I normally love T-Mobile. They have great customer service, usually work very hard to make me happy, and have done some cool stuff like switch around my plan, but leave my older (cheaper) add-ons even though they weren’t currently available. I know many other companies cough*sprint*cough wouldn’t do that. Or at least didn’t do that when I was a customer. Maybe number portability makes everyone nicer. Regardless, I just spent a pissed off 20 minutes on the phone with t-mobile as I discovered more and more how they’re ripping me (and you) off:
* Connection time — When you call someone on a landline phone, if they don’t answer, you don’t pay. If it rings twenty times before they answer, your time starts counting when they answer. Not so on a cell phone. As soon as your phone is connected, start the clock. I always assumed calls that didn’t go through didn’t get charged. I only noticed when I was overseas and paying $1 per minute even for calls that never completed, but this is pretty crappy. Of course, this isn’t nearly as bad as:
* Forced billing — If you don’t have text messaging included on your account, but someone sends you a text message, you pay for it. You can’t turn it off. You can’t stop receiving alerts, you pay for them. They won’t reimburse you, you just pay for it. If you have text-messaging enabled on your phone, but not picture messaging and someone sends you a picture message, guess what? You pay for it. Again, you can’t turn it off, you can’t decline to accept, you just pay whatever the going rate is.
So if, for example, T-Mo decided their revenues were running a little low, they could just have their employees with unlimited texting go out and send a bunch of messages to people and make them pay for it. Or heck, just let some spammers have your phone number and point them at their email->sms gateway. Sure, practically speaking they’d piss off too many people who’d probably leave their service, but they could do it. But what if they only did it to you once every six months? Would you notice or even care about the extra 35cent or 25cent charge? What if they did it to ALL of their customers once every six months. That adds up quickly. And it’s totally within their rights in the current contract, and there’s not a darn thing you can do to stop it. How much does that suck?
I’d love for the tech I just spoke to to be wrong. I’d love for there to be some provision of the contract or their policies that means it’s not true. Supposedly, the tech said they’re “working” on technology to allow you to decide what you want to receive and what you don’t want to receive. But not now. Now you just pay.
Of course, that brings me to my final rant:
- It doesn’t matter what phone I have, I want my t-zones — T-Mobile has a t-zones option that’s meant for phones with WAP web browsers to surf the web their their WAP gateway, and also allows direct email server access from those phones. On my old sony T610, I would connect directly to my mail accounts and send/receive mail from my own email account, completely independant of T-Mo. And this was included in T-zones.
When it came up in conversation with one of the techs today that I had a Treo, she said she’d go ahead and take t-zones off my account. I informed her that she’d do no such thing. She replied that it didn’t work on the treo and I didn’t need it. I told her it did work, and she’d better freaking not remove it since I had worked so hard to keep it on my account during my last plan change. She said that it was unsupported and may stop working at any time and it’s not t-mobile’s fault. I responded that I understood web/wap wouldn’t work, but that email had been listed as included with the t-zones plan since I had originally started up, and if they stopped that from working, with whatever phone I was using, they were breaching the terms of the contract, and I would be officially pissed off. She tried to BS to me that “oh, but the treo does mail differently”, to which I responded vehemently and technically exactly WHICH protocols, frequencies, and ports were used when I used t-zones email on my Sony T610 and how it was exactly identical to when I used t-zones email on my Palm Treo. It became akwardly quiet then when she realized she couldn’t keep following her script (which insists that she point out that T-Zones on the Treo is insupported because they want you to pay for the $20/month data plan) because I’d ream her so quick with an actual factual understanding of the issues. Then we managed to shift topic back to what could potentially cause a text-message to your phone’s email address (heck, I’d give it out, but I’m afraid someone will decide to send me a hundred text messages, costing me money with no recourse) and I ended the call as quickly as possible.
Mark my words. If t-mobile ever tries to screw me over on this email on the treo thing, I will take them to court. I don’t need to swear on it, but believe me when I say it.
Hmm, looks like I need to look at the terms of my fine print. Tech may have been wrong:
http://www.howardforums.com/archive/topic/311104-1.html
Left by Jordan on January 17th, 2006
Wow, I had forgotten how much cell service sucks in the States. Here’s my plan with China Mobile:
1. 20 RMB/month, includes 300 SMSes (sending, paying for text messages you receive is one of the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of in my life, since they can just charge the sender) and 20 minutes of talk time.
2. Talk time (over the first 20 minutes) is 0.2RMB (about US$0.025)/minute from 9AM to 9PM and 0.1RMB at night.
3. SMSes (over the first 300) are 0.1RMB/each to China Mobile customers (about 85% of the customer base and almost everyone I know) and 0.15RMB/each to China Unicom customers (nice having only two companies).
4. It’s pay as you go. The 20RMB for the plan gets taken out of your total money on the first of every month, and if you need to add more money to your card you can either go to the China Mobile office or buy refill cards (which pretty much everywhere sells now). None of that “you don’t get to keep your unused minutes” crap.
There is also a pricing for WAP, but I almost never use it, though I’ve heard from people that do that it’s better than any plan they’d ever had (they were European, though, so I don’t know how that compares to the States).
All of that using basically the same equipment as US carriers (meaning the cost to build the network was just as high as in the US). While property rental and wages are lower in China than the US, at least some of that is going to be offset by the sheer number of business offices run by China Mobile (far more than all the American carriers put together, I would wager) and the correspondingly larger employee base.
I wonder how much of the high cost of US cell phones is because of need to cover expenses and how much is just because people will pay for it so that’s what they charge?
Left by John B on January 18th, 2006
And coverage is so much better. I never drop calls, it’s clear, and my signal is almost always full (even when I’m in the middle of a city surrounded by big buildings, or underground, or in the middle of nowhere on a train speeding between two cities). Compared to my Cingular plan I had a couple of years ago before coming to China it’s night and day.
Left by John B on January 18th, 2006
Oh, and billing is per second, not 2:01 == 3:00 crap.
(I’ll stop rubbing salt in the wound, sorry)
Left by John B on January 18th, 2006
lol
It’s cool to hear that things are so great over in China right now. It is interesting to know what the differences are from one place to another. I think that a lot of people in the US assume that most of the stuff we have here is better or cheaper, but it seems less and less like that is the case.
Perhaps in 20-50 years people will emigrate from the US and other lands to go to the promised land in China.
Left by David M on January 20th, 2006