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Verizon Plans $20 Upgrade Fee Even If You Pay Full Price For a Phone (macrumors.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the icing-on-the-cake dept.

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.

21 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Verizon's "baby come back" letters are pathetic.

    1. Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      I will never go back to Verizon after having went over to T-mobile. Much better prices, free tethering/hotspot, Pandora doesn't count against my data cap (and soon Youtube too), and customer service that doesn't treat me like they're doing me a favor by letting me use their service.

      All Verizon has is a good network, and even that is now irrelevant unless you live way out in the boonies (or travel there a lot).

    2. Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Informative

      AT&T similarly charges $15 per smartphone added or upgraded with AT&T Next, and "bring your own" devices. Sprint also charges an upgrade or activation fee up to $36 per device. T-Mobile does not have upgrade fees.

      You can always tell who's behind in the market, can't you?

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    3. Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago by Moof123 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Went to Ting, which subcontracts with Tmobile in my case. I average 14 bucks a month. Perfect for people like me who have light phone usage and rare data usage. I hate multi year contracts for anything.

    4. Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago by demonlapin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There is the small problem that there are only four widely-spoken languages in the Americas, that quite a lot of people will have to travel a long, long way to encounter more than two of them on a regular basis, and that one of them is so isolated from the European source that even native speakers will have difficulty making themselves clearly understood on more than a trivial level by speakers of only the European variety (Canadian French). Whereas Europeans can travel a relatively short distance and find themselves in a place where an entirely different language is in general use. Languages aren't all that hard, but skills that cannot be practiced without a lot of expensive travel are unlikely to be very robust.

    5. Re: I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Wahoo as a native speaker of the Swiss version of French, I never had any trouble to talk with Quebec people or fail to understand them in a conversation (and I can tell you that I had lengthy workshop over the phone). Except from their weird usage of bonjour to say goodbye or their use of the French quatre-Vingt Dix to say nonante (ninety) and of course their funny accent, you get used to it.

    6. Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago by ukoda · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yes, but the French claim that the Canadian French is unintelligible. I discovered this when living in China and one staff member accidentally send a sample product to a French customer with the Canadian French video tracks installed. I couldn't blame the Chinese staff member, I was impressed they spoke three languages already and could correctly tell the sound track was French. But the French customer kicked up all hell over being sent a 'foreign' language.

    7. Re:I switched to T-Mobile a few months ago by Fly+Swatter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Get yourself an audiobook and start learning Spanish. There are plenty of people in the US to practice with. Not being able to speak Spanish is almost pathetic.

      Get yourself an audiobook and start learning English. There are plenty of people in the US to practice with. Not being able to speek the primary language of a region, and planning to live in it, is pathetic.

      There, FTFY.

  2. Why, Verizon? by Sable+Drakon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  3. We don't need no stinking upgrade fees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    In the UK, upgrade fees are unheard of. You're being ripped off.

    1. Re:We don't need no stinking upgrade fees by dgatwood · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In the UK, all phones use GSM, which means that you can move service to a new device by moving the SIM card. The phone company actually has to do stuff on their side to switch service to a new CDMA device, which usually requires a phone call to their customer service team. So there's a decidedly nonzero cost to switching to new devices. With that said, they could probably set up an automated system if they wanted to drive the cost down into the single-digit cents range instead of the single-digit dollar range. There's just not enough competition in the pathetic U.S. cellular service market to force them to bother.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  4. You tell your carrier about your new phone? by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:You tell your carrier about your new phone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Verizon is a cdma and not a standard gsm network, they don't use sims like gsm networks and plans are directly tied to the phone. Support for sim cards are only used for 4g. US cell companies generally suck. Only t-mobile and at&t are gsm with somewhat different frequencies, while verizon and sprint are cdma networks. So yeah, half of our choices are proprietary networks that are locked down to a single phone often including "connecting" fees.

    2. Re:You tell your carrier about your new phone? by Solandri · · Score: 3, Interesting

      No, the rest of the world caught up to the U.S. You know that GSM vs CDMA war? CDMA won. GSM is the old tech, CDMA is the new tech.

      Most 3G data service on GSM use CDMA or wideband CDMA. CDMA is just vastly superior at allocating bandwidth between users than GSM's original protocol (TDMA). GSM couldn't compete so they were forced to license CDMA and add it to their spec for data services. You know how you can talk and use data simultaneously on GSM phones? That's because it has a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. Pure CDMA phones like Verizon/Sprint originally couldn't do this because they only had a single CDMA radio which is used for both voice and data, but not simultaneously.

      If the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA networks, the data speeds on your GSM phone today would be down near 1 Mbps. We wouldn't have LTE today either - it is very similar to CDMA, using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA was needed as a "proof of concept" market test case that this orthogonality stuff really worked when scaled up to about a hundred simultaneous users per cell.

  5. Re:Why would I upgrade? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  6. Re:Please explain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Verizon hates its customers. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc. just want to make money, but Verizon is too big to care about lame stuff like mere profit. They have to be dicks about it.

  7. Re:Every time I change my SIM? by dgatwood · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Please explain by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

    There are two main systems for providing cellular voice communication in the U.S.: GSM and CDMA. GSM, as used in most of the world, uses a SIM card to determine which cell towers it should connect through, and then uses a database that maps the SIM card's identifier to a subscriber account. CDMA uses an MEID, which is an identifier that is baked into the device itself (similar to an IMEI). The towers/billing systems then use a database that maps the device's MEID to an account number. As a result, your account is quite literally tied to a specific physical device, not to a card that can be moved from device to device.

    To add further complexity, many CDMA-based devices do actually have a SIM card, but it is used exclusively for talking to the LTE portion of cell towers (or when roaming overseas) and is not used for primary voice communications or for 3G data.

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  9. Re:What "support costs" are they talking about? by omnichad · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:Every time I change my SIM? by guises · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  11. Re:You Yanks Are Stupid! by LostMyBeaver · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.