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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.
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
In the UK, upgrade fees are unheard of. You're being ripped off.
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.
I am glad you told me all about your family situation and your opinion about the need for SD cards. The discussion about upgrade fees was definitely helped by this invaluable information.
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?
Verizon uses CDMA. There is no SIM card (except for the one used to provide LTE data, where applicable).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Well...CDMA requires a record change at the carrier side, not just a SIM swap. So you have to call a 3rd-rate call center, repeat your phone number and personal identity info a half dozen times, half to a machine and half to a human, and talk to someone who's never even seen a non-GSM phone try to follow a script to find out the IMEI number of the new phone. They will fail at least once and may need to involve a supervisor. That costs them at least $1.30. The rest is pure profit.
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.
But still no swappable battery (as far as I've heard).
You've identified the problem here. CDMA can be made to work with removable cards, but there aren't any providers in the US who choose to do it that way. Unsurprising, since there's nothing forcing them to do it that way, and this makes it more difficult for customers to switch phones or service providers.
Of course they do.. what's the alternative? These companies build wireless networks able to span across one of the largest countries in the world with demands from customers to have 4G when an LTE tower has an effective range of about 8 miles of line of sight or 1.6 miles of rough terrain. There are individual farms in the US that could require 20 or more high powered LTE towers for coverage.
It's not like Europe where there are 2-10 mobile service providers within a country and as soon as you cross to another country, you roam onto another network cleanly. Creating an LTE network in Europe costs nothing and the population density is much higher so the costs are covered more quickly. Also the governments understand the absolute critical importance of a functioning LTE network and fund their build out in to rural areas.
The US is too busy deciding between Trump and Clinton... It's like "Would you prefer to be shot in the left temple or the right temple?"... Either way, NATO will be going to war large scale within 3.5 years.
How to convince people to switch carriers.
guaranteed to make people walk.
Did the blur somehow get worse, or did user expectations get better?
You already answered your own question.
Ah, the good old mathematician's answer: funny to some, but unhelpful. Which of the above was the answer?
It's caused by being low resolution and stretched across a much higher resolution display.
PC monitors in the DivX era had a typical resolution of 1024x768 or 1280x1024, but DVD-Video source material in North America and Japan was 704x480.* Movies were commonly encoded at resolutions even smaller than that due to preference for square pixels. So things were already stretched even then. And a 1024x768 pixel phone display would have roughly Retina-class resolution. Are you referring specifically to use of Binge On with Retina-class tablets?
* The Rec. 601 scanline, used by DVD and other standard-definition video standards, is 720 pixels wide because it includes 16 pixels of nominal analog blanking. This is not considered part of the 4:3 or 16:9 frame but is instead intended for recentering a signal.
Heck, even sparsely-populated countries like Sweden and Finland have nationwide coverage for decades already and always had better prices.
The issue isn't population density as much as size. Sweden may not be as densely populated but it is a small country, so it doesn't take as many towers, and resultant costs, to provide coverage. Increase that by a 10 or 20 or so times an date cost doesn't justify the added subscriber base.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Population density of the USA (including Alaska!!) is almost twice that of Sweden: 35 vs 21 people per km2. It should be easier (more economical) to cover the USA - especially if you would exclude Alaska which is mostly completely uninhabited anyway - than it is to cover Sweden.Finland is even worse, just 18 people per km2. Yet even there you have nationwide coverage.
The typical subscriber base of a US based carrier is a lot greater than that of a Swedish carrier, compensating for the larger area to cover. After all it's subscribers that bring in the money. The US has more potential subscribers per area, less carriers (less competition) and far higher fees for mobile phones - yet they can not even build out a nationwide coverage??
You can't just look at density, you must also look at how the population is distributed. While the overall density is greater, there are far larger tracts of sparsely populated areas, so many more towers would be needed than in say Sweden to provide similar coverage. That makes it much more expensive since you need many more towers to reach a very small slice of the US population. If you look at Sweden's cell of coverage map, it appears the very sparse regions in the north west have poor coverage, a situation that mirror the US in that low population density areas are not a priority when building out networks. Considering the US probably has good coverage for over 95% of the population the nationwide network is good enough of for most users and building it out to cover the small percent left its simply not cost effective.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The part I don't understand is: I walk into an Apple Store, and I buy/replace my iPhone. If I pay for it, no charge from Verizon. If it's on Apple's payment plan, $20. The way the payment plan works is that Apple signs you up for a loan with a third party bank. What does Verizon care how I pay for a phone I buy from somebody else?
On top of that, Verizon is rarely involved. Apple Stores have access to activate phones and update accounts, and the labor is done by an Apple employee. This part at least is a pure cash grab.