Happy New Year.

It seems that everyone’s favorite wireless company and I do not get along. On December 29th, 2006, I finally had the last straw. First, some history:

The original reason I left Verizon a few years ago (2003/4?) was coverage at my house. The coverage overall was fine, as it was a dual-mode (digital and analog) phone…The POS Kyocera phone…Anyway, the problem was the coverage in my house was spotty, and even around my house outside was not the greatest.
Therefore, I made a smart move - I moved to Sprint. The only problem with Sprint was that if you sneezed wrong, they wanted you to extend your contract. So when they came out with Fair and Flexible, I was kinda pissed that I’d have to extend my contract just to change my rate plan. So I stuck with them for 2 years…No phone upgrade (Samsung VI-660), and while data was very usable, I just couldn’t give any more money to a company which I thought was downright terrible.
So my contract with Sprint was up, and I was able to get in a good deal with Cingular - no contract! I was quite happy at that idea, and had them for about 5-6 months. There was only one problem with Cingular - their data speeds were not speedy at all. I’m talking 2 - 5 KB/s, where I was getting 12 KB/s on Sprint. So painfully slow was not an understatement.

Once the CTO left, I needed to be able to get my email pretty much all of the time. This requires a good data plan.

Here is where I made my mistake. I ported back to Verizon. Verizon had very good data speeds, so it was a good thing, or so I thought. The unfortunate part was Cingular was not setting up 3G (3rd Gen, High speed data) stuff any time soon, so I didn’t really have a choice when it came to DATA. I tried T-Mobile, and while it was faster then Cingular, was nothing like Verizon.

Stupid, stupid, stupid me didn’t think of getting Verizon for DATA only…I moved everything to them. STUPID, STUPID, STUPID me. Leon said I didn’t sound as good, and within 2 days I was already experiencing ho-hum voice quality and reception in my house. The data worked ok, but not great (fast, but same reliability as voice). The phone I picked had a great keyboard (good for email), but it kept requiring restarts all the time - it ran Windows Mobile 2005. I evaluated the phone too long - more then 14 days, and I was stuck with it. Mistake number 2.

So, 5 - 6 months go by of 3+ time a day restarts of the phone, dropped calls all over the place (at least 2 a day), and just generally being annoyed, when I fianlly say enough and I get the bright idea of porting my number back to Cingular (which I never had a problem with voice service), and finish out my contract with Verizon using only a data plan. I was talking on the phone with Verizon support and I mentioned this, and they told me it should not be a problem to do that.

So I went to a Cingular store, and got my number ported. Unfortunately, do to some policy chnages, can’t do the no contract thing any more. So I signed a year contract. I went home and had dinner. By the middle of dinner, I get a text message saying port complete. Crap, that was too fast. So I run to a Verizon store, and explain the situation….Say I want to activate a new number to finish out my contract…I’m told that I can’t really do that, it’d be a new agreement no matter what. So I do a 1 year, and expect a $50 chargeback for the phone price difference. But, they tell me I need to deal with Customer Service for anything (early termination fee, and insurance, since I couldn’t add it on because I didn’t buy it right there….). Fine.