 brianPremium
join:2002-05-02
Lake Forest, CA
 ·DSL EXTREME
1 edit | I thought they (Verizon) were already doing this A few years ago, before we were married, my wife and I each had our own separate Verizon Wireless plans. Each of us were less than a year into our two year contracts, with hers ending a few months before mine.
We were looking to save a little money and consolidate some bills, so we called up VZW. We had them change our two separate plans into a family share plan with my wife's line as the master account, and mine as one of the additional lines.
VZW did not charge us a fee to do this. Nor did they extend my wife's contract. In fact, my contract effectively was shortened by about two months, and our total bill reduced by about $10/month. This was in summer of 2005.
Last year, we added my mother-in-law to our account as an additional line. No charges outside of the standard activation. And again, no contract extension. |
| My wife and I did the same. However they DID up the contract. I would be curious to see what would happen if you called Verizon and asked to terminate early.
My real horror story came from DirecTV. When I signed up with the service, I explicitly asked them if I could cancel at any time, without any ETF. They said yes. I repeated this several times, in several different formats. At one point I asked "If I call you up in 4 months, cancel the service and return the equipment, and I pay for those four months (200$ total), would that satisfy all of my obligations?" The response, yes, you wouldn't owe anything.
Well, lets fast forward 8 months. Guess what they tried to stick me with. A $15/month early termination fee. They said that it was only $15/3 months so they were cutting me a deal from the normal $175 ETF. I would have none of that.
That was probably the only situation where I ever had a customer service agent yelling at me over the phone that I signed a contract and returned it. The funny thing was, they never sent me a contract to sign. I never ended up paying the fee, but damn if it didn't sour me from any company that requires a contract.
I'm even contemplating terminating with Verizon this Spring. Their service was fine (except for the fact that gouge for services that should be free). It is the contract that simply annoys me. I prefer to be free, not indentured under contracts to every company I ever want to do business with. |
