After many, many years, we finally said goodbye to Verizon. We’d been with them through numerous series of acquisitions over decades. I started with Ameritech, of all names. Then it became Cingular, and I’m sure AT&T was involved in there somewhere. But eventually, we landed in Verizon’s pool and had stayed there ever since.
We were on an old plan with them, sharing 2 GBs of data between our two phones. That was perfectly adequate, and the price was reasonable. In fact, they kept trying to sell us to move to the traditional plans of unlimited data for the same price per line that we were paying for both of our lines together.
Not a great sales tactic.
What they really should’ve done was just end the plan we were on. But they didn’t do that because they knew we’d just leave at that point. Instead, they did something dumber.
They raised the price of our plan by about $45/month, so they got us anyway, to pay over $70/line but with limited data capacity. I know it was a tactic to get us to voluntarily leave the legacy plan, assuming that the switching cost would be too inconvenient.
They were wrong.
After a chance conversation at a Spectrum office for an unrelated piece of business, I got clued into their mobile offer (because of course they have to sell something at every opportunity). But while my gut instinct is to turn down unexpected/pressure sales, it did make me think about it. So at my own convenience, I researched the offer separately.
I didn’t find a catch or a gotcha. One year of unlimited for the same price as Verizon’s increase for one line. Two lines would be what we were just paying before the VZN price hike. My new employer offers to subsidize personal cellphone use for those of my job class, which means I’m paying $40/month for two lines.
And Spectrum leases Verizon’s towers anyway.
This reminds me of when we finally cut off our old copper phone line from AT&T. After they raised the rate to $65/month about 20 years ago, I was done justifying paying that much on a just-in-case that was born from the great blackout of 2003. I knew they were trying to sell their VOIP service instead, but I didn’t stay with AT&T because of that.
Almost like there’s a pattern here of not-quite-great business decisions. Or maybe it is, and I’m not smart enough to figure that out.
When the promo rate expires, I was explicitly told by the Spectrum rep I worked with to contact either his store or the main CS number to ask for a new deal. They’re clearly more interested in retaining and growing their customer base, which is fine by me as long as I don’t have to pay those near-monopolistic Verizon prices again.