Phone Wars

We were with Verizon at the beginning of the year, but the cost alternatives at other places were too much to ignore.  Our plan was up with Verizon so we shopped around.  We ended up going with the AT&T plan where you got 4 smartphones, unlimited talk and text and 10GB of data to share.  The plan really was perfect, we text a lot, don’t talk a lot (the teenager does) and Cheri and I didn’t use much data while Skyler used between 4 and 5 GB herself.  We had to buy our phones because it wasn’t a contract, and we had to buy Skyler out of her contract with Verizon but we went ahead and dropped the cash because we’d be saving $100 a month with AT&T.

It was ok at first, the network was a little slower, but we expected that.  Then we noticed that occasionally the phone wouldn’t ring but we would get a voicemail alert.  So it wasn’t letting calls through.  Now mind you, we don’t live out in the middle of nowhere and we never had these issues before.  I rarely use the phone for talking so it didn’t bother me so much.  I just made everyone aware of the issue, via Facebook.

The money we were saving made it ok but the longer we were with the service, the more we noticed that we would lose network.  Text messages wouldn’t go out or when they did, they would take anywhere up to 10 minutes.  It’s been really bad the last month or so, maybe because I’m paying more attention to it.  Sending a picture is torture, don’t even try to send multiple ones.

Earlier today, while bitching about my phone, Cheri got online and started looking at Verizon plans.  They have a plan that’s pretty much the same as the AT&T plan so we decided that we were going to run over to Verizon tomorrow and check it out.  Since I was annoyed, I sent out a tweet with both of the companies listed.

I figured that would be it, but apparently not.

I feel so loved.  I figured I would go ahead and respond and see what each would say.  Here’s the Verizon conversation.

That was it, a typical sales job.  He was trying to get me over to their side, which I expected.  He didn’t really answer if I can use my old Verizon phones or not and didn’t really say anything about the Edge plan other than it was an alternative to a contract so I assume it’s a month to month like our AT&T plan.  According to the website, it costs the same as well but we’ll look into that tomorrow.

Here’s the conversation with AT&T and it didn’t go to well for him.

Like I said, it didn’t go to well for him.  Granted, he started behind the 8 ball because I was already annoyed with the network.  Then he did the cardinal sin (in my eyes) as someone that calls tech support.  Have you restarted your phone?  I realize that support deals with morons all the time, but I hate it when they ask me the basic questions.  It shouldn’t make me mad because I hadn’t really told him anything yet. but I just hate when they treat me like one of the morons.  Yes, I’ve shut my phone off, I’ve shut off all running apps, I made sure I had bars before I sent messages or made calls.

I guess we’ll all have to wait until tomorrow after work to see if I switch to Verizon or not.  Like I said above, it will depend on deposits and how much we have to pay for phones.