me. Amortizing the full price card over two years, that was a $32/month increase which basically doubled what I was paying before taxes. That’s not considering that I was essentially double-paying for the card considering they were still charging me the same monthly price as if I’d taken a new device under contract while still charging me full non-contract price for the device itself.
At that point, I told them to cancel the sale. I took my existing card, snapped it in half, and dropped it on the counter saying I’d like to cancel my service now, please. Oddly enough, they didn’t try to run retention games on me after that, and just canceled no questions... Sometimes being considered the crazy customer gets stuff done.
I walked next door to AT&T to enable tethering on my iPhone instead. I lost my grandfathered AT&T unlimited data in the process alas, but saved about $20/month all told versus what I’d originally been paying Verizon, nevermind their double cost forced upgrade price.
It *was* nice having devices from two carriers in case of coverage issues with one, but haven’t missed Verizon’s BS over the last four years without them.