I once signed up for a new phone service that promised me unlimited calling. It wasn’t one of the big companies, but rather a startup company offering great rates. The first month, it was wonderful. For just $30 a month, I could call my sister and talk for an hour, or call my mother, or hey, even clients. Yes, that first month was wonderful. The second month, however, wasn’t.
I got a letter in the mail. I was being billed over double the $30 or having my account canceled. You’re going to love this one – I had unlimited calling, but when I called the company, they said that it was unlimited for people who stay within what they considered a “normal” usage amount. When pressed on what constituted normal, the rep had no answer. Whatever it was, I had exceeded it – either I paid the bill or they canceled my account. I did them a favor and canceled first. And I contacted the Attorney General’s office. Nowhere in any of the paperwork I signed was there a stipulation that “unlimited” really wasn’t unlimited. Thank you for the bait-and-switch attempt, folks, but I’m passing.
I bring this up because of the news that Comcast is now planning to limit Internet usage for its customers. Apparently, we email too often or we surf too much, for the company is putting restrictions on the amount of bandwidth we can consume. Here’s the story. And here’s Verizon’s home page. Might want to do your switching now. Not advocating one over the other. I’m just saying I’m apt to do business with companies that don’t limit my unlimited usage. Isn’t that what I’ve paid for?
In this case, it’s not bait-and-switch, but it is a bit shocking that a major company such as Comcast, which by the way has much better customer service than Verizon in my opinion, is cutting corners. I use the Internet and email for work and for pleasure. It has to be unlimited. I can’t be worried about how much over my quota I’ve gone or when my service provider is going to call and slap my hand.
As freelancers, we need our tools to be there. If my unlimited phone service suddenly has limits, it’s no longer useful to me. The same with my Internet service or my postal service or anything else that helps me earn a living. Imagine if we were told we couldn’t send out more than 100 pieces of mail a year? You’d have to choose between sending your water bill (because hey, it’s now going to cost you bandwidth to pay it online) or Aunt Bessie’s birthday card.
What do you think of service providers placing restrictions on your business tools?
It never ceases to amaze me the lengths that some companies will go to in order to alienate their customers . . . this reminds me of the cell phone company (sadly, I don’t recall which–I just know it wasn’t mine) that “fired” customers who called customer service too frequently.
I sort of understand the need for usage caps – why should you pay the same $50 per month to download 100 GB of data as someone who downloads 1 TB of data? However, I don’t advocate baiting and switching or not letting customers know ahead of time that there is a cap.
I just signed up with Skype for their “unlimited calling plan” – they make it very clear that the unlimited means “fair use” and is capped at 10,000 minutes a month. I can live with that, and I trust Skype more as a company now that they made that clear up front.
writtenexpressions, I believe it was Sprint who fired the customers. It cost less to lose a customer than it did to provide customer service.
What “service providers”? There’s no such thing anymore. Our current administration has set it up so that Big Business is allowed to profit from anyone below them by screwing them regularly without consequence.
Even though I’m saying this from a Canadian perspective, I’m with you, Devon. I’d like to start seeing the service part–and that doesn’t mean more telemarketing calls–of all the service providers we deal with on a daily basis.
I have DSL through my phone company, so this doesn’t apply to me per se. However, all I can say is that when Comcast took over my former cable company about two years back, service and prices got shot to he!!. My phone company occasionally ticks me off (like when they recently decided to up my monthly fee to “cover the cost of increased use of their IT department”), but not to the degree I suspect Comcast would. Many days I’m connected to the Internet for 18 hours, and more often than I’d like, the majority of those hours are getting used.