Tag Archives: Sprint

Virgin Mobile’s Iphone Offering Could be a Game Changer

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Virgin Mobile announced that it is now going to selling an Iphone with a monthly plan that costs $30. Of course, the buy-in price is $549 for the 8GB Iphone. If you bought a Iphone from AT&T or Verizon, it would cost you only about $99-$199 but you’d have to opt in for a 2 year activation contract. With this contract from Virgin, you only have to stay as long as you want to stay because you already gave them the cost of the Iphone upfront.

The plan gives you unlimited data and text plus 300 minutes of calls for only $30. For someone like me who rarely makes a phone call, this is probably the phone for me. My Iphone package from AT&T has historically been a major rip-off, and I’ve always known that, but I wanted the convenience of that really good phone, so I stuck with it.

The really only down side to this is that Virgin Mobile is on the Sprint network, and if you’re in a location like Grand Rapids, their service is atrociously bad. I had Sprint for two months at one point, thinking I was moving up to something new, and man I was never so pissed at a phone network before. I had dropped calls constantly, and when you have very few phone calls as it is, that’s just wrong. When I finally gave up the phone, they tried to turn the blame on me and charge me some outrageous deactivation fee, which I argued with them on the phone until they dropped half of the price. I mentioned at the end of that conversation that they have become very successful at burning bridges with former customers. They didn’t seem to care.

The other downside to this plan is that you don’t that Virgin Mobile isn’t going to pull the rug from under you at any time. While the contract is month to month, that works both ways. They may pull an AT&T and then decide you no longer get unlimited data because they are the owners of the service and you can either accept their new terms, or you can pay a disconnect fee for being a bad customer. In this case, there won’t be a disconnect fee, but because you paid up front, they might just say the game is over and leave. And you’ll be holding a nice little piece of metal that doesn’t do anything any longer. That would really suck.

But on the other hand, I was with Virgin Mobile years ago when I was living in San Francisco and didn’t want to pay a monthly fee for a cell phone. It was a month to month thing, and it really worked well for me. So, they’ve proven they can actually do it. Back then, I had what was called the “Party Animal” phone, which I wrote about long ago, convinced that Virgin Mobile would discover I was not, in fact, a party animal and take away my phone. But they never caught onto me, so I was able to use it until the Iphone came along. And we all the know the rest of that story.

The Problem of Relying on a Dying Technology Company

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For the longest time, I have had trouble finding an Internet company that both works and is somewhat affordable. A long time ago, I went through Comcast, and aside from atrocious customer service and a product that worked 33% of the time, it wasn’t half bad. But when I moved away from the place where Comcast served my apartment building, I no longer had access to that dismally somewhat okay service. Upon moving to Grand Rapids, I was stuck in an apartment complex that did some kind of sweetheart deal with a company called Suite Solutions, which I discovered had atrociously bad Internet service. I was lucky if I got a stable signal four days out of a week, and there were so many weekends where it went down on Friday and didn’t come back up until Sunday after midnight. I shut off Suite Solutions and never looked back.

As a result, I had to be a little more creative about finding an Internet service provider. Because this company was the one with the sweetheart deal, that meant you couldn’t go through any of the standard Internet companies. Therefore, I looked for other places where I could try to get my Internet service. My two choices really ended up being AT&T’s DSL service, which is generally a lot slower than most other Internet offerings, and a company called Clear Wire, which runs a satellite Internet service on the backs of the Sprint network.

For the last year or so, I’ve actually been using Clear, and even though they’re not the greatest service in the world, I’ve also started to realize that I’ll be lucky if the service remains working for another year or so. Clear has been losing money big time since it first started, and it just doesn’t have the ability to compete with any of the big boys out there. Also, for some reason their management seems to do pretty much everything wrong, and their ability to attract new customers has been horrid. Sprint has been talking about closing them down almost since the day I first signed on to using them.

