Verizon Wireless
:: Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004 @ 7:40:12 pm
:: Tags: General
I’m on hold with Verizon Wireless right now; today has reminded me of both why I love their service and why I hate mobile phones and their carriers in general. Every time I call in, a VZW service person picks up the phone after only a few seconds of being on hold. This alone is almost reason enough to stick with their service, especially compared to what I’ve experience first-hand from carriers like Cingular.
But since I started using the TREO 600, my reported minute usage has gone through the roof. I’ve used the phone as usual, with the addition of perhaps 10-15 minutes a day of data — which I was assured would be billed as minutes because I don’t have an explicit data plan. Image my surprise when I checked minute usage at 5:15pm and saw: Pk:2417 OffPk/Night:1892 Wknd:1801 (!). Obviously, this is crap. I just checked online 15 7:36pm, and it reports: Peak Minutes: 3,065, Off Peak Minutes: 2,252, Weekend Minutes: 2,248. Amazing how in 2 hours and 21 minutes, I can accumulate so many more minutes!
All of the service agents are telling me that they don’t quite know how to deal with the TREO yet, but I’m sure they’ll figure it out. In fact, the dude on the phone has some interesting information that he is going to relay to me as soon as I’m off of hold (or so I’m told). More soon. ;)
UPDATE: Jaren Angerbauer is the awesomest Verizon service agent ever. He cleared up the problem, and proposed a solution that will keep me happy as a Verizon customer. Apparently, the TREO 600 connects to the network ever three minutes to uh…. see what’s up, I guess — which amounts to at least 480 minutes a day of data logged to airtime minutes. No VZW agent should ever allow you to not get a data plan without a severe warning. Also, there are currently only two data add-ons that you can get tacked on to a voice plan: an unlimited plan for $44.95/month, and a “5 megabit” plan for $34.95. I am guessing that he meant megabyte and not megabit (1 byte = 8 bits), but either way it’s probably not a good deal compared to the unlimited plan.
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you know, i think it is megabits. all the wireless carriers i’ve seen use megabits… i believe as a ploy to trick laypeople into thinking that they’re buying megabytes. sneaky!
ya, actually, most carriers, isps, and networking people use bits instead of bytes for bw. (i help design networks for large carriers, isps, corps, etc.) it’s us end users who are accustomed to using bytes for filesize and, thus, bytes/sec for bw. most client side file transfer apps also use bytes/sec. so among most geeks it’s bytes/sec, but in the networking world, it’s usually bits/sec. :)
yeah. i’m used to both bytes and bits, but end users are definitely used to bytes. i hear confused people all the time when they are taking about their network speeds (modem, dsl, whatever)…
That’s like saying a website offers 20 Giga-bits of bandwidth per month :P Joe schmoe has no idea what the difference is, only that 20 Gb looks like more than 5GB. Bad Verizon!
Other than that though, yah, Verizon has been great to me. My customer service experiences of late haven’t been up to the level they were a few years ago, but compared to most of the stories I hear from friends and my own personal experiences with the shit-hole that is Sprint, i’m relatively happy :)
But if you ever start doing that stupid peace sign or saying can you hear me know Eric, I will hurt you! Or rather, your camera equipment since it won’t fight back :D