The Mobile Phone Service Bitch Thread

You think the way that they treat customers is shitty? You should see the way that they treat each other! Paying in June for services rendered in March would be AHEAD OF SCHEDULE!!! Woooo!

Go ahead. Send some international text messages! (Hang on, Sprint isn't even ON my freaking PMN list...)

After calling verizon and some other number, I eventually come to the realization that I use SUNCOM which is 'a member of the AT&T Wireless community.' So, AT&T didn't have my number, but SUNCOM did. HURRAH! And it turns out I CAN use my cell out of state, I just get roaming charges. DOUBLE HURRAH!*

*Yes, this shows I know absolutely nothing about cell phones even though I own one. I'll admit that.

SunCom? No such operator!

It lets ANYONE change your personal message, listen to your messages etc...

Phone up and get to prompt for pin number.

Try a number

its wromg

try another number

its wrong

try another number,

It lets you in !!!!!!!!!!!!

Happy hacking

SunCom obv. don't have international roaming, unless they are a subsidiary of a bigger parent company - duh- probably AT&T (USAAT) in which case, please don't ring abroad, you will make my life hell. But not as much hell as T-Mobile USA do.

I am the only person here, apparently, that understands the American roaming invoices, because I am the only person that seems to understand that different states have different sales tax rates! And they laugh at me for not being able to figure out the British postal system.

Eh, I'll just ring them from a payphone.

Anyone else experienced this kind of thing? Obv. no-one else has access to my 'phone, and there's no WAP itemised on my bill for the dodgy download times.

I switched to T-Mobile from Verizon and it's been A BEAUTIFUL WONDERFUL THING though though admittedly it is kind of like the end of The Duel where dude has sacrificed his own car in the middle of the desert just to be rid of that ugly, horrible truck that won't leave him alone.

Also, is it really necessary to sign a TWO YEAR contract??

Anyway I don't want a two-year contract, and I'd rather just keep on using my old phone. Customer service at T-Mobile has told me that they give me a free phone anyway, even if I just keep using my old one. Which seems like an extraordinary decadence.

I use their Sidekick II, which I like, but their service is atrocious. They recently hit me with $380 in retroactive charges because they'd apparently never charged me the $20/month (!) that I was supposed to pay for data access for the last 19 months. Also, their service is super-spotty, and I live in a large city.

You don't have to get a 2-year plan--it just costs more if you don't get it.

Also, welome back!

Anyhow I got a T-Mobile plan, 1 year, 1000 minutes + free nights and weekends, I got to keep my old phone, and I get a $75 rebate for not taking one of the free ones! Yay me! I was also told that texting works fine across all networks! Get ready for sm srios txtng!!!

While I was in there paying off the remainder of my bill last night, I was watching the exchange between a woman whose phone was broken. She had insurance, but they didn't have her (popular) model in stock, so she had to wait "three or four business days" for another phone. She was distraught, but calm, and asked if it would be possible for them to loan her a crappy phone until hers was ready. Without even looking up from what he was doing on the 386 computer he was touch typing on, the customer service dude just shakes his head slightly. Gotta love it.

Anyway, I'm curious about other horror stories and recommendations. A friend of mine had a major problem with Cingular/AT&T recently, so I'm hesitant to go with them. My girlfriend uses them, so our conversations wouldn't count as minutes. That's a plus. Are people happy with Verizon? I am extremely hesitant to sign another two year contract, and putting up the $150 deposit right now is going to be tough. Halfway considering going with Metro PCS for a few months, but then I'd have to buy a phone.

Hey, honey-voiced O2 lady, could you giving me long-winded descriptions of quite rubbish sounding offers when I'm in the middle of topping up my credit? I'm already giving you too much money and I don't appreciate my time being wasted with explanations of ways I can give you more. Thank you.

Any other Verizon users out there experiencing the glory of a national outage? It was disconcerting when I picked up my phone to make a call and saw the SOS.

Pretty galling that we're 5 hours in and have not gotten any more information from Verizon than "We are aware of the issue and working to restore it"

OTOH watching the comments roll in under the DownDetector and TechRadar posts brought back some weird Web 1.5 nostalgia for me. Dudes changing their display name to "Verizon representative" to troll people, dropping bad freestyles, replying to anything with a vaguely femme profile picture -- it all had big MSN chat room energy

Yeah I put it in the "Is New York dead" thread because at first I assumed it was regional. It really freaked me out, I thought it was something wrong with my account, couldn't log in to my online account (continuous errors), spent ages on hold, the help line was no help because they said MY NUMBER WASN'T IN THEIR RECORDS which is when I really started to worry, and you can't talk to a human. Verizon's own outage reports said there was no outage for hours!

I got service bars back around 8pm, but this morning I can barely stream music or news. The stream keeps going robotic and fading out, which always makes me panic that I've left my phone somewhere. What does that signify, anyway? What's happening, technologically speaking, when an audio connection gets stretched out and distorted and patchy?

I’m no telco expert (anymore) but basically my understanding is that when you lose bandwidth - meaning there’s serious interference, or something is blocking the signal like an elevator or tunnel, or there’s simply not enough open channels to carry the full amount of data, the systems adapt by sending some lesser amount of data through whatever bandwidth IS available to maintain at least some quality of service despite the limitation. As this smaller amount of data is turned back into sound or images, you get blurred and pixelated visuals and/or distorted, crunchy audio. Remember when everyone’s iPod only had a relatively small amount of storage so you’d rip MP3s at lower bitrates and it sounded kind of crap? Like that.

I suspect what’s happening with Verizon right now is their system is still slowly coming back to full capacity so while you at least have SOME service it’s not the normal level of bandwidth across the board and that’s why.

Thanks! Good explanation. Idk if it signifies but my internet even at work where presumably there's a very high capacity connection has also been significantly slower at loading & processing than normal, for the same time that the phone disruption has been going on.

Spotted this article whilst browsing through my RSS reader, may be of interest.

Here's How to Fix Your Phone Now That Verizon Says the Outage Is Resolved
Can't get your phone out of SOS mode? Here's the fix.
https://lifehacker.com/tech/heres-how-to-fix-your-phone-now-that-verizon-says-the-outage-is-resolved