As a result, the service has been kind of spotty. I suspect that the service is getting worse because they’re closing down their lines, but they don’t want to lose any of the revenue they already have coming in through the door. I suspect that they’ll keep going until they squeeze every dollar out of their customers and then they’ll pull the plug (probably the day after the last charge goes through my credit card account).

I’m kind of sad about this because it’s been kind of nice having an Internet company that was somewhat off the grid and pretty fast (it was a decent speed). But they need, or needed, more customers, and they had a horrible process of making that happen. If I wasn’t already a customer, I probably would avoid them like the plague, because they have really draconian policies about shutting off the service. An example is that even though I bought the modem outright, meaning there’s no leasing and no amount of money they’ve invested, they still force you to sign their entry agreement where they rake you over the coals when you try to leave, charging you a disconnect fee, like a cell phone does when you leave before finishing out a two-year contract. You really don’t attract people with policies like that, and even though the clerk promised me that I wouldn’t end up having to pay the separation fee if I left (because I bought my own equipment instead of using theirs), I know better, and know that when I finally leave, it won’t be without a fight.

But slowly, my Internet is going away. I’m probably going to switch to AT&T as a result, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not upset that this company couldn’t make it on its own. It’s one of those cases where a company that could have done great things was led into the ground by people who just didn’t get it. And I saw it happening. I would have said something if there had ever been anyone willing to listen, but you know how those things go.

The other day, I was driving by the office where I first looked at the service they were offering. The storefront was empty. On the door was a notice from the landlord, threatening Clear with legal action for not paying its rent. Not a good sign. Not, not a very good sign at all.

Technology Companies Still Don’t Understand Their Business IS Customers

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Sprint PCS is ramping up its engines to try to gain new customers because their managers realize they’re just not cutting it as the third biggest cell phone company. If you looked at them on paper, they’d have everything to sell, such as the only big cell phone service that still offers an unlimited data plan (unless grandfathered in), a great all in one wireless satellite service (Clear Wire), and they’re generally cheaper. So why aren’t they defeating everyone else?

Well, let’s look at that for a moment. I had Sprint, and I currently still have Clear as my additional service. When I had Sprint as a cell phone, the first thing I noticed is that I rarely could get a solid signal. And if I did, I’d lose it. When I went in to complain, the response wasn’t “Oh, we’ll look into that” but “They’re aware of it, and we’re waiting to hear something new”. In other words, they knew they had problems and they did absolutely nothing to fix it. I had Sprint for six months before I gave up on it. When I gave up on it, of course they wanted to charge me they’re punishment fee, even though I was dropping the service because it never worked. A smart company would have said: “You’re right. It’s our fault, so we’ll pick up the charge.” That way, I might look back at Sprint with a sense of “Hey, they at least treated me with respect.” But that’s not how I left.

As for Clear, I like it, but it’s a generally shitty service for the price that I pay. I was using it at home and at work. At work, I would sometimes lose signal for a week (and no tech person on their end could fix it, other than the classic: “Have you tried restarting your computer?”). I still have it, and I paid for the modem straight out (which means there should be no fee whenever I do disconnect), but I’ll bet you every dollar the United States doesn’t have to pay its bills that they’ll try to tack on a disconnect fee, even though the disconnect fee is supposed to pay for the “great discount” I would have gotten on the equipment, which I paid full price for because they didn’t have a deal, and I really didn’t feel like renting their shit.

So, Sprint is now having trouble gaining new customers. You might think word of mouth might be their biggest problem. The woman who works in the next cubicle over from me has had nothing but nightmares with Sprint phones and service. I was on the shuttle bus going home from work last night, and two women started a chorus of how much Sprint sucks as they discussed their lousy phone service.

Now, this could be just in Grand Rapids, but I’m suspecting that if they’re screwing it up here, they’re probably screwing it up in a lot more places. Big companies are a lot like that. I’ve hated Comcast practically every city where I’ve had them, and I’ve had them in Grand Rapids, Stockton and a few other places that aren’t coming to my Alzheimerish mind right now.

Netflix is another one of those companies that doesn’t seem to get it. Oh, they think they do, and they’re all meta-like, acting like they’re on top of things with their knowledge of psychology and how people will eventually get over their price hikes, but rather than first telling their customers that the price of new content requires more money to pay for it, they just upped the price and pretty much told everyone to either live with it or leave, and then did this sanctimonious crap about how they’re the best deal in town so either live with it or stare at the walls in silence because they won’t have Netflix to watch instead.

This is NOT the way to treat your customers, especially the ones who stuck by you all of these years when you were growing and struggling to grow. Right now, I’m royally pissed at Netflix, and when September comes around I will cancel their services completely. Not drop down to the streaming only, or the disks only, but dump them completely like a cheating girlfriend who was never really good in bed in the first place. Okay, that’s a bit vulgar. How about: Like an ice cream flavor that doesn’t taste as good as…ah, never mind. Go with the first, vulgar one. It works well enough.

It’s almost as if major companies are less concerned about public relations and more concerned with handling damage control. And if your company’s focus is always how to minimize your negativity from customers, then something’s seriously wrong with your business model. My advice there is fire all of your executives, hire a bunch of kids who have watched a lot of Elmo on Sesame Street, and start over.

Drowning in Misleading Information About Technology

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About six months ago, I decided to give up my iPhone for an Android phone. I’ve never been a real fan of Apple, the company, although I have somewhat been on the sidelines for Apple, the technology. The iPhone was definitely one of their best products ever, and I bought one when they first emerged. Then I upgraded to the second generation of the phone, which I believe was the 3G or 3GS (I get them confused). One of the things I really liked about the cell phone (my first real smart phone) was its long battery life. There were times when I went several days before recharging it.

One of the problems with the original iPhone was that you had to go through AT&T. That’s another one of those companies that I’ve learned to live to love and hate, sometimes in the same sentence. Their customer service is atrocious, no matter how hard their PR people try to make it seem otherwise. And sometimes dealing with them as a customer can be a freaking nightmare. But when you don’t have to deal with that side of the house, they do what they need to do, and things generally go smoothly. Not exactly a five-star endorsement, but you take what you can get, I guess.

Well, I discovered at one point that I couldn’t block calls on my iPhone no matter what I did. I was getting nonstop calls from telemarketers and bill collectors (most not even for me), and it was becoming really frustrating. So I looked to Apple to see if there was an app to fix this. There’s not. Apple doesn’t like you to block things, and if Steve Jobs doesn’t like something, that’s just the way every customer will experience the customer experience. Also, AT&T sucks in this area, as they couldn’t figure out a way to stop this other than to block a call (each one), to which they would charge me a nominal ($10) price to do so EACH TIME. That wasn’t a solution.

So, I bought a Sprint Samsung Epic phone (after trying out a few crappy Sprint phones). So far, I’ve been massively disappointed in Sprint. I mean MASSIVELY. They drop calls constantly, and they have finally acknowledged that there’s something wrong in Grand Rapids, although they can’t figure out what it is, but they’re not willing to really do anything to make the experience better other than to offer a different phone (on the same crappy service, which is actually the problem).

And the smart phone isn’t really that smart. In so many ways, Android fails. Miserably. I use Touchdown to link my work email, and whenever I have an appointment on my calendar, any change to the at calender appointment adds a brand new apointment (AND) leaves the old one in place, so that even though I’ve changed my appointment, my phone constantly wants to remind me at the old time that there’s an appointment, even if there no longer is one. When you work in a place where people are changing their appointments all of the time, this makes your calendar somewhat useless. Again, failure of miserable proportions.

The other day, my phone stopped working. For no reason. And then the next day, it started working again. No explanation. Meanwhile, two people phoned me and kept getting voicemail, which they left messages. No messages, of course, ever went through because, well, Sprint sucks.

So I contacted AT&T again, trying to figure out if there’s some way to get the new iPhone 4, and it turns out that I’m in my upgrade range now. What I didn’t know, until I asked a few colleagues who had iPhone 4s on both AT&T and Verizon, that the battery life of the iPhone 4 is no better than my crappy Samsung epic. For some reason, Apple made a brand new phone that is worse than the previous version. My 3G goes for days; the iPhone 4 doesn’t go longer than a half of a day, which seems to be the life span (battery wise) of almost all smart phones these days. That’s just crappy.

So, it looks like I may end up staying with my old iPhone 3G because it’s still the best phone on the market. It doesn’t matter that we’re already into an iPhone 4, and probably moving to an iPhone 5. I doubt it’s going to be much better itself. And every Android phone made is massively dysfunctional, yet it’s branded as the “thing to beat Apple”. If that’s the case, then we’re still a few years away from ever getting something decent out on the market that fills the need of the rest of us.

And that sucks.

Cell Phone Companies in the US Really Suck

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Just yesterday, AT&T attempted to (and may have succeeded in) buying T Mobile. Now, personally, this really doesn’t affect me as I don’t have a T-Mobile account. I do have an AT&T account, but as AT&T is doing the buying, and not being bought, it’s not that big a deal to me. However, an inner sense in me tells me that I should be concerned because yet another cell phone provider is gone, taken over by one of the big ones that means less competition and fewer choices for us in the long run.

Some years ago, I was in South Korea, and I had a pretty good cell phone (even though it was pretty hard to understand half of the texts that would come through on it, so I never knew if it was someone from work or someone trying to sell me sex over the phone). The amount I paid per month was minimal, and the coverage was excellent. Sadly enough, I can’t say the same about the amount I pay here, nor can I say very good things about the coverage. Let me explain.

I have been with AT&T since they first got hold of the iPhone. When I first started with them, the coverage was atrociously awful. My phone dropped calls nonstop, and for someone who doesn’t get very many phone calls as it is, that’s extremely problematic. But eventually, it got better, but the pricing never did. It’s like they’re offering a luxury service at luxury prices when in reality they’re offering me something that’s essentially nothing more than a phone. Yes, a phone. Not a teleportation device. Not a phaser or a device that provides me with access to continous sex (or religion for those of you who don’t like the idea of instant access to sex). This is not a luxury item. Yet our cell phone companies act like they’re offering the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: Sliced bread was pretty damn great, and nothing’s really come along since that’s better. The pricing for cell phones is horrible, and that’s something that never seems to get better.

In other countries, they get decent cell phone packages at really good prices. The phone networks are also a lot more stable. And to top it off, they’re built on really powerful cell phone networks that don’t feel like they’ve been established with duct tape and string. The whole 4G thing is probably the straw that should have destroyed many backs of camels a long time ago. Instead of just telling us that they haven’t really produced anything all that great, cell phone companies tell us that they have “4G” coverage, when in reality it’s 3G coverage but designed so that it doesn’t fail as much. Sprint is the one provider that actually has a real 4G network, and I’ll let you in on a little secret I’ve discovered recently. They can’t seem to handle their 3G service in some areas, like where I live in Grand Rapids. Every time I have gone in to complain about lousy cell phone service, a clerk tells me something along the lines of “Yeah, we know about it, but I’ve been told they’re working on it.” Kind of like the government is working on the War on Poverty, right? Working on something, and FIXING something are two different things. Unfortunately, no one seems to get that.

What we really need is a brand new communicator technology that does away with cell phones completely and ends the monopolies that these companies have over our communication network infrastructure. It would be so much nicer if a brand new company came along and offered us something of serious value and put these cell phone companies completely out of business. Of course, I can imagine that these parasites will jump in before that ever happens and claim some weird patent was already filed that reads something like: “Patent covering any technology that actually communicates better than cell phones” and causes our legislators to side against us like they usually do whenever it comes to an argument of big business versus real people.

That’s really all I have to say on the subject. I need to take my medication now. [ /end ridiculous rant